Boswell Reviews
Wendy Doniger,
Making Brothers The early Christian ceremony of "making
brothers" joined people of the same sex. But what exactly
did the ceremony mean then . . . and what does it mean for us
now?
SAME-SEX UNIONS IN PREMODERN EUROPE, By John Boswell (Villard Books: $25; 412 pp.) By Wendy
Doniger,
Wendy Doniger is the Mircea Eliade professor of the history
of religions at the University of Chicago and the author of Women,
Androgynes, and Other Mythical Beasts (University of Chicago
Press)
Los Angeles Times Sunday July 31, 1994 Home Edition Book Review,
Page 1 Type of Material: Book Review
John Boswell's "Same-Sex Unions in Premodern
Europe" broaches two crucial issues: the subjectivity of
translation--in this case, what do other people mean when they
speak of love or marriage? And the relevance of history--of what
use is the past to us?
Boswell approaches these questions in a particularly
striking and controversial form--more vividly than a historian
investigating, say, slavery or usury in the ancient world--because
he is speaking of sex. Sexuality in general, and sexuality between
people of the same sex in particular, has always been characterized
by tremendous privacy, subjectivity, circumlocution and, often,
concealment. After all, people's sex lives are always a mystery.
(Boswell remarks that the Marquess of Queensberry--who
denounced Oscar Wilde as a "Somdomite" ( sic )--"doubtless
. . . had no idea what Wilde actually did in bed.") Our own
partners often surprise us by turning out to have sexual tastes
very different from what we thought they had, sometimes after
many years of seeming intimacy. This being so, the task of understanding
the sexual habits of people of other cultures and other times
is well-nigh impossible.
John Boswell, the A. Whitney Griswold Professor
at Yale and author of several widely praised books, "Christianity,
Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality" and "The Kindness
of Strangers," has attempted to demonstrate not only that
same-sex unions occurred widely in pre-modern Europe, which few
people would be shocked to discover, but also that the church
approved of such unions, which has shocked many people to the
point of blatant disbelief. More particularly, he presents a corpus
of Greek documents that he regards as definitive evidence that
a ceremony celebrating same-sex marriage (generally between men,
occasionally between women), was performed within the early Greek
Church.
The existence and genuineness of these documents are not in question;
indeed, some of those who would belittle Boswell's
achievement have pointed out that historians have known about
documents of this nature for years. What is in question is what
they mean, and, more particularly, what they mean for us. And Boswell's approach to these questions is profound
and exciting.
Boswell asks and answers the main questions that
are likely to arise in the reader's mind, and his catechism about
the ceremony of same-sex union raises problems about context,
translation, and subjectivity:
1--Does the ceremony solemnize a personal commitment, as opposed
to a religious, political or family union? Boswell thinks
it does; but he admits that this is a matter open to debate, and
he himself presents a great deal of evidence for religious, political
or family concerns underlying same-sex relationships.
The historical context that Boswell establishes
is a world in which heterosexual marriage was largely ignored
by pagans and discouraged by the church (a notion that will no
doubt strike some readers as more shocking than the book's main
premise), in which asceticism and chastity were encouraged both
outside and within Christian marriage, and men paired off to accomplish
most of the acts regarded as central to society (such as war,
commerce, education, friendship and, within the church, martyrdom). Boswell therefore finds it "hardly surprising
that there should have been a Christian ceremony solemnizing same-sex
unions."
Were the men who participated in this ceremony just "good
friends"? Boswell thinks not: Since all
Christians were expected to love one another (and all humans)
anyway, why would they have a special ceremony to establish that
sort of love? But then he notes, contradictorily: "It would
indeed be curious if the religion of a preacher who so privileged
friendship turned out not to have a ceremony solemnizing it."
He also admits the wide range of non-romantic, non-erotic reasons
for such union, including business contracts (not unlike contemporary
prenuptial contracts among the wealthy). So, in answer to the
problem of context, we have a resounding "maybe."
2--Is the ceremony homosexual? This question involves two sub-questions:
(a) "Was the ceremony 'homosexual' in an erotic sense?"
Here he equivocates: "This is hard to answer for societies
without a comparable nomenclature or taxonomy. Most pre-modern
societies drew less rigid distinctions among 'romance,' 'eroticism,'
'friendship' and 'sexuality' than do modern cultures."
Boswell is enormously sensitive to the difficulties
inherent in translating texts of this nature. He has taken great
care to assemble, transcribe, translate and interpret his texts,
and he warns the reader about the wide range of meanings of the
various Greek, Latin and English terms for the central concepts
of love and marriage, as well as for the intersecting terms for
brother/sister and friend. The terms simply do not translate from
one language to another. Furthermore, sensitive issues produce
euphemisms.
For instance, in Sanskrit (to take the case I know best), the
word kliba, which has traditionally been translated as "eunuch,"
meant anything but a eunuch (the practice only entered India centuries
after the word kliba became current). Rather, it includes a wide
range of meanings under the general homophobic rubric of "a
man who does not act the way a man should act," including
someone who was sterile, impotent, castrated, androgynous or transvestite,
a man who committed fellatio with other men, who had anal sex
or, finally, a man who produced only female children. When a culture
does not want to confront an issue, it produces a haze of obfuscating
terms that can be used for a wide range of purposes.
Boswell is dealing with a similar problem in
his attempts to define the words used by different texts for lover,
brother, friend and so forth. He notes that the term that most
scholars would render literally as "making brothers,"
adelphopoetas, "ranges from a mechanical obligation incurred
when one party is in another's debt, involving no affect whatever
. . . to the most intimate and personal bonds in a society, as
between . . . homosexual lovers. It is questionable whether applying
a single term to such phenomena does not obscure more than it
discloses."
Yet he cuts the Gordian knot when he translates this term as "same-sex
union," and he presents a most persuasive array of texts
describing same-sex relationships in the ancient world, and even
describing certain ceremonies that formalized them. But he is
too honest a scholar not to admit that these relationships were
of so various a nature, and were described with such an elusive
range of terms, that it would be impossible to "prove"
that the documents central to his argument sanctify what most
modern readers would regard as a marriage. Boswell confronts
the opposing arguments clearly, painstakingly, intelligently,
cogently and respectfully. It is a testimony to the fairness of
the book that the author provides the reader with enough evidence
to construct strong objections to its central argument.
As for Boswell's second sub-question, (b) "Did
it celebrate a relationship between two men or two women that
was (or became) sexual?" again he equivocates: "Probably,
sometimes, but this is obviously a difficult question to answer
about the past, since participants cannot be interrogated."
But he goes on to argue that it doesn't "matter" that
we cannot know this. For he argues, indirectly, that heterosexual
marriages do not always produce, or even intend to produce, children
(the Yuppie theology), that they are not always sexually consummated,
that even in our own highly sexualized age love, sex and marriage
do not always go together like a horse and carriage. Marriage
in Europe, for example, is often more about property, or about
cleaning and shopping, than about procreating children (who can
be adopted) or enjoying sex (which is easily available elsewhere).
While this is of course true, it papers over the prevalent human
desire to produce legitimate children, to carry on both genetic
and material inheritance, and the power of the sexual intimacy
of the honeymoon to cement the relationship that outlives it.
After all, no man ever divorced a woman for shopping with another
man.
When it comes to the early church, however, Boswell is
on stronger grounds for rejecting the importance of physical relations,
for early Christian antipathy to material inheritance and biological
posterity led many (including Augustine) to regard sex and procreation
as not merely nonessential but, indeed, detrimental to heterosexual
marriage. Indeed, Boswell notes, "offspring
could have been problematic for followers of Jesus . . . who had
none himself, but somehow it was not, perhaps simply because a
majority of Christians experienced a normal human desire to bear
offspring and welcomed any justification of it."
Still, Boswell fails to take full account of
the force of that "normal human desire" and the centrality
of procreation in all religions, including the early church. For
the early church created a violent dichotomy between heterosexual
marriage, in which sexuality was tolerated for the sake of children,
and the priesthood, in which asceticism was idealized and sexuality
entirely rejected. In this taxonomy, homosexual attachment represented
a major "category error": something that did not fit
into any existing conceptual category, "matter out of place."
It was regarded not, like heterosexual marriage, as a compromise
between two goals in tension (procreation and asceticism), but
as a mutually polluting combination of the worst of both (sterility
and lust). This attitude was a major source of the homophobia
that, as Boswell himself stresses throughout
the book, led to the suppression or misinterpretation of the documents
in question throughout their later history.
And what about homosexual attachments between priests? Boswell notes that young boys caught in homosexual acts were
punished by being confined in a monastery, and he remarks: "In
any event, being placed with monks was likely to provide the best
environment to locate other men romantically interested in their
own gender." Apparently this "punishment" was like
the "execution" courted by Br'er Rabbit: "Don't
throw me into the briar patch, Br'er Fox." Are we to assume
that the ceremony of same-sex union was tolerated by the church
as a tacit acceptance of homosexual attachments within the clergy? Boswell does not tackle this sensitive issue
directly, but he gives the reader much data to ponder.
3--Was it a marriage? His answer here raises the problem of subjectivity:
"The answer to this question depends to a considerable extent
on one's conception of marriage." Boswell brilliantly
demonstrates the difficulty in knowing how people of that time
might have interpreted the documents in question: "This would
depend to a large extent on the hearer's openness to this possibility.
One could interpret the story as evoking a pagan notion of friendship,
from which sexuality was thought to be absent. . . . Christians
particularly susceptible to such feelings may have interpreted
them more erotically." Thus he deconstructs the erotic vocabulary,
leaving us with the realization that relationships are in the
eye of the beholder. He has proven that you cannot prove that
the ceremonies were erotic--nor, or course, that they were not.
Yet Boswell argues that many of these relationships
in pre-modern Europe could well have been romantic, erotic, sexual,
even that romantic homosexual relationships, involving sexual
love, might have been more prevalent than heterosexual ones. He
also points out that many non-Western cultures--Japanese, Chinese,
Native Americans, African, Asian, South American--"have recognized
and institutionalized same-sex unions. . . . Of course, the fact
that people elsewhere have recognized same-sex unions does not
in itself demonstrate that the Western tradition ever did so,
but it should help to counter the visceral disinclination even
to consider such a possibility."
This brings us, at last, to the question of the relevance of history.
What do these early Christian texts have to do with us? A great
deal. Struggles over exactly the questions they raise are going
on as of this writing in Oregon and Colorado, Boswell points out. "Even persons who argue that same-sex
couples should now have the right to contract marriage like anyone
else are apt to view such unions as an exotic indulgence of our
time, a novel experiment in a liberal society." Here I would
invoke the historian's version of Murphy's Law, what might be
called Herodotus' Law: "Everything that can happen has happened."
But this law has a corollary: Everything that can be thought has
been thought. Did the early church approve of gay marriages? Boswell argues that the notorious and persistent homophobia of
both church and state only developed later, and even then only
in certain times and places. But his own claim that the documents
of same-sex union were later condemned in the West leaves him,
and us, with two possibilities: 1--(a) It was sexual and therefore
(b) the early church condemned it. Or else: 2--(a) it was just
brotherhood and (b) the early church did not condemn it. The argument
for a genuine "gay marriage" in the early church, however,
would have to combine 1 (a) and 2 (b): it was sexual and the church
did not condemn it. And Boswell is simply too
good and honest a scholar to argue that his own evidence proves
this. He merely suggests that it could mean this, and that the
evidence is too ambiguous for anyone to disprove it.
Boswell concludes his book by saying: "Recognizing
that many--probably most--early Western societies institutionalized
some form of romantic same-sex union gives us a much more accurate
view of the immense variety of human romantic relationships and
social responses to them than does the prudish pretense that such
'unmentionable' things never happened." I think he is overstating
his case a bit here, but with the deletion of "probably most"
and "romantic," we are still left with a highly meaningful
sentence.
Even if we grant that Boswell has demonstrated
that the early church might have sanctioned such ceremonies, what
does this say about contemporary attempts to legalize similar
unions? To argue from history in a literal way is to play into
the hands of the most reactionary factions of the church: If it
wasn't done then, we can't do it now. Such a syllogism ignores
all the gains of the Enlightenment and would force us to reinstate
slavery, torture, the disenfranchisement of women. But this is
not Boswell's argument at all. He is merely attempting
to demonstrate that our own civilization, and others, took very
seriously indeed relationships that many people nowadays would
outlaw as unnatural. If it was possible for them, it is possible
for us. This is very relevant indeed.
Source.
From: Wendy Doniger, "Making Brothers The early Christian ceremony of "making
brothers" joined people of the same sex. But what exactly
did the ceremony mean then . . . and what does it mean for us
now? SAME-SEX UNIONS IN PREMODERN EUROPE, By John Boswell (Villard Books: $25; 412 pp.)" Los Angeles Times Sunday July 31, 1994 Home Edition Book Review, Page 1 Type of Material: Book Review
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