They were debating the nature of original sin in an apotheca in Naples. “We discussed a lot of things,” Giovanni Casaburo told the inquisitors in 1598 when they asked him what exactly was said in the apothecary’s shop. “Among them that if Adam hadn’t sinned, eating the forbidden fruit, we wouldn’t have sinned as well.” So far, so orthodox. But then the apothecary Marcello Impicciato joined in. “What apple?” he asked. “Adam and Eve fucked in the ass, and that’s why they were rejected from Paradise.”

What apple? In 1588 Violante Scaglione testified: “Adam’s apple was Eve’s butt, not the pit of the fruit that got stuck in his throat when he was called by God.” They debated it in a tobacconist’s shop in Tuscany in 1702. Did Adam eat an apple, or was it a fig, or a pear? Giuseppe Cinatti said it was no fruit at all—Adam’s sin was “sticking it [his penis] into her ass” instead of “putting it into her cunt,” as God had commanded. One French philosopher phrased it more delicately: “The apple which tempted our first father was the symbol of the rear parts of woman, which very well represents an apple split in half.” An anonymous seventeenth-century student’s notebook records his lecturer’s conclusions: “There were two trees in paradise. Eve ate from one, i.e., was fucked by it, i.e., by Adam’s dick, which was the forbidden fruit.” Italian peasants, apothecaries, friars; French libertines, Dutch philosophers—all believed that Adam sodomized Eve in the Garden of Eden.

This was the true act of original sin—anal sex not as a generic taboo but as an act so intensely pleasurable as to be literally divine. God jealously guarded sodomy, and Adam presumed that highest pleasure for his own. The friar Giovan Battista d’Antrodoco was put on trial in 1662 and declared anal sex so exquisite that God “wanted to keep [it] for himself.” When the inquisitors collected witness testimonies about the unorthodox beliefs of Marcello Impicciato, one remembered the apothecary recounting his own theology of original sin: “Christ was a bugger, and he wanted to bugger, and this was the reason why he put Adam in the terrestrial paradise, and that the fruit was the ass, and Christ wanted to bugger Adam.” According to some heretics, God created Adam in order to sodomize him.

It was Augustine, in the late fourth and early fifth centuries, who had first introduced sexuality into the story of original sin. As an adolescent, he had felt intense shame at his own arousal. “In the sixteenth year of the age of my flesh,” he recalled in his Confessions, “the madness of raging lust exercised its supreme dominion over me.” He was a slave to desire. “A very hard bondage had me enthralled.” Until Augustine, most early Christians held that Adam’s sin was disobeying God’s command not to eat the apple. There was nothing particularly sexual about it; the Genesis story, in the biblical scholar Elaine Pagels’s words, was for early Christians a parable “of moral freedom and moral responsibility.” But Augustine’s shame changed all of that. Adam and Eve had been disobedient, but in Augustine’s view, the punishment for disobedience was further disobedience—of the body: arousal, an erection, lust. The body defied the soul. The rest of us inherited this damaged nature from Adam (quite literally, Augustine thought: it was transmitted in sperm, which is why Christ, immaculately conceived, wasn’t stained by desire). This was concupiscentia, carnal desire, and it was the fate of all humans after the Fall to be enchained by it.

It was Augustine’s pessimistic, highly sexualized interpretation of the Genesis story that prevailed. He understood his erection as proof of humankind’s inborn errancy from God and rewrote the theology of original sin to make sense of his own desire and shame. Over a thousand years later, d’Antrodoco loved to have sex with boys, and he doesn’t seem to have been even a little bit ashamed. “Buggery was an act of beatitude,” he was reported to have told the friars. Anal sex allowed him to achieve a state of blessedness. After he had sex with an altar boy, he bragged that there was no finer sacrifice than “being served by a nice ass”: the youth’s body reimagined as Christ’s flesh on the altar, as a Eucharistic sacrifice. (In Mediterranean Europe, homosexual sodomy was mostly of the pederastic variety: sex between an older man, taking the active role, and a youth, taking the passive one. Consent was not considered.) The forbidden apple was “ass cheeks,” and anal sex “was a pasture for angels, because it had something divine in it.” Francesco Calcagno, a monk from Brescia, would have agreed; at his trial in 1550 he said, “A nice ass was his altar, his mass, the host, and the chalice and the paten.” He claimed to prefer to “adore a nice young boy, lying with him, than the good lord.” Luca Daniel came before the Inquisition in Sicily: he had tried to persuade his partner to have anal sex with him, and when she expressed some reservations, he told her that it was not sinful but a feat worth performing on the altars of Rome.

In his brilliant and endlessly surprising What God Kept for Himself,Umberto Grassi finds twenty-six cases of early modern heretics, all men, who told inquisitors that they believed Adam had sodomized Eve in the Garden of Eden.^* It’s hard not to conclude that if Augustine had felt a little differently about his own teenage erection, centuries of Catholic theology—of our understanding of human nature, how we feel about our desires—would look quite different. Like Augustine, these believers also came to see their own sexual experience—wanting and having—as the foundation for a new version of the story of original sin. For the men in Grassi’s study, men who debated the finer points of apples and asses and desire and shame in apothecary shops and tobacconists and cloisters, sexual pleasure led them to their own theology—albeit a deeply heretical one. Their story had the shame radically written out.

Anal sex could feel so good that you might start to wonder how something so enjoyable could be abhorrent. What if it isn’t the fucking that’s wrong but the theology? And if it’s the theology and not the fucking, then one might begin to wonder how that theology came to exert its force; about its origins, about the investments of the authorities—church and state—who uphold it; and about the foundations of that authority and whether they are as unshakable as they appear. In the feminist scholar Catharine MacKinnon’s book on pornography Only Words (1993), she wrote that “an erection is neither a thought nor a feeling…. Having sex is antithetical to thinking.” It’s true that an erection isn’t a thought, but it might be the beginning of a thought, as it was for Augustine. And it was for the dozens of men in early modern Italy who felt desire and pleasure but not shame, or at least not much, and started to doubt and to critique—and to rewrite the meaning of original sin.

For them, the orthodox story of original sin—Adam, Eve, the apple—was an elaborate cover-up. The apple was an apple for the uninitiated but a symbol of Eve’s ass for those unencumbered by orthodoxy; “preachers did not say this from the pulpit out of decency,” according to one Sicilian man who was tried for heresy. But they knew the truth. God was a fraudster. He had wanted to keep sodomy for himself, or Christ did, and now clerics hoarded this secret knowledge, secret pleasure. It was both cardinals and angels who jealously guarded anal sex now, according to d’Antrodoco. This was a trope in Italian burlesque literature of the Renaissance: the idea that anal sex was the most refined pleasure, made illicit by the elite only to deny its delights to ordinary people, a form of authoritarian control exercised through sex. “These celestial delights are hidden…under a curtain of horror,” wrote the libertine and satirist Antonio Vignali, “in order not to give them in abundance to anyone.” This made the practice of sodomy not just deliciously taboo but an act of rebellion against the moral and social order.

The men brought before the Inquisition for unveiling what really happened in Eden espoused a bewildering variety of other heresies too. According to one witness, Impicciato said “more than a hundred times that…Adam buggered Eve and broke her ass, and besides that I heard him saying three times that there was no God, nor hell and paradise.” Another reported hearing him say that God “can’t do anything more than a fly in Apulia,” and that “Christ was born a tramp.” A noble Venetian who was tried for heresy believed not only that Adam sodomized Eve but that clerical celibacy should be abolished, since the practice was upheld by the Church only to guard its wealth. One of my favorite heretics in the book, a friar named Juan Campanaro, kept animals and his own young child in the church, chatted up women during confession, and sang filthy songs about the saints. One witness reported that Campanaro said he

valued more knowing carnally a woman (saying this with dishonest words) than the whole paradise together, and that he would have liked that there hadn’t been death so as to enjoy this world, and that when one died, everything ended, and both the body and the soul died.

The belief that Adam sodomized Eve was not the foundation of a coherent theology, but across many of the wildly heretical views reported to the inquisitors, there is a common theme: seek pleasures in this world rather than sacrifice them for the next. The body was holy, and sodomy worthy of the altars of Rome; sex with a woman was an experience more transcendent than entering paradise. And who knew what was coming next? Several of the men stated that they did not believe in the immortality of the soul, in heaven or hell or purgatory, suggesting the immanence of this world—it was not worth denying oneself because body and soul would die. These men evidently still believed in God’s existence—even if he had no more power than a fly in Apulia—but without the salvational theology of early modern Catholicism, what was left? As the historian Alec Ryrie has written of early modern atheism, without a belief in the possibility of salvation, “you might still have a rather abstract God, [but] you have precious little religion.”

Sex was central to the heretics’ critiques of the Church and its insistence on salvation. In 1564 the Council of Trent reaffirmed Augustine’s view that all humans inherited Adam’s bad desire and that we are all inclined to sin, but that through our free will and the grace of God we might strive against our own impaired natures. Celibacy was affirmed as the highest good and marriage as an acceptable container for sexuality for those who could not achieve it. But ordinary people rebelled against the hardened sexual morality of the Tridentine Church and undermined its pronouncements. In Venice in 1688 one friar flirted with a woman by telling her that “before the Council of Trent, carnal sins were not sins, not even venial ones”—possibly the first time I’ve seen ecclesiastical history repurposed as a pick-up line. In 1659 Francesco Pavona came before the Inquisition for saying that the clerics at Trent only prohibited fornication—sex outside of marriage—“because, being old, they could not do it themselves.”

And yet there was, as Grassi argues, a “striking consistency” in the ways that heretics across two centuries described their revision of Genesis. These consistencies suggest that the story of Adam’s sodomizing Eve circulated beyond chats in tobacconists’ shops. Grassi traces it through libertine texts of early modern Europe; these writers, themselves building on an existing trope in Italian burlesque poetry and novelle, used sodomy to articulate an alternative morality to that of the Catholic Church. Libertine philosophers meant their words to be both shocking and funny, but they also understood sex as a mode of thought. According to one such text, La Cazzaria, “From the mixing of the cunt, prick and ass, knowledge of fucking and buggery follows, and thus scientia is enlarged.” Nanna, a courtesan in Pietro Aretino’s Ragionamenti, puts it this way: “A pair of luscious buttocks can accomplish more than all that the philosophers, astrologists, alchemists and necromancers have ever wrought.” Pleasure opened the floodgates of doubt—and moved them to more radical conclusions. Antonio Partenio, a Venetian libertine who was tried by the Inquisition, confessed that he believed that religion is “nothing but the cover of political power, so as to conceal its tyranny.”

The most extreme example in Grassi’s study is the work of the Dutch scholar and libertine Hadriaan Beverland, whose book On Original Sin (1678) is perhaps the kinkiest work of philosophy to have been published in early modern Europe. His description of Eve in Eden is worth quoting at length for the full effect:

She gets carried away by a frenzy and rising heat, she growls, loses control over her bladder and her stomach disobeys, she is wet. The sounds and sights make the pent-up urine flow. She is in heat, desirous, obtrusive, and promiscuous like young cattle in a stable…. Until the little virgin…contemplates the very desirable extended tree stem, apt and pleasing to her sex, goes to her husband with a wanton face and embraces his neck. She kisses him and he does not resist…and rouses his very innocent member with her wanton hand and flattering words…. In this way, she gave her body to her man through the accursed appetite for his hard member.

That hard branch of the Tree of Knowledge gave Eve an idea. Beverland wonders if the original penetration might have been anal—some eminent theologians, he writes, have considered that Eve “turned around and on hands and knees, had awkwardly presented her narrow asshole”—but ultimately rejects this idea for the more conventional positioning.

Beverland’s theology of original sin is hot and at times ashamed of its own eroticism. Grassi writes that he seems torn between “obsessive rumination on the pain inflicted by sex” on us and a “glamorous celebration of sexual debauchery.” But I’m not sure there is a contradiction; that polarity—pain experienced in chorus with pleasure, the knife-edge drama of disgust and excess—is just what makes lots of non-vanilla sex sexy. And there is a powerful eroticism in Beverland’s catalog of supposedly shameful desires, in simply naming all the things we get up to: the “masturbators, lesbians, men who jerk off, women who jerk off, poo-eaters, practitioners of cunnilingus,” never mind the “pederasts, sodomites, catamites,” “those who submit to anal sex,” the “masculine lesbians,” the “drinkers of menstrual blood,” the “chick-squeezers, and other grandsons of Romulus who wiggle their asses.” Beverland gives Eve the gentlest understanding of the psychology of human desire when she tells Adam, “Make use of the gifts that nature has given. I am not so strict that I would condemn the fires I have felt.”

Much libertine writing about Adam and Eve, though, came later than the earliest confessions of similar beliefs recorded by the inquisitors. Grassi rejects the idea that libertine philosophy flowed directly from oral culture, or that oral culture was substantially inflected by literature, but offers a rather looser (albeit somewhat undefined) set of interactions between the two. He also highlights the cross-cultural currents of the Mediterranean world, where Muslim ideas—about sodomy and salvation—might prompt radical understandings of religious difference. There was Zozamo Canatta, a surgeon from southern Sicily who had been captured by Muslim corsairs as a teenager and admitted a variety of heresies: that sodomy wasn’t a sin, that Muslims could be saved without converting to Christianity, that the belief in the Eucharist was ridiculous—nothing but that “which they eat through the mouth and expel through the arse.” Another Italian captive, Vincenzo lo Restivo, was imprisoned for life for confessing that he had been sodomized by many Muslims while on the galleys but had purified his body with water as Muslims did. And why not? It was Canatta who went around saying that the world was divided into three parts—Asia, Africa, and Europe—and that “I have walked all around the world.” He saw Jews and Muslims in each part. “Do you wish, or do you think,” he challenged, “that all these people will go to Hell, and the few Christians will go to Paradise? That is why I do not want to believe in anything.” Canatta had come to his own conclusions. The inquisitors imprisoned him, and when he would not reform his beliefs, burned him in effigy.

Too often we think of theology as some desiccated thing. For better or worse we now have other ways of understanding the complexity of human desire: neuroscience, psychology, pornography. We forget that for centuries, theological writing was our most sophisticated literature on sexuality—on desire, shame, pleasure, on why we want what we want and what all that wanting can mean.

When the teenage girls who lived in the Conservatory of Saint John Lateran, a female boarding school for orphans in eighteenth-century Rome, wanted to know about sex, it was a book that tempted them. The girls’ confessors heard something they didn’t like and encouraged them to denounce themselves to the Holy Office. Antonia Andreozzi recounted to the inquisitors that it had started innocently enough: “Being in the infirmary of the Conservatory for a very minor illness, I found a book on a bed, whose title I don’t know, and I took it to read it a bit, and I found myself reading about…Adam’s sin in the terrestrial paradise.” She told her friends what she’d read; she said she thought the fruit Adam had eaten was a fig. “Oh you simpleton!” they mocked her. What was she missing? She sensed that it had something to do with sex. She began to wonder if “Adam’s sin was not having eaten the fruit, but having committed impurity with Eve.” Later, the girls were in the middle of practicing Loyola’s spiritual exercises—a series of immersive meditations on Christ’s Passion—but Angela couldn’t let it go. Maybe the original sin didn’t have to do with a fig at all, and the story was an allegory for something unnameable. She told the inquisitors that she really just wanted to impress her friends. It is all painfully familiar to anyone who has ever been a teenage girl. Why didn’t she know what everyone else seemed already to understand?

Another one of the girls, Mariangela, also told the inquisitors about how she was tempted by that same book “and started reading it, and I came across a passage that described Adam’s sin.” She ended by “believing to myself that that sin had been a sin of impurity.” She discussed it with a friend and “realized that she held my same opinion that this sin was other than the eating of a fruit.” The book had conveniently gone missing in the meantime; no one could recall its title. In the stories they told the inquisitors, the girls staged their own encounters in a garden of Eden, made this book into their own tree of knowledge. They had wanted, and found out, and some innocence was lost. They recanted their “very foolish thinking” and affirmed that they “only believed and professed what the Holy Mother Church believed.”

In Baroque Italy a man might walk into a shop to buy some tobacco and join in a debate about the finer points of Genesis. A teenage girl might go to her friends with her most burning questions about sex—that, at least, hasn’t changed—but her questions might be inflected by the theology of original sin. This is one of the fascinating paradoxes of early modern religion. We know about these conversations in shops and girls’ boarding schools only because the Inquisition wanted to correct belief; the records are at least partly records of attempted repression. And yet religious stories were the way people talked about sex. The book on Adam’s sin, the apple, the fleshy sacrifice of the Eucharist: all offered a way for anyone, not only the elite and the educated, to inquire about sexual appetite and shame and why we want what and whom we want, to wonder and doubt.

It’s the doubt that is most troubling, both to the inquisitors and to historians. What exactly did it mean to be an atheist, and was atheism even possible in the premodern world? Is it enough to critique religion, or does true atheism require a more substantially theorized denial of the existence of God? If atheism indeed entails a theory of unbelief, does that implicitly exclude the radical unlearned people—the type who might say “Adam fucked Eve in the ass,” for example—from a definition of religious skepticism? Could a smattering of different heresies become more than the sum of their parts—become something we might recognize as a more radical doubt in the existence of God? Historians have long debated these questions: how to define atheism, but also its social infiltration, and how doubt might look different when expressed in libertine philosophy versus the confessions of an eccentric apothecary.

Alec Ryrie has argued that unbelief does not have to be theorized or put in philosophical terms; both belief and unbelief can be chosen for “instinctive, inarticulate, intuitive reasons.” Grassi’s study suggests that unbelief can be chosen for embodied reasons, too; sex might be pleasurable enough to lead to radical doubt. Ryrie critiques Lucien Febvre, the Annales historian whose study of early modern belief—and whose total rejection of the possibility of atheism in the period—set the agenda for decades of historical thinking on the problem. Febvre wrote that expressions of unbelief were insubstantial: “It hardly deserves to be discussed, any more than the sneers of the drunkard in the tavern who guffaws when he is told that the earth is moving, under him and with him, at such a speed that it cannot even be felt.”

It’s a telling comparison. Antonio Partenio was tried by the Inquisition both for stating his belief that Adam sodomized Eve and for lots of other unorthodox beliefs, including because he “maintained with some firmness of opinion the motion of the earth”: in other words, Copernican heliocentrism. One of the unsettling implications of Grassi’s book is that the crackpot theorists—the ones raving in taverns—might, just occasionally, be what they say they are: freethinkers. In their minds the Catholic theology of original sin and the institutions that allowed corruption to flourish were a conspiracy that only they could see through. Anal sex was the initiation into knowledge, its pleasures the reward for knowing.

Maybe the mistake is thinking that atheism is the opposite of faith. And maybe the two are never more intimately connected than in bed. This might be the only time we modern atheists still cry out to a higher power. Oh my God: it’s a prayer without an addressee, without a request. Perhaps this is nothing more than our clumsy way of naming pleasure—perhaps our erotic vocabulary is just impoverished. Or maybe an orgasm is still a religious experience even if we don’t believe in God; we recognize something transcendent in sexual pleasure even if we can’t name it very well, even if we have lost the language and narratives and imagery of theology that once shaped the experience and lent it meaning. There was unbelief at the heart of belief in early modernity—and there may yet be belief at the heart of our own unbelief.