How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken

by Daniel Mendelsohn

  And so, despite the recent erosion of the once-rigid distinctions that forced Wilde to choose between philology and fame—and by “fame” I mean conspicuousness within, and impact upon, the outside, public, “real” world—every now and then you’re still tempted to see in his unhappy trajectory from Magdalen to maudlin a sort of morality tale. Sometimes, it’s safer to stick to stichomythia.

  I couldn’t help thinking of Wilde as I read and reread a recent book by another precociously gifted philologue who, like Wilde, came to chafe at the dried-up donnish bit, and who as a result sought an audience outside of the academy’s walls. His book is, in fact, expressly aimed at a broadly public rather than a narrowly academic audience, and toward that end was published by a trade rather than university press. Indeed, like much of Wilde’s oeuvre, this work seeks to present a devastating indictment of social and especially religious hypocrisy on the subject of human sexuality. It is a nice further coincidence that its late author was, like Wilde, charming, personable, erudite, and above all an extraordinarily gifted linguist. (His defenders invariably point to his expertise in such arcane tongues as Old Church Slavonic.) And like Wilde, he was a homosexual who suffered both personally and, according to some, professionally for it.

  The book I am talking about is John Boswell’s Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe. In it, the author claims to have unearthed a medieval ecclesiastical ceremony known as the adelphopoiêsis which, he argues, was in fact a liturgy to be performed at (primarily male) homosexual marriages. As much today as a hundred years ago, that is the kind of claim that makes you very notorious indeed.

  The tortured relationship between homosexuality and Roman Catholicism is familiar territory for Boswell’s readers—as it was, indeed, for Boswell himself. In his extremely well received 1980 study Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, published by the University of Chicago Press, Boswell shed welcome light on the early Church’s by no means straightforward attitude toward male homosexuality. Hence though he was to eventually become generally (and laudably) more cautious about the anachronistic use of words like “gay” to describe the affective states experienced by members of cultures radically different from our own, Boswell’s latest project may be seen as the next charge in a polemic whose opening salvo was fired nearly fifteen years ago. There is little doubt, moreover, that this scholarly interest was fueled by deep personal feeling. Boswell, a homosexual, was also a devout Catholic.

  In view of the undeniably powerful political uses to which the Church’s institutionalized opposition to homosexuality has been put over the centuries, it was inevitable that what began as the author’s personal and scholarly interest in destabilizing the theological and historical premises for the Church’s position should end up serving a political purpose as well. This last consideration explains why, upon its publication in the summer of 1994, Same-Sex Unions won the kind of fame—and notoriety—that would have warmed even Oscar Wilde’s heart. The apogee of this publicity was the triumphant citation of Boswell’s book in the popular comic strip Doonesbury. “For 1,000 years the Church sanctioned rituals for homosexual marriages,” declares Mark Slackmeyer, a gay character who has recently come out; he then goes on to mention the source for his information: the “new book by this Yale professor.”

  Given the political climate at the time of the book’s publication, you can hardly blame Slackmeyer for his enthusiasm. If they were indeed what Boswell says they were, the ecclesiastical ceremonies discussed in Same-Sex Unions would be considered by many to be powerful ammunition in the increasingly ugly battles about social tolerance now being fought in America. Among the liberal press and especially gay activists, it was hoped that what Boswell’s publisher, Villard, calls his “sensational discovery” would, in the words of an approving Nation reviewer, “have a chance of intervening effectively in this debate [i.e., over gay marriage].” This fantasy of “effective intervention” is a potent one: how nice it would be for us gay men and women to go clumping down to the Senate floor, Byzantine manuscripts firmly in hand, and hurl the appropriate bits of papyrus and vellum into Senator Helms’s empurpled visage. In more ways than one, it would all be Greek to him.

  This makes it all the more unfortunate, both for that political project and for Boswell’s posthumous reputation (he died a few months after the book’s publication in 1994), that the only people who have reason to be intimidated by Boswell’s ceremonies of adelphopoiêsis—and, perhaps more important, the only people likely to use them as weapons in a political battle—are, in fact, those who have no Greek: that is, readers who lack the training and expertise necessary to evaluate what are, in the end, this work’s very dubious claims. For seen as a work of philology, Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe is a bad book. Its arguments are weak, its methods unsound, its conclusions highly questionable. Most disturbing of all is its rhetorical stance: the complexities and ambiguities of the historical, literary, and linguistic material Boswell discusses are of a very high order indeed, and hence give the lie to his rather disingenuous assertion that no specialized scholarly training is necessary to the proper evaluation of this book. (Professional scholars have been arguing heatedly over his conclusions since the day the book appeared.) Given the author’s inevitable awareness of his thesis’s potential impact on a wider public discourse, his decision to target precisely those readers who have no particular expertise is alarming.

  Seen, however, as a work of that other category—“fame”—Same-Sex Unions has been considerably more successful; even Professor Nussbaum didn’t make it to Doonesbury. In Boswell’s case, what’s striking is that so obvious a philological failure should be accompanied by so great a public impact. This correlation, I think, should provoke serious discussion about the means by which intellectual celebrity is achieved and the aims to which it can be put. In the end, Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe provokes questions that are far more disturbing than the “controversial” answers it claims to provide. It exemplifies the dangers inherent in careless cross-pollination of scholarship and politics, of philology and fame.

  Why all the fuss? That’s an easy one. Pretty much any evidence that marriages between male homosexuals were performed under the auspices of the early Church would certainly put a crimp in the Vatican’s current rhetorical style. Referring to increasing debate about the legalization of same-sex marriages in (post)modern Europe and America—at the time of the present article’s publication, it is on the constitutional agenda in Hawaii—Pope John Paul II denounced such unions as “a serious threat to the future of the family and society.”

  I should say at the outset that I characterize Boswell’s book as being about “gay marriages,” despite the fact that some have defended his book from scholarly skepticism precisely on the grounds that Boswell himself carefully eschews that tendentious term in favor of the ostensibly more judicious “same-sex unions.” To do so, these defenders argue, bespeaks a praiseworthy scholarly prudence. Although it is true that Boswell himself hedges his rhetorical bets in this fashion, the overarching thrust of his arguments, his own description of the unions as celebrating “permanent romantic commitment,” the enormous quantity of material he marshals concerning both the language and diction of erotic (versus, say, agricultural) activity in the ancient world and about the history of homosexual relationships from archaic Greece to the early years of the Christian Church—all this makes it clear that what Boswell is talking about in this book is what his intended audience of nonscholars will surely understand as “gay marriages celebrated by the church.”

  Indeed, when halfway through his study Boswell pauses to frame one of three “nonpolemical” questions that a responsible historian faced with the manuscripts in question might pose—“Was it a marriage?”—Boswell is, in his own words, “unequivocal”:

  The answer to this question depends to a considerable extent on one’s conception of marriage, as noted in the Introduction. According to the modern conception—i.e., a permanent emotional union ackno
wledged in some way by the community—it was unequivocally a marriage.

  It seems more than likely that, to Boswell’s own unequivocally modern audience, “same-sex unions” will be taken as meaning “gay marriages.” These are Boswell’s own words. If the “unions” he’s talking about here are any other than the kind of affective, mutual, primarily erotic partnerships that people today understand as constituting a marriage, then his elaborate dissertation becomes a pointless exercise. To deny this essential point, or to hide behind sophistries about the alleged neutrality of the English term “same-sex” as opposed to “gay,” is disingenuous.

  At the center of Boswell’s four-hundred-page thesis about medieval gay marriages stands the text of an early Christian ceremony known as the akolouthia (occasionally eukhê), eis adelphopoiêsin, the “liturgy” (or “prayer”) “for the creation of brothers”—or the “creation of lovers,” depending on how figuratively you care to read the adelpho- (literally, “brother”) in adelphopoiêsis. (This interpretive point, to which I shall return later, is the fulcrum of Boswell’s thesis.) The service has survived in various versions in a large number of manuscripts from all over Europe. These documents date to the period between the tenth and fifteenth centuries. In order to provide proper cultural context for these strange texts, however, Boswell laudably devotes nearly a third of his study to what he sees as the Greek, Roman, and late antique “background” evidence; and it is to his handling of this material (often well over a millennium older than the manuscripts themselves) that I shall devote most of my own discussion. I do so because the foundation of Boswell’s argument about the meaning of the adelphopoiêsis ceremony is, in fact, an interlocked series of interpretations of linguistic and cultural material that is primarily classical.

  Since the adelphopoiêsis liturgy proved to be a novelty even to a highly trained medievalist like Boswell himself, it seems appropriate to give an example here. Of those furnished in Boswell’s “Appendix of Documents,” the one that is most ample and that contains the greatest quantity of material that could be construed as being helpful to the author’s argument is the eleventh-century manuscript known as Grottaferrata II. I provide it here in Boswell’s own translation, along with my own bracketed transliterations of important phrases from the original Greek. (I retain the author’s italicization of the rubrics of priestly activity.)

  OFFICE FOR SAME-SEX UNION

  (akolouthia eis adelphopoiêsin)

  i.

  The priest shall place the holy Gospel on the Gospel stand and they that are to be joined together [hoi adelphoi] place their hands on it, holding lighted candles in their left hands. Then shall the priest cense them and say the following:

  ii.

  In peace we beseech Thee, O Lord. For heavenly peace, we beseech Thee, O Lord.

  For the peace of the entire world, we beseech Thee, O Lord.

  For this holy place, we beseech Thee, O Lord.

  That these thy servants, N. and N., be sanctified with thy spiritual benediction, we beseech Thee, O Lord.

  That their love [agapê] abide without offense or scandal all the days of their lives, we beseech Thee, O Lord.

  That they be granted all things needed for salvation and godly enjoyment of life everlasting, we beseech Thee, O Lord.

  That the Lord God grant unto them unashamed faithfulness [pistin akataiskhynton] sincere love [agapên anypokriton], we beseech Thee, O Lord.

  That we be saved, we beseech Thee, O Lord.

  Have mercy on us, O God.

  “Lord, have mercy” shall be said three times.

  iii.

  The priest : Forasmuch as Thou, O Lord and Ruler, art merciful and loving [philôn], who didst establish humankind after thine image and likeness, who didst deem it meet that thy holy apostles Philip and Bartholomew be united [adelphous genesthai], bound one unto the other not by nature but by faith and the spirit. As Thou didst find thy holy martyrs Serge and Bacchus worthy to be united together [adelphous genesthai], bless also these thy servants, N. and N., joined together not by the bond of nature but by faith and in the mode of the spirit, granting unto them peace and love and oneness of mind [agapên kai homonoian]. Cleanse from their hearts every stain and impurity, and vouchsafe unto them to love one other [sic] without hatred and without scandal [to agapân allêlous amisêtôs kai askandalistôs] all the days of their lives, with the aid of the Mother of God and all thy saints, forasmuch as all glory is thine.

  iv.

  ANOTHER PRAYER FOR SAME-SEX UNION

  (eukhê hetera eis adelphopoiêsin)

  O Lord our God, who didst grant unto us all those things necessary for salvation and didst bid us to love one another [agapân allêlous] and to forgive each other our failings, bless and consecrate, kind Lord and lover of good, these thy servants who love each other with a love of the spirit [pneumatikêi agapêi heautous agapêsantas] and have come into this thy holy church to be blessed and consecrated. Grant unto them unashamed fidelity [and] sincere love [agapê], and as Thou didst vouchsafe unto thy holy disciples and apostles thy peace and love [agapên], bestow also on these, O Christ our God, affording to them all those things needed for salvation and life eternal. For Thou art the light [and] the truth and thine is the glory.

  v.

  Then shall they kiss the holy Gospel and the priest and one another, and conclude [apoluetai]:

  ECCLESIASTICAL CANON OF MARRIAGE OF THE PATRIARCH METHODIUS

  [Kanôn ekklêsiastikos epi gamou, poiêma Methodiou patriarkhou]

  O Lord our God, the designer of love [agapê] and author of peace and disposer of thine own providence, who didst make two into one and hast given us one to another, who hast [seen fit?] to bless all things pure and timeless, send Thou now down from heaven thy right hand full of grace and loving kindness over these thy servants who have come before Thee and given their right hands as a lawful token of union and the bond of marriage [episynoikêsian kai syndesmon gamou]. Sanctify and fill them with thy mercies. And wrapping the pair in every grace and in divine and spiritual radiance, gladden them in the expectation of thy mercies. Perfect their union [synapheian] by bestowing upon them peace and love and harmony [agapên kai homonoian], and deem them worthy of the imposition and consecration of the crowns, through the prayers of her that conceived Thee in power and truth; and those of all thy saints, now and forever.

  VI.

  And after this prayer the priest shall lift the crowns and dismiss them [apoluei autous].

  This, then, is the ceremony of “same-sex union.”

  In beginning his discussion, Boswell describes this ritual as being swathed in mystery and even, perhaps, in danger. His own study of it, he informs us in the Preface, “was undertaken as the result of a notice about a ceremony of same-sex union sent to me by a correspondent who prefers not to be named.” The hint at an urgent desire for anonymity provides a nice, John Grisham-y touch sadly absent from most scholarly prose; but the dark intimation that these rites were unknown to scholars is misleading. Since the end of the nineteenth century, when Giovanni Tomassia studied the ceremony, and into the twentieth when it was taken up again by Paul Koschaker, the adelphopoiêsis has been known to scholars. They have argued that the ceremonies celebrated some kind of “ritualized” friendship along the lines of a blood-brotherhood—a formalized relationship for which the parallels from ancient Mediterranean cultures, as the title of Gabriel Herman’s 1987 study Ritualized Friendship in the Greek City suggests, are as numerous and well attested as are the competing parallels, drawn from the context of ancient sexual and erotic conventions, that Boswell adduces in support of his own argument. And indeed, nothing in the first four sections of this text (which closely resembles the entirety of the other examples Boswell gives) provides sufficient support for Boswell’s “gay marriage” reading of the adelphopoiêsis over and above the less controversial and better-supported readings. The emphasis on peace, mutual Christian love, agapê, and aversion to scandal confor
m to any number of nonerotic interpretations—for example, that the ceremonies formalized alliances or reconciliations between heads of households or perhaps clans.

  But few would contest the stunning and controversial force of the Grottaferrata manuscript’s fifth part, which is indisputably a liturgy of Christian marriage, and indeed even of the sixth, with its reference to the traditional crowns of the Orthodox wedding service. On the force of this single document, as it appears in Boswell’s Appendix, the case for gay marriage would seem to be incontrovertible.

  The problem is that this is not, in fact, a single document: the fifth and sixth parts are almost certainly not part of the adelphopoiêsis ceremony. Rather, these appear to be the first two parts of an entirely separate, bona fide marriage ceremony—one of various kinship-related rituals that appear to have been collected in this and other of the various manuscripts in which the adelphopoiêsis liturgy appears. And here we come to the first example of what turns out to be a pattern of methodological and argumentative sins, both of commission and omission, on Boswell’s part. Among these are a presentation of the evidence that is so tendentious as to be misleading; a highly selective use of anomalous or unrepresentative evidence to support key premises of the arguments; and a pervasive failure to account adequately for nuance and context in citing original sources. Subtending all of these is a rhetorical strategy whose disingenuousness verges on fraud, given the popularizing aims of Boswell’s book: and here I refer to Boswell’s self-serving deployment of notes and ancillary scholarship, the overall effect of which is to suppress information crucial to the proper interpretation of the arguments presented in the text itself.