***
I think I know what you're thinking: if Adam and Eve could have sex in the Garden of Eden, before the Fall, without displeasing God, then which particular arrangement might they have used? Which posture, for a young monogamous heterosexual couple in paradise, best accorded with God's intelligent design? The face-one-another sitting-up position? Spoons? Scissors? Doggy-style? Cowgirl? Reverse cowgirl? All of the above?
Saint Thomas Aquinas has supplied the correct answer for all of us, not just for Adam and Eve: The wife, he explained in his Summa Theologica, must be on bottom, horizontal and still. The husband must lie on top, also horizontal, with no more motion than is absolutely necessary to get the job done. And the couple must do it no more often than is necessary to beget offspring.
The "Christian" (a.k.a. missionary) position, wrote Saint Thomas, is not a matter of personal preference, but of God's immutable will: it would be less wicked, he explained, for a young man to have sexual intercourse with his biological mother in the horizontal Christian position, than for a married man and woman to have sex in some other, unapproved position (such as reverse cowgirl).
I know what you're thinking: What would Saint Thomas Aquinas know about it? Was he ever in a position to judge?
Okay, maybe he was – I never kept close tabs on Thomas Aquinas and his mother – in fact, I never gave the Countess Theodora and her famous son a moment's thought until the young saint wrote that it would also be less sinful for a young man to have sex with his own mother than to masturbate. That's when I really started to wonder about Saint Thomas and his mother, because Lady Theodora Aquinas, Countess of Teano, was a gorgeous woman, with an hourglass figure and breasts out to there.
When Aquinas went on to write that looking on your own mother with lust in your heart is no worse than actually doing it, I thought to myself: seriously, there is something worrisome about Aquinas's affection for his mother.
So maybe Saint Thomas was not the self-righteous little wanker that his colleagues, and his own father, Landulph Aquinas, took him for. Even so, I cannot embrace the saint's argument that the missionary position is the only way to go, especially when the moon is full, and the lady is beautiful, and we're feeling whimsical.
Here is a related question, one that I often get from unmarried teens: if Adam and Eve started having sex even before they ate the forbidden fruit and got married, why then did Eve not become pregnant until after she and Adam got expelled from Paradise?
I wish there were an easy answer to that one, boys and girls! I wish I could tell you that God believes in sex education. I wish I could report that Yahveh instructed Adam and Eve in the Christian missionary position as the best and only way to multiply and to populate the Earth. But the Lord (until Saint Thomas Aquinas came along) preferred for His human creatures to discover how to do it on their own time, without tutoring or undue mothering.
The goats and horses and rabbits and cows and bulls of Eden figured out right away how to be fruitful and multiply. But because Almighty God, in His inscrutable wisdom, refused to teach Adam the secrets of human reproduction, the poor boy had to observe how these things were done in the barnyard animal kingdom; and he was thereby led into some harmless confusions that I would rather not get into. Suffice it to say that Adam and Eve kept trying something in the Garden that did not help them to be fruitful and multiply as quickly as God had intended. But they figured out their innocent mistake, soon enough.
– L.
