You read a lot, you learn a lot. From the New York Review of Books, on a discussion of Umberto Grassi’s new book, What God Kept for Himself: Atheism, Sodomy, and Dissent in Renaissance Italy:

They were debating the nature of original sin in an apotheca in Naples. “We discussed a lot of things,” Giovanni Casaburo told the inquisitors in 1598 when they asked him what exactly was said in the apothecary’s shop. “Among them that if Adam hadn’t sinned, eating the forbidden fruit, we wouldn’t have sinned as well.” So far, so orthodox. But then the apothecary Marcello Impicciato joined in. “What apple?” he asked. “Adam and Eve fucked in the ass, and that’s why they were rejected from Paradise.”

What apple? In 1588 Violante Scaglione testified: “Adam’s apple was Eve’s butt, not the pit of the fruit that got stuck in his throat when he was called by God.” They debated it in a tobacconist’s shop in Tuscany in 1702. Did Adam eat an apple, or was it a fig, or a pear? Giuseppe Cinatti said it was no fruit at all—Adam’s sin was “sticking it [his penis] into her ass” instead of “putting it into her cunt,” as God had commanded. One French philosopher phrased it more delicately: “The apple which tempted our first father was the symbol of the rear parts of woman, which very well represents an apple split in half.” An anonymous seventeenth-century student’s notebook records his lecturer’s conclusions: “There were two trees in paradise. Eve ate from one, i.e., was fucked by it, i.e., by Adam’s dick, which was the forbidden fruit.” Italian peasants, apothecaries, friars; French libertines, Dutch philosophers—all believed that Adam sodomized Eve in the Garden of Eden.

This was the true act of original sin—anal sex not as a generic taboo but as an act so intensely pleasurable as to be literally divine. God jealously guarded sodomy, and Adam presumed that highest pleasure for his own. The friar Giovan Battista d’Antrodoco was put on trial in 1662 and declared anal sex so exquisite that God “wanted to keep [it] for himself.” When the inquisitors collected witness testimonies about the unorthodox beliefs of Marcello Impicciato, one remembered the apothecary recounting his own theology of original sin: “Christ was a bugger, and he wanted to bugger, and this was the reason why he put Adam in the terrestrial paradise, and that the fruit was the ass, and Christ wanted to bugger Adam.” According to some heretics, God created Adam in order to sodomize him.

It was Augustine, in the late fourth and early fifth centuries, who had first introduced sexuality into the story of original sin. As an adolescent, he had felt intense shame at his own arousal. “In the sixteenth year of the age of my flesh,” he recalled in his Confessions, “the madness of raging lust exercised its supreme dominion over me.” He was a slave to desire. “A very hard bondage had me enthralled.” Until Augustine, most early Christians held that Adam’s sin was disobeying God’s command not to eat the apple. There was nothing particularly sexual about it; the Genesis story, in the biblical scholar Elaine Pagels’s words, was for early Christians a parable “of moral freedom and moral responsibility.” But Augustine’s shame changed all of that. Adam and Eve had been disobedient, but in Augustine’s view, the punishment for disobedience was further disobedience—of the body: arousal, an erection, lust. The body defied the soul. The rest of us inherited this damaged nature from Adam (quite literally, Augustine thought: it was transmitted in sperm, which is why Christ, immaculately conceived, wasn’t stained by desire). This was concupiscentia, carnal desire, and it was the fate of all humans after the Fall to be enchained by it.

It was Augustine’s pessimistic, highly sexualized interpretation of the Genesis story that prevailed. He understood his erection as proof of humankind’s inborn errancy from God and rewrote the theology of original sin to make sense of his own desire and shame. Over a thousand years later, d’Antrodoco loved to have sex with boys, and he doesn’t seem to have been even a little bit ashamed. “Buggery was an act of beatitude,” he was reported to have told the friars. Anal sex allowed him to achieve a state of blessedness. After he had sex with an altar boy, he bragged that there was no finer sacrifice than “being served by a nice ass”: the youth’s body reimagined as Christ’s flesh on the altar, as a Eucharistic sacrifice. (In Mediterranean Europe, homosexual sodomy was mostly of the pederastic variety: sex between an older man, taking the active role, and a youth, taking the passive one. Consent was not considered.) The forbidden apple was “ass cheeks,” and anal sex “was a pasture for angels, because it had something divine in it.” Francesco Calcagno, a monk from Brescia, would have agreed; at his trial in 1550 he said, “A nice ass was his altar, his mass, the host, and the chalice and the paten.” He claimed to prefer to “adore a nice young boy, lying with him, than the good lord.” Luca Daniel came before the Inquisition in Sicily: he had tried to persuade his partner to have anal sex with him, and when she expressed some reservations, he told her that it was not sinful but a feat worth performing on the altars of Rome.

Huh.

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