The connection between the witchcraft delusion and the attitude toward all women has already been implied.[34] The dualistic teaching of the early church fathers, with its severance of matter and spirit and its insistence on the ascetic ideal of life, had focussed on sexuality as the outstanding manifestation of fleshly desires. The contact of the sexes came to be looked upon as the supreme sin. Celibacy taught that through the observance of the taboo on woman the man of God was to be saved from pollution. Woman was the arch temptress who by the natural forces of sex attraction, reinforced by her evil charms and incantations, made it so difficult to attain the celibate ideal. From her ancestress Eve woman was believed to inherit the natural propensity to lure man to his undoing. Thus the old belief in the uncleanness of woman was renewed in the minds of men with even greater intensity than ever before, and in addition to a dangerous adventure, even within the sanction of wedlock the sex act became a deed of shame. The following quotations from the church fathers will illustrate this view:
Jerome said, "Marriage is always a vice; all we can do is to excuse and cleanse it. ... In Paradise Eve was a virgin. Virginity is natural while wedlock only follows guilt."[35]
Tertullian addressed women in these words: "Do you not know that you are each an Eve? The sentence of God on this sex of yours lives in this age. ... You are the devil's gateway. ... You destroy God's image, Man."[35: Bk.1.]
Thus woman became degraded beyond all previous thought in the teaching of the early church. The child was looked upon as the result of an act of sin, and came into the world tainted through its mother with sin. At best marriage was a vice. All the church could do was to cleanse it as much as possible by sacred rites, an attempt which harked back to the origin of marriage as the ceremonial breaking of taboo. Peter Lombard's Sentences affirmed marriage a sacrament. This was reaffirmed at Florence in 1439. In 1565, the Council of Trent made the final declaration. But not even this could wholly purify woman, and intercourse with her was still regarded as a necessary evil, a concession that had to be unwillingly made to the lusts of the flesh.