It has really been a widespread and almost universal feeling among the ancient and primitive peoples that there is something impure and sinful in the things of sex, so that those who would lead a religious life must avoid sexual relationships; even in India celibacy has commanded respect (see, e.g., Westermarck, _Marriage_, pp.

150 et seq.).

As to the original foundation of this notion--which it is unnecessary to discuss more fully here--many theories have been put forward; St.Augustine, in his _De Civitate Dei_, sets forth the ingenious idea that the penis, being liable to spontaneous movements and erections that are not under the control of the will, is a shameful organ and involves the whole sphere of sex in its shame.

Westermarck argues that among nearly all peoples there is a feeling against sexual relationship with members of the same family or household, and as sex was thus banished from the sphere of domestic life a notion of its general impurity arose; Northcote points out that from the first it has been necessary to seek concealment for sexual intercourse, because at that moment the couple would be a prey to hostile attacks, and that it was by an easy transition that sex came to be regarded as a thing that ought to be concealed, and, therefore, a sinful thing.

(Diderot, in his _Supplement au Voyage de Bougainville_, had already referred to this motive for seclusion as "the only natural element in modesty.") Crawley has devoted a large part of his suggestive work, _The Mystic Rose_, to showing that, to savage man, sex is a perilous, dangerous, and enfeebling element in life, and, therefore, sinful.
It would, however, be a mistake to think that such men as St.Bernard and St.Odo of Cluny, admirably as they represented the ascetic and even the general Christian views of their own time, are to be regarded as altogether typical exponents of the genuine and primitive Christian view.
So far as I have been able to discover, during the first thousand years of Christianity we do not find this concentrated intellectual and emotional ferocity of attack on the body; it only developed at the moment when, with Pope Gregory VII, mediaeval Christianity reached the climax of its conquest over the souls of European men, in the establishment of the celibacy of the secular clergy, and the growth of the great cloistered communities of monks in severely regulated and secluded orders.[51] Before that the teachers of asceticism were more concerned to exhort to chastity and modesty than to direct a deliberate and systematic attack on the whole body; they concentrated their attention rather on spiritual virtues than on physical imperfections.