Onan: Gratuitous Theological Misinterpretation

An observation from my friend Claude: written-up by ChatGPT

Genesis 38 contains the story of Onan, a tale often misunderstood and misapplied. Here is the key passage:

“Judah took a wife for Er his firstborn; her name was Tamar. But Er, Judah's firstborn, was wicked in the sight of the Lord, and the Lord put him to death.

Then Judah said to Onan, ‘Go in to your brother's wife and perform the duty of a brother-in-law to her; raise up offspring for your brother.’ But since Onan knew that the offspring would not be his, he spilled his semen on the ground whenever he went in to his brother's wife, so that he would not give offspring to his brother.

What he did was displeasing in the sight of the Lord, and he put him to death also.” (Genesis 38:6-10)

Cultural Context and Onan's Motivation

This story revolves around the ancient practice of "levirate marriage", where a man was obligated to marry his deceased brother’s widow to produce offspring on his behalf. Any child from this union would legally inherit the deceased brother’s name and property. Onan’s act of spilling his semen was not just contraception but a calculated move to deny his brother’s lineage while maintaining an appearance of compliance. Onan’s selfishness - putting his inheritance above his duty - was the core issue, and God’s punishment reflects this breach of moral and social order.

The Church’s Use and Misuse

Over time, the Church interpreted this story to condemn not just Onan’s selfishness but also certain sexual practices, including contraception and masturbation. Early theologians like St. Augustine, influenced by natural law theory, emphasized the procreative purpose of sexuality. Onan’s act - interpreted as contraceptive - was generalized to include masturbation, as both were seen as “wasting” reproductive potential.

This overextension arose from focusing on Onan’s physical act rather than its context. While the Church’s broader teaching on sexuality aimed to safeguard its procreative and unitive purposes, the Genesis account per se is not about masturbation. It highlights familial duty, justice, and Onan’s moral failure, not the morality of specific sexual acts.

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Unusual Reasons

This post is about people who undertake significant life changes, but for unusual reasons.

1. Programming

Dr Hamid Lesan escaped to England from Iran, where, as a dissident, he was under the scrutiny of the Shah’s secret police, the SAVAK. He worked as a colleague of mine at STL in the mid-1980s on formal methods research and AI. I asked him once how he had gotten into programming; he replied that he had first engaged with programming as an interesting application of the lambda calculus.

[Dr Hamid Lesan received his Ph.D. in Mathematical Logic from the Department of Mathematics of the University of Manchester in 1978. After a brief period of teaching, he joined STL in 1980, where his work has been mainly concerned with Formal Methods and Natural Language Processing. He is currently working on tools for supporting the formal specification and development of software in the context of the ESPRIT project RAISE. (ICL Technical Journal, Volume 7 Issue 1 - May 1990). He died in August 2006 - I’m not aware of the circumstances.]

2. Joining the revolutionary left

In the early 1970s, when I was at Warwick University, there was a plethora of far-left organisations looking to recruit: the International Socialists (IS, later SWP); the Socialist Labour League (SLL); the Militant Tendency in the Labour Party; and the International Marxist Group (IMG), British Section of the Fourth International.

It was a time of unrest, and we talked big. Our perspective was becoming a mass revolutionary party as the Bolsheviks had achieved in 1917. Once, one of our leaders, Peter Gowan, came to Warwick to speak. He looked forward to the future mass party, but mentioned that today, most of the leading cadres had elected to join the IMG - rather than other bigger, higher profile organisations - specifically because of its link with the International.

Probably not one in one hundred thousand workers and students had ever heard of the Fourth International: I certainly hadn’t before I was recruited…

3. Being received into the Catholic Church

People join religious organisations for many, often prosaic reasons. But JD Vance joined after an intense study of St. Augustine’s massive City of God. In this fifth century work, Augustine condemns Rome, the City of Men, devoted to present excess, hedonism, selfish ambition and heedless individualism. Vance had no problem identifying those ancient Roman pagans with contemporary American coastal elites with their mindless hedonism; their secular, patronising arrogance.

Augustine counterposes the City of God, the community of those who love God and live according to His will. The Catholic Church is a visible manifestation of the City of God on earth, and promotes the virtues of humility, communitarianism and morality.

JD Vance considered the Catholic Church as the right organisation of resistance: he decided to join.

[St. Augustine wrote "The City of God" over a span of several years, beginning in 413 AD and completing it around 426 AD. This period was during a time of great turmoil in the Roman Empire, particularly marked by the sack of Rome by the Visigoths in 410 AD, which partly inspired Augustine to write the work. The full title of the work is "De Civitate Dei contra Paganos" (The City of God against the Pagans), and it addresses the decline of Rome and defends Christianity against the accusations that it was responsible for the fall of the Empire. (ChatGPT).]

"The Lessons of History”

"The Lessons of History”  by Will and Ariel Durant

From "The Lessons of History” by Will and Ariel Durant (p. 45).

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"History has justified the Church in the belief that the masses of mankind desire a religion rich in miracle, mystery, and myth.

“Some minor modifications have been allowed in ritual, in ecclesiastical costume, and in episcopal authority; but the Church dares not alter the doctrines that reason smiles at, for such changes would offend and disillusion the millions whose hopes have been tied to inspiring and consolatory imaginations.

“No reconciliation is possible between religion and philosophy except through the philosophers' recognition that they have found no substitute for the moral function of the Church, and the ecclesiastical recognition of religious and intellectual freedom."

The paradox is here plainly set out. My emphasis added.

Exactly the same paradox plays out in the physicist's visceral rejection of the personal implications of what they research and teach.

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You don’t need to be a historian or physicist to understand the heart of the issue. Here’s Joni:

"We're only particles of change, I know, I know. Orbiting around the sun. But how can I have that point of view, when I'm always bound and tied to someone..."

From the title track, "Hegira", by Joni Mitchell.

Exactly right. This is why no-one really and truly believes in nihilism. How could you live your life on the basis that you are a collection of fundamental particles shaped by local, historical boundary conditions within the vastness of the timeless universe - and that is all that can be said about you, and everyone and everything else?

'In the Courts of Three Popes' - Mary Ann Glendon

 

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Courts-Three-Popes-American-Diplomat-ebook/dp/B0C5VBNX12/

Here is an edited version of this review, expressing my take on this interesting book.

'"In my years of service to the Holy See, I was a stranger in a rather strange land - a layperson in a culture dominated by clergy, an American woman in an environment that was largely male and Italian, and a citizen of a constitutional republic in one of the world's last absolute monarchies." 

So declares Harvard professor Mary Ann Glendon as she addresses some of the most vexing issues in the Catholic Church today, from the work to protect women's rights internationally, to responding to clergy sexual abuse, to address hypocrisy regarding sexuality within the clerisy, to the corruption of the Vatican Bank and Roman Curia. 

In Pope John Paul II's words, the Church enters the third millennium on its knees in penance for failures such as clerical sex abuse, or in failing to lead the way for lay women to hold positions of power in the Church. If John Paul II neglected administration, allowing the Vatican bureaucracy full sway, his successor, Pope Benedict XVI, simply buckled under the pernicious pressures of the Vatican establishment. Glendon is not an unrestrained admirer of the current Pope Francis, seeing him as arbitrary, capricious and needlessly losing too many battles with corrupt and self-serving institutions.

Glendon illuminates the issues vexing the Church today: the place of faith in secular politics, relating the Church to other religions, clericalism and the power of laypeople, and corruption at the Vatican Bank and within the Roman Curia. 

Despite its many failings, she argues that the Catholic Church is yet a living, breathing global community. Behind doctrines and policies and institutions lie people, personalities, aspirations, and relationships that still promise to transform lives.'

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The book is not as interesting as it could have been. In style one may infer that Mary Ann Glendon is a hostess type: gregarious, of firm principles, humane, practical, orthodox.

A Myers-Briggs ESFJ. 

A hard-hitting, forensic analysis of institutional failure this is not: (see, by contrast, "In the Closet of the Vatican: Power, Homosexuality, Hypocrisy" by Frederic Martel).

Journalists are of course in the business of exposing crime, weakness and hypocrisy. But in the round the Catholic Church is much more than the Vatican bureaucracy. When it is operating with its mission statement and founder in mind, it is a unique force, generally for the good, on our planet. If only the centre could be sorted out!

What did his mother call Jesus?

That old Texan joke: "If the English of the King James Bible was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for me!"

I understand the local priest's attachment to the Latin Mass. Two thousand years of cultural continuity;  the kinship of fellow-priests down the centuries reciting the same liturgy.

Outreach into the vernacular must have seemed like wanton cultural vandalism.

Still, one should be mindful of the culture within which one basks. The Mother of God did not call her son Jesus (Ἰησοῦς in the language of the hated Empire) - it was the Aramaic Yeshua.

Vatican productivity: a modest proposal

Press Release: PFN/FANUC 26 February 2017.

"PFN/FANUC is pleased to announce today a strategic partnership with the Vatican.

For many decades the Catholic priesthood has been contracting. Despite the consolidation of dioceses and enhanced roles for the laity, churches have been closing and some Masses have been cancelled. The problem is particularly acute during periods such as Lent when extra weekday Masses are normally scheduled for parishioners.

The root cause is the flat productivity of the Catholic Church over 2,000 years. The ministry is extraordinarily labour-intensive, even more so than the health care sector. Finally, however, advances in Robotics and Deep Learning have allowed PFN/FANUC to introduce the Klerjibot™, based on the FANUC pedestal robot.

Capable of being rolled out on a massive scale, the automated celebrant requires only a standard power supply and broadband connection. The system ships with three languages: the vernacular for celebrating Mass, Italian as the lingua franca of the priesthood, and Latin, for dealing with the Curia.

The Klerjibot can perform Mass in fully automated mode, using its visual and auditory sensors to detect parishioners approaching for communion. More conservative jurisdictions may feel that an automaton cannot preside over such sacred mysteries as transubstantiation. In such cases the system can revert, during this phase of the Mass, to teleoperation.

PFN/FANUC and the Vatican will jointly set up a system of national call-centres where banks of trained priests will be alerted as communion approaches, remotely logging-in to the Klerjibot to take over that part of the ceremony. It is anticipated that one priest could control as many as ten different machines in widely-spaced locations, leading to an incredible increase in productivity.

First trials are expected soon in California."

Diary: Christmas Bazaar + Clare's weights

#inconsequentialtrivia

We missed a frost last night. Just damp and cold for the Church Bazaar in the Town Hall. We do a fast flyby. Buy marmalade, bread, some cakes. Inspect the books and buy a few novels. Finish with hot drinks and a mince pie. This year Clare did not directly engage with Santa. Then Waitrose.

Father Christmas at Wells Town Hall - the RC Church Bazaar

Clare inspects one of the stalls

Back in 2015, Clare and Santa got on famously (above). This year: quieter.

A misty morning showing the weed mats - work-in-progress in our front garden

Clare has augmented her 'beauty bells' with a 2 kg pair

It's a joy to watch her flap.