by E. J. Graff
What the Romans and the Jews had in common was that everyone had to marry. Procreation was a social duty, with personal pleasure as a kind of bonus.
Christianity turned all this on its head. When Jesus’s early followers insisted on their right to celibacy—to personal freedom from society’s expectations—theirs was a defiant rebellion against marriage. And it was quite definitely understood that way, by both Romans and Jews.
That first insistence on the ideal of refraining from sex was far more radical than we imagine now. Some Roman Stoics and other philosophers advised sexual restraint; a very few Jewish prophets and preachers chose asceticism to show their outrage at how far Israel had fallen from God’s expectations. But when Jesus’s new followers took celibacy up as a communal ideal, they meant to stop birth and death entirely, bringing on the millennium. As one historian explains, “By refusing to act upon the youthful stirrings of desire . . . Christians could bring marriage and childbirth to an end . . . organized society would crumble like a sandcastle.” So there, Mom and Dad: no grandchildren for you! My body is my own, and anyway, the world is rotten!
To some, especially women, Christian celibacy was appealing as the only way to avoid an arranged marriage, a marriage that would define the rest of your life. Through sexual renunciation you could defy tradition, declare your independence, and choose your inner life over society. The celibacy impulse was not so different, in other words, from the impulse a young lesbian today might feel when declaring herself to her parents—deciding that she’d rather reject traditional society than violate her inner life, her conscience. Comments one historian, “Even today, an adolescent who takes time to think before plunging into ordinary adult society—into marriage, and the double obligations of family and career—may hesitate, for such obligations usually cost nothing less than one’s life, the expense of virtually all one’s energy.” For girls whose marriages had been arranged as early as age six and who were expected to marry as soon as they spotted that first pubescent drop of blood, celibacy could be irresistible. Popular among Christians in the early centuries was the (perhaps true) story of a young Roman woman named Thecla, who—after hearing Paul preach through an open window—chose celibacy and refused an arranged marriage with a fiancé who would have supported both herself and her impoverished mom. The fiancé denounced Paul to the government: “This man has introduced a new teaching, bizarre and disruptive of the human race. He denigrates marriage: yes, marriage, which you might say is the beginning, root and fountainhead of our nature.” Precisely the point: smash nature, smash society, and come closer to God.
All this celibacy was considered shockingly antisocial by the Romans and sinful by the Jews, who over the next centuries never tired of noticing how badly the Christians misinterpreted the critical Genesis verse, “It is not good for man to be alone.” It’s one of those wonderful moments of conflict in history’s marriage battles: three civilizations, three religious traditions in absolutely flagrant disagreement about a central element of marriage: sex.
In this early Christian view, what is marriage for? Promoting the corrupt secular world, which early Christians wanted to reject. Sex and marriage were the big sell-out, the compromising Wall Street job rather than the pure-art garret.
Reproducing: Is It a Marriage . . . Or Is It a Brothel?
But as Christ’s return kept getting delayed, and as Christianity morphed from a fringe cult into an imperial religion, Church fathers faced a new question: how could that fever to just say no be translated back into daily life—in other words, into marriage?
Peculiarly, figuring out marriage’s purpose was the job of monks, men who considered sexuality an affliction. The perfect, and most influential, example lies in the well-known experience of the great, dour theologian Augustine. In the late fourth century, Augustine was an ambitious young man studying to be a Roman rhetorician. For eleven years he lived with a concubine, as was expected for young men of his class; presumably aided by contraception, they had just one son. When he was about to move to Rome to take up his career, he let his mother banish his concubine and bastard, a preparatory step to marrying him to the right kind of girl. Ah, but then—in a wrenching and famous religious struggle—Augustine converted. He repented all the time he’d spent turned in any direction other than the Christian God. He recoiled at his memory of “the mists of slimy lust of the flesh” and “the bubbling froth of puberty [that] rose like hot breath beclouding and darkening my heart.”
And so Augustine, who won the contemporary theological battle to write Christianity into the Empire’s rules, took early Christian celibacy just a bit further and redefined celibacy as normal and natural. No longer was celibacy just a rebellion against nature, a way to mock the social order, to insist that even the meek, the poor, the outsider, the eunuch still mattered in God’s eyes. Now sex—perhaps our signal “natural” impulse—was the unnatural act. That attitude made the question “What is marriage for?” a real stumper. How could sex be excused for us ordinary folk who could not, or would not, rise to the celibate perfection Augustine’s God demanded? Augustine and his followers came up with three justifications for marriage: proles (procreation); fides (fidelity, or avoiding fornication); and sacramentum (a permanent bond—unlike, say, Augustine’s seamy abandonment of his concubine). And they quite definitely put them in that order. “I do not see what other help woman would be to man if the purpose of generating was eliminated,” Augustine wrote: otherwise everyone could stay celibate, i.e., good. Was sex a sin if you didn’t actively intend babies while you did it? Some thought it was, but Augustine let a couple off the hook “if, although they do not have intercourse for the purpose of having children, they at least do not avoid it. . . . [Otherwise] I do not see how we can call this a marriage.”
That attitude was very generous, really, since Augustine still believed that even if you were married, sexual pleasure was a venial sin. But then, Augustine believed it was essential to make accommodations for us ordinary folk. To prevent us from falling into the mortal sin of unrestrained fornication was the purpose of fides—the idea that each spouse had an obligation to fulfill his or her sexual duties. “Paying the marital debt” meant a spouse had to say yes if her husband asked—otherwise hubby might be forced into adultery or masturbation. She shouldn’t worry if she didn’t enjoy herself—in fact, that made her a little bit better than he was. As St. Jerome, another church father, wrote in a phrase that echoed down the centuries: “An adulterer is he who is too ardent a lover of his wife.”
So for the early Catholic Church, that’s what marriage was for: to dutifully make babies and to avoid mortal sin. The monks and theologians offered a little jumpstart toward angelic life by helpfully ruling sex off-bounds just as often as they could—for instance, during menstruation, pregnancy, or nursing (which could be as long as two years), and on holy days—such as Thursdays, in memory of Jesus’s betrayal, Fridays, in memory of his death, Saturdays, in honor of the Virgin Mary, on Sundays, of course, on Mondays, in memory of the departed souls, as well as forty days before Easter, Pentecost, Christmas, on feasts, fasts, and even—imagine!—on the wedding night and the few days after, to train you for a lifetime of continence. One medieval Jewish commentator noted dryly that perhaps there would be an occasional Tuesday or Wednesday on which a baby might be made.
Did people really live by these rules? Hardly. As the early Church became a medieval power, those theologians were quite distant from a more practical Church administration. Throughout medieval and premodern Europe, plenty of people outside the monks’ aeries lustily enjoyed themselves. Much of medieval European peasant society took it for granted that courting young men and women would go walking all night, so long as the pair kept company only with each other—and so long as the couple married once she was pregnant, which is why roughly a third of brides were pregnant on their wedding day, and why most suits in ecclesiastical courts had to do with “pre-contracts”—one person insisting that the other, now trying to
marry another, had already implicitly married her in some midnight rendezvous. (If a girl changed her boyfriend too often, however, on May Day she might find some foul and smelly tree planted priapically in her front yard, a way for the village boys to jeer in judgment on her reputation.) As late as the fourteenth century, European newlyweds might be put to bed with bawdy encouragement by a crowd that burst back in next morning to find out how it had gone—hardly a ritual carried out by people who believed in sexual restraint. The Church licensed prostitutes’ guilds and collected regular dispensation fees for their trade, assuming prostitution to be the only way to stop male lust from overwhelming honorable mothers. Priests took concubines so often that by the late Middle Ages there was actually a Church fee schedule for priests’ concubines and bastards. Among the Swiss, dispensation prices were one and one-half to two gulden per year per concubine, so long as the priest stayed with the same woman: an additional absolution fee was due if the priest started a new relationship; one gulden was required to legitimate each child.
And so perhaps more realistic than the monks’ restraining orders was the Church’s absolute ban on contraception. Augustine and all his followers had seen clearly his argument’s logical consequence: if procreation was the only way marriage could be justified, then contraception was a terrible sin. If you used anything to block conception, Augustine wrote, “I dare to say that either the wife is in a fashion the harlot of her husband or he is an adulterer with his own wife.” Or to put it more clearly, any attempt to prevent pregnancy “makes the bridal chamber a brothel.”
Can this have mattered to people who lived before the Pill? Indeed it did. Human beings have been trying to snip the link between sex and babies through all of recorded history. For instance, the Egyptian Petrie Papyrus of 1850 b.c. contains three prescriptions for vaginal pessaries, including various substances that would coagulate over the cervix and block sperm. The Greeks and Romans prescribed an endless variety of contraceptive drinks that included such slightly poisonous ingredients as copper (in liquid form), willow leaves, barrenwort, rue, fern root, aloe, ginger, and poplar root; they also used pessaries, spermicides, coitus interruptus, anal intercourse, and, harsh as it seems to us, infanticide. For the Jews—for whom procreation was one of marriage’s two key goals—contraception was a complicated concept, requiring some serious theological attention. So long as the couple weren’t trying to keep themselves from ever having children, contraception to protect either spouse’s pleasure or health was perfectly fine; the rabbis therefore prescribed “the cup of roots,” a drink of Alexandrian gum, liquid alum, and garden crocus, as well as coitus interruptus, pessaries, and vaginal sponges.
Effectiveness was another question entirely. Amulets and prayers were often prescribed alongside these other methods, which suggests that contraception often led to rue—the emotion as well as the abortifacient herb.
What the long history of contraception—as well as the call to celibacy—suggests is that if humans do have a “nature,” it may well lie in the desire to master the consequences of our sexual lives. Those different approaches aren’t necessarily opposed—unless the one side believes the other to be positively sinful, a rebellion against God. Precisely that happened with early Christianity, which turned the refraining ideal into a critical battle line in the marriage wars with an idea that still rocks political conversation today: is sex evil unless it leads to babies?
Medieval theologians thought the answer obvious. And so they started more than a millennium of outcries against the “vice against nature”: any attempt to block offspring. Most of us, today, think of the “crime against nature” as any sex between two men or two women, or maybe as the act of a man who forces himself into a woman’s anus. But only recently has the “crime against nature” dwindled to something so minimal. For most of theological history, the monks meant any nonbegetting sex. The ninth-century theologian St. Bernardine of Siena wrote, “It is better for a wife to permit herself to copulate with her own father in a natural way than with her husband against nature” and “It is bad for a man to have intercourse with his own mother, but it is much worse for him to have intercourse with his wife against nature.” Oedipus, stop agonizing: at least you didn’t wear a condom!
And yet, however horrifying he thought it was to have sex while avoiding conception, Bernardine believed everyone was committing this sin: “Of 1000 marriages, I believe 999 are the devil’s.” Other theologians believed that the “crime against nature” included any kind of “conjugal onanism,” such as withdrawal, oral or anal intercourse, or even any variation from “the fit way instituted by nature as to position”—woman on her back, man on top, which according to contemporary medicine was the best way to make babies. At certain points in Catholic theological history, these “sins against nature” were considered homicide, since they killed potential children: priests couldn’t give penance and absolution but had to refer such sinners to the bishop. One theologian wrote, “May a person copulate and prevent the fruits of the marriage? I say that this is often a sin which deserves the fire.”
Refraining, 2: The Protestants Rebel Against Celibacy
By the time Martin Luther nailed his ninety-five theses to the Wittenberg Church door on October 31, 1517—hammer blows whose echoes were violent religious battles across Europe for the next several hundred years—a vast number of people saw the Refraining ideal as rotten and hollow. According to one Franciscan who became a Protestant pamphleteer, the Refraining ideal was this fictional priest’s chief lament: “Thus am I entangled: on the one hand, I cannot live without a wife; on the other, I am not permitted a wife. Hence I am forced to live a publicly disgraceful life, to the shame of my soul and honor . . . How shall I preach about chasteness and against promiscuity, adultery, and knavish behavior, when my own whore goes to church and about the streets and my own bastards sit before my eyes?” The celibacy ideal wasn’t the only marriage problem. Out of the Church’s high-minded beliefs about sexual union had grown—as one would expect from any large bureaucracy—a vast and tangled thicket of sometimes contradictory marriage rules, rules to be examined elsewhere in this book. Those marriage rules led to endless ecclesiastical court litigation and expensive dispensations, the scandal and frustration of Europe. One 1875 Protestant reformer believed, “What more natural than when a set of greedy priests found that people were ready to pay a price to be allowed to marry, they should have made marriage yet more difficult, that they should increase the number of meshes in their net, and with it the amount of their revenues?”
Given such a messy state of affairs (and marriages), when Luther decried the Church’s sexual hypocrisy, he could preach in outrageous language:
Pope Gregory wanted celibacy established . . . by chance he wanted to have some fishing done in a pond he had in Rome, and in it more than 6,000 heads of infants were found [presumably monks’ drowned bastards]. . . . A similar example happened in our time. The nuns in the Austrian village of Closeter Neumberg were compelled to move to another place because of their disgraceful life . . . twelve jars were discovered in the new cellars. Each jar contained the corpse of an infant. . . . I pass over in silence countless other facts which my mind shrinks from relating.
Of course these are nonsense charges, equivalent to the medieval cry that Jews killed Christian babies for their Passover feast—or, to use similarly ludicrous charges from contemporary anti-gay pamphlets, that most gay men eat feces and prey on young boys, or that lesbians die by age forty-five. Luther could get away with such exaggerations because everyone knew some local sexual irregularity (or, to be contemporary again, because anyone can see on TV some scantily leather-clad man gyrating drunkenly on an urban Pride float)—and so listeners could imagine that, far away, things could be much, much worse.
In other words, the crusading Protestants were outraged that the Refraining ideal had led to rampant sexual irregularities. And so, like any group burning for idealistic reform—like, in other words, the early Christian cel
ibates before them—they wanted one correct rule, to be followed by every correct believer. This time, the rule wasn’t celibacy but marriage. The Protestants wanted everyone to marry, in exactly the right way—and they were practically ready to post a shoot-on-sight border patrol to ensure that no one strayed. The Protestants wanted no more impediments, annulments, exemptions, dispensations, concubines, bastards, adulterers, secret promises made in the heat of lust and forever enforced. From now on you were in or out, licit or il-, married or un.
The Protestant campaign to sweep everyone firmly into marriage was a Through-the-Looking-Glass mirror of the early Christians’ enthusiastic civil disobedience action against marriage. Now priests, monks, and nuns were urged to come out of their sinful solitude (or sodomy) and marry. Luther shuddered at the fact that most Europeans then didn’t marry until their late twenties—too much time to fornicate!—and urged that girls be married off promptly at fifteen and boys at eighteen.
But for this campaign against Refraining to succeed, the ideal had to be replaced with a new and improved ideal: Holy matrimony. Protestant sermons repeated the phrase constantly. Holy matrimony! What a shocking oxymoron to contemporary Catholic ears! Holy motherhood, sure—but matrimony, the least of the sacraments, had been just a repository for your concupiscence, a reluctant defense against hell. What in the world could make marriage holy, not just a slightly dirty but necessary runner-up to celibacy?
The answer lay back in Augustine’s three justifications for marriage: proles, fides, and sacramentum. The Protestants insisted that marriage was a secular ceremony, and not (as the Catholics had finally decided in 1215) a mystical and irreversible sacrament. Sacramentum, in the early Protestant reformers’ theologies, meant something much more daily, more human, more—if you’ll excuse me—bourgeois. Marriage’s purpose, wrote England’s Archbishop Cranmer in his 1549 Prayer Book, was “mutual society, help and comfort, that the one ought to have of the other, both in prosperity and in adversity.” In this view, human companionship was the sacrament. Marriage was holy not merely because it made legitimate babies and kept you from fornicating, but because being good to each other (that profound daily challenge that many of us know well) was pleasing to God.