So in the late 1970’s early 1980’s John Boswell, an
extraordinary academic in many ways, wrote about Adelphopoiesis Liturgies and
postulated the concept of Same Gender Marriages between gay men in the early
church. This and many other piercing questions to the history we take for
granted are found in his text Christianity, Social Tolerance, and
Homosexuality. This text is not a
revisionist history but consistently points out the exceptions that prove the
general consensus, that the past was 100% homophobic, to be quite wrong on many
accounts.
Recently, for reasons I am not quite aware, there has been a
series of memes on the internet about his research, specifically from his text Same-Sex
Unions in Premodern Europe. In this text
Boswell shows that certain individuals who took part in an Adelphopoiesis
Liturgies also had many other major markers, such as mutual gravestones and
cohabitation, which would mark them as a gay male couple. To consider these
specific couples to be known gay couples the church blessed using an available
liturgy is a plausible hypothesis. To call the Adelphopoiesis Liturgy a Same
Gender Marriage Liturgy, however, is not.
Let me throw out a hypothetical situation. In less then a
week one of my good friends is getting married, I am one of his groomsmen.
Mutual friends describe our relationship as an “epic bromance”. In the early
centuries of the church male Christians who found themselves in the midst of an
“epic bromance” would take part in an Adelphopoiesis Liturgy to name each other
brothers before the church and God. They would place their hands on the Gospel
Book, the priest would pray over them asking the Holy Spirit to give them the
gifts requisite to being true brothers to each other. They would also take on
all legal and cultural obligations that brothers have for each other.
Now let us say me and my soon to be married bro did this. We
would be brothers, but not husband and husband. The relationship recognized in
the rite is a spiritual one and has no mention or expectation of us physically
consummating our love in any way. It would be expected for me to be a witness,
just like a familial brother, at my bro’s wedding. What would happen there, by
the way, is his bride would come in covered in a veil, be blessed, and the
priest would witness the transaction from the bride’s father’s household to her
husband’s household. If something would happen to my spiritual brother I would
quite possibly take his wife into my household and might even be responsible
for producing his heir through the Greco-Roman form of leverite marriage.
Needless to say this is not what we are talking about any more when we use the
term “marriage” nor are the basic expectations of the Adelphopoiesis Liturgy
what are being sought by most same gender couples that I know about.
To return to Boswell:
“To insist, for instance, that in order to constitute
“marriages” homosexual unions of the past must emulate modern heterosexual marriage
is to defy history. No marriages in ancient societies closely match their
modern equivalents. Most were vastly more informal; some were more rigid. Most
cultures regard marriage as a private arrangement negotiated between two
families. No precise criteria could be specified as constituting a “legal”
marriage during most of the period of this study: two people who lived together
permanently and whose union were recognized by the community were “married”.
Even early Christian theology recognized the difficulties of deciding who was
and was not married; Augustine was willing to designate as a “wife” any woman
who intended to be permanently faithful to the man she lived with (De bono
conjugali 5.5)”[1]
I want to highlight two major points from this. First is
that no historical reality is going to viably represent modern day concepts of
marriage. Second that Boswell is looking through the historical record for gay
couples that were “two people who lived together permanently and whose union
were recognized by the community” and found that some probable candidates had
taken part in Adelphopoiesis liturgy as a way to be recognized
as family by the community. He did not find any evidence that Adelphopoiesis Liturgies regularly constituted anything equivalent to the marriages sought by modern same gender couples; he simply found that they were at some points used to constitute a community recognition between two men who show other markers of possibly being a long term committed same gender couple.
Having now possibly dashed the dreams of a
pure precedent for same gender marriage rites within the Christian tradition
let me close with a few of my hopes. First that the church will continue to
seek a theology of Marriage that speaks to a life long committed emotional,
physical, and spiritual relationship between two equal and mutual individuals.
Second that the church will invest its time in developing liturgies and
theologies around friendship and spiritual family that we had in the past but
now completely lack. My dashing of the idea of ancient same gender marriage
comes from the barrier this causes to the development of both goals.
[1] Boswell,
John. Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.
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