the physical organs of sex are a device of the devil.
On the contrary, indeed, some of the most distinguished of the Fathers,
especially those of the Eastern Church who had felt the vivifying breath
of Greek thought, occasionally expressed themselves on the subject of
Nature, sex, and the body in a spirit which would have won the approval of
Goethe or Whitman.

Clement of Alexandria, with all the eccentricities of his over-subtle
intellect, was yet the most genuinely Greek of all the Fathers, and it is
not surprising that the dying ray of classic light reflected from his mind
shed some illumination over this question of sex. He protested, for
instance, against that prudery which, as the sun of the classic world set,
had begun to overshadow life. "We should not be ashamed to name," he
declared, "what God has not been ashamed to create."[52] It was a
memorable declaration because, while it accepted the old classic feeling
of no shame in the presence of nature, it put that feeling on a new and
religious basis harmonious to Christianity. Throughout, though not always
quite consistently, Clement defends the body and the functions of sex
against those who treated them with contempt. And as the cause of sex is
the cause of women he always strongly asserts the dignity of women, and
also proclaims the holiness of marriage, a state which he sometimes places
above that of virginity.[53]

Unfortunately, it must be said, St. Augustine--another North African, but
of Roman Carthage and not of Greek Alexandria--thought that he had a
convincing answer to the kind of argument which Clement presented, and so
great was the force of his passionate and potent genius that he was able
in the end to make his answer prevail. For Augustine sin was hereditary,
and sin had its special seat and symbol in the sexual organs; the fact of
sin has modified the original divine act of creation, and we cannot treat
sex and its organs as though there had been no inherited sin. Our sexual
organs, he declares, have become shameful because, through sin, they are
now moved by lust. At the same time Augustine by no means takes up the
mediaeval ascetic position of contemptuous hatred towards the body. Nothing
can be further from Odo of Cluny than Augustine's enthusiasm about the
body, even about the exquisite harmony of the parts beneath the skin. "I
believe it may be concluded," he even says, "that in the creation of the
human body beauty was more regarded than n