History of marriage and celibacy

This essay reflects on the reception of Lu Xun's short story " The Loner " (Gudu zhe, alternately translated as " The Lone Wolf, " " The Misanthrope, " and " The Isolate ") in American classrooms, where students have sometimes wondered whether that character might be read as " queer. " It suggests that the title character's unusual and self-imposed celibacy is probably best explained by his belief, in a very general sense, in the foundational values of zoology as practiced in Japan and China in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and thus that the story may be a better gateway to understanding the ways in which Lu Xun envisioned the mixed impact of new political economies on private life than a source text for queer studies. At the same time, however, this essay emphasizes that in " The Loner, " as elsewhere, accounting for the " heterosexual imperative " of early zoology (e.g., with its emphases on animal husbandry, propagation, reproduction) can have meaningful consequences for " queering " interpretations of received texts from literature, history of science, and beyond.

Front. Lit. Stud. China 2013, 7(3): 441–458
DOI 10.3868/s010-002-013-0025-0

The application of sociological theories in clinical practice introduces a broader dimension to the existing therapeutic approaches available to the mental health practitioner. Rather than deal with a presenting problem or dysfunction by focusing solely on the presenting symptoms, or delving exclusively into a client's internal psyche, applying social theory in a clinical manner adds the element of interpersonal relationships and the connection of the client with his or her social world. This article will describe a therapeutic approach to treating clients and couples in an unconsummated relationship who present with a specific sexual dysfunction or problem that is commonly addressed with sex counseling or sex therapy. Drawing upon sociological micro theories of exchange and symbolic interactionism, this approach combines classic medical, cognitive and behavioral interventions with a process of discovery that leads to an understanding of the social context out of which the problems emerged and are maintained.

Many people, including in the scientific community, today claim that Jesus was married. Their main argument can be stated as follows:
“Jesus was certainly married because Jesus was a rabbi and, at the time, every rabbi had to be married and have children.”

What about this claim?

When the Sadducees challenged Jesus with their marriage riddle, he replied that “the sons of this age marry and are given in marriage, but those who are considered worthy to attain to that age and to the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage” (Luke 20:34–35). The church has long viewed this as evidence that resurrection marks the start of an eternally celibate existence.

Yet many vital questions surrounding this interpretation have remained largely unexplored. How did the early church fathers view the passage, and what interpretive lens shaped their conclusions? Does the rest of the biblical data say anything about resurrected celibates? Is the concept of eternal celibacy an accurate reading of Jesus’ words in their original Hebraic context?

This two-part series will examine the historical record and the Hebrew Scriptures for answers to those questions. It will argue that Jesus’ remarks regarding “marrying and giving in marriage” in fact fell prey to misinterpretation by the Hellenized church fathers, which in turn obscured the biblical portrait of the future of marriage.

In part 1, we will first trace the interpretive history of the passage and identify potential influences behind the popular reading. We will then examine three indications that Jesus actually had a very different meaning in mind. In part 2, we will present an alternative reading that proposes a specific Old Testament text as the background for his famous reply.

See the longer treatment in Early Jewish and Christian Memories of Moses' Wives: Exogamist Marriage and Ethnic Identity (Mellen, 2005).

In contrast to the book of Ezra, whose protagonists demand that Jews expel “foreign” wives, the story of the Midianite Zipporah, Moses’ wife, affirms that foreign women are beneficial to Israel. Zipporah’s circumcision of her son in Exodus 4 is the climax of a pattern in which females thwart attacks on endangered males. Later, Zipporah’s Midianite father confessed faith in Moses’ God and ate a meal with Israel in the presence of God. Zipporah and her father represent a household that originated outside of Israel’s ideological boundaries, but became positively allied to Israel through marriage, circumcision, confession, and sacrifice. This and similar stories suggest that, among those who selected and shaped the narratives of the Tanakh, there was considerable and persuasive dissent from what has often been assumed to be the dominant position in Second Temple Judaism. This paper is a precursor to a book that explores the origins of circumcision, celibacy and textual ethnicity construction, as well as Jewish and Christian interpretations of Moses’ exogamy.

This essay will focus on the Jovinian controversy, starting from the beginning of the accusation by Jerome, who firstly realized the risk of the Roman monk’’s predication, that is the significance and value of virginity (and respectively of marriage) within the ascetic life. This dispute appears more understandable if we consider the situation of monasticism in Rome: at the end of the fourth century many different form of ascetic life is still alive and generally in conflict with each other. Therefore, after a description of the
landscape on which the dispute between Jovinian and Jerome rises up, it will be useful to reread some events of the life of two illustrious members of the Italic Christian aristocracy, Pammachius and Paulinus of Nola, in order to show how some elements connected to the ascetic life are quite the same.

Scopo di questo saggio è dipanare la matassa relativa a Gioviniano, partendo dalle origini della disputa e da quelli che, agli occhi di Girolamo, appaiono come i rischi maggiori di tale proposta, ovvero il valore da attribuire alla verginità (e specularmente alla vita coniugata) nella scelta ascetica. Tale preoccupazione risulta comprensibile se si constata la presenza concomitante di diversi, e in confitto fra loro, stili ascetico-monastici a Roma sul finire del IV secolo. Pertanto, tracciato un quadro dello sfondo sul quale la controversia prende forma e messa a fuoco la ragione del contendere fra Gioviniano e Girolamo, sarà utile rileggere le vicende che coinvolgono due illustri esponenti dell’’aristocrazia cristiana italica, Pammachio e Paolino di Nola, alla luce di quanto emerso.

Rev. Shaji George Kochuthara invited Aaron Milavec to present a guest lecture at his four-day International Conference, "Vatican II, the Papacy, and Freedom of Religious Inquiry - Inflicting Pain in order to Impose 'Orthodoxy,'" Revisiting Vatican II: 50 Years of Renewal (Bangalore, Dharmaram Vidya Kshetram, Bangalore, India 560029, 02 Feb 2013). 

This paper was expanded and later published as “Collegiality Versus Papal Absolutism Following Vatican II,” Revisiting Vatican II: 50 Years of Renewal, Vol. II, ed. Shaji George Kochuthara, Bangalore: Dharmaram Publications, 2015, 138-154.

Nombreuses sont les personnes, y compris dans le milieu scientifique, qui soutiennent aujourd’hui que Jésus était marié. Leur principal argument peut s’énoncer ainsi :
“Jésus était certainement marié car Jésus était rabbin et, à l’époque, tout rabbin devait obligatoirement être marié et avoir des enfants”.

Qu’en est-il exactement ?

[Only an extract of this article is given here; for the full version consult Harvard Theological Review or contact the authors]

The Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum in San Jose (CA) owns a small but important collection of unpublished Coptic papyri and parchments. One notable papyrus preserves a unique text in which the practitioner invokes an unnamed female figure to help a woman protect her “purity,” “virginity,” and “marriage.” Although the specific context behind the text is not altogether clear and the appeal for virginity in marriage is curious and without parallel in other magical texts, one possibility is to see the text in light of the Christian practice of celibate marriage whereby a male and female entered into a non-sexual marriage.

An examination of the reception and implementation of the reforming ideals of the papacy in eleventh- and twelfth-century Welsh dioceses, with a particular focus on the reception of canonical texts and the practice of clerical celibacy. I argue that the picture in Wales, contrary to common perceptions, broadly reflects that of Anglo-Norman England.

Draft: The idea of celibacy has not been considered, encouraged, or dignified by Christians since the introduction of the Romantic movement. A succinct exploration of the topic with some remarks about the relevancy of singleness in the 21st Century.

Éste es un libro de historia de la familia. El sujeto, el protagonista, es la familia y los cambios que experimentó entre los siglos XVI y XVII en la Navarra prepirenaica. Entre los estudios realizados sobre la familia pirenaica dominan los realizados por antropólogos y juristas, que tratar de dar una visión sistemática de la "casa" como institución. En su enfoque, predomina el deseo de mostrar cada uno de los elementos que la integran, y en ellos la casa aparece como una institución muy elaborada e integrada en unidad. Nuestro enfoque es distinto. Sin olvidar el carácter unitario, presentamos el proceso que le dio origen, describiendo la situación anterior para mostrar después los cambios progresivos que la modificaron. Queremos presentar cómo la casa fue una solución entre las múltiples posibles que pudieron adoptarse y comprenderla como una combinación de elementos viejos y nuevos que, al asociarse, dieron lugar a una nueva realidad. Hubo ventajas, inconvenientes y limitaciones en una institución que contribuyó decisivamente a configurar el paisaje social del Pirineo de Navarra en los siglos siguientes: la casa se erigió en el corazón de la sociedad que surgió después del siglo XVII.

"The word paternoster has been applied in a variety of senses. In the Middle Ages paternoster became a synonym for lovemaking. An early instance of this usage appears in the anonymous medieval Latin Prisciano regula. Later it occurs in Rutebeuf's Old French De frere Denise and the Middle English Secunda Pastorum. Evidence that the medieval usage perhaps continued into the modern period is found in Thackeray's Vanity Fair and Hugo's Notre-Dame.

The erotic paternoster may have originated in a playful juxtaposition of a holy prayer and an unholy deed, in an awareness that people saying the paternoster often had their minds on their lovers, or in the proximity of the paternoster to the kiss of peace in the liturgy."

In Ungarn kam es zu öffentlichen Eheschließungen der Kleriker von 1531 an. Ein Brief von Elek Thurzó an Tamás Nádasdy (1532) findet es natürlich und typisch, das die lutherischen Geistlichen verehelicht sind. Der Patron von Matthias Dévai, der Stuhlweißenburger Propst, Imre Bebek schloss eine Ehe in Ofen zu Weihnachten 1533 unter spektakulären Umständen. Die Geschichte scheint ein gut durchdachter kerygmatisch-prophetischer Akt zu sein. Beide überlieferten Berichte deuten an, dass der Propst seine Tat mit der evangelischen Freiheit gerechtfertigte. Obwohl Dévai in seinen Schriften die Frage der Ehe auffallend wortkarg behandelte und er selbst wahrscheinlich in Zölibat lebte, ist die Relativierung der Gültigkeit des Gesetzes für sein Denken charakteristisch, daher vermutet man im Hintergrund des aufsehenerregenden Skandals die theologischen Ansichten von Dévai. Zahlreiche kleine Fakten und nebensächliche Umstände weisen darauf, dass die Beziehung zwischen Bebek und Dévai enger und ausschlaggebender war, als das früher in der Forschung angenommen.

Dopo la sinodo romana del 1059, che vietava il matrimonio per i membri del clero e che, soprattutto, impediva ai sacerdoti sposati o conviventi di esercitare le funzioni liturgiche e ai laici di partecipare ai riti da loro officiati, si alzarono le voci di coloro che vivevano questa disposizione come una profonda ingiustizia, perché andava a colpire un clero, coniugato sì, ma degno sotto tutti gli aspetti di esercitare le funzioni sacerdotali. Inoltre, quelle norme non solo escludevano dal sacerdozio uomini colti, casti e di costumi morigerati, ma emarginavano pure dal consesso sociale le loro mogli, donne oneste che diventavano concubine, e i loro figli, che da una condizione di piena legittimità diventavano bastardi.
Le due posizioni in merito al matrimonio del clero che si opposero, ormai per l’ultima volta, alla metà del secolo XI, avevano alle spalle entrambe una lunga tradizione e avevano convissuto a lungo, con momenti di scontro acceso solo in quei contesti politici che intendevano creare confini chiari fra l’ambito di azione politica degli ecclesiastici e quella dei laici. Per determinare quei confini, infatti, si andava a intervenire sull’identità specifica degli uomini di chiesa e sulla loro separazione dal resto del corpo sociale, che si voleva espressa innanzitutto dalla castità e dalla rinuncia al legame matrimoniale.

This chapter concerns the contradiction in modern Catholicism that women can be God-like but not priest-like. Drawing on research into the Roman Catholic Women Priest movement, it explores how this contradiction persists through the manipulation of metaphors of contagion and containment in relation to notions of sin and virtue. Just as the sins of the one couple (Adam and Eve) contaminate the many and for generations thereafter, the moral failures of any one individual, by analogy, can be applied metaphorically to all of humankind. Yet grace, too, can be contagious, spreading among persons (underlying certain Catholic models of religious practice). Problems arise when some people’s sins turn out to be more contagious than others. Through a mixture of ethnographic and historical sources, the discussion traces how sin and grace are differently containable or contagious according to gender. The infinite manipulability of this sin/grace complex helps to illuminate how opposition to the ordination of women remains institutionally entrenched even as male sex-abuser priests have come to dominate the media. The chapter concludes that Catholicism’s multiform problems with gender are reproduced via this politics of contagion and containment, and that radical repercussions are at stake in sin’s containment.

Michelle ARMSTRONG-PARTIDA, "Clerical Marriage and Priestly Masculinity in Fourteenth-Century Catalunya".

In fourteenth-century Catalunya, Catalan priests formed domestic unions with women that were marriage all but in name. Episcopal visitation records from the diocese of Girona, Barcelona, Vic, and Urgell show that parish clergy were able to meld a family and a household with their profession in spite of the Church’s prohibition against clerical marriage. The fact that so many clergymen were promoted through the holy orders to become parish priests and still managed to form de facto marriages and support their children indicates that although the standards of the medieval Church had changed since the Gregorian period, the customs of parish clergy had not. Countless clergymen defied orders to expel their women and set aside their families, regardless of the threats of excommunication and repeated episcopal fines that were inconsistently applied to the clerical population. Judging from the number of priests who persisted in these de facto marriages, the financial burden was ultimately tolerable not only because clergymen were emotionally attached to their families, but also since the role of a paterfamilias, who ruled a household with a wife and children, was central to their masculinity. It was not merely proof of sexual activity or evidence of offspring that conferred masculine status in the parishes of late medieval Catalunya. Priests established marital households because medieval society defined adult male masculinity as one in which a man advanced to take on the role of husband and father.
.

Michelle ARMSTRONG-PARTIDA, "Mariage clérical et masculinité sacerdotale dans la Catalogne du XIVe siècle".

Dans la Catalogne du XIVe siècle, les prêtres de paroisse formaient avec des femmes des unions qui avaient tout du mariage, sauf le nom. Les archives des visites épiscopales des diocèses de Gérone, Barcelone, Vic et Urgell montrent qu’ils étaient en mesure de concilier leurs familles et leurs maisonnées avec leur profession, en dépit des prohibitions édictées par l’Église à l’encontre du mariage clérical. Le fait que tant d’ecclésiastiques reçus dans les ordres sacrés pour devenir prêtres de paroisse aient cependant pu s’engager dans des mariages de facto et entretenir leurs enfants indique que même si les normes de l’Église avaient changé depuis la réforme grégorienne, tel n’était pas le cas des coutumes du bas-clergé. D’innombrables hommes d’Église passaient outre aux ordres de se défaire de leurs femmes et de leur familles, malgré les menaces d’excommunication et les amendes épiscopales répétées qui s’appliquaient, sans régularité toutefois, à la population cléricale. À en juger par la grande quantité de prêtres qui persistaient dans ces mariages de facto, la charge financière des amendes était en définitive tolérable, non seulement parce que ces hommes d’Église étaient émotionnellement attachés à leurs familles, mais aussi parce que le rôle de paterfamilias placé à la tête d’un foyer avec femme et enfants avait une importance centrale du point de vue de leur masculinité. Ce n’étaient pas simplement la preuve d’une activité sexuelle et l’existence d’une progéniture qui conféraient le statut masculin dans les paroisses de Catalogne à la fin du Moyen Âge. Les prêtres fondaient des foyers parce que la masculinité adulte, telle que la société médiévale la définissait, impliquait d’endosser les rôles de mari et de père.

This article is a Review of Mohammed Hocine Benkheira's book La maîtrise de la concupiscence.Mariage, célibat et continence sexuelle en Islam, des origines au Xe/XVIe siècle (Paris, Vrin, 2017). The book focuses on the evolving ways Muslim medieval scholars considered the topics of marriage and celibacy. It is based on the analysis of different corpuses: Coranic exegesis, Hadith collections, juridical treatises (fiqh) as well as historiographical sources, Sufi or medical treatises and christian literature.

The application of sociological theories in clinical practice introduces a broader dimension to the existing therapeutic approaches available to the mental health practitioner. Rather than deal with a presenting problem or dysfunction by focusing solely on the presenting symptoms, or delving exclusively into a client's internal psyche, applying social theory in a clinical manner adds the element of interpersonal relationships and the connection of the client with his or her social world. This article will describe a therapeutic approach to treating clients and couples in an unconsummated relationship who present with a specific sexual dysfunction or problem that is commonly addressed with sex counseling or sex therapy. Drawing upon sociological micro theories of exchange and symbolic interactionism, this approach combines classic medical, cognitive and behavioral interventions with a process of discovery that leads to an understanding of the social context out of which the problems emerged and are maintained.