On the cusp of the seventeenth century, a Neapolitan apothecary found himself before the Inquisition. The matter at hand was the forbidden fruit that got Adam and Eve expelled from Eden. Was it a fig? A pear? An apple? The apothecary applied a more figurative interpretation:
“An apple? Adam fucked Eve in the ass, and that’s why they were rejected from Paradise.”
Umberto Grassi in his unusual book What God Kept for Himself: Atheism, Sodomy, and Radical Dissent in Renaissance Italy documents religious dissenters (which included both avowed libertines and professed friars) on trial for heresy who testified before Inquisitors that the original sin was Adam sodomizing Eve. “[P]reachers did not say this from the pulpit out of decency,” one defendant said, but the evidence can be deduced from the text. A French philosopher observed, “The apple which tempted our first father was the symbol of the rear parts of the woman, which very well represents an apple split in half.” As another more bluntly put it, “Adam’s apple was Eve’s butt.” This led to the conclusion, according to one of the accused, that Adam sinned by “sticking [his penis] into her ass” instead of “putting it into her cunt.” The Dutch scholar Hadriaan Beverland in his book On Original Sin (which has been called “perhaps the kinkiest work of philosophy to have been published in modern Europe”) described Eve’s behavior in more detail:
She is in heat, desirous, obtrusive, and promiscuous….[T]he little virgin…contemplates the very desirable extended tree stem, apt and pleasing to her sex….[She] rouses his very innocent member with her wanton hand and flattering words….[Eve] turned around and on hands and knees, had awkwardly presented her narrow asshole….
Implicit in this exegesis was a critique of the clerical establishment that exalted celibacy (sex within the confines of marriage was tolerated for those incapable of continence) during the Counter-Reformation. A Venetian noble tied his belief that Eve was sodomized in Eden to his advocacy of the abolition of priestly celibacy. In Renaissance burlesque poetry and novellas, it was suggested that the Church condemned anal sex simply because its pleasures were so sublime. “These celestial delights are hidden…under a curtain of horror in order not to give them in abundance to anyone,” one satirist wrote. In Sicily, one accused heretic told the Inquisition that he tried to persuade a woman reluctant to engage in anal sex with him by assuring her that the act was worthy of being consummated on the altars of Rome.
The Inquisitors were not unaware of the implication that taboo sex acts were not only social and moral transgressions, but gateways to doubt. One frisky friar was recorded as testifying that he “valued more knowing carnally a woman…than the whole paradise together.” Sodomy, in particular, opens up vistas that occlude religious belief. A courtesan in one Renaissance work says, “A pair of luscious buttocks can accomplish more than all that the philosophers, astrologists, alchemists and necromancers have ever wrought.” In another text we learn, “From the mixing of the cunt, prick and ass, knowledge of fucking and buggery follows, and thus scientia is enlarged.” One of the dissenters was on trial for his belief in both lapsarian sodomy and Copernican heliocentrism. The “glamorous celebration of sexual debauchery,” in Beverland’s words, announced the death of God. Historian Alec Ryrie, who has studied early modern atheism, admits that “instinctive, inarticulate, intuitive reasons” can be foundational for unbelief.
Such as the rapturous sight of a pair of luscious buttocks.
Lutheran Guilt 