3,000 years of marriage history: not!

Are you tired of the pro-H8 people telling us that we are daring to challenge 2000 or 3000 years of tradition? Me too. So I was delighted to find this Letter on Marriage with a History of Marriage written during the Massachusetts marriage debate by Stephen Schloesser, Professor of History Boston College (and a Jesuit priest), to a politician. It's worth reading the whole thing, especially the details about Catholicism. But here are a few highlights:

Maybe the most frustrating thing I have heard in the recent debate is this claim that has become a mantra: that we are in the processing of changing some allegedly unchanging 3,000-year-old institution called "marriage." Of course, the decision to grant marriage licenses would be a "change" in marriage practice‹ but "marriage," whatever that is, is always in the process of being changed. To pretend that its alteration is somehow a rupture in what is otherwise a three-thousand year continuity is just silly.

It seems helpful to me to recall what traditional marriage is: it is a community's legal arrangement in order to pass on property. In it, a male acquires (in the sense of owning and having sovereignty over) a female for the sake of reproducing other males who will then inherit property.

Not surprisingly, there has been a long tradition of thinking about slavery and marriage as companion institutions....

In any case, the idea of marriage as "one man and one woman" is a true rupture and innovation in the tradition. The tradition in nearly every major ancient culture --at least, for those players who had power and thus for those whose marriages we have written records of -- has been polygyny: one male who owns several (or many) females.....

For the New Testament /Christian period....I do think there are very valuable things worth noting. The first is that early Christianity was really not into marriage, and it takes quite a leap of the imagination to spin biblical Christianity as somehow being the party of "family values." St. Paul thought the world was ending the day after tomorrow; understandably, since there were perhaps only weeks, days, hours or minutes to live, he counseled his followers: "It is better not to marry." ...

....When Christianity was transformed overnight from being an outlaw sect to being the Empire's religion, several shifts took place: one was that Christians went from being anti-imperialist pacifists to serving as infantrymen and officers in the Christian Emperor's military; another was St. Augustine's many ways of transforming Christianity into a religion that no longer looked for the rapture but had rather faced the fact that they were in the world for the long haul.

... In general, during the early medieval Church, all sex is a problem, and all sex is equally a problem. In the sixth-century penitentials, the penalties imposed on monks for having sex with a man and a woman are equal: three years of penitential activities...

Marriage, both in the Roman and the early medieval periods, was the moment that marked the passing of the rights over a woman from her father to her jusband; not just rights over her property, but her mund (protection / brideprice), that is, both the obligations to protect her and, if something bad happened, rights to any fines that accrued from her death or injury. In other words, she wasn't a person under the law: instead, she was first her father in law, and then her husband. Thus, when a man and a woman committed adultery, the woman was executed (for committing a sin) and the man paid a fine to the husband for violating his property rights.. ...

In the twelfth century, the idea of marriage as a "sacrament"--i.e., as something fundamentally regulated by the Church--was established along with priestly celibacy and primogeniture. The simultaneous appearance of these practices shows the way in which the preservation of property suddenly became an issue of great anxiety: celibacy prevented church property from passing on to priests' wives and children; primogeniture insured that property remain intact as it passed on to only the eldest son; and Church surveillance of marriages made sure that an authority larger than, say, the most powerful warrior / aristocratic families on the block, was overseeing the passing on of dowries...

Marriage as an "emotional unit" as opposed to an "economic unit" was largely an invention of the early nineteenth century ... for the males, prostitution is seen as an integral part of the new arrangement of marriage. .... Since the end-game must be the safe transfer of bourgeois property on to a new generation, the state takes over the task of regulation....Divorce, finally legalized again in France in the 1880s, emancipated men but perhaps not women unless they had reserved some independent means...

It is hardly coincidental: this is also the period during which the idea of "homosexuality"‹ and then, later, "heterosexuality"‹ was invented. It is also the moment in which bestiality appears to decline. ....

In fact, it seems more correct to say that the idea of a "civil marriage"--between anyone whomsoever‹was the genuine modern innovation in marriage practice, and that its transformation from a Christian sacrament (or at least a church ceremony, since many Protestants recognize only Baptism and Eucharist as "sacraments") to a civil union has been incomplete, messy, and perhaps incoherent....

In short: this mantra of "3,000 years of unchanging history" can and ought to be summarily dismissed.

My own discussion of this was here.