Early on in his book John Boswell insists that religious belief is not the cause (his italics) of antihomosexual bigotry (p. 6). Is such bigotry then simply a motiveless malignancy without rhyme or reason? Or is it a constant of the human mind, an aspect of that fear of the Other that has always been with us? In a sense this last may be what is proposed, for Boswell repeatedly suggests, without ever really discussing, an explanation based on the perennial contrast between the city and the country. He holds that the city, in the ancient world and the middle ages, was an easy-going place, multicultural and tolerant, where diversity flourished. Stadtluft macht frei — “city air makes you free,” as one medieval proverb has it. Sexual freedom, it seems, is naturally at home in the city. The countryside, by contrast, is narrow, dour and sexually restrictive. Characteristically, life in the boondocks is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. Rustics who become aware of the good life of abundance and variety that is lived in the city will understandably become envious and seek to stamp it out. Intolerance then for Boswell usually results from the impact of narrow country values on the city. As urbanization declined in late antiquity, and more and more districts became purely peasant in composition, what could be more natural than that sexual repression would increase?
Matters are, alas, not so simple. Let us take a few selected examples. In classical Greece, evidence indicates that, apart from big cities like Athens, homosexuality flourished in country areas (e.g., Elis, Boeotia and especially Crete). By contrast, the Ionian cities of Asia Minor were much less given to same-sex relations. There is no clear pattern; but the main point is that in classical times rural homosexuality was a reality — and an important reality — in vast tracts of rural Greece. Does the situation change as we move down the centuries? It does not seem so. Two of the most influential writers of the pastoral tradition, Theocritus and Vergil, place their homosexual swains in the country. (Theocritus wrote in the early third century B.C., Vergil in the late first.) While a certain amount of literary idealization occurred, it does not seem that the poets’ visions of life in country Sicily and Arcadia would ever have been plausible if the country were known to be a boundless reservoir of sexual puritanism, as Boswell’s model implies. But in fact the rustic idylls of Theocritus and Vergil were phenomenally successful, forming the basis for the whole European literary tradition of Arcadia.
What about the argument that as cities became depopulated in the late Roman Empire — the third to sixth centuries of our era — intolerance increased? The difficulty here is that depopulation and ruralization occurred only in the Western half of the Empire; in the East things continued much as before, and in fact new centers of population sprang up in Syria and elsewhere. [1] But in this very urban East antihomosexual hysteria reached its height in the sixth century in the laws and persecutions of Justinian.
Let us turn to the other end of the time frame encompassed by Boswell’s magnum opus, the period after 1000, whence he recovered those delightful poems and dialogues he interprets as tokens of a vibrant homosexual subculture. In the thirteenth century, as he shows, the relative tolerance for same-sex affections that had flourished in the twelfth was brutally swept away. Yet the thrust of urbanization continued apace, and population grew to an excess that was only to be curbed by the Black Death in the middle of the fourteenth century.
In short there is much counterevidence to disprove Boswell’s simple dichotomy of the intolerant countryside vs. the easygoing city. Apart from the fact that it does not fit what we generally know about demography and regional sexual preferences, Boswell seeks to apply his theory in a mechanical way. He thinks it sufficient to mention that a Justinian or a barbarian chieftain was born in the country to explain his intolerance. This smacks almost of the determinism of astrology. Once born a hick, always an intolerant hick. This is hardly an adequate view of human motivation.
Where did Boswell get his convenient dichotomy? Until the nineteenth century much European literature was dominated by the pastoral ideal of the beauties and simplicity of country living. At that time, probably as a result of the spectacular advance of the Industrial Revolution, a new mood arose, the Counter-Pastoral as Raymond Williams has termed it, which stigmatized the narrowness and meanness, in short the “idiocy” of rural life. [2] In American literature we know this view from Sinclair Lewis, with his corrosive portrait of the pretensions of George Babbitt of Zenith, and H. L. Mencken, with his attacks on the follies of the American “booboisie.” The myth of small-town evil is still being purveyed every night on television. While it would be unfair to attribute Boswell’s formulation to an early addiction to “Peyton Place” or “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman,” it does seem to be an anachronistic projection as applied to the middle ages. If anything, present-day rural narrowness is a late product of the evolution that Boswell is tracing, not its source. It is the result of the sedulous propagation of Christian morality, essentially protestant, over a period of centuries.
If we reject, as we must, this macrohistorical generalization that locates the source of the problem in the original sin of the countryside, can we discern another pattern that fits better with the facts? I believe that we can. To this end, the main portion of this paper will be devoted to a consideration of what I regard as the main currents of the politics of sexuality, first in the Early Christian period, then in the central middle ages.
To judge from the sources that have come down to us, the range of sexual behavior practiced among the Early Christians was astonishingly broad. We can grasp this breadth if we look first at the extremes: on the one hand, the Libertines who encouraged a great variety of sexual expression, and on the other, the party that demanded total virginity or eunuchry — no sex at all. The Early Christian libertine sects are known to us mainly from the colorful accounts of their opponents. [3] Basically the libertines held that the created world was evil, a botched product of the unauthorized intervention of the demiurge against the will of the high god. To continue creation through conception and childbearing is to compound the evil. However, union (or syzygy: conjunction) is good. Combining these two value judgments, we conclude that fucking is desirable as long as the possibility of conception is avoided.
Let us now glance at one of the typical gatherings of these libertines, according to a description of a horrified opponent, the Early Christian father Epiphanius. The votaries have gathered for a banquet, but this is no chaste agape feast. In fact it soon turns into an orgy. Since women are held in common, there is no need to restrict oneself to one partner. However you must take care not to deposit the semen in the womb, but instead offer it up in your hands to God, and then eat it. Some sects, again according to Epiphanius, were much given to masturbation; others, such as the Levites, restricted themselves to homosexual relations. In any event variety seems to have been prized: according to Irenaeus, these libertines practiced acts “which we cannot believe or even conceive in our minds.” Some sects seem to have adopted the convenient rationalization that members were already in a state of grace, and could not, by definition, ever sin. Therefore all things are lawful (as even St. Paul allows). Each believer was accompanied by a guardian angel to make sure that he or she did nothing that was not permitted. Anything you can do then, it is appropriate to do.
These libertine sects have been dubbed the extreme left wing of Early Christian sexual mores. [4] Standing at the opposite extreme, the far right if you will, are the super-Puritans, or Encratites. The Encratites insisted on total continence; it is never lawful to have sex, even within marriage. For this belief various supports were sought. There is indeed a vein of continence-advocacy that runs through the New Testament (e.g., “But those that shall be accounted worthy of the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor take wives”; Luke 20: 35). A more moderate recommendation occurs in Paul’s well known “It is better to marry than to burn” (I Cor. 7: 9). Marriage is a second option. For those who can manage it, virginity is preferable.
In the ensuing centuries these sentiments gained force. It was thought not simply miraculous but necessary that the birth of the Savior be a virgin birth. [5] There was something inherently unclean about conceiving and birthing in the normal way. In an extension of this view, which became the doctrine of the Church (in clear contradiction to the New Testament itself), Mary remained perpetually a virgin. And so did Jesus. Jesus never had sex. After their calling the Apostles too took the pledge. According to views which enjoyed increasing currency in the third and fourth centuries, the greatest culture heroes of Christianity either had never fucked at all, or had stopped doing it once they saw the light. Imitation of their self-chosen eunuchry was the surest path to sanctity. So virgins of both sexes gained enormous prestige in the early church.
At first sight there would appear to be no connection at all between the extreme left and the extreme right, sexually speaking. Sex is obligatory; it is forbidden. Yet both groups were labeled gnostic by their opponents. The common ground lies in the fact that both groups were repelled by procreation. Now it is unlikely that the libertine fringe ever formed a serious threat. Roman society in general was moving towards a greater asceticism and other-worldness; in the new climate the licentious rites of the Carpocratians and the others seem like a throwback to the time of Petronius and Nero. Yet some threat must have been felt for orthodox writers like Irenaeus and Epiphanius to spend time refuting them. Still the right wing was much more imposing. It could claim what appeared to be real Scriptural authority in its demands for total continence. On the other hand, beginning with the time of Constantine the Great, the official church had made a deal with the Roman state. Implicit in this arrangement was a program for the restitution of the former strength of the Empire. And that strength meant population. Accordingly, the church could endorse neither abstinence as a universal ideal, nor the kind of contraception that results from libertine coitus interruptus and homosexuality.
We can see something of the inner tensions induced by this conflict in the career of St. Augustine of Hippo, who is perhaps the most fully documented individual of the period, perhaps indeed of all antiquity. [6] For nine years Augustine served a puritanical faith: Manicheism. Although it is often portrayed as a Christian heresy, Manicheism was in fact an independent religion. [7] Manicheism solved the problem of the undesirability of sex by dividing its adherents into two groups: the inner core or perfecti, who were expected to remain chaste, and the hearere, the mass of the population, who must strictly subordinate themselves to the inner circle — paying in effect for their retention of sensual pleasures by a reduced status. (This solution already seems to have been adopted several centuries before by the Qumran sect of Judaism known to us from the Dead Sea Scrolls.) During Augustine’s years as a Manichee he lived in a continual and ultimately unbearable state of anxiety, for he was unable to maintain the abstinence required of a true believer. Indeed, he was living in sin with a woman not his wife.
After his return to Catholic Christianity, Augustine worked out a compromise which was to be accepted by the main body of the church. Sex was permissible only within marriage, and only for procreation. Fellatio, cunnilingus and anal copulation are out, then, even for married couples. Even without consulting the existing Biblical proof texts, homosexual behavior is excluded because it cannot occur within marriage, and cannot lead to procreation. Libertinism, then, is totally ruled out in any of its forms. However, the sexual right wing could not be treated so cavalierly: there were canonical texts commending abstinence and, as indicated, virgins had attained great prestige within the church. To deal with this problem Augustine took a leaf, as it were, from the Manichean book. Virginity was more perfect, granted; but it was only for the few. In due course the church physically removed these ascetics to monasteries and nunneries far from the main population centers. Virginity or eunuchry was acceptable, but only for limited numbers in segregated situations. [8]
We can summarize the contrasts between the pre-Augustinian and post-Augustinian situations as follows. First we have in effect a triptych of options:
| promiscuity : sex within strictly limited bounds : no sex |
The new dispensation rotates this arrangement ninety degrees:
|
no sex
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - sex within strictly limited bounds --------------------------------------- promiscuity |
The unbroken line indicates the strict separation that is henceforth recognized between the hell of promiscuity below, and the earth and heaven of the permitted states above. In this way a spectrum has been turned into a hierarchy.
Augustine was, of course, not alone in moving to the procreation standard. It had been anticipated by Tertullian, and before him by Philo and Plato. (In fact, the Hellenic roots of important aspects of Western asceticism remain one of the best kept secrets of historical research.) The procreation standard was probably fated to triumph because of the alliance of the Christian church with the Roman state, as has been indicated. The state needed soldiers to fight wars and farmers to grow food. It did not need a great mass of holy virgins clamoring for admiration and support.
One other aspect of St. Augustine’s thinking must be noticed here, and that is his evolution, as a result of his struggles with the Manichees and Donatists, to a position of religious compulsion. [9] Compelle eos intrare became his watchword: compel them to enter (the church). This formulation provided a great charter for all subsequent methods of brainwashing which hold that if you coerce the body, eventually the mind will follow. Augustine’s coercive stance was in keeping with the temper of the times. Rome had gone through a great crisis in the third century, when the Empire seemed repeatedly on the verge of collapse. The solution adopted by Diocletian at the end of the century was an enormous bolstering of state power. Prices and wages were fixed, and the peasantry bound to the soil. In this way Diocletian transformed the relatively pluralistic Roman constitutional system, the principate, into the dominate, a proto-authoritarian system. [10] In former times there was a certain sharing of power with the equestrian order and the Senate; now the emperor emerged as a sacred personage, standing alone on the stage. Diocletian was not a Christian; indeed he persecuted them. Yet it was this system, which sought to exchange liberty for security, that the Christians inherited under Constantine. Of course the emperors and their ecclesiastical advisers did not have the power of a Hitler or a Stalin. A law of 451, for example, forbids the use of pagan temples, which had been supposedly closed for 60 years. Evidently the earlier ordinance had not been effective. Gradually, however, with the primitive means of social control at their disposal, the state and the state church sought to remold society in their image. It is in this light that the triumph of the procreation standard, and the final affirmation of the prohibition against same-sex relations, must be viewed. The whole society was to be regimented to fend off enemies from within and without. As is well known, this plan worked in the East, but not in the West, which was overrun by barbarian hordes. Sometimes the new system, the authoritarian dominate under Christian auspices, had the means and the will to enforce its sexual recommendations and prohibitions. Sometimes it lacked these means — but from the late fourth century onwards it always had the will. The methods and urgency of repression were to vary, but never the principled commitment to it.
In the western half of the Empire the dominate effectively collapsed under the onslaught of the barbarian raids and settlements. [11] As we see in the case of the Vandal invasions, the barbarians were themselves often intolerant of same-sex behavior. They were Arian Christians, and the role of this version of the faith on their social attitudes has not yet been adequately investigated as far as I know. In any event, no clear pattern emerged. The legal system dissolved, with as many as four, often imperfectly recorded, legal traditions operating in a given territory. Under these circumstances it is not surprising that the kind of control of morals that had been successfully attained in the Byzantine Empire could not be attempted. Another tack was tried: the use of the confessional. Originating in Ireland, the class of documents known as penitentials set forth an elaborate schedule of penalties, including those for sexual misconduct. [12] It is noteworthy that here the death penalty was generally abandoned, even as an ideal. For prepubertal boys same-sex play could be punished by a penance of as little as twenty days; for some adult offenses in some jurisdictions as much as fourteen years was specified. Most lay between the extremes. Sucking cock, if detected, in Western Europe in say the eighth century, might net a penance of anywhere from two to seven years. Once again, the aim of control is evident, but circumstances required compromise on the means and sanctions. The development of the penitential system is the main contribution of Western Europe to sexual codification in the earlier medieval centuries, the so-called dark ages. Evidently, they were not really so dark: much greater darkness was to come.
Around 1000 A.D., western Europe began to seethe with a series of grassroots reform movements, many puritanical. [13] The reformers, often unlettered men, denounced the wealth and corruption of the church and demanded a return to the poverty and life of renunciation supposedly practiced by the Apostles. The cry of the vita apostolica was heard everywhere. Some urged an end to marriage and sex as an inevitable corollary. In short we have a resurgence of super-Puritanism.
At first the reaction of the official church to these movements was one of implacable hostility. The reformist agitators were seized and burned. They were smeared by being accused of having imported their weird ideas from the East — the Manichee again stalked the land. It was alleged that members of these sects freely indulged in perverted sexual practices. From this comes the equation of heretic and homosexual, both expressed by the medieval French and English terms bougre and bugger. The link between sexual variation and heresy, already forged by some of the Fathers, was revived as a convenient device for attacking both.
In time, however, the church began to compromise. Some advocates of reform began to be heard within the church itself, notably in the Gregorian movement, which first established clerical celibacy as an obligation. [14] Much energy was drained off into the Crusading ventures. Yet this did not suffice, as the later medieval heresies, the Waldensians, Wicklyffites, Hussites and so forth, show. Once again, as in the Early Christian period, the church was faced with the possibility of being trumped by a formidable opponent: a movement fed by powerful longings towards the goal of purity represented by asceticism and renunciation. Once again this asceticism clashed with the power needs of the establishment. The state, in the form of the new model monarchies of France and England, was emerging as an independent force to be reckoned with. These monarchies, together with the papal curia in Rome and Avignon, developed rationalized methods of record keeping and disciplined staffs — bureaucracies — which greatly facilitated social control. In this way the pattern observed 700 years before in the Eastern Empire repeated itself. Once again we find vigorous persecution of heresy and sexual freedom in the name of a strengthened Respublica christiana: a universal Christian polity, where what was not forbidden was required and what was not required was forbidden. The sphere of individual choice was to be drastically shrunk. In this way western Europe reached, by a longer route, the goal the late empire had set for itself. Act II repeats Act I.
Space limitations preclude further examination of the details of the second phase of this great historical tragedy. Such details would be necessary in order to understand the breathing space the distractions of twelfth century Europe afforded to the homophile literary effusions that Boswell has recorded, while blurring their historical setting.
Yet the main lines are clear. Except for a few marginal libertine sects, which were not destined to survive, Christianity has always been resolutely opposed to sexual freedom. Its opposition, originally exhortatory, took on new stringency through its Faustian bargain with the state. As this bargain reveals, however, Christianity does not stand alone in its culpability. State policy, as we see today in the Soviet Union, China and Cuba, will vigorously discourage homosexuality when it is perceived as counter to its own interest. In the past, moreover, irrational hatred of homosexuality has not been limited to the Judeo-Christian sphere, as the pointed diatribes surviving in the texts of Iranian Zoroastrianism attest. Manichean puritanism has been mentioned. Moreover, tribal groups in various parts of the world have proscribed homosexual behavior, vigorously and with considerable apparent success. Regrettably, antihomosexual bigotry is a many-headed hydra.
To the question of whether Christianity is guilty of harboring and fomenting irrational prejudice against homosexuality, Boswell has returned a negative answer. His attempt at exculpation rests in part on his abusive and amateurish interpretations of Scriptural texts; the weaknesses of these arguments have been demonstrated by Warren Johansson in his accompanying paper. One may remark in passing that this gambit of trying to establish the original innocence of Christianity is ultimately modeled on the Reformation myth of a pure primitive Christianity, whose splendors were obscured by the defacements of FrühKatholizismus. We need only remove these accretions to have a wonderful and complete guide to human happiness. On the contrary, it is necessary to stress that mainstream Christianity has always been adamantly opposed to permitting same-sex relations. The vigor of its repressive measures has varied as a function of the forces at its disposal and the urgency of the perceived threat. To paraphrase Marlene Dietrich: it isn’t because she wouldn’t, it isn’t because she shouldn’t — but only because she couldn’t — that some breathing space was permitted. The story might have been somewhat different if the church had not struck its Faustian bargain with the state. But it was apparently unable to resist adding the weapons of coercion to its rhetoric of persuasion and moral disapproval. Such opportunism must place us forever on our guard, in particular with regard to a work such as Boswell’s where an apologetic tract has assumed the sheep’s clothing of a historical investigation.
The successful detection of this maneuver, however, should not lull us into the false belief that Christianity is our only enemy. Indeed it may not be the main enemy any longer. The enormous strengthening of the power of the state — often obtained in part through persecuting the church — seen especially in the countries of the so-called socialist camp and many third-world nations, has made life a hell on earth for homosexuals unlucky enough to live in these places. Once again the consolidation of state power, now minus Christianity, requires sexual orthodoxy. And this is done under the banner of atheism.
Since the exposure of the weaknesses and distortions inherent in Boswell’s selective use of evidence may give undue comfort to gay atheists something must be said of the problems posed by this position. In particular, modern secular humanists have neglected the difficulty acutely formulated by the Marquis de Sade, who, while by no means a humanist, was a convinced atheist. [15] In this view, when the last king is finally strangled with the entrails of the last priest we shall truly confront what atheism necessarily entails for our moral system. The consequences of this advance include not only the boon of sexual freedom, but also every kind of excess which might result from the unleashing of the libido dominandi, the keen lust for power over others. In this matter the Marquis de Sade saw farther and more clearly than his sentimental confrères of the ironically named Enlightenment and such latter-day epigones as Colonel Ingersoll and Madeline Murray O’Hare.
No-one should deny that there have been many gentle and benevolent atheists. However, under certain conditions, when atheism becomes both militant and coercive, disaster follows. Attempts to create a new social order in which Christianity is displaced by the coercive imposition of atheism reveal two features.
The new monolith lacks the checks and balances built up through the centuries of social development that have created our present liberal polity. Elsewhere, the purportedly progressive systems that have resulted from the attempt to extirpate religion have sooner or later sought to control morals as a point of state policy. In this way the new anti-Christian civilization becomes the mirror image of intolerant medieval Christianity.
As seen from the French Revolution onwards, atheists, when placed in positions of power, seem to undergo special temptations to act out their personal tensions through violence. As Sade noted, in some individuals the realization that the traditional restraints were no longer in force opened the floodgates of indulgence: henceforth they need fear neither hellfire nor the social pressures of a philanthropic ethic stemming ultimately from religion.
In this perspective, the best chance for homosexuals, and for others espousing some type of social nonconformism, would seem to lie in a pluralistic society, where there is something approaching a balance of forces. The attenuation, but not the elimination, of Christianity is the policy best suited to foster the preservation of this balance.
We who believe in sexual liberty have many enemies. To concentrate on one alone, as many of us are tempted to do, is short-sighted. In addition to widening our horizons of vigilance, however, we need to pay attention to the particular patterns of social dynamic in which hatred of sexual freedom has flourished. We must ask, once again, the perennially relevant question: cui bono, who benefits? In the late Empire it was the military and bureaucratic leadership class of the dominate coalescing with the emerging ecclesiastical hierarchy. In the central middle ages we find a renascent papacy and the new monarchies. In the Reformation it was puritanical reformers like Calvin and John Knox.
I believe that we can learn from history. But the essential preamble to this learning is the realization that its lessons must not be mechanically transferred from one era to another. The chief lesson to be learned from the two historical phases we have examined is not the homophobic attitude of Christianity. That we knew already. The burden of proof was on John Boswell to prove otherwise, and he has spectacularly failed. The untold story is the role of state power in dictating permitted sexual arrangements. State instigated persecution of homosexuals is the rule in a hundred countries today. Following one of several scenarios it may become the rule tomorrow in America. In this situation vigilance must not only be eternal but it must monitor all azimuths, for attacks may come from unexpected directions. Yet if we can learn from history we have a real chance of survival.
[1] The consequences of the differing fates of the Eastern and Western halves of the Empire are clearly set forth in W. E. Kaegi, Byzantium and the Decline of Rome, Princeton, 1968. The bibliography on the historical problem of the “fall” of the Roman Empire is, of course, enormous. See, e.g., K. Christ, ed., Der Untergang des römischen Reiches, Darmstadt, 1970 (bibliog. pp. 456-487).
[2] R. Williams, The Country and the City, New York, 1973.
[3] W. Foerster, Gnosis: A Selection of Gnostic Texts, vol. I, Oxford, 1972, pp. 313-25.
[4] J. T. Noonan, Jr., Contraception: A History of Its Treatment by Catholic Theologians and Canonists, New York, 1967, p. 80.
[5] H. von Campenhausen, The Virgin Birth in the Theology of the Ancient Church (Studies in Historical Theology, 2), London, 1964.
[6] P. Brown, St. Augustine of Hippo: A Biography, London, 1967.
[7] G. Widengren, Mani and Manichaeism, London, 1965.
[8] The classic statement of the historical working out of this solution is contained in E. Troeltsch, The Social Teachings of the Christian Churches, 2 vols., London, 1931 (German original, 1911).
[9] P. Brown, “St. Augustine’s Attitude to Religious Coercion,” in his Religion and Society in the Age of St. Augustine, London, 1972, pp. 260-78.
[10] W. Seston, Dioclétien et la tetrarchie, Paris, 1946. For an interesting analysis of the cultural consequences of this massive shift, see H. P. L’Orange, Art Forms and Civic Life in the Late Roman Empire, Princeton, 1966.
[11] For a survey of literature and problems, see L. Musset, Les invasions: les vagues germaniques, Paris, 1965.
[12] Boswell’s laconic and inadequate treatment of this evidence, which has been carefully sifted and discussed by scholars over the past 130 years, is striking. For a recent review of the state of the question, with full bibliography, see C. Vogel, Les “libri paenitentiales” (Typologie des Sources du Moyen Âge Occidental, A-III, 1), Tournhout, 1978.
[13] The best treatment of this upsurge is still J. B. Russell, Dissent and Reform in the Early Middle Ages, Berkeley, 1965. See also the documents in W. L. Wakefield and A. P. Evans, Heresies of the High Middle Ages, New York, 1969. For the connection between medieval puritanism and Marxist chiliasm, see now I. Shafarevich, The Socialist Phenomenon, New York, 1980.
[14] For an introduction to the vast primary and secondary literary on the Gregorian movement, see B. Tierney: The Crisis of Church & State, 1050-1300, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1964. More generally, see the brilliant synthesis of G. Ladner, The Idea of Reform: Its Impact on Christian Thought and Action in the Age of the Fathers, Cambridge, MA, 1959.
[15] The best account of the challenge of Sade’s thought to the optimistic pieties of the official Enlightenment appears in L. C. Crocker, Nature and Culture: Ethical Thought in the French Enlightenment, Baltimore, 1963.