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| 27 3 The Arrival of Christianity With the arrival of Christianity, Europe faced a profound change in the nature of God. For the Greeks and the Romans there had been a host of gods and goddesses, who were in many respects like humans. They had healthy appetites for food, drink, and sex. With a multitude of gods, there was interaction not only between gods and humans but also among the gods. Those interactions had a great deal of similarity to interactions among humans and even to some degree among the animals, and there was not a great chasm between the gods and humanity, or again even with the animals . There were entities that were the result of sex between mortals and gods. There were half-human, half-animal beings and even gods with animal characteristics. The place of mankind in the universe was not troubled, because the differences between or among the categories were not so stark. Gods, humans, and animals had much in common, and our human activities , including our sexual activities, did not place humans on either side of some divide between the gods and the animals or really distinguish us in any major way from the gods, other than in our mortality, or from the animals. We, the gods, and the animals all had the same appetites, and in satisfying those appetites we were not engaged in anything shameful. The Christian God is of a different nature. The Christian God, like the Jewish God, is not one among many. The Christian God is a unique individual , even if one believes in three aspects represented in the Trinity. That God does not have others of similar type with whom to interact. That God is certainly not sexual and would seem to have no need for other appetites. The ascendancy of that God had to work a profound change in the view of the relationship between God, humanity, and the animals. We could no longer all be similar entities, and one of the differences would be in our appetites. Our appetites separated us in our nature from God and showed more of a similarity with the animals. At the same time, the story of the creation of humans had us created in the image and likeness of God. That similarity to God was not physical and 28 | The Arrival of Christianity was not in a shared level of knowledge or of power. It had to be a spiritual similarity.1 We shared in godliness not in our bodies but in our spirit. But our bodies, and the needs of those bodies, separated us from God and corrupted the shared spirituality. Because we had bodies, we were also like the animals, despite the likeness of our spirits to God. We were reminded of this belonging in part to the animal side of a divine-animal divide when we experienced and when we fulfilled appetites like those of the animals, appetites that God did not experience. Richard Posner, in his book Sex and Reason, recognizes that the Christian belief in a degree of divine nature in humanity would be corrupted by the existence and needs of the body: Man is a degenerate version of God, the degeneracy consisting not only in pride and envy and other spiritual flaws but also in the possession of a body that is prone not just to decay but to every sort of shame and indignity . The body . . . should be clothed, ideally at all times; for it is a shameful thing, a thing to be concealed, not flaunted in the manner of the Greeks and Romans. And bodily activities should be confined to those that are necessary.2 The nature of a noncorporeal God, one without appetites, made the existence of our needs to eat, to drink, and to eliminate and the existence of our sexual urges a measure of just how far we were from the divine nature and how close we were to the animals. The early Christian Church faced the task of distinguishing humans from the animals. If we were to share in the divine nature, we would have to establish a difference between God and the animals and show that humans did not belong on the animal side of that divide. Joyce Salisbury studies the relationship between humans and animals in the Middle Ages, and it must be remembered that the Middle Ages were still early in the development of the Christian Church and its impact on the culture of Europe: When...

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