On Fri, 20 Feb 2004 15:41:04 +0900, "Eileen Lakes" Our Creators
prohibit the same sexes' marriage!
He said to them, “All cannot accept this saying, but only those to
whom truth has been given: “For there are eunuchs who were born thus
from their mother’s womb, and there are eunuchs who were made eunuchs
by men, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the
kingdom of heaven’s sake. He who is able to accept the truth, let him
accept it.”
56:
4 For thus saith the LORD unto the eunuchs that keep my sabbaths, and
choose the things that please me, and take hold of my covenant;
5 Even unto them will I give in mine house and within my walls a place
and a name better than of sons and of daughters: I will give them an
everlasting name, that shall not be cut off.
[WE call them homosexuals.]
The Historic Origins of Church Condemnation of Homosexuality
versione italiana
On May 14, 390, an imperial decree was posted at the Roman hall of
Minerva, a gathering place for actors, writers and artists, which
criminalized for the first time the sexual practice of those whom we
call "homosexual" men -- this had never happened before in the history
of law. The prescribed penalty was death by burning. This law was
promulgated by an emperor who at the time was under a penance set by
St. Ambrose, the bishop of Milan, and the law was issued in the
context of a persecution of heresies. Homosexual men at the imperial
court had been powerful opponents of Catholic doctrine during the
fourth-century conflicts over the nature of Jesus Christ, known as the
Arian controversies.
Prior to 390, both religious and secular laws had targeted only
one particular form of homosexuality: when a man or youth who
otherwise exhibited a virile attraction toward women nonetheless
agreed to or was forced to play a female role in intercourse with
other men. For example, Biblical laws against homosexual acts call it
an abomination and prescribe death as a punishment when "a man lies
with a male the way one lies with a woman." Meanwhile, only
heterosexually-oriented men (including bisexual men) would properly be
called "male," since potency with women was the primary proof of
masculinity. Augustus Caesar's law against adultery likewise
prohibited intercourse with "males," and may well have provided the
impetus for a widely-attested wave of castrations in the early
empire -- in order to supply sex partners who were not "male." As
late as 342, Constantius II issued a decree imposing an "exquisite
punishment" for the crime which occurs "when a male marries an
effeminate [femina, literally 'a woman'] and what he wants is for the
effeminate to play the male role in sex [literally 'project the male
parts']," thus for himself to play the female role.
Men lacking desire for or potency with women, like today's
homosexual men, were never intended by these laws -- they would not
have been deemed, on the whole, to be male. Maleness implied playing
the role of penetrator and procreator. Those who did not, failed to
meet the ancient criteria for being called male. One could say that
the very concept of masculinity or virility was defined throughout the
ancient Mediterranean, not in contrast to women, but to homosexual
men. Innumerable loci can be adduced to show that exclusively
homosexual men were called non-male, half-male, neither male nor
female, androgynous, or third sex -- but never male.
It is a very little-known fact that there was a category of men in
the ancient Mediterranean who were called "natural" or
"constitutional" eunuchs. It is even less known that these eunuchs
are defined in early third-century Roman laws as having no physical
defects -- at most they had a peculiar mental orientation. They
were evidently what we call "born homosexuals." In the laws, they are
differentiated from castrated men and others, who do have physical
defects. Natural eunuchs were entitled to marry women, adopt, and
bequeath property, since "there is no bodily defect present as an
impediment to that." Nonetheless, Juvenal had found that "when a
eunuch marries a woman, it is hard not to write satire."
From early Babylon down to the late Roman empire, eunuchs had
played two major roles in ancient society -- as priests in pagan
temples, and as domestic servants in wealthy households and royal
palaces. Thus eunuchs had a tradition of spirituality, and of being
close to power. In the fourth century, this combination made them a
great help to bishops whom they supported, and a potent threat to
those whom they opposed. The eunuch Eusebius, the grand chamberlain of
the Byzantine palace under Constantine and then under his son
Constantius, was considered to wield virtually imperial power due to
his ability to control access to the emperor, especially during the
son's reign. Eusebius was an active proponent of the Arian doctrine,
which held that the Almighty God was not the Father of Jesus in a
procreative sense (notwithstanding the virgin birth), but rather that
God adopted Jesus as His Son through grace. In his History of the
Arians, St. Athanasius, a virulent advocate for Catholic doctrine,
recounted Eusebius's mission to Rome allegedly to bribe and threaten
the pope Liberius into accepting communion with Arian Christians.
Afterwards he summed up:
It was the eunuchs who instigated these proceedings against all
[i.e., pressure tactics against Nicene Christians in various cities].
And the most remarkable circumstance in the matter
is this; that the Arian heresy which denies the Son of God
receives its support from eunuchs, who, as both their bodies are
fruitless, and their souls barren of the seeds of virtue, cannot bear
even to hear the name of son...The eunuchs of Constantius cannot
endure the confession of Peter [Matthew 16:16], nay, they
turn away when the Father manifests the Son, and madly rage
against those who say that the Son of God is His genuine Son, thus
claiming as a heresy of eunuchs that there is no genuine and
true offspring of the Father.
Regardless of what homosexual Christians may feel today about Jesus's
status as God, it is clear that in the fourth century they were
identified as powerful enemies of Catholic doctrine. This is not the
place to examine the merits of official Church doctrine -- to discuss
whether Jesus was more or less like other human beings, or whether the
male role in a procreative act can properly be attributed to God.
Suffice it to say, the early supporters of the Nicene creed saw
homosexual men as dangerous rivals.
Now, in addition to being spiritual authorities and palace
servants, eunuchs had a traditional role as sexual passives. Because
they were not "male," this behavior was legal in both pagan and
Biblical law throughout all prior history. A sympathetic historian in
the time of Constantius noted that the emperor himself was sexually
devoted to his eunuchs, courtiers, and wives; while, "content with
these, he was never defiled by any transverse or unjust lust." It
was Constantius, a Christian, who issued the aforementioned decree
implicitly recognizing homosexual marriage (as long as it did not
involve a "male" partner in a passive role). Remember that this decree
was issued in a period when palace eunuchs were powerful and
influential in the imperial court.
The gender of eunuchs, until the fourth century, was typically
described as it is in Lucian's dialogue The Eunuch: "neither man nor
woman, but something composite, hybrid, and monstrous, alien to human
nature." Or as in Aristotle's assertion that eunuchs "fall but
little short of the idea of the female." Or in Pliny's
categorization of eunuchs, alongside hermaphrodites and castrati, as a
third gender. However, by the early fourth century the first signs
appear of an expansion of the definition of masculinity to include
eunuchs. To Firmicus Maternus, an astrologer and Christian convert,
eunuchs are "males without seed and who cannot copulate, obscene,
disreputable, filthy, lewd passives"-- the point being that he
calls them males, something writers in prior centuries had never done.
At the same time, we notice the definition of eunuch is beginning
to shrink. In the early third century, Clement of Alexandria had
defined the eunuch as one not unable, but unwilling to have sex.
Basilides (quoted by Clement) had defined the born eunuchs of Matthew
19:12 as persons who "from their birth have a nature to turn away from
women, and those who are naturally so constituted do well not to
marry. Now, in the fourth century Epiphanius of Salamis claims
the born eunuchs are incapable of doing anything sexual "because they
lack the divinely created organs of generation." And they get no
credit or heavenly reward for their abstention from sex, for "they
have not done the thing not because they didn't want to but because
they couldn't" and therefore "they have no experience of the struggle"
(committing the sin is a physical impossibility for them).
Nonetheless, "they have felt desires." This is a flat reversal of
Clement's and Basilides's statements.
This reduction of eunuch status to a physical defect is but one
churchman's tactic (eventually superseding all others) within a
general fourth-century ecclesiastical strategy to deprive physically
whole, natural eunuchs, i.e. homosexual men, of their religious
credibility. Gregory Nazianzen adopted a different rhetorical means
towards the same end. In his case, he admitted that natural eunuchs
lacked desire to procreate, but, like Epiphanius, Gregory too denied
them credit for their abstinence because it was natural for them and
had not resulted from a fierce internal struggle. Rather than abstain
from procreation, Gregory instead called on Christian natural eunuchs
to avoid prostituting themselves and thus dishonoring Christ.
So it is against the backdrop of a concerted effort by Nicene
proponents to debase their powerful enemies that we must assess the
outlawing of the sexual life of homosexuals. In 389, one year before
the anti-homosexual decree mentioned at the start, the emperor had
taken away the right of heretical neo-Arian eunuchs to make or benefit
from wills. This exemplifies the targeting of eunuchs through
imperial laws as a way of combatting heresy. Early the next year,
having committed an atrocity against the residents of Thessalonica,
the emperor Theodosius was excommunicated by St. Ambrose. His august
majesty came crawling to the bishop, theoretically an imperial
subject, and begged for forgiveness and reinstatement. The bishop
relented and promised reinstatement after the emperor had completed a
penance, which lasted eight months. It happened to be during the first
month of this penance that the law against sex acts by homosexuals was
promulgated. Initially unsuccessful due to the unexpectedly high
number of violators, the decree was reissued in August at Trajan's
Forum as follows:
All those whose shameful habit it is to condemn the male body to
suffer an alien sex in the manner of women, for they appear to be
in no way different from women, shall expiate a crime of this kind
in avenging flames in the sight of the people.
The old crime of passive male homosexuality was thus expanded to
include passive "non-male" homosexuality by the focus on the "male
body" [virile corpus]. The universality of the law is reinforced by
the word omnes ["all those"]. Heretofore, those known in law as
natural eunuchs were not considered "male," but they certainly had
male bodies. Prior Roman law had already established that, with
natural eunuchs, "there is no bodily defect" [corporale vitium non
est]. Finally, the emphasis on the effeminacy of the perpetrators
makes clear that this law is specifically targeted at those "non-male"
types -- i.e. natural eunuchs -- who had been exempt from all prior
laws against homosexuality.
Having once established power over imperial legislation regarding
religion, Catholic authorities never looked back. With the outlawing
of heresies, enforced by imperial power, no one was in a position to
contradict the established doctrine of the Church. If the Church
decided that Jesus meant only persons suffering from anatomical birth
defects in Matthew 19:12, who would have been in a position to object?
If the now imperial Church found that a homosexual engaging in his own
natural sexuality was guilty of the sin of Sodom, who would stand up
to argue?
Rather, the Church continued to use the oppression of homosexuals
(of whom, like Jesus's living water, there is an unending supply) as a
tool to consolidate power. When Justinian enacted the next laws
against homosexuality, in 538 and 544, he returned to
characterizing the crime as a corruption of "males" (as opposed to
male bodies), but since the term male was beginning to be applied to
homosexuals already in the fourth century -- a trend that the Church
supported since it preferred to define maleness based on anatomical
organs rather than procreative libido -- it can be assumed that the
New Constitutions 77 and 141 against homosexuality were meant to
include all those with a male body as well. In case the real target of
the laws was unclear to anyone, No. 77 also castigated blasphemy.
Perhaps 150 years had not been enough time to silence eunuch
theologians who insisted on Christ's full humanity -- and even
labelled Him a fellow eunuch? What is interesting and new about
No. 141 is its insistence that those who were guilty must "not only
refrain from sinning," but "confess their faults in the presence of
the Most Blessed Patriarch," thereby averting punishment but ruining
their reputations and putting an end to any hope of an ecclesiastical
career.
The seventh century Visigothic Code ultimately solved the
ambiguity around natural eunuchs by ordering the castration of every
man guilty of a homosexual act -- which certainly gives the
Spanish obsession with cojones a whole new dimension. The closet was
thus constructed, and with it a new definition of masculinity as
well -- based not on the fulfillment of the procreative role, but
rather on the preservation of bodily integrity. A male was now
identified merely by an intact penis and testicles. ***
Many of those who call themselves Christian claim to believe in a
"literal" interpretation of the Bible. Yet, less than 1 percent of
adults and teen-agers in "conservative Bible-believing churches could
name the Ten Commandments." What is even more troubling, other surveys
show less than 10% of evangelicals have read the Bible at all. How the
heck can someone who has never read the Bible claim to a be "Biblical
literalist?"
Today something is terribly wrong in much of the Christian Community.
The poor are held in contempt, rivers of hate and venom flow from the
pulpit while reactionary politics have taken the place of Scripture.
Whole volumes are devoted to attacking science (biology, physics,
geology) while the mention of Jesus is rarely heard above the racket.
Most people may not know it, but the Protestant version of the
Christian religion is split over more things than just how to read the
Bible.
The literal in errancy of the Scriptures" does not mean literal "word
for word" but that the Bible must be taken as a clue and thus one must
"pick and choose" what is or not true and ignore the rest. To claim
otherwise is asinine.
Christ say in all things we must seperate the wheat from the
chaff, The lies from the truth. No where is that more important than
in a bible.
.
In the mind of Christ,
Michael
**
A preacher is the blind
leading the blind...
The Last Church
http://www.thelastchurch.org
michael@thelastchurch.org
alt.religion.thelastchurch
alt.religion.the-last-church