Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe. By John Boswell.
Villard Books. 412 pp. $25
.
Ancient in origin, same-sex unions blessed in the Church occur quietly
to this day. So says John Boswell, Professor of Medieval History at Yale
University and the author of this new and lavishly publicized book. It
may surprise readers of this journal to learn that he is probably right-
depending on what the ceremony means.
This is a subject about which I have the good fortune to speak not
merely as a scholar or an observer, but as a participant. Nine years ago
I was joined in devout sisterhood to another woman, apparently in just
such a ceremony as Boswell claims to elucidate in his book. The ceremony
took place during a journey to some of the Syrian Christian communities
of Turkey and the Middle East, and the other member of this same-sex
union was my colleague Professor Susan Ashbrook Harvey of Brown
University. During the course of our travels we paid a visit to St.
Mark's Monastery in Jerusalem, the residence of the Syrian Orthodox
archbishop. There our host, Archbishop Dionysius Behnam Jajaweh,
remarked that since we had survived the rigors of Syria and Eastern
Turkey in amicable good humor, we two women must be good friends indeed.
Would we like to be joined as sisters the next morning after the
bishop's Sunday liturgy in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre? Intrigued,
we agreed, and on a Sunday in late June of 1985, we followed the bishop
and a monk through the Old City to a side chapel in the Holy Sepulchre
where, according to the Syrian Orthodox, lies the actual tomb of Jesus.
After the liturgy, the bishop had us join our right hands together and
he wrapped them in a portion of his garment. He pronounced a series of
prayers over us, told us that we were united as sisters, and admonished
us not to quarrel. Ours was a sisterhood stronger than blood, confirmed
in the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, he said, and since it was a
spiritual union, it would last beyond the grave.
Our friendship has indeed endured and flourished beyond the accidental
association of two scholars sharing an interest in the Syriac-speaking
Christianity of late antiquity. The blessing of the Syrian Orthodox
Church was a precious instance of our participation in the life of an
ancient and noble Christian tradition. Although neither of us took the
trouble to investigate the subject, each privately assumed that the
ritual of that summer was some Christian descendant of an adoption
ceremony used by the early church to solemnify a state-that of
friendship-which comes highly recommended in the Christian tradition
("Henceforth I call you not servants . . . but I have called you
friends." [John15:15]).
If this were all that Professor Boswell were claiming to have
"discovered," neither I nor anyone else would be likely to dispute his
findings. It seems reasonable to assume that ceremonies like the one
Susan Ashbrook Harvey and I went through continue to take place in those
eastern churches that preserve the rite of adoption
(adelphopoiesis) for friends. In fact, scholars of the liturgy
have known for years of these rituals.
But any such modest claim is not what Boswell has in mind. He claims
that the "brother/sister-making" rituals found in manuscripts and
certain published works are ancient ceremonies whose cryptic (or, in
current argot, "encoded") purpose has been to give ecclesiastical
blessing to homosexual or lesbian relationships, thus making them actual
nuptial ceremonies. This startling claim is certainly far from the
reality of the ceremony in which we participated nine years ago. Is it
perhaps just as far from the real meaning of such ceremonies in the
distant past? According to his publisher, Boswell "irrefutably
demonstrates that same-sex relationships have been sanctioned and even
idealized in Western societies for over two thousand years." He has also
"restored" a rite that could be used in contemporary homosexual
marriages, should they become legal.
The texts on which he leans for his assertions will be examined below.
But to begin with, I will say flatly that neither Boswell's
reconstruction of them nor his method of argumentation can possibly
support the interpretation he proposes. First, it is highly implausible
that homosexual unions either in antiquity or in the Middle Ages would
have been blessed by a religion that promoted ascetic devotion to the
kingdom of God rather than that condition which contemporary Americans
understand as the healthy expression of erotic drives. In that sense the
book is, as Boswell himself admits, counterintuitive in its very
premise. Furthermore, early Byzantine law codes contain extremely harsh
punishments for homosexual intercourse.
But even more disturbing than its implausible assumption is the book's
promotion of a contemporary cause, i.e., homosexual marriage, through
the invention of precedent. Even the most cursory examination of
Boswell's documentation exposes the way he has struggled to force a
group of documents to conform to his conclusions. Despite its facade of
scholarship, the book is studded with unwarranted a priori assumptions,
with arguments from silence, and with dubious, or in some cases
outrageously false, translations of critical terms. And Boswell's
insouciance about historical accuracy would be unacceptable in an
undergraduate paper. It will, for instance, come as news to Orthodox
patriarch and Byzantinist alike that "the Theodosian Code [439] had made
the upper reaches of the Roman state a Roman Catholic theocracy"; and
Severus of Antioch (d. 538) would be aghast, patrician Hellenophone that
he was, to discover that he had composed his Homily on St. Sergius in
Syriac.
Boswell's approach to the historian's craft has hallowed antecedents in
the pious partiality and distortion that marked the writing of modern
church history from its beginnings in the sixteenth century. While
Boswell clearly aspires to influence the current American debate about
such issues as the nature of marriage and the rights of homosexuals, his
tendentiousness in the use of evidence is depressingly old-fashioned. In
fact, for all its topicality, its commercial sales appeal, and its
political timing (hardly by chance was it released on the twenty-fifth
anniversary of the Stonewall protests), the book's methods fairly creak
with age. To be sure, Boswell's documents are real, but he uses them in
a way that would be quite familiar to church historians of the era of
"confessional" church history, famously represented by the Magdeburg
Centuries among the Reformers and Caesar Baronius among the Catholics.
Those writers, responding to certain pressing ideological needs of their
own day, created a history to serve the purpose of their employers,
whether the patrons of the Evangelische Kirche or Roman prelates. Like
them, Professor Boswell has set out to create a usable past.
For Christians, antiquity means the founding centuries of the Church,
when apostolic teaching was preserved and elaborated and a body of
thought assembled. Thus someone attempting to demonstrate, say, that
believers' baptism is the only authentic Christian practice, or that
women may now be ordained as priests, will seek to gain the sanction of
antiquity for his position. Traditionalists, for whom it is imperative
that Roman Catholic priests be unmarried and celibate, "prove," by
invoking the evidence against itself, that early Christian priests who
were married never in fact made love to their wives or sired children
after their ordinations.
In the present superheated climate of ideological warfare it has been
tempting to abandon the painstaking search for the true reconstruction
of the past. Proponents of intellectual movements like cultural
criticism or of political movements like multiculturalism have claimed
flatly that there is no possibility, respectively, of securing a
historical narrative of events as they happened eigentlich, or
of arriving at a consensus view. If "texts" do not exist independently
of their readers, no one true interpretation can be said to exist.
That is not Boswell's approach: he portrays his work as an investigation
that by patient reconstruction and analysis restores the record of gay
couples of the past whose existence was heretofore hidden by the prudery
of an oppressive church and culture. It is understandable that groups
that see themselves as oppressed should want to recover their authentic
history. But to create a false history, as Boswell has done in this book
(despite its elaborate scholarly apparatus), is to undermine the very
cause the work hopes to advance.
II
According to Boswell, the "Christian ceremony of same-sex union
functioned in the past as a 'gay marriage ceremony.'" Until the
fourteenth century, when, he alleges, Christian societies developed an
"obsessive" fear of homosexuality and condemned it as the most horrible
of sins, the Church employed the rite of adelphopoiesis as a
way of sacramentally instituting a "permanent romantic commitment"
between homosexual lovers. The documents that allegedly attest to this
practice go under the title which in English means "the making of
brothers" (or "sisters," since in the Greek compound, the word
adelpho- can signify either noun). The language employed in
these texts does not suggest any kind of sexual connection between the
two parties united in this particular bond. How, then, does Boswell
confirm their status as rites for "gay marriage"? By building a case for
the existence of a hidden context, which is in turn made the
interpretative key for determining the documents' meaning. A careful
reading of each of the eight chapters with which Boswell builds his case
reveals the fragile base on which the entire edifice stands. He
obviously anticipated strong criticism: in September of 1993, even
before the book was out, he challenged his readers on ABC's "Day One":
"Let these people [i.e., his critics] show I read the Greek or Old
Church Slavonic wrong." And in the June 2, 1994 issue of the New
Yorker, he promised his interviewer that "They're going to lose any
arguments they pick with me."
The question of Boswell's translation is a critical one: in the book's
first chapter, titled "The Vocabulary of Love and Marriage," it is
assumed that certain terms, the majority of them Greek, are not to be
translated according to the norms of classical philology. Thus, for
example, as has been pointed out, though the text in no way supports his
doing so, Boswell construes adelphos, "brother," to mean
"homosexual lover," by this means supporting the existence of homosexual
marriage in antiquity. Here we find disingenuousness opening the door to
ingenuity: after examining the semantics of certain Greek and Latin
terms for love (erao, agapao, and phileo) and
marriage (gamos, nubere, etc.) and demonstrating that
there is often an overlap of meaning among them, Boswell adduces the
contemporary use of the term "brother" among gay males to conclude that
"the most significant problem in the whole catalogue of semantic
slippage related to love and sexuality is the use of sibling
designations for romantic partners, of either gender." Just as "to sleep
with" can in modern usage be taken to mean sexual intercourse, so by
(false) analogy adelphos and adelphotes (brotherhood)
are taken to mean the state of sexual union. Boswell actually cites the
term "brother," used to refer to fellow Christians in the early
centuries of the Church, to bolster his case that the word was
metaphorical and therefore likely to mean "lover"-when in the early
Christian context it signifies simply belonging to Christ's family, one
of the adopted sons of God.
By the end of the chapter Boswell has reached the point of claiming that
earlier scholarly discussions of "brotherhood" rituals were meant "to
disguise the nature of the same-sex union" and that his
(mis)translations are necessary to rescue the term from its prudish
application to mere brotherhood, whether of blood kinship or, as in the
Church, spiritual kinship. Of one such union of brotherhood he writes,
"[I]ts nature has long been obscured both by artful mistranslation and a
general unwillingness to recognize something as ostensibly improbable as
a same-sex union."
Having compromised the plain meanings of words, meanings supported by
the majority of readings in the corpus of classical literature, Boswell
next turns to the Greco-Roman world in order to establish the supposed
context for the Christian rituals he will take up later. In two
succeeding chapters he discusses, respectively, heterosexual matrimony
in late antiquity and "same-sex unions" in the same period. It is
necessary for his argument to establish that these were two roughly
equivalent forms of human consortium, because in subsequent chapters he
means to demonstrate that early Christianity absorbed such late-Roman
customs. Along the way, he routinely characterizes marriage, which in
the Roman Empire was always legally and explicitly heterosexual, as an
impersonal union, and "primarily a property arrangement." Since, he
implies, marriages between men and women were "business deals," not
usually marked by affection or equality, homosexual unions, with their
intense and intimate friendships, were humanly superior. A throwaway,
and unsupported, line on page 65 asserts that "divorce was very common
in heterosexual marriages at Rome, as well as nonmarital sexuality, at
least for the male. . . . " The reader is encouraged to think that late
Roman citizens treated marriage casually and cynically; but the texts of
late antiquity suggest just the opposite. Admittedly a practical
arrangement, marriage varied in its details, but also included the aims
of mutual affection and successful childrearing.
Boswell's short chapter on marriage can hardly be taken seriously as a
scholarly consideration of an exceedingly complex subject. During the
last fifteen years, the entire subject of marriage and the family in
late antiquity has come under intense scrutiny, and Boswell devotes
little effort to presenting the conclusions of that research, mainly
because he is eager to prove the equal standing of legal homosexual
unions that supposedly stood beside marriage. In his discussion, he
provides little material not already presented in his Christianity,
Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality (1980), a popular but intensely
criticized monograph which similarly attempted to show that the early
Church tolerated a preexisting Roman custom of homosexuality.
Because he therefore needs to establish that Roman law permitted
homosexual unions, Boswell must interpret all uses of the word "brother"
in adoption ceremonies as a sign of homosexuality, and must force every
reference to male friendship to connote homosexual coupledom in the
modern sense. For example, discussing a passage from Xenophon, he
translates a passage which in Greek reads aner kai pais suzugentes
homilousin, "man and boy converse/consort, being bound together"
(cf. Greek-English Lexicon, ed. Liddell and Scott, col. 1669) "as in
Boeotia, man and boy live together, like married people." In a footnote
to this passage, he does grant that "like married people" is not
literally expressed here-but fails to inform the nonspecialist reader
that there is no mention of marriage in the passage at all!
The remainder of the chapter discusses three types of "formal unions"
between men. None, in fact, is evidence of a legal, contractual
"marriage" between members of the same sex. The first is a fictionalized
description of a homosexual abduction; the second describes a ritual
akin to blood-brotherhood; and the third is clearly a form of legal
adoption between males. Only the third can be representative of any
common procedure in the late Empire, and none is comparable to the
institution of marriage. Yet by selective quotation Boswell gives the
impression that homosexual marriage was acceptable and legal in the
world into which Christianity came, and dismisses those scholars who
accepted the plain sense of fraternal adoption as having been blinded by
their homophobia.
The final five chapters of the book contain Boswell's analysis of the
Christian history of homosexual marriage. These chapters contain
frequent gaffes, faulty translations, and specious arguments, and a
sizeable essay would be required to correct them all. Boswell's general
argument is that Christianity uncritically absorbed late-Roman mores
with regard to sex and marriage. Thus he casually transfers the
misleading portrait he has drawn of the late-ancient pagan world to the
social and cultural life created as Christianity began to dominate the
Mediterranean. In doing so, he misreads the intensely religious devotion
which insisted that those wishing to become Christians must, in both
outlook and behavior, choose between "the way of life and the way of
death" (Didache, 1-6 [ca.100]). Here is Boswell's gloss on
Christianity's sexual morality: "[Early Christian insistence on
sexuality's procreative purpose] probably drew its heightened intensity
among Christian peoples from a fervent, almost obsessive Christian
emphasis on the afterlife as the primary focus and measure of all
earthly value and action-a preoccupation that may now seem
counterintuitive even to Christians, living in more worldly and
materialistic frames of reference."
Salvation through faith in Christ, not "afterlife," was the moving force
behind conversion to Christianity-at least before it was made the state
religion. Because such salvation entailed a thorough reinterpretation of
the visible and invisible world, early Christian authors put the whole
of their inherited pagan culture under anxious scrutiny. Despite the
fact that religious paganism survived well past the period of early
Christianity, it is highly questionable to assume, with Boswell, that
pre-Christian sexual practices could be easily transferred into
Christian ritual, when in fact they could not be and were not.
When he turns to a discussion of "the new religion," Boswell depends
upon a number of unwarranted assumptions in order to promote his view
that the practice of same-sex unions was carried over into early
Christianity. First, he creates a caricature of the early Christian
enthusiasm for the solitary, ascetic life in imitation of Christ.
Second, he distorts the scriptural and patristic teachings on marriage
and its purpose-strict in part because they derived from Judaism-into a
purported ambivalence about the worth of marriage. Third, by selective
quotation he converts certain paired saints, most notably Sergius and
Bacchus, into homosexual couples venerated by Christians for that
reason.
Two egregious errors occur on pp. 110-111. In the first, Boswell wishes
to show that matrimony was downgraded by early Christians. He repeats
the by-now conventional, but unproven, explanation of the women's
monastic movement by declaring that celibacy provided Christian women
"an escape from the confinements of ordinary social obligations, and. .
. a route to social power and prestige through the Church." The
patristic attitude toward marriage he summarizes by libeling Augustine:
"St. Augustine, whose views of sexuality were to become normative in the
Western church, lived with a concubine for fifteen years, had a son by
her, and then dismissed her summarily when he had the opportunity to
satisfy his ambition by marrying an heiress."
Augustine records in the Confessions that, although he did
accede to his mother's wish that he pursue an ambitious marriage, "this
was a blow which crushed my heart to bleeding, for I loved her dearly."
Augustine, in other words, was torn between conflicting desires, but he
was not unfeeling or casual about his quasi-marriage. Nor are his views
entirely representative of early Christian views of marriage.
Further, in a discussion of marriage in the early Christian period,
Boswell asserts that "a thousand years after its inception Christianity
would begin to emphasize the biological family as the central unit of
Christian society." Here he has perhaps been misled by the current
scholarly interest in asceticism. Had he read the homilies of John
Chrysostom or Augustine, the orations of Gregory Nazianzen or the
Life of Macrina by Gregory of Nyssa (all from the early
centuries of the Fathers), he would have found a considerable emphasis
on what we nowadays call the "nuclear" family as the primary way of life
for Christians, despite the attractions of an undistractedly religious
life.
Boswell is in any case chiefly interested in supposed homosexual unions,
and he discusses Christian marriage mainly in order to contrast it with
same-sex unions entered into solely for the sake of love. Since the
historical evidence for such unions is almost nil, he is led to
outrageous acts of eisegesis. His reading into the text what is not
there begins with the "beloved disciple," a case argued unsuccessfully
in his previous book: "Certainly the most controversial same-sex couple
in the Christian tradition comprised Jesus and John. . . ." He then
moves to Perpetua and Felicitas, North African martyrs of ca. 200: "The
paired femaleness of the two martyrs seems to be what appealed most to
Christians. . . ." Ss. Polyeuctos and Nearchos (ca. 250) died together.
Their biographer, Boswell claims, describes them as "brothers, not by
birth, but by affection." The Greek text, however, reads kata
proairesin, "by choice." Boswell goes on to quote at length from
the acta of the two martyrs, invoking the principle of
mistranslation elaborated in Chapter One to translate the ametro
philia enjoyed by Nearchos and Polyeuctos as "boundless love,"
rather than, as is correct, "limitless friendship," thus injecting an
erotic charge where the text contained none. He concludes:
Although the point of the story was manifestly
to appeal to Christians as a reminder of those who embraced
martyrdom as Christians in the face of Roman persecution, it
may have evoked particular enjoyment from those sensitive to
romantic relationships (or special friendships) with a party
of the same gender, particularly since both men were
soldiers, and there was a widespread and ancient Hellenistic
connection between homoeroticism and the military.
Many Christians may not have gotten the point, Boswell adds, but those
"particularly susceptible to such feelings [the erotic] may have
interpreted them more erotically." This is always possible, of course;
but it proves nothing.
The Life of Sergius and Bacchus, which records the deaths of
two soldier-martyrs in the reign of Maximian, is given similar
treatment, based on a similar mistranslation. In the story, Bacchus dies
first, and appears in a vision to exhort Sergius to preserve his
Christian faith in the face of certain martyrdom the next day. Boswell
asserts that "Bacchus' promise that if Serge followed the Lord he would
get as his reward not the beatific vision, not the joy of paradise, not
even the crown of martyrdom, but Bacchus himself, was remarkable by the
standards of the early church, privileging human affection in a way
unparalleled during the first thousand years of Christianity."
To arrive at this conclusion requires that Boswell read Sun soi gar
apokeitai moi ho tes dikaiosynes stephanos as "For the crown of
justice for me is to be with you." But that is not how it reads; the
Latin version more correctly translates the Greek as Tecum enim mihi
reposita est justitia et corona: "For with you is laid up for me
the crown of righteousness" (in the Latin, "righteousness and crown")
[cf. 2 Timothy 4:8]. In other words, the two will together gain the
crown-not primarily one another's person, as Boswell wishes.
The final three chapters of Same-Sex Unions build on Boswell's
interpretation of early Christian texts to discover what the ceremonies
he has uncovered signify. He concludes that wherever the term "brother"
is found, an erotic meaning is justified. By equating the terms
"brother" with "lover" and "friendship" with (erotic) "love" and linking
them to earlier texts, Boswell is able to read the few medieval Western
and Byzantine references outside the rituals reproduced here to attest
to an ancient tradition of homosexual marriage that continued unabated
from Roman antiquity through the Byzantine and, in isolated instances,
into modernity.
Boswell raises three possible alternative interpretations of the
ceremonies, but only in order to dismiss them. In his view, they do not
establish a "spiritual fraternity," nor are they blood-brotherhood
rites, nor are they fraternal adoption ceremonies. Boswell then tries to
establish a parallel between "same–sex and heterosexual ceremonies of
union," and finally, by interpreting instances of the use of the term
adelphopoiesis as a homosexual marriage, he finds the
"antecedents" for his rituals. The Emperor Basil I (867-886), founder of
the Macedonian dynasty of Byzantium, and apparently a homosexual, then
becomes a prima facie case for the commonness of same-sex unions, when
in fact Basil's homosexuality was notable precisely because it was
unusual.
Even so, Boswell's account of Basil's relationship with another man
involves mistranslation. Before becoming emperor, Basil was made brother
of one John, a native of Achaia, although he had at first resisted
entering into a relationship with an underling. According to Boswell's
translation of the historian Theophanes Continuator, Basil "honored
[John] with the title protospatarius and granted him intimacy
with him on account of their earlier shared life in ceremonial union."
The word for "intimacy" here is parrhesia, meaning the freedom-
of-speech, the boldness, enjoyed by an inferior before his superior. And
"earlier . . . union" is more readily translated as "previous
association in spiritual brotherhood," the Greek clause reading: kai
tes pros auton parresias metedoke dia ten phthasasan koinonian tes
pneumatikes adelphotetos. Contrary to Boswell, koinonia rarely
means sexual intercourse, even though, in Boswell's words, "Basil was
thus what modern Americans would call a 'hunk.'" It is hard to see, by
the way, how Figure 13, a reproduction of a manuscript illumination of
this episode in Theophanes, bears out either Boswell's interpretation of
this adoption ceremony as a "liturgical union" or his estimation of
Basil's physical allure.
A final chapter argues that "same-sex unions" have continued to be
practiced, even though the prejudices of modern scholars have caused
them to be misinterpreted as non-homosexual.
At the end of this long and tortured attempt at historical
reconstruction lie the celebrated documents themselves. Two appendices
contain translations and documents that allegedly attest to same-sex
union. Oddly, these sections contain somewhat different kinds of
material. The first contains a hymn to Sergius and Bacchus, a nuptial
office from the Gelasian sacramentary, a brotherhood contract between
Louis the Eleventh of France and the Duke of Bourgogne, a "heterosexual
ceremony" of the 1549 Book of Common Prayer, and twelve
adelphopoiesis rituals, of which three are in Slavonic and nine
in Greek. The presence of canonical marriage rites alongside supposed
gay marriage rites is undoubtedly meant to suggest their equivalency.
As for the texts printed in Greek (the Slavonic texts are not presented
in the volume), only a few of these texts have not been published
before, and an examination of the "Manuscripts of Same-Sex Union" shows
that of the sixty-two manuscripts consulted, only eleven have not been
previously published or described. Scholars have known of these prayers
and services and have steadily published them over the course of the
century. Boswell, then, did not discover them; he only put them to use
for his purposes.
Nothing makes this plainer than the claim advanced for the entries under
Akolouthia eis adelphopoiesin in MS. Grottaferrata Gamma Beta
Two. Boswell refers, as if they belonged to the same ritual, to a text
called "another prayer for the making of a brother" and the
"Ecclesiastical Canon of Marriage of the Patriarch Methodius." Footnote
80 astonishingly claims that a line appearing in the manuscript between
the first and second items cannot signify a division between types of
text, when the Greek makes perfectly clear from the final verb-
(apoluetai) "they are dismissed" after "making a profound bow"
(proskynousi, not necessarily "kissing," as Boswell translates)
to the Gospel, the priest, and each other -that the Kanon of
marriage is not a part of the adoption ceremony. This is most
inconvenient for Boswell's case, as even he later concedes.
All in all, then, this book does not begin to accomplish what it set out
to do. (The reviews, after the early burst of hopeful publicity, have
been notably skeptical-even from sources one would expect to be
favorable.) Indeed, the author's painfully strained effort to recruit
Christian history in support of the homosexual cause that he favors is
not only a failure, but an embarrassing one.
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Robin Darling Young is Associate Professor of Theology at the Catholic
University of America, where she teaches early Christian history.
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