by Diarmaid MacCulloch, Emeritus Professor of the History of the Church in the University of Oxford; his book Sex and the Church: a History, is scheduled for publication in Autumn 2024
Picture credit: Barry Jones
Western society’s acceptance of homosexuality as one accepted variant in social relationships has been a breathtakingly fast process in comparison with most societal changes: it has been contained within my still not excessively venerable lifetime. Not surprisingly, the transformation has left some folk behind, for a variety of reasons, particularly those Christians for whom it disturbs particular views of biblical or ecclesiastical authority. It is easy for those who have got beyond such preoccupations to mock or belittle them, without realising the unexpressed depths of such negative feelings. Often that is because we (and they) do not know enough about the Christian past and what it contains. Here is one little story about the history of the Christian West and its homophobia.
‘Homosexuality’ is a very recently-coined word, the invention of a mid-nineteenth German/Hungarian journalist Károly Mária Kertbeny to describe what he regarded as a medically-defined behavioural disorder (another such disorder he named ‘heterosexuality’). While Kertbeny’s science now looks, well, mid-nineteenth century, his coinages have persisted to our own time when other nineteenth-century attempted word-inventions have fallen by the wayside; they have become central to some of the most bitterly-fought disputes in Christian Churches.
Previously, the main Western Latin word for a variety of unusual sexual activities, some of which were between people of the same sex, was ‘sodomy’, a medieval coinage with an Old Testament reference. The word sodomia was popularised in the eleventh century by the reforming monk Peter Damian in his polemic ‘Book of Gomorrah’ (Liber Gomorrhianus). It was an inescapably negative theological term, on the analogy of the older Latin word blasphemia; thus Peter paired ‘sodomy’ with the sin of denying God, in the process ‘thinning and condensing’ the wrongdoing of the ill-fated biblical city of Sodom from malpractices that were originally much more various.
Ivo Bishop of Chartres, Damian’s contemporary and the major influence on Western Christian canon law in his time, evolved the concept of ‘sins against nature’, in which same-sex acts were ‘always unlawful and beyond doubt more shameful than to sin by a natural use in fornication and adultery’; at least fornication and adultery were not active obstacles to the continuation of the species. All this marched in step with the developing Western Christian doctrine that marriage must necessarily involve the potential for reproductive sex. Any obstacle to reproduction was ‘against nature’, so the same acts committed between men and women, or solo masturbation, fell into the same category of sodomy.
Most bizarre and extra-biblical of Western Christian claims about ‘sodomy’ was that the baby Jesus killed all sodomites, simply by being born in Bethlehem; he would not come into a world where there were people doing things ‘against nature’. This story is to be found in a couple of standard texts read or heard by the devout throughout the medieval West, and medieval England in particular. First was the thirteenth-century Latin anthology of saints’ lives by Archbishop Jacobus de Voragine known as The Golden Legend. Second was the Festial, a fourteenth-century compilation of vernacular sermons for English parish priests to use throughout the liturgical year, by an Augustinian Canon John Mirk, who drew much of his material from de Voragine. They cited authorities from the Early Church for their malevolent fable – Jerome and Augustine of Hippo – which is good evidence that it started life in learned and clerical circles before moving out to instruct the wider public.
Distorting a remark in a sermon attributed to Augustine of Hippo, de Voragine and those echoing him claimed that at the birth of Christ all the ‘sodomites’ in the world had suddenly died, as committing ‘sins against kind’ [nature]. Christ delayed entering the world till they had all gone. Yet evidently this mass Christmas extinction proved not to be permanent, needing continuing vigilance from all right-thinking people. As I have explored the history of sex, gender and the family over two millennia of Christian history, I have noticed how casually medieval Westerners would allude to the Christmas sodomite massacre in writing about other spiritual matters. Moreover, the story has not been forgotten. The more unpleasant corners of the Internet persist in gleefully reminding the right-thinking of medieval Christ’s view of sodomy by repeating the tale, though anachronistically relating it to that nineteenth-century word ‘homosexuals’. I will not dignify such Internet sites by naming them, but if you want to try it for yourself, have a go at Googling ‘Christmas all sodomites died’.
This is what modern Christians are up against as we struggle to come to a balanced view of how to deal with developments in sexuality over the last three hundred years: a background of fear and hatred based on clerical paranoia in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. We can do better than that, surely? Or we may have to order a new set of Christmas card designs.
Further reading: M.D. Jordan, The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology (Chicago, 1997), from whom comes that useful phrase ‘thinning and condensing’. For the original texts: R.W. Granger (ed. and tr.), Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend: readings on the saints (Princeton NJ, 2012), legend no. 6. The Birth of our Lord Jesus Christ), citing Jerome as well as Augustine; S. Powell (ed.), John Mirk’s Festial (Early English Text Society 334-35, 2009, 2011), sermon no. 6, Nativity of Christ, citing Augustine.
Any thoughts?