Husbands, wives, children: it was these, in the heartlands of the Latin West, that were increasingly coming to count as family.
Casting the First Stone
On one occasion, when Christ appeared to Catherine of Siena, he did so accompanied by Mary Magdalene. Catherine, weeping with an excess of love, remembered how Mary, kneeling before the feet of her Lord, had once wet his feet with her own tears, and then wiped them with her hair, and kissed them, and anointed them with perfume. ‘Sweetest daughter,’ Christ told her, ‘for your comfort I give you Mary Magdalene for your mother.’ Gratefully, Catherine accepted the offer. ‘And from that moment on,’ so her confessor reported, ‘she felt entirely at one with the Magdalene.’26
To be paired with the woman who had first beheld the risen Christ was, of course, a rare mark of divine favour. From childhood, Catherine had taken the Magdalene as a particular role model. Far from betraying complacency, though, this had borne witness to the opposite: Catherine’s own gnawing sense of sin. As reported by Luke, the woman who wept before Jesus, and anointed his feet, had ‘lived a sinful life’.27 Although she was never named, the identification of her with the Magdalene was one that had enjoyed wide currency ever since Gregory the Great, back in 591, had first made it in a sermon. Over time – and despite the lack of any actual evidence for it in the gospels – the precise character of her ‘sinful life’ had become part of the fabric of common knowledge. Kneeling before Jesus, seeking his forgiveness, she had done so as a penitent whore. Catherine, by accepting the Magdalene as her mother, was embracing the full startling radicalism of a warning given by Christ: that prostitutes would enter the kingdom of God before priests.
Here, for a Church that demanded celibacy of its priesthood and preached the sanctity of marriage, was an unsettling reminder that its Saviour had been quite as ready to forgive sins of the flesh as to condemn them. The lesson was one that many moralists understandably struggled to take on board. Women who made their living by tempting men into transgression seemed the ultimate manifestation of everything that the Church Fathers had condemned in Eve. The more attractive a whore, so one of Abelard’s students had argued, the less onerous should be the penance for buying her services. The quickening pulse of reformatio had only intensified this characterisation of a prostitute’s embraces as a cess-pit into which men might not help but fall. Keeping pace with the escalating campaign against heresy, a series of initiatives had aimed at draining the swamp. In Paris, for instance, as the great cathedral of Notre Dame was being built, the offer from a collective of prostitutes to pay for one of its windows, and dedicate it to the Virgin, had been rejected by a committee of the university’s leading theologians. Two decades later, in 1213, one of the same scholars, following his appointment as papal legate, had ordered that all woman convicted of prostitution be expelled from the city – just as though they were lepers. Then, in 1254, a notably pious king had sought to banish them from the whole of France. The predictable failure of this measure had only confirmed the Church authorities in their anxiety to have sex-work quarantined. Just like Jews, prostitutes were commanded to advertise their own infamy. It was forbidden them to wear a veil; on their dresses, falling from their shoulders, they were obliged to sport a knotted cord. So dreaded was their touch that, in cities as far afield as London and Avignon, they were banned altogether from handling goods on market stalls.
Yet always, lurking at the back of even the sternest preacher’s mind, was the example of Christ himself. In John’s gospel, it was recorded that a woman taken in adultery had been brought before him by the Pharisees. Looking to trap him, they had asked if, in accordance with the Law of Moses, she should be stoned. Jesus had responded by bending down and writing in the dust with his finger; but then, when the Pharisees persisted in questioning him, he had straightened up again. ‘If any of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her.’ The crowd, shamed by these words, had hesitated – and then melted away. Finally, only the woman had been left. ‘Has no one condemned you?’ Jesus had asked. ‘No one, Sir,’ she had answered. ‘Then neither do I condemn you. Go now and leave your life of sin.’
Contempt, then, was not the only response that women who had succumbed to sexual temptation might provoke among dutiful Christians. There was sympathy for them too, and compassion. Innocent III, that most formidable of heresy’s foes, never forgot that his Saviour had kept company with the lowest of the low: tax-collectors and whores. Endowing a hospital in Rome, he specified that it offer a refuge to sex-workers from walking the streets. To marry one, he preached, was a work of the sublimest piety. Friars – although prevented by their vows from going quite as far as that – felt themselves charged with a particular mission to do as Christ had done, and welcome fallen women into the kingdom of God. The French nickname for Dominicans – jacobins – had soon become a nickname for prostitutes too. Prostitutes themselves, perfectly aware of the example offered them by the Magdalene, veered between tearful displays of repentance and the conviction that God loved them just as much as any other sinner. Catherine, certainly, whenever she met with a sex-worker, would never fail to assure her of Christ’s mercy. ‘Turn to the Virgin. She will lead you straight into the presence of her son.’28
Yet there were some sins that could not be forgiven. In the decades that followed Catherine’s death, the Christian people continued to look with dread to the heavens, and shudder before the divine anger that was so plainly brewing. Plague; war; the papal schism: evils of such an order could only be God’s judgement on Christendom. Moralists versed in the Old Testament knew all too well what might follow. In Genesis, the annihilation was recorded of two cities: Sodom and Gomorrah. Because they had become rotten through with sin, God had condemned them to a terrible collective punishment. Burning sulphur had rained down from the heavens; smoke like that from a furnace had risen up from the plain on which the two cities stood; everything living, even the very weeds, had been destroyed. Only melted rock had been left to mark the spot. From that moment on, the memory of Sodom and Gomorrah had served God’s people as a terrible warning of what might happen to them, were their own society to become similarly cancerous with evil. Old Testament prophets, arraigning their countrymen of sin, were forever prophesying their ruin. ‘They are all like Sodom to me.’29
But what precisely had been the sin of Sodom? The key to understanding that lay not in Genesis, but in Paul’s letters. Writing to the Christians of Rome, the apostle had identified as the surest and most terrifying measure of humanity’s alienation from God’s love the sexual depravity of gentile society. One aspect of it more than any other had disgusted him. ‘Men committed indecent acts with other men.’30 Here, in Paul’s formulation, was a perspective on sexual relations that Roman men would barely have recognised. The key to their erotic sense of themselves was not the gender of the people they slept with, but whether, in the course of having sex they took the active or the passive role. Deviancy, to the Romans, was pre-eminently a male allowing himself to be used as though he were a female. Paul, by condemning the master who casually spent himself inside a slaveboy no less than the man who offered himself up to oral or anal penetration, had imposed on the patterns of Roman sexuality a thoroughly alien paradigm: one derived, in large part, from his upbringing as a Jew. Paul had been steeped in Torah. Twice the Law of Moses prohibited the lying of men with other men ‘as one lies with a woman’.31 Paul, though, in his letter to the Romans, had given this prohibition a novel twist. Among the gentiles, he warned, it was not only men who committed indecent acts with others of their own sex. ‘Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones.’32 A momentous denunciation. By mapping women who slept with women onto men who slept with men, Paul had effectively created an entire new category of sexual behaviour. The consequence was yet another ramping-up of the revolution brought by Christianity to the dimension of the erotic. Just as the concept of paganism would never have come into existence without the furious condemnation of it by the Church, so the notion that men and women who slept with people of their own sex were sharing in the same sin, one that obscenely parodied the natural order of things, was a purely Christian one.