In Professor Francesca Stavrakopolou's book God: An Anatomy, in Part 2 (God's Genitals), in chapter 5 (Cover Up), at location 1591-1664 of the ebook we read (all words in bold are my own for emphasis):
The censoring of Michelangelo’s work was just one of a number of Counter-Reformation strategies adopted by bishops, priests and theologians in the wake of the Council of Trent (1545–63) to tackle what had come to be seen as the scandalous profanity of frontal nudity in Christian art.[3] No matter that Michelangelo, like many of his predecessors and peers, used the nude theologically to celebrate the humanity and masculinity of the divine Christ. For too many, the genitals were both spiritually and morally dangerous, and were thus to be hidden from view.
This was far from a new idea. The genitals have long functioned as a site of religious and cultural anxiety in human societies. Simultaneously associated with sex, reproduction and urination, the places and spaces between our legs trigger deep-rooted social and cultural concerns – particularly about their public display – and are coded with values and meanings in ways many other body parts are not. These values and meanings are closely linked to the generative and changeable physiology of our genitals. … They are powerfully transformative. And like other manifestations of power and transformation, they are potentially dangerous – unless carefully harnessed or managed by the social and cultural preferences of the communities in which we live. …
This was of particular interest to me in the context of the Book of Abraham and God being depicted with an erection. For it helps us see this Mormon depiction of God in a positive light. The next section was of particular interest because, as I have argued in the following blog series, I believe that Joseph Smith was seeking to liberate the Saints from Augustinianism. Thus Professor Stavrakopolou's following words here provide further support for my arguments:
In the hands of early [Catholic and Protestant] Christian theologians, [the story of Adam and Eve is] about human misbehaviour became a morality tale about the dangers of the flesh. ‘They turned their eyes on their own genitals, and lusted after them with that stirring movement they had not previously known’, conjectured the fifth-century CE bishop Augustine of Hippo – a Christian convert and reformed womanizer, who knew the hazardous allures of the body all too well.[6] His formulation of humanity’s ‘original sin’ would quickly become a central doctrine of the Western Church. Eve became a temptress who led her husband into religious deviancy. Transgression led to sexualization, rendering innocent nudity shameful nakedness. The first humans fell away from God, exchanging the easy intimacy of the garden for the sweat, pain and unruly sexual desire of the carnal world. Salvation from original sin, congenitally inherited by all humans, was only to be found in Christ – the celibate, sinless counterpart to Adam – who was birthed into the world by Mary – the virginal, uncorrupted foil to Eve. Woeful shame and dangerous lust have infected our genitals ever since.
And yet there is nothing in the biblical story of Eden to suggest that the covering of the genitals reflects the sin of sexuality. Rather, it is a tale about the disobedience of Adam and Eve, and the threat they now pose to God, who shares with his divine colleagues in the heavenly council his worry that, in acquiring wisdom, the humans have become ‘like one of us’.[7] They are akin to gods. Their rudimentary clothing marks this transformed, elevated status –a new status further acknowledged by God himself, who replaces their flimsy fig leaves with more durable outfits of leather, made by his own hand. Beyond the bounds of the garden, humans immediately harness their newfound wisdom to do as the gods have always done: they bear children, cultivate crops and rear animals; they kill, travel, play music, build cities, forge tools, craft weapons and perform rituals. In covering their genitals, Adam and Eve reveal not their sexualized self-corruption, but their godlike capacity for the creation of culture.[8]
Note how the Professor explains that the Council of Gods were endowing Humanity with Divine attributes by providing the fig leaves so that they can do as the gods have always done and bear children. With this context in mind, Joseph Smith can be seen as completely reversing the Augustinian point of view. Instead of the fig leaves being a cover-up of shameful genitals, Joseph Smith presents the fig leaf aprons in the temple as symbolic of the procreative potency of the male phallus in a positive and affirming manner as a source of power through strength in the loins and the priesthood seed toward an increae of lives (Abr. 2:11; D&C 132: 15-20, 63).
The professor continues:
The distortion of this [Adam & Eve] story by early theologians is just one episode in the long history of a ferocious Christian hostility towards sex and the genitals. It was a hostility shaped in part by the acute ascetic tendencies of certain ancient and classical Greek philosophies, including aspects of Stoicism and Platonism, in which the base and the bodily were sharply distinguished from the sublime and the immaterial. …
Note how this is also remedied in the restored gospel, which is a more materialist or physicalist spirituality. She goes on to summarize the attitude of the Apostle Paul and then says, "For Paul, an out-and-proud celibate himself, the holy and the horny could not and should not mix." Once again, from this perspective I see the restored gospel as being more affirmative of bodily drives and desires. For example, see Parley Pratt's 1840 pamphlet An Appeal to the Inhabitants of the State of New York, Letter to Queen Victoria, in particular the essay Intelligence and Affection, where he speaks favorably of the procreative sensual affections.
She goes on to point out that many early Christians began to see sex itself as something to be avoided, as she writes:
By the second century CE, this hostility had intensified. In an important text known as the Acts of Thomas, the risen Jesus suddenly appears in the bedchamber of a couple on their wedding night, urging them not to have sex: ‘Know that if you refrain from this filthy intercourse, you become temples holy and pure . . . and you will not be involved in the cares of life and of children, whose end is destruction’. …
… many early Christians –including Paul and the Gospel writers –believed that the world as they knew it was about to end, for it was to be swept away by the Kingdom of God, in which there would be no place for sex nor need for procreation. …
This historical analysis gives further support to the need of the restored gospel, in order to restore the original hebraic attitude of sexuality and reproduction; that had clearly been distorted by dualistic Greek philosophy and the mistaken apocalypticism of certain sects within Second Temple Judaism.
