Between Christ and Caliph. Lev E. Weitz
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under the authority of ecclesiastical law.
MARRIAGE AND SEXUALITY IN THE LATE ANTIQUE IMAGINATION AND CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY
Although demonic interference was no doubt a singular and unexpected event, when the bride and groom from Babta went down to the waters of the Euphrates to marry, they were partaking in a wholly ancient institution that had been enacted untold numbers of times in the thousands of years of the Middle East’s recorded history. The challenges of various ascetic movements notwithstanding, an average observer of the societies of the late antique Roman and Sasanian empires could have taken marriage largely for granted as a common social institution—that is, as a collection of recognized “ways of doing things” that structured particular human actions and relationships, and which “provide[d] stability and meaning to social life.”2 Anthropologists maintain that while marriage is nearly ubiquitous in human societies, any universal, cross-cultural definition will be inadequate.3 Essentially all late antique eastern Mediterranean and Middle Eastern societies, however, shared a general sense of what marriage was and what it did. It was the enduring crux of biological and social reproduction; it enabled the formation of the other institutions that were the building blocks of social and political organization, the family and the household.4 Marriage rendered sex between a man and a woman licit and any resulting progeny legitimate (though some other institutions that were not marriage in strict terms could do the same). It established new ties between previously unrelated individuals and kin groups. By affiliating progeny to families and lineages, furthermore, marriage outlined the paths by which both material property and genealogical cultural capital—the status associated with ancestry—would devolve to new generations. Marriage, in other words, was the chief institution that facilitated the reproduction of both the human race biologically and the hierarchies of lived human societies, generation after generation.5
The peoples of the ancient Middle East were well aware of this fundamental connection between marriage and the broader associations to which humans belonged, and so they often assigned the institution particular cultural weight. Augustus, the first Roman emperor, enacted legislation promoting marriage and childbearing among Roman citizens for the good of the empire.6 In Zoroastrian cosmology, marriage with particular kin relations was a pious act that modeled the “divine and mythical unions” of the good god Ohrmazd with his daughter and mother.7 For early rabbinic Judaism, distinctive marital customs signaled the continuity of “one Israel” stretching deep into the biblical past.8 In a similar vein, marriage, as the legitimate channel of human sexuality, became an important locus in the development of Christian thought, which from its earliest days recognized a fundamental connection between sexuality and humans’ potential to achieve salvation. Characteristically Christian understandings of that connection, however, departed radically from most Greco-Roman, Zoroastrian, and Jewish traditions (not to mention later Islamic ones). Most ancient marital regimes and systems of sexual morality were organized around the reproductive imperative and placed great value on it. Essentially all Christian traditions, on the other hand, came to see abstention from sex as the highest, most pious mode of living in the material world in anticipation of perfection in the next one. The very utility of marriage and its reproductive purposes was uncertain at the least and wholly superfluous when this logic was followed to its extreme. A theology and ethics of sexuality rooted in the valorization of continence thus became an integral piece of Christian thought in the late antique and medieval Mediterranean world.9 It persisted in marked tension, however, with the practice and regulation of marriage as a social institution in the imperial legal orders of late antiquity.
Map 1. The Middle East in Late Antiquity
The notion that membership among the Christian faithful required chaste sexual practice was rooted ultimately in the teachings of Paul’s epistles, most famously in I Corinthians 7. Paul’s letter gives a “passing endorsement of continence as an optimal state,” which, while not providing a systematic theology of sexual renunciation, set the parameters of later Christian thought on the subject.10 Early Christian thinkers of later generations outlined a soteriological vision that valued virginity and continence—the eschewal of human sexuality altogether—as the most perfect way of life in an imperfect world and the surest path to salvation in the next. The institutions through which early Christians put these ideas into practice were highly varied and contested. More radical groups called Encratites by their opponents required celibacy of all the faithful; in northern Syria and Mesopotamia, lay celibates known as Sons and Daughters of the Covenant lived among their householder neighbors; cenobitic monasticism, celibates living in communities separate from lay believers, developed especially in Egypt before spreading elsewhere.11 By the fifth century, a rough pattern had begun to emerge that increasingly cordoned off sexual renunciation as the proper vocation of monks and high ecclesiastics.12 But virginity and continence retained their supreme rank on the scale of chaste sexual practice in the Christian imagination.
If sexual renunciation was of such value, however, where did that leave the vast majority of Christians—ordinary householders who had sex and had children, and without whom the church in society would no longer exist? Virginity and continence had theological weight; they were perfection in imitation of Christ and the angels, which sexually active lay marriage was not. Yet scripture carved out at least some place for the latter in Christian cosmology. Genesis 1:28 commanded humans to be fruitful and multiply. Ephesians 5:23 compared marriage to Christ’s relationship with the faithful—“the husband is the head of the wife just as Christ is the head of the church.” As Christianity grew from a marginal movement to the dominant religion of the Roman Empire and beyond, it became all the more imperative for Christian thinkers to expand on these teachings and articulate conceptions of sexual practice within marriage that, if not as perfect as continence, constituted at least an acceptable standard of chastity for everyday believers. In the late antique eastern Mediterranean, Christian teachings on chaste lay sexuality coalesced around three principles: the indissolubility of the marriage bond, the unlawfulness of sexual activity outside of monogamous marriage, and the procreative purpose of sex within marriage.13 The Church Fathers built these principles out of a range of received teachings. Especially foundational was the biblical notion that a man and woman become “one flesh” through sexual intercourse (Genesis 2:24). Christian thinkers understood this as a divinely decreed, essentially indissoluble ontological status—hence Jesus’ teaching against divorce, “what God has joined together, let no one separate” (Matthew 19:6, Mark 10:8–9). Equally significant was Paul’s insight that, given the divine institution of the singleness of flesh, any sex outside of a monogamous marital union was fornication (porneia), inherently defiled and defiling (1 Corinthians 7).14 Finally, strands of Stoic philosophy contributed to the early Christian imagination the conviction that if sex within marriage was lawful, it was so only for reproduction rather than for pleasure, wage labor, or any other purpose.15
These perspectives defined late antique Christianity’s theology of conjugal, chaste sexuality. In the centuries before Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, they were a radical departure from a Greco-Roman sexual culture in which divorce was relatively simple and extramarital sex with dishonorable bodies (slaves and prostitutes) had been perfectly acceptable for men. The circumscription of licit sexual activity to the single, indissoluble, procreative marital bond was thus a major innovation.16 It was also a practical one, in the sense that it provided householders who could not achieve perfection in virginity or continence a means to ensure their worthiness of salvation. The Greek and Latin Church Fathers (John Chrysostom and Augustine are two major exemplars) constructed this message in a substantial body of theological literature, much of it admonitory and for lay consumption. Little has been written on the theology of lay marriage in the early Syriac traditions of the Christian east, our main area of interest. In general, early Syriac writers like Aphrahat (fl. fourth century) and Ephrem (d. 373) contemplated the virtues of virginity extensively while devoting less attention to worldly marriage,17 although they invested great significance in an ecclesiology of marriage according to which the church looks forward to union with Christ the bridegroom in the world to come.18 When late antique churchmen of the Syriac traditions