LOVE LOCKED OUT – BOOK REVIEW AND COMMENTARY
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© July 9, 2011
James Cleugh, an English author, published LOVE LOCKED OUT in 1963 when he was seventy-two, six years before his death. He was witness in his old age to the collapse of morality and the advent of soaring licentiousness of “The New Age.”
The book is a survey of love, licentiousness, and love’s restrictions in the Middle Ages fueled by repressive Church dogma, superstition and senseless violence.
It makes no claims to be a definitive work, or a scholarly study. It succeeds, however, in showing how institutional fear can translate into extreme sexual perversion when physical love is locked out.
I first read the book as an idealistic young man reared in Irish Catholicism, and now have reread it at the age of the author. We may not become wiser with age, but we do gain some perspective on our folly. It is for that reason I offer this review.
BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES
Cleugh uses the mechanism of juxtaposition of extremes to illustrate his points.
He opens with Paul the Apostle, now a martyr. Paul’s legacy finds Emperor Constantine of Rome (312) making Christianity the religion of the realm. Fast forward to 1498, and you have the Italian monk, Savonarola taking Paul’s word to the literal extremes, and using that authority in Florence, Italy to burn valuable books, works of art, and other personal adornments considered indecent.
Florentines didn’t take kindly to this. So, Savonarola, the ascetic mystic and brilliant scholar was arrested, mobbed, tortured and burnt at the stake.
What Savonarola failed to understand is that physical love is at the core of the human spirit. Fail to give that spirit oxygen and decadence flourishes. In fact, Cleugh insists pagans before Christianity paled in licentiousness once it became the religion of the realm. Astute St. Augustine observed, “We are all born between urine and feces.”
Savonarola searing contempt for the flesh, Cleugh points out, was already in decay by the fourteenth century. A complex of causes was responsible from material success, to increased travel, which provided knowledge of other civilizations and cultures. At the same time, both laymen and priests came to lead secret lives. The idea of obscenity was born. To wit, Michelangelo got into serious trouble with Pope Paul IV for showing sexual organs of the figures in the “Last Judgment.”
FEAST OF FOOLS
Between the thirteenth and sixteenth century, the “Feast of Fools” was created, a religious and secular festival. Sexual repression took a holiday during these wild orgies. The backlash of these orgies became Martin Luther’s Reformation. Yet Cleugh claims, “If not for the dancing holidaymakers of the Middle Ages, modern civilization might never have grown out of its suicidal rigid theocracy.”
Before the advent of Christianity, worshipers of Orpheus and Adonis had mingled the profane with the sacred in their religious rites.
The Fools Cult produced a cadre of clowns who made themselves useful by being entertaining to those in power at every level. Most service-oriented positions today are derivatives of this Middle Age Fools Cult from town clowns to academic gowns. Fools were often rogues, hideous, witty, solitary, defiant of authority, and generally beyond the reach of any authority for serious chastisement. Fools turned out in many cases to have more sense than their employers. This “cult of folly” prompted Erasmus to pen his IN PRAISE OF FOLLY (1509). It proved the predicate to sycophants and entertainers moving into the roles of movers and shakers up to our day.
Jesters of the fifteenth century pointed out that while monks went about barefooted, they lived in extravagantly glorious monasteries, and while they had enormous quantities of corn, they didn’t grow any themselves, and while they were celebrate, they had lots of little children as if they had grown like vegetables in their gardens.
COWLS AND COIFS
St. Paul’s sales pitch was to reject life and all its temptations for eternal happiness impossible to confirm in the next. He was selling the sizzle, not the steak. This seeded the franchise industry of the Middle Ages, monasteries and convents. It was a logical development of a faith that rejected the world. Who bought into this idea?
Cleugh indicates that in the fifth and sixth century members of the aristocracy abandoned their estates and flocked to these domiciles. In doing so, did they reject the licentious world? Cleugh says, no, they did not. As early as the reign of Pope St. Gregory I (540 – 604) “the Great,” indiscriminate concubinage had come to be accepted.
Monasteries and convents flourished, but not without debauchery. Convents were the only places where girls could be given a decent education to fit them for the running of large households on marriage as they were all from the aristocracy.
This changed in the twelfth century when the Church encourages daughters of tradesmen, agriculturists and artisans to become nuns. Combined orders of canons and nuns were instituted with 300 males to 60 females. Scores of penniless and derelict women, even lepers, clamored for admission. The experiment of double monasteries with only a wall between monks and nuns proved a shocking failure, as nearly all the women became pregnant.
Imagine the reaction of a young devout Catholic in the twentieth century reading of this behavior in the twentieth century. In his catechistical education, there had been no mention of bad or nasty popes, debauchery monks or wayward nuns, much less popes such as John XII (955 – 964) who kept a harem in the Lateran Palace.
Popes through the centuries, interrupted occasionally by saintly ones, openly ignored celibacy and did not differ much in character with robber barons. All Europe seemed to be racing down into what Alcuin of York called “a flood of fornication, adultery and incest.”
By the eleventh century, when it was widely believed that the wrath of heaven over debauchery would destroy the world, a campaign was launched to eradicate clerical concubinage. It failed.
Pope Gregory VII (1073 – 1085) was of another mind. In 1085, he made the papacy the supreme secular and ecclesiastical authority of Europe, which included the celibacy of the clergy. Roman Catholicism became a theocratic empire. Rome remains the last such empire in the twenty-first century.
That said official celibacy would lead over the next thousand years to repeated scandals up to modern times.
The confession of sins to a priest was common from the early days of the church, but the confessional box was not instituted until 1565. Cleugh says this was necessary to put a stop to sexual shenanigans taking place behind the altar between the priest and confessors.
Closeting monks and nuns in cloistered existence worked up to a point. Thousands managed to survive an existence deprived of physical love, but Cleugh asks, was this the best use of humanity?
Erasmus himself considered that chastity was more endangered in the cloistered life than any other place. Then there were popes such as John XIII (965 – 972) who found nunneries as amusing to visit as brothels and did so regularly.
This nasty pope was condemned and deposed by the Council of Constance, which he had summoned in 1413 for self-confessed “incest, adultery, general loose living, homicide and atheism.” Once disposed from his exulted office, he wasn’t burnt alive, as was reformer John Huss for heresy the following year, but made Dean of the Sacred College.
Cleugh writes:
“Attacked from without for hypocrisy and betrayed from within by reckless licentiousness the Church hierarchy still had to maintain the official restrictions on sex expression … Christianity could never have survived the paradox inherent in these circumstances if not for men like Canon Hemmelin who stuck to the middle of the road.”
The Canon believed, as did Francis of Assisi, that the church must build, as do men and women who “fall in love,” from physical beauty to spiritual beauty. It was the best way to come to terms with foolish intolerance of the erotic appetite. Unfortunately, he proved the exception rather than the rule.
WITCH HUNTS
Pope St. Gregory I launched the first witch-hunts in 600. The victims were often silly or pretentious old women or hysterical girls.
Witch ceremonies called “covens” (for covenant) were often held in the dead of night, and in the forest. This paranoia took a bizarre turn in the early fifteenth century with the strange life of Gilles de Rais. Cleugh included it in this section for that reason.
Gilles de Rais was the loyal companion to Joan of Arc in her successful quest to Charles of Ponthieu (Charles VII) on the French throne after the English attempted to install King Henry V, He turned out to be one of the most notorious serial killers and sex feigns of all time, sadistically raping, mutilating, butchering and killing more than six hundred women and children.
The nobleman was a patron of the arts, a skilled painter, learned alchemist, and esteemed citizen. His career luridly illustrated the close connection between witchcraft, black magic and erotic excesses of the Middle Ages.
Witchcraft started as a defiant perversion of the Catholic Mass with the Black Mass, the worship of the devil instead of Christ, as well as defiance of sexual austerity with salacious depravity. Socratic “daimon” became “demon” with Satan in the new theology.
In 1491 Jeanne Pothiere, a nun of Camrai, swore she had been forced to copulate 444 times by a demon. Quite a number of her Sisters in Christ became victims of Satan in a way that went to their heads. They tore off their habits, assumed the attitudes of copulation, shrieked or gabbled obscenities, blasphemed, seized their colleagues with libidinous intent, making noises indicative of enjoyment of an act absolutely prohibited by the Fathers of their order.
French author Honore de Balzac saw how the Church used superstition to exploit the masses, and wrote about it. The belief in demons became a powerful tool of priests to control excessive carnality.
New Age Writing of the twenty-first century attracts youths of both of high and low intellectual inclination to buy into a concoction of the mystical and erotic. It is the occult’s confection of the Holy Trinity and heaven, and the fallen angel Satan and hell as point counterpoint to social good against licentious evil. Occult science deals with the irrepressible urge to promiscuous lovemaking despite the social reserve of society. Black magic, Black Mass and Black Art come to mind as well as necromancy or sorcery. .
In the fourteenth century, nudity was not enough for dramatists. Satan had to appear nude with an immense artificial phallus to symbolize his magic and power. By the end of the century, however, “Moralities” were dramatized. With characters as ethical abstractions, not religious figures, especially of the Seven Deadly Sins with Lust opening the door to extravagance.
Love being locked out produced extremes in the Middle Ages that led to a chaotic laxity of a dying culture, a culture to which the evidence suggest we have not escaped.
Physical love has been locked out, but keeps returning despite the bigots and cynics, and despite rather than because of religious institutions.
WHOREDOM
St. Jerome defined prostitution as mere promiscuity. By the third century, it was maintained that any woman who copulated for any purpose other than procreation was automatically a prostitute, whether she received money or not.
Medieval gentlemen, too, preferred blonds, as whores, or as wives. Girls with blond or red hair had a better chance of marrying well, mainly because the Madonna and Christ were thought to have had fair hair.
The Manicheans, who first influenced St. Augustine, approved prostitution as they believed amorous ecstasy resembled the exaltation of mystical piety, and the greater the sinner the more joy there would be in heaven over his or her salvation. There was an obvious contradiction with the Church here, as this was considered Christian heresy.
The medieval harlot’s life was permeated with dogmatic Christianity for bawdy houses were often called “abbeys,” and full of icons and holy images. In Russia up to the twentieth century, girls prayed to these images before submitting to their clients in the hopes of preventing injury, disease or childbirth.
In 386, St. Augustine understood the paradox. “Remove harlots and you will pollute the world with the crime of lust.” Many modern sociologists have echoed these sentiments.
The papacy reached its apogee in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries but physical pleasure for plain men and women held its ground. This despite endless wars, epidemics, famines, social injustice, enforced celibacy of the clergy, and the prospective menace of eternal torture and damnation after death.
The slow decline of priestly despotism after 1300 was met with the rising standard of secular education. Men and women began to think more highly of themselves. They grew less amenable to pastoral injunctions of humility and to the idea of being miserable sinners.
DANSE MACABRE
Cleugh writes, “Medieval Europeans lived on far more familiar terms with plague, famine and violent death than even the populations that have faced the blood-stained, morbid and starvation-ridden twentieth century.” He continues, “Religious fanaticism, not only, of course, in Christian lands, has always exacerbated warfare.”
He would not be surprised by the reign of terror, 9/11, the Arab Spring, or the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“Woe to the vanquished” was the cry the Romans during the Middle Ages, as they ruled the battlefield, slaughtering their captives in the thousands. Much of the primitive barbarity that brought horror and desolation upon Europe, between the years 500 and 1000, was followed by a cultural resurrection, as plague and pestilence in 1000 made it seem certain it was the end of days.
Europeans of this period descended into erotomania with a scarcity of mental alternatives to sexual incontinence or senseless physical violence. The merciless annihilation by the medieval papacy of unorthodox Christian sects or reformers, especially if they advocated polygamy or sexual freedom, resulted in wholesale slaughter. Cleugh writes, “As in so much else the medieval mind in war and love was a child which has so far not grown to much more than an adolescent.” I have made that same charge in a different context elsewhere as a reflection of our times and how we handle are social, economic and political problems.
Similar to our times, epochs of moral depravity coincided with those of high morality. The medieval revolt against ecclesiastical taboo on carnal love afforded an extraordinary climate for venereal disease, which reached epidemic proportions, as there was little understanding of the disease or how to treat it.
The same was true of bubonic, pneumonic and septicemia plagues, as well as diphtheria, typhoid, typhus, malaria, leprosy, cholera, smallpox, influenza and syphilis. The sixth century bubonic plague complicated by smallpox devastated the whole Christian world for fifty years hastening the darkening of moral horizons. With Church theology having a strangle hold on knowledge, there was no inquiry into causation of these plagues except secretly and then under the pain of death.
The “Black Death” raged for a generation in the fourteenth century with twenty-five millions Europeans perishing. Civilization virtually stopped. Boccaccio wrote in the preface to his Decameron that three out of every five Italians died in the years of this plague.
Gonorrhea was more common than syphilis in the Middle Ages with neither disease yet proven to be transmitted by sexual intercourse. It wasn’t until the fifteenth century common sense about carnal love was gaining some footing. The moral disgrace with syphilis and gonorrhea, once the cause was known, found many puritanical nineteenth century doctors refusing to treat any patients with venereal diseases. Cleugh writes:
“The scientific innocence, the utter lack of any idea of hygiene, the gross superstitions and the lax of sexual habits in general of Europeans at the end of the fifteenth century rendered syphilis for thirty years as potent a promoter of the very sin which many people supposed to have originated it, as bubonic plague itself.”
The average fifteenth century citizen, in his relative ignorance, cared little about his aches and pains until they became unbearable. Many suffer that same inclination today. Medieval doctors did not guess the existence of bacteria, so without microscopes they only could guess the cause of disease much less venereal diseases.
Pope Alexander VI (1493 – 1503) was considered the incarnate of Satan himself. He was suave, cunning and unscrupulous, lecherous and greedy, and led the way into every kind of erotic frenzy, normal and abnormal.
During the pope’s reign, syphilis was said to have killed a third of Europeans population. Cleugh says the “herd instinct” took charge just as it does in war with the excitement of fear with man “reeling back into beast,” sliding in reverse down the staircase of evolution. When plagues struck in the Middle Ages, the population was already set against clerical persecution of their sexual instincts. With death everywhere, everyday life, Cleugh says, “went rotten with concupiscence.”
The Paris Faculty of Medicine declared, during the Black Death, that medical science could do nothing against either the will of God or Satan. Nuns hurried from their cloisters to dens of debauchery, while the average man and woman preferred to try to forget the malady by giving every carnal appetite free reign to the point of utter exhaustion.
PORNOGRAPHY
It would not be proper to end this review without indicating how locking love out gave birth to pornography.
Christian pornography was present from the earliest days when physical love was feared, failing to see its connection to spiritual love, except ascetically. It was first disguised in transcendental or sentimental robes, in chivalry with damsels and ladies forgiven their transgressions and violation of the sexual code because of their physical beauty, misfortune or social courage.
Pope St. Gregory VII (1073 – 1085) was one of the most important and influential popes in the entire history of the Church, marked with watershed moments. He acquiesced, however, to erotic license and adulterous acts under the holy portico itself, and did nothing but register disgust to the coarse profligacy in a formerly civilized country. He was tactful to a fault with the debaucheries of kings and nobles who in other ways supported the Church. His eye was on another ball, solidifying the political and spiritual power of the Church. Pornography flourished.
Street corner storytelling and courtly bards alike were set in love between men and women, and conflict between men. There was the popular and the high flown with increasingly fornication disguised and blatant entering the stories. There is Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur (1485), which was published fourteen years after his death, and remains popular to this day. Sexual passion, which is the core of the story, is the root from which all fictitious narrative, good, bad and indifferent arises. But it is highly significant that the official repression of sexual love by Christian Europeans, from the fifth to the fifteenth century, found the spirit of poetry and prose glorifying the rebellion against marital fidelity so commanded by the Church.
One gay story of marital infidelity tells of a merchant’s wife, whose husband returned after two years abroad to a child. His wife told her husband that some snow that she had swallowed while thirty had done the trick. The husband pretended to believe her. On his next trip he sold the snow-child for a good sum. When he came back, he told his wife that the boy had melted away on a sun-scorched sandbank when the ship had been wrecked. He thus turned the tables with a wit peculiarly medieval.
We have seen in modern times pornography become a multi-billion-dollar business protected by the first amendment to the constitution. Nudity has once again become common fare, and x-rated films as available as peanuts. The Internet has hundreds of pornographic outlets and conventional films push the limits of propriety. War and scandal grace the tabloids today with periodic attempts to chasten the promiscuous, but as it was in the Middle Ages, surges and fluctuations match the morality of the times that can be traced to ripples to thunder as Aphrodite in some form rides the waves, and Cleugh concludes, “and will forever against the rocks.”
LOVE LOCKED OUT
This was a theme that resonated with me as a young man. I read this book when I was virgin, uptight, and nearly through university with my mother saying to me one day, “Jimmy, you’re not still a virgin, are you?” I was because I bought the programming. I followed the dictates of my Church, and I must confess at this late stage, I was a mess.
My catechetical education during my impressionistic years found my mind separated from my body, and physical love dissociated from spiritual love. It has taken me a lifetime to repair the damage, and this book read when I was thirty flew into the face of everything I thought I knew. I have read it again more than forty years later, and this time, it made sense to me, not because there were bad and nasty popes, or debauching nuns and priests, and depraved kings and nobles, but because I finally understood the ecstasy of physical love cannot be locked out of the heart if spiritual love is to find a home in it. Humanity today, as disgusting as it sometimes seems, has made real progress in giving love a break. In this progress, we find ourselves not separated from people of the Middle Ages, but a new iteration, dealing with life, its joys and its problems not too much differently from the way they dealt with them, but fortunately, with many more tools than they had at their disposal.
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