Sexuality and the Fall of Man

Abstract

To understand virginity one must start at the Beginning. It is not just the logical place to begin, it is the only place, for the belief in the perfective character of virginity is intertwined with the mysteries of the creation, man’s primal life in a garden of innocence, and an original transgression. Christianity has always been heedful of the way things were in the Beginning, and perhaps this systematic concern reflects a basal tendency in all religious thought, the disposition to explain and evaluate belief and observance in the light of the nature of things in the Time before time, in illo tempore.² A sense of afflicted nostalgia for the original state of human nature is so prevalent in the writings of the Fathers as to suggest that Christian thought is actually based upon a mode of quondam retrospection which views present, profane reality exclusively in terms derived from a belief in a sinless Beginning. As Paul Ricoeur writes,

To posit the world as that into which sin entered, or innocence as that from which sin strayed, or again, in figurative language, Paradise as the place from which man was driven, is to attest that sin is not our original reality, does not constitute our first ontological status; sin does not define what it is to be a man; beyond his becoming a sinner there is his being created.³

Gaude ergo talem te esse, qualis Dei formata es manibus. Ille ergo integra condidit utique, quam integritate ditavit; quam ad integritatis praemia praeparavit. Perversi enim naturalem corrumpunt homines, quam Deus formavit integram. Et haec offensa humani generis prima, haec damnatae originis causa dum protoplasti esse noluerunt quod fuerant conditi: idcirco meruerunt in se et in prole damnari. Reparatae castimoniae in vobis retentaculum, O virgines, quod perdiderunt in paradiso primi homines. - Leander, Liber de institutione virginum ¹