Rants & Raves

I am currently reading a book (it’s taking forever, but I will finish it!) called The History of the Family Volume One – Distant Worlds, Ancient Worlds (Belknap-Harvard, 1996). It’s a translation of a collection of French anthropological/historical essays originally compiled in 1986. It’s difficult to read at best, and sometimes I have to read the same sentence over a few times to understand it. I’m not sure if that’s the translation, the anthropological terms they use, or a bit of both. I picked it up because of the medieval section, and having finally reached it, I’m having a little more fun. Not that the ancient stuff is boring, it’s just that I now have some historical background under my belt for this section.

The first essay on medieval families, “Barbarian Europe” by Pierre Guichard, is an interesting one, given the emphasis on what marriage should be in this day and age. The Roman Empire didn’t always place an emphasis on marriage or “conjugality” (two people sharing a life together without the legal standing of marriage - in other words, cohabitation.) In the first century BCE, marriage was a path to follow, but it wasn’t more or less important than any other path. It wasn’t until three or four hundred years later that couples began showing heavily in Roman art.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that marriage was important in some circles because estates and royal titles needed to be kept in the family and you needed a legal way to do this. Women weren’t allowed, for the most part, to inherit land, so they had to marry someone to get a piece of the pie. There was also the widespread practice of adoption, in which a man would take a boy or a young man into his family for inheritance purposes of one sort or another. The rules regarding adoption are vast and are for another story.

According to Guichard,

[T]he concept of the family often considered specific to Christianity – monogamous, indissoluble, consensual – on which the social reality of the modern restricted conjugal unit is easily assumed to be based, has some strictly Roman antecedents.

As Christianity was becoming a religion to reckon with, the Church decided that, since the institution of marriage was already established, and it seemed to keep people chaste, it wouldn’t tell people who were already married to dispose of this union, even though it wasn’t the ideal (which would have been celibacy - more on that later.) Again, Guichard:

Both palaeo-Christian iconography and the writings of the Doctors of the Church in the fourth to sixth centuries suggest that the Christian concept of marriage initially represented something of a retreat from the ‘pagan’ ideal of marriage in the early Empire.

Early Christian art “totally and permanently” did not show married couples. The only conjugal couple any of it showed was Adam and Eve, and that was to show original sin. Marriage was not an end, rather a means – apparently it kept people from bonking anything that moved. The Bible reflected this view on marriage. St. Paul, in his letter to the Corinthians, says that “It is good for a man not to marry,” (1 Corinthians 7:1, NIV translation) and “Now to the unmarried and the widows I say: It is good for them to stay unmarried, as I am. But if they cannot control themselves, they should marry, for it is better to marry than to burn with passion. (7:8-9)

So if you were married, you haven’t sinned, and you should stay that way, but if you weren’t married, don’t get into it, which is probably why Catholic priests aren’t allowed to marry. The ideal was to be celibate, and marriage was the lesser of two evils (chaste or the Whore of Babylon), which seems strange to me. If you didn’t procreate, and God didn’t “visit” all the virgins, wouldn’t Christianity necessarily die out? But even the idea of chastity wasn’t an entirely Christian idea – St. Jerome looked to Aristotle and Seneca to develop the idea of chastity in marriage, the Emperor Julian was staunchly chaste while wanting paganism to return. Ammianus Marcellinus, another pagan, associated chastity with “restrained asceticism.”

Now you can say that I looked at just what one chapter of one book of the Bible says, and you would be right. These were just the words of St. Paul, and I’m sure there are contradictions. I mean, how did “be celibate” become “have as many kids as possible”? But I digress. After expressing its views on marriage itself, the Church then sought to finalize the ideal of marriage. This ideal is best summed up by a second-century lawyer, Modestinus, who said that marriage is “the union of one man and one woman, a lifelong association in which divine and human law are combined.”

Jack Goody, a British historian who wrote The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe (Cambridge, 1983), believed that the Church tried to restrict marriage so that it could aquire more land and money, which seems to make sense. If you were a rich Christian man and didn’t marry, your estate would go to the Church when you died. If you were a widow and you remarried, the estate would go to your husband, not the Church. Apparently David Herlihy, a contemporary of Goody’s, disagreed, thinking that the Church restricted marriage because it didn’t want men having too many women. I’ve tried finding a quote for this statement or something to explain it further, but cannot find one. Goody also believed that

the model of the family that prevailed from the beginnings of Christianity, that of the ‘Holy Family’, derived from Jewish society as it was in the time of Christ, has no room for anything other than the restricted family, an ideal taken up by the Church Fathers both in their thinking on the family and in their conception of the relationships between Christ and the Church and between the ecclesiastical hierarchy and the faithful - Guichard’s quote, not Goody’s

Wait a minute, I bet you’re saying, did I just read something about Judaism? After all, Christianity grew out of Jewish laws and customs. Well, in a nutshell, and not to offend my Jewish readers by the brevity, Judaism loves marriage. How else are you going to have a family? I did find two sites giving some insight into the customs of Jewish marriage in general and the rules added by certain sects. The Bible has this to say: “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife.” (Genesis 2:24) This was after God made Eve from Adam’s rib (or part of the side, depending on the translation.) In fact, there are at least 15 references to people marrying others in Genesis alone. The Old Testament praised marriage, while the New Testament wanted marriage to just go away.

For further reading and this subject, Wikipedia has a page on the Jewish view of marriage. There is also the Soc.Culture.Jewish Newsgroup’s FAQ, which I found very illuminating. For a look at the Christian view of marriage, Wikipedia comes to the rescue again.