Episode Details

What do you do when you believe something is sinful, you believe you can't stop it, and you realize you might as well make money from it — and somehow convince yourself this is the reasonable position?

This is, roughly speaking, the theological and administrative position that much of medieval Europe arrived at regarding commercial sex. And the fact that this position was articulated, defended, and institutionalized by one of the most powerful religious institutions in world history — the Catholic Church — tells us something important about the difference between official morality and operational reality.

We are now in the medieval period, roughly from the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century through to the end of the fifteenth century — a thousand years of complicated, contradictory, deeply human history. And if the ancient world built the architecture of commercial sex, the Middle Ages inherited that architecture, slapped a coat of religious guilt on the outside, and then continued using it while arguing loudly about whether they should.

Augustine and the Theology of Necessary Evil