중세 말 육체와 성에 대한 교회의 이념과 규율 메커니즘

Abstract

This paper examines the ecclesiastical disciplinary mechanism of body and sex of the 13-14th centuries in the light of the ecclesiastical idea of sex, the sexual discourse in confession and the punitive structure of body in hell. Roman Church defined the sex as an evil, the philosophical basis of which originated from St. Augustinus. He ascribed the cause of original sin to the revolt of sexual organ which was a product of carnal desire, and considered the revolt of sexual organ as the libido, i.e. the principle of sexual organ which could not be controlled by human consciousness. The revolt of sexual organ together with the libido contains the structure in which man should put his own desire under the endless surveillance and control in relation not to the other but to the self. Therefore the carnal desire having at once the possibility of fall and the one of salvation became the object of strict regulation and control not only in this world but in the other world. The confession and the hell of the late Middle Ages were the sophisticated disciplinary machines corresponding to the ecclesiastical idea of sex. As for the confession as a sacrament, the obligatory practice of annual confession, the stress on the contrition through self-examination, and the inducement to speak about one’s own sex were the technologies of the self which led Christians to know better about and to abandon their own sexual desire. The image of hell also has the same disciplinary mechanism as does the confession. The diversity and cruelty of punitive method, the spacial categorization of punishment according to the nature of crime, the correspondence between crime and punishment, the decrease in the criminal desire, and the penetration of infernal image into the daily life space―all of them played an important role not only in decreasing the criminal desire but in urging Christians to conduct the self-examination and to confess their own sins to the priest. In the last resort, the disciplinary mechanism of sex and desire was a kind of Machiavellian invention by means of which Roman Church made an effort to regulate Christians’ excessive desire and to reintegrate the ideological deviants into Christianity in those days when it tried to consolidate its own ideological monopoly in face of the rapid development of city and the violent growth of heretics.