Are women "sewers" or saints? The church can't decide. D uring the national U. If we think his relationship with a prostitute violates patriarchal family values, however, we would be wrong for much of Christian history. In fact, many of the church's major formative theologians and the social policies they espoused assumed that prostitutes were necessary to preserve the patriarchal family.
Illustration: Trees of Desire Women were perceived as temptation -- or the embodiment of evil. Christianity has had a profoundly ambivalent attitude toward sexuality, an ambivalence often projected through race onto darker-skinned peoples. On the one hand, the doctrine of the incarnation, that God became an actual human being, led official Christianity to repudiate theologies such as Gnosticism that equate the physical world, including the body, with the fall and human sin.
On the other hand, Christianity, under the influence of Paul, early Christian ascetics and Augustine, a bishop and theologian of the early Christian church, split the spiritual and the body. In this theological dualism, the spirit and the male as the spiritual principle is always at risk from the drag of the sexual impulse the female. Prostitutes were tolerated and more mobile in medieval Europe. Aristotle, as is well known, equated women with the material principle in the existence and equated men with the rational principle.
For the correct ordering of existence, the rational had to rule over the physical and give it, the passive element, shape and direction. Most theologians wrote about the body and sex from the experience of celibacy and they problematized sexuality altogether and most forms of human intimacy.
In God's good providence, the fathers believed even the drag of the flesh had its purposes, and God had provided that all things work toward the good.
