Recapitulation

From Hammurabi to Augustus, diverse sexual beliefs and practices abounded in ancient Mediterranean societies. Roman moralists and lawgivers adopted some of the sex lore of earlier societies into their own system, at the same time as they rejected other sexual attitudes as incompatible with their way of life.

Christianity brought still further diversity into Mediterranean ideas about the role of sex in human life, as the Church attempted to integrate the mental habits and practices of late ancient culture into its heritage of biblical revelation and Jewish law. As the western half of the Roman Empire crumbled, Latin Christians needed to rethink their sexual theories once again to take account of the customs and practices of Germanic, Celtic, and Oriental peoples. Thus be­gan the long, laborious process through which medieval men and women gradu­ally created the sexual ethos that has become central to the traditional value systems of Western societies.

Long before the time of Jesus, philosophers and rulers had learned to be wary of sex. This fiery passion must be controlled lest it disrupt settled house­hold and property arrangements and undermine the social harmony of commu­nities. Pre-Christian societies had also glimpsed the fundamental connections of sex with life, with heaven, and with the gods. From primitive fertility cults and temple prostitution to the world-weary disenchantment of the Epicureans, the ancient world alternately yearned for carnal ecstasy and foreswore it with cold disdain.

Jcsus of Nazarcth said little about sex. His Roman and Jewish contempo­raries discussed sexual ethics in some detail, but Jesus provided little explicit guidance on sexual conduct. His followers soon incorporated into the new reli­gion elements drawn from Jewish law and practice, but early Christians lacked any uniquely characteristic approach to sexual conduct.

Philosophical speculations of late antiquity largely shaped the views of the Christian Fathers on sexual issues. Abstinence and adherence to the aims of nature became basic tenets of Christian sexual teaching. No sex at all should be the highest Christian ideal, the Fathers taught, although grimly joyless and re­sponsible copulation was acceptable for those determined to marry and breed children or tormented by carnal temptation. The Fathers adopted much of this from the late Stoics. Nature and the natural became the norms that governed marital sex, which was held to be authorized primarily for the conception and nurturing of offspring and secondarily for the avoidance of fornication. The Fa­thers frowned upon delight in fleshly pleasure. They praised virginity as meri­torious and splendid, and cherished chastity as the preeminent Christian virtue.

Political events during the late fourth and fifth centuries disrupted the Church’s application of its newly fashioned sexual doctrine. Germanic successor­states made a shambles of the Christian Empire’s administrative routines. The Church’s organizational unity crumbled with the empire that had fostered it, while regional authorities supplanted the older organs of ecclesiastical govern­ment, as a rural and Germanic West grew increasingly estranged from an urban, imperial, and still Roman East. These new circumstances seriously limited the ability of Church authorities to discipline Christians who flouted ecclesiastical norms of any kind, including sexual norms. Yet despite the provincialism of the early Middle Ages, the main lines of the older sexual doctrine remained intact.

But early medieval Church authorities had a limited capacity to regulate the behavior of the laity. Germanic kings and their followers were accustomed to marrying early and often. Polygyny was common among wealthy men, who sometimes kept flocks of concubines as well as a number of official wives. The new spiritual leaders of recently baptized Germans and Celts found it difficult to persuade the laity to alter their matrimonial habits.

Changes in society and economy following the invasions, however, soon transformed the traditional household structure of antiquity into something new. The disappearance of large-scale slavery and the emergence of peasant ag­riculture led to the appearance of the monogamous nuclear family as a basic social unit in the early middle ages. One consequence of the new social struc­ture founded on the family unit was the gradual adoption of Christian ideals of sexual conduct among rich and poor alike. By the mid-eighth century the new type of family household and sexual morality was becoming well established in most parts of Western Christendom.

Europe entered upon a new phase of economic, political, and social develop­ment shortly after A.D. 1000. The Church also achieved new levels of spiritual and intellectual leadership early in the new millennium. The Gregorian re­formers not only demanded that priests and prelates foreswear marriage and concubinage, but also required observance of stricter standards of sexual con­duct from the Christian laity as well. Leaders of the reform movement were aware that in order to impose these standards on an unwilling world they would need to use sturdier tools than their predecessors had possessed. They found what they needed in canon law.

Canon law was transformed into an effective instrument for Church govern­ment and discipline during the twelfth century.

The Decretum also furnished law teachers with a basic textbook that allowed them to explain canon law systematically to ever increasing numbers of law stu­dents who began filling the law faculties of Europe’s new universities. By the end of the twelfth century the teaching and study of canon law became a growth industry. Law professors spun out treatises and commentaries that became something akin to best-sellers, while clever young men with their eyes on the main chance guessed that one reliable road to high office, power, and con­siderable emoluments began in university law faculties. The clever young men guessed right. At the same time the pace of legislation quickened rapidly. Popes, councils, and synods poured out a seemingly endless stream of new rul­ings and regulations, which the law faculties soon incorporated into their cur­ricula, thus lengthening the course of studies and creating still greater need for professionally trained canonists to cope with it all.

Sex, both within marriage and outside of it, was a prominent concern of the new law and the new lawyers. Marriage law grew rapidly in volume and com­plexity. Law teachers soon incorporated into their commentaries on marriage law insights gleaned from the revived Roman jurisprudence that the civilians were studying. Meanwhile popes, notably Alexander III, sought to refashion the institution of matrimony in ways calculated to diminish the power of par­ents to control the marriages of their children and to permit individuals to choose their own spouses.

The thirteenth and fourteenth centuries witnessed the expansion and con­solidation of canonical marriage law. During the same period canon law became increasingly concerned with other aspects of sexual behavior. Nonmarital sex became a problem of growing interest to the Church’s lawyers, as did the law of evidence and procedures in sex cases.

After 1350, however, competition from secular governments began to erode the Church’s monopoly on sex law. Royal and municipal courts successfully as­serted jurisdiction over rape, prostitution, incest, adultery, fornication, and sexual deviance. Some secular judges even tried to bring marriage and divorce cases before their courts.

The Protcstant Reformation and Catholic reactions to it resulted in a critical reexamination of medieval sex doctrines during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. For a time, Protestant reformers hovered on the brink of a radical transformation of sexual mores. They downplayed the spiritual value of vir­ginity and denied the necessity of sacerdotal celibacy, while they also rejected sacramental status of matrimony. Catholics struck back by reaffirming that mar­riage was a sacrament, but at the same time totally revamped their own mar­riage law and in the process redefined what constituted marriage.

By the end of the seventeenth century, however, Protestant Puritans and Catholic Jansenists had resurrected some of the most Draconian provisions of medieval sex law and enshrined them in statutes and casuistic manuals, where many lingered until the second half of the twentieth century. The Reformation and its aftermath did not result in abandonment of the views about sex that had become traditional in the medieval Church. Instead medieval sexual morality became the paradigm for modern Western assumptions about human sexuality that remain by and large intact.