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170 Chapter 4
Sexual pleasure was natural for humans and sex in Paradise, before
original sin, would have been pleasurable. More gradually, in the
period of ‘High Scholasticism’, the thought gained ground that sexual
pleasure need not be wrong at all. John Gillingham’s brilliant
short synthesis on twelfth-century marriage illustrates this point
from sources that escape the historians of scholasticism. He quotes
Matthew Paris’s formula for a proper marriage: ‘Law connects
them, love and sexual compatibility’, and notes Innocent III’s
advice to Philip Augustus—that ‘It was not enough to give Ingeborg
the public status of a queen. He must also sleep with her,
for “nothing could be more honourable or more holy than this”’
(ibid.). The data about consummation’s powerful symbolic status
converge with these findings.
Hinduism and Catholicism
In fact medieval Christianity resembled some Hindu sects in the
central importance accorded to sexual intercourse as a symbol of
human union with the divine. In both cases the meaning attaches
to real sexual intercourse: more is involved than a literary topos.
There are important anities between the Hindu and the Catholic
conception of marriage: in addition to the religious meaning attached
to sex, there is a common emphasis on indissolubility. A
big di·erence, of course, is the medieval Church’s emphasis on the
union of one to one, absolutely excluding polygamy, as the symbol
of Christ’s union with the Church.
M. M•uller, Die Lehre des hl. Augustinus von der Paradiesesehe und ihre Auswirkung
in der Sexualethik des 12. und 13. Jahrhunderts bis Thomas von Aquin:
Eine moralgeschichtliche Untersuchung (Studien zur Geschichte der katholischen
Moraltheologie, 1; Regensburg, 1954), 276–9.
Ibid. 285–6; P. J. Payer, The Bridling of Desire: Views of Sex in the Later Middle
Ages (Toronto etc., 1993), 82–3. Cf. e.g. the supplement to the Summa theologica
of Thomas Aquinas, q. 41, art. 3–4 (Sancti Thomae Aquinatis . . . opera omnia,
iussu...LeonisXIIIP.M.edita, xii (Rome, 1906), 79–80) and q. 49, art. 1 and 4
(ibid. 92–3, 94–5). On Albert the Great, see L. Brandl, Die Sexualethik des heiligen
Albertus Magnus: Eine moralgeschichtliche Untersuchung (Studien zur Geschichte
der katholischen Moraltheologie, 2; Regensburg, 1955).
J. Gillingham,‘Love, Marriage and Politics in the Twelfth Century’ (1989), repr.
in id., Richard C¥ur de Lion: Kingship, Chivalry and War in the Twelfth Century
(London etc., 1994), 243–55 at 251; ‘sexual compatibility’ translates ‘concordia lecti’
in Gillingham’s paraphrase.
M. Weber, Die Wirtschaftsethik der Weltreligionen: Hinduismus und Buddhismus
(1916–20), repr. in Gesammelte Aufs•atze zur Religionssoziologie, ii. Hinduismus und
Buddhismus (T •ubingen, 1988), esp. 326–50.
Or a symbol of his union with human nature: but this is not a separate meaning—
it is the basis of his union with the Church.