of men with even greater intensity than
ever before, and in addition to a dangerous adventure, even within the
sanction of wedlock the sex act became a deed of shame. The following
quotations from the church fathers will illustrate this view:

Jerome said, "Marriage is always a vice; all we can do is to excuse and
cleanse it. ... In Paradise Eve was a virgin. Virginity is natural
while wedlock only follows guilt."[35]

Tertullian addressed women in these words: "Do you not know that you are
each an Eve? The sentence of God on this sex of yours lives in this age.
... You are the devil's gateway. ... You destroy God's image,
Man."[35: Bk.1.]

Thus woman became degraded beyond all previous thought in the teaching
of the early church. The child was looked upon as the result of an act
of sin, and came into the world tainted through its mother with sin. At
best marriage was a vice. All the church could do was to cleanse it as
much as possible by sacred rites, an attempt which harked back to the
origin of marriage as the ceremonial breaking of taboo. Peter Lombard's
Sentences affirmed marriage a sacrament. This was reaffirmed at Florence
in 1439. In 1565, the Council of Trent made the final declaration. But
not even this could wholly purify woman, and intercourse with her was
still regarded as a necessary evil, a concession that had to be
unwillingly made to the lusts of the flesh.

Such accounts as we have of the lives of holy women indicate that they
shared in the beliefs of their times. In the account of the life of a
saint known as the Blessed Eugenia preserved in an old palimpsest[36] we
read that she adopted the costume of a monk,--"Being a woman by nature
in order that I might gain everlasting life." The same account tells of
another holy woman who passed as a eunuch, because she had been warned
that it was easier for the devil to tempt a woman. In another collection
of lives of saints is the story[37] of a holy woman who never allowed
herself to see the face of a man, even that of her own brother, lest
through her he might go in among women. Another holy virgin shut herself
up in a tomb because she did not wish to cause the spiritual downfall of
a young man who loved her.

This long period of religious hatred of and contempt for woman included
the Crusades, the Age of Chivalry,[38] and lasted well into the
Renaissance.[39] Students of the first thousand years of the Christian
era like Donaldson,[22] McCabe,[40] an