Medieval Virginity, Modern Mayhem

Last updated on: October 21, 2014 at 1:52 pm by David Mills

Medieval Virginity, Modern Mayhem 2014-10-21T13:52:02-04:00 David Mills

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From the learned Father John Hunwicke, one of those learned people who turn his learning to insight, the story of the demivirgins of Oxford (read that first) and then an application for the present. He contrasts their defense of their virginity with our culture’s “own novel superstition: that everybody is inevitably going to express genitally the sexuality in which they say ‘God has created them’.”

He explains:

The point which these Armoured Virgins — even the mythical as well as the historical ones — make is that it is neither compulsory nor inevitable to be sexually active. Our Christian cult of Virginity teaches that if you want, or, rather, are called, to be a male or a female who is not committed irrevocably to pursue fruitfulness with another individual ‘in bed and at board’, the consequence is simple. You offer up to God a sexually abstinent life. The assumption all around us is that since mechanical means exist whereby sexuality may now be divorced from both fertility and commitment, we are all at liberty to be uncommitted, sterile, and promiscuous. This preposterous nonsense is now solemnly enshrined in the ‘laws’ of this land! It is one of the most superbly crafted of the deceits of the Evil One. Day by day, it becomes increasingly clear that it is only in a culture which values Virginity and Celibacy that Matrimony itself can flourish . . . paradoxical as that may seem to us.

During the recent Synod, the suggestion was made that the modern debates within the Church about Gender and Sexuality may be our equivalent of the debates in the first six Christian centuries about Christology. I think this is quite an acute observation. If it is true, this means that we have several centuries of the present mayhem in front of us.

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