When Brothers Dwell in Unity
Same Sex Unions in Premodern Europe
by John Boswell
New York: Villard Books, 1994.
(412 pages: $25.00)
reviewed by Leon J. Podles
The late John Boswell has become the chief source of scholarly propaganda for those Christians who wish to approve of homosexual behavior. Boswell has found ceremonies of brother-making ( adelphopoiesis) in medieval liturgical books from Orthodox churches. His thesis is that these ceremonies, which bless a relationship between two men, were gay marriages. He reasons that because homosexuals could have used these blessings as gay marriages, they therefore would have used them as gay marriages, with the implicit consent of the Church hierarchy and laity.
Homosexual activity, Boswell admits, was regarded in premodern Europe as sinful, but only about as sinful as premarital intercourse, and was, like fornication, generally tolerated in practice, whatever laws were made. Boswell claims that in certain Greek usages, brothers (adelphoi) was a euphemism for homosexual lovers. He adduces further evidence for the existence of medieval blessings of homosexual unions from the supposed suppression of these rites of brother-making, a suppression that he says coincided with a growing popular opprobrium for homosexuality after the fourteenth century, the subject of his 1981 book, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century.
However, Boswell’s whole thesis is rendered highly improbable by the fact that the Byzantines, who supposedly were blessing homosexual unions, were at the same time imposing sanguinary punishments on homosexual behavior in the civil code (a fact that he admits, but fails to explain satisfactorily). The existence of a rare Greek use of brothers as a euphemism for homosexual lovers hardly proves that the Christian Greek meaning of brothers did not derive from the Koine and the use of brothers in Scripture. Some people may use confirmed bachelor as a euphemism for homosexual, and bachelor may be a synonym for celibate, but it would be foolish to argue that bachelor means homosexual in standard English usage, or that the Roman Church, in obliging its clergy to be celibates (i.e., bachelors) is obliging them to be homosexuals. But such is the nature of Boswell’s linguistic argument. Nor do the rites of brother-making correspond to the full Byzantine marriage, as Father Patrick Viscuso, an Orthodox canonist, pointed out in his review of Boswell in the New Oxford Review. Viscuso was cited by Boswell, but claims that Boswell misunderstands the Byzantine rites of marriage, which were a series of ceremonies that united families, and that Boswell manipulates the evidence in a highly tendentious fashion. Nor have the rites died out, as Boswell claims. The Byzantinist Robin Darling Young mentions in her review in First Things that she underwent the rite with a friend when they were in Jerusalem. She dismisses Boswell’s attempt to find precedents for gay marriage as an “embarrassing” failure because of his sloppy and biased scholarship. Camille Paglia, no prude and a friend of homosexuals, panned the book in her Washington Post review.
The most sustained criticism appeared in, of all places, the New Republic, whose editor, Andrew Sullivan, is a professed Catholic and homosexual. There Brent Shaw examined the mistranslations, the mis-citations and misunderstandings of historical evidence, and the faulty reasoning. Shaw concluded that the desired end, a toleration of homosexuality, “will not be achieved by tendentious misreading of antiquity.” The few favorable mentions on the book have appeared in the New Yorker, a citadel of scholarship under its new editor, in the oeuvre of the famous Byzantinist and theologian Gary Trudeau (the Doonsbury strip cartoonist), and in a review by a priest in the Baltimore Catholic Review, who had previously written a glowing series of articles on homoerotic friendships (such as David and Jonathan, Jesus and the Apostle John) for the Washington Gay Blade.
There is no evidence that these rites of brother-making were ever used by homosexual couples as gay marriages. Nor is there any evidence that the priest blessing the relationship or the congregation witnessing it thought that they were witnessing a blessing of a union that was a marriage or that included homosexual activity. Even if we had explicit evidence that homosexuals had entered into such unions (evidence that is lacking), it still would be necessary to have evidence that the public meant to approve of such unions. Second marriages in which a widowed spouse has children have been used as cloaks for incest in the modern world, and may have been so used in the Middle Ages. But the official blessing of a second marriage should not be interpreted as a sign that Christians do not disapprove of incest or regard it as a minor peccadillo.
There may have been a growing popular dislike for homosexuality after the High Middle Ages. This dislike may have stemmed from the association of homosexuals with profoundly anti-Christian heresies such as the Cathars and Bogomils (one etymology of bugger derives it from Bogomil) which despised procreative sex because it entrapped spirits in the suffering of the material world. Greater urbanization also may have provided more opportunity for homosexuality, which does not flourish in a rural community. But greater intolerance does not mean that homosexual activity was ever tolerated. It may have been either so rare, like cannibalism, that condemnations would have been superfluous, or it was seen simply as a matter of private sexual vice, like masturbation, more a matter for private counseling than public fulminations.
Boswell returns to a theme from his previous book in an appendix of this book: that the Jews identified the sin of Sodom not as homosexuality but as inhospitality. However, Boswell has a tin ear for literature, both sacred and secular, and as he misses the bitter insults in Juvenal and Martial in their allegations about the same-sex marriages of their contemporaries, he misses the point of the story of Sodom. Since Boswell’s interpretation of this story has seeped down even to church bulletins, it is important to look more closely at Genesis 19.
The author of Genesis frames the story of Sodom with the story of the conception and birth of Isaac, and contrasts the hospitality of Abraham, which welcomes both strangers and new life, to the inhospitality of Sodom, which seeks to abuse strangers—and sexual abuse is the obvious meaning of the story. The Sodomites want to know the strangers, a word that is used frequently in Scripture to imply sexual union and survives in our phrase carnal knowledge. Lot certainly interprets it as sexual when he offers his daughters in the place of the strangers. The homosexual intercourse of the Sodomites is condemned because it is inhospitable to new life, unlike the marriage of Abraham, who even in his old age welcomes a child.
Leon J. Podles holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Virginia, has worked as a teacher and a federal investigator, and is president of the Crossland Foundation. He is the author of The Church Impotent (Spence), Sacrilege (Crossland Press), and Losing the Good Portion: Why Men Are Alienated from Christianity (St. Augustine Press). Dr. Podles and his wife have six children and live in Baltimore, Maryland. He is a senior editor of Touchstone.
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