Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century by John Boswell (The University of Chicago Press, 1980, 424 pp.)
The Unmentionable Vice: Homosexuality in the Later Medieval Period by Michael Goodich (ABC-Clio, 1979, 164 pp.)
by Dr. Ralph Blair
While others have been repeating angry epithets of their own immediate subculture and setting up antigay lobbies, this Yale historian has been quietly at work for the past decade, patiently picking his way through nearly two millennia of church history to discover the heretofore undisclosed relationship of homosexuality and the Christian church. This masterpiece of scholarship is the most important of all Christian books on homosexuality. It is an embarrassment to intolerant Christians and a vindication for those who have not been seeking, with prideful pretension, to expel homosexuals from the Kingdom of God.
Out of his exhaustive research, Boswell writes: “Very few influential theologians based objections to homosexual practices on the New Testament passages now claimed to derogate such behavior, and those who did invoked them only as support for arguments based primarily on other authorities. It is, moreover, quite clear that nothing in the bible wourld have categorically precluded homosexual relations among early Christians. In spite of misleading English translations which may imply the contrary, the word ‘homosexual’ does not occur in the Bible: no extant text or manuscript, Hebrew, Greek, Syriac, or Aramaic, contains such a word. In fact, none of these languages ever contained a word corresponding to the English ‘homosexual’, nor did any language have such a term before the late nineteenth century. …it is doubtful … whether a concept of homosexual behavior as a class existed at all.” He points out: “Almost no early Christian writers appealed to Leviticus as authority against homosexual acts” and that even in the bible, the sin of the Sodomites is never understood as homosexuality. Among the early Christians, Boswell relates, the creation story “does not figure in any polemic on the subject and would have constituted an extremely weak argument if it had”. Most surprising of all is Boswell’s reporting that the clobber passages used today from I Corinthians 6 and I Timothy 1 were read as countering male prostitution and general moral weakness “well into the fourth century” and as against masturbation “at least from the time of Aquinas on” and that even antigay church leaders such as Tertullian, John Chrysostom, Augustine, and (as late as the 12th century) Peter the Cantor, searched the Scriptures to bolster their antigay case but none of them used the Corinthian and Timothy passages. Boswell indicates that with reference to Romans 1, even John Chrysostom allowed: “Only those possessing something can change it”, thereby admitting, as did Aquinas much later on, that there are some who “by nature” are involuntarily homosexual and, in Aquinas’ view, cannot be judged as if the homosexual were not their nature or character. The Romans 1 phrase, “against nature”, Boswell explains, should be rendered with the idea of the “unexpected, unusual” as Paul himself uses the same phrase again in the same letter to describe God’s unnatural behavior with the Gentiles (11:24).
Boswell outlines a 1,500 year relationship between church history and homosexuality. He reports that there was no biblical or early church hostility to gay people but that during the dissolution of the Roman state (3rd to 6th centuries), an increasing hostility developed with the disappearance of urban subcultures, growth in governmental regulation of personal lives, and a rise in the valuation of asceticism. In the early Middle Ages, gays were not very visible but with the revival of urban life by the 11th century there was a reappearance of an even celebrated gay subculture throughout church and state. The late 12th century saw a decline in the fortunes of gay people as the establishment, with xenophobic zeal, sought to get rid of minorities (e.g., Jews, usurers, Muslims, “witches”, and assorted heretics including the forerunners of the Protestant Reformation). Interestingly, Boswell found that, then as now, people were stirred up against unwanted others (e.g., Jews) by false-witness bearing about alleged physical dangers to Christian children (cf. Anita Bryant and Moral Majority crusades against gay rights). Boswell explains that these shifts were motivated by economic and political agenda, theological ideas contaminated by misconceptions about hares and hyenas, and a misogynistic revulsion to men allowing themselves to be used “as women”. It was not until 1179 that an ecumenical council (Lateran III) ruled on homosexual acts. Even by the 14th century, “usury incurred more severe penalties in church law than ‘sodomy’ did”, but it was not long before “theology, ethics, law, and even crusades were powerless against a practice which increasingly met the needs of the age”. Unfortunately for gay people, homosexuality did not meet such needs. So, homosexuality became something “worse” as money-lending with interest became something “better”.
Though some evangelicals may foolishly disregard as irrelevant the careful research Boswell has done with respect to “tradition”, they cannot be so cavalier when it comes to what he has done with the biblical material. Even so, evangelicals such as Thomas Howard, Peter Gillquist, Robert Webber and others have been urging us to return to our roots in the early church. Now, thanks to Boswell, we have guidance for doing just that so far as homosexuality is concerned. It now remains to be seen whether many evangelicals will go back to the Bible and to the beginning on this or whether we will continue to maintain an “us-them” mentality, ungraciously hiding behind the accumulated baggage of the later centuries.
Because Boswell has done such a thorough job, medievalist Michael Goodrich’s good work must take a second place. It is, however, a very good supplemental text and contains a fascinating appendix on the 1323 trial of Arnold of Verniolle.