SEXUAL CONSTITUTION:

Marriage and Procreation: On Children as the First Purpose of Marriage (Allan C. Carlson, Ph.D., adapted from a Family Policy Lecture given to the Family Research Council, Washington, DC, on October 20, 2004)

My purpose here is to examine the bond between marriage and procreation. Where did this linkage come from? Why is it no longer self-evident? What earlier developments weakened the procreative nature of marriage? And: Is it possible to salvage this appeal to procreation in the same-sex marriage debate?

Sex and Civilization

Turning to the first question—where did the bond between marriage and procreation come from?—my answer is simple: It is no less than the foundation for what we might call the unwritten Sexual Constitution of our Civilization.

Nearly two thousand years ago, what would become Western Christian Civilization began to take form in a time of great sexual disorder. The moral and family disciplines of the old Roman Republic were gone, replaced by the intoxications of empire. Slave concubinage flourished in these years. Divorce by mutual consent was easy, and common. Adultery was chic, and widespread. Homosexuality was a frequent practice, particularly in man-boy sexual relations. There was a callous disregard for infant life, with infanticide a regular practice. Caesar Augustus, worried about the plummeting Roman birthrate, even implemented the so-called “Augustan Laws” in 18 B.C., measures that punished adultery, penalized childlessness, and showered benefits on families with three or more children. These laws may have slowed, but did not reverse, the moral and social deterioration.

Between 50 and 300 AD, and out of this same chaos, the Fathers of the Christian Church crafted a new sexual order. Procreative marriage served as its foundation. Importantly, they also built this new order in reaction to the Gnostic heresies which threatened the young church; indeed, which threatened all human life.

The Gnostic idea rose independent of Christianity, but I am concerned here with so-called Christian Gnosticism. The Gnostics drew together myths from Iran, Jewish magic and mysticism, Greek philosophy, and Chaldean mystical speculation. More troubling, they also appealed to the freedom from the law as proclaimed by Christ and Paul. In this sense, they were antinomians; that is, they believed that the Gospel freed Christians from obedience to any law, be it scriptural, civil, or moral. The Gnostics claimed to have a special “gnosis,” a unique wisdom, a “secret knowledge” denied to ordinary Christians. They appealed to unseen spirits. They denied nature. They developed a mélange of moral and doctrinal ideas. But virtually all Gnostics did share two views: they rejected marriage as a child-related institution; and they scorned procreation.

This heresy posed a grave challenge to the early Christian movement. Indeed, the Epistles are replete with warnings against Gnostic teachings. In 1 Timothy 4, for example, Paul writes that “some will depart from the faith by giving heed to deceitful spirits and doctrines of demons….who forbid marriage.” In Jude 4 we read that admission into the Christian community “has been secretly gained by…ungodly persons who pervert the grace of our God into licentiousness.” 2 Peter tells of false prophets corrupting the young church, “irrational animals, creatures of instinct,…reveling in their dissipation, carousing with you. They have eyes full of adultery, insatiable souls.” Similar warnings or admonitions are found in 1 Corinthians (5:1-8; 6:12-13), Romans (6:1; 8:2), Philippians (3:18), Galatians (5:13), 2 Timothy (3:6-7), Ephesians (5:5-7), and Revelation (2:14-15). Simon Magus, described in Acts, chapter 8, was most probably a Gnostic, evidenced by his use of magic.

Relative to sex, Gnosticism took two forms. One strand emphasized total sexual license, endless sexual experimentation. Claiming the freedom of the Gospel, these Gnostics indulged in adultery, homosexuality, and ritualistic fornication. The Church Father Clement described abuse of the eucharist by the Gnostics in the church of Alexandria:

There are some who call Aphrodite Pandemos [physical love] a mystical communion….[T]hey have impiously called by the name of communion any common sexual intercourse….These thrice-wretched men treat carnal and sexual intercourse as a sacred religious mystery, and think that it will bring them to the Kingdom of God.

Other Gnostics of this sort taught that “marrying and bearing [children] are from Satan”; that sexual intercourse by “spiritual men,” in and of itself, would hasten the coming of the Pleroma, or the fullness of the divine hierarchy of the eons; and that the true believer should have every possible sexual experience.

In marked contrast to this polymorphous perversity, the other Gnostic strand totally rejected sexuality. Tatian, for example, led a faction called the Encratites, or “the self-controlled.” They saw marriage as corruption and fornication, and demanded lifelong abstinence. In the heretical Gospel According to the Egyptians, Salome asks: “How long shall men die?” Jesus is said to answer: “As long as you women bear children.” From this, these Gnostics concluded that they could defeat death by ceasing procreation. They also celebrated androgyny, since a being without sexual identity could obviously not be procreative. The heretical Gospel of Thomas has Jesus saying: “Every woman who makes herself male enters the Kingdom of Heaven.” The evil of the world denied the bearing of children; the celibate alone would enjoy the Kingdom of God.

Considering these two Gnostic forms, historian John Noonan summarizes:

The whole thrust of the antinomian [Gnostic] current was to devalue marriage, to deprive marital relations of any particular purpose, and to value sexual intercourse as experience [alone].

Within the broad context of a Roman Civilization sliding into family breakdown and sexual hedonism, the young Christian church faced as well this infiltration of life-denying, socially destructive ideas into its own ranks. For Christian leaders, the great question became: Just what is marriage for?

Christian Marriage

Answers came from several sources. The Church Fathers noted, for example, the fierce hatred shown by the Gnostics to the Hebrew Scriptures. From Judaism, accordingly, the Church Fathers could see children as a Divine blessing for their parents and for the community as a whole. As told in Deuteronomy:

And because you harken to these ordinances, and keep and do them, the Lord your God will keep with you the covenant and the steadfast love which he swore to your fathers to keep; he will love you, bless you, and multiply you; he will also bless the fruit of your body….You shall be blessed above all peoples; there shall not be male or female barren among you….

Genesis was also filled with promises from God to the patriarchs that their wives should be fruitful and that the Lord “will multiply your descendants as the stars of heaven and as the sand which is upon the seashore.” Throughout the centuries, the Jewish sages had declared that “One without children is considered as though dead.” Another early source stated that “he who does not engage in procreation is as if he diminished the Divine image.”

Another Jewish inspiration may have been the small, ascetic Essene community, now famed for compiling the Dead Sea Scrolls. According to the First Century historian Josephus, members of this order entered marriages “not for self-indulgence, but for the procreation of children.”

Still another source may have been Philo, a Jew trained in Greek philosophy, who expressed revulsion over pagan Roman pleasure-seeking. “Like a bad husbandman,” he wrote, “[the homosexual] spends his labor night and day on soil from which no growth at all can be expected.” The sexual act was for procreation, Philo insisted. Seeking a consistent sexual standard, he even reached a novel conclusion, condemning marriage to women known to be sterile.

Another source for early Christian leaders was the Stoic ideal. Also filled by revulsion over the sexual excesses of first century Rome, the Stoics—including philosophers such as Epictetus and Musonius Rufus—summoned reason to control human desires and behavior. Moderation in all things, including sexuality, was their goal. They also held that there was a natural law which gave purpose to human life and which revealed acts unworthy of human beings. Sexual intercourse in marriage, the Stoics concluded, found its clear and natural purpose in the propagation of the human race. However, intercourse only for pleasure was suspect. As the First Century Stoic, Seneca, declared:

All love of another’s wife is shameful; so too, too much love of your own. A wise man ought to love his wife with judgment, not affection. Let him control his impulses and not be borne headlong into copulation. Nothing is fouler than to love a wife like an adulteress….Let them show themselves to their wives not as lovers, but as husbands.

Or as another Stoic text explained:

…we have intercourse not for pleasure, but for the maintenance of the species.

It is clear that these Stoic teachings had a particularly strong effect on the Church Father, Clement of Alexandria. Indeed, according to John Noonan, Clement’s influential work on the purposes of Christian marriage was simply “a paraphrase” of the Stoic, Musonius Rufus.

And of course, these early Christian leaders also drew on the Gospels and the letters of Paul. The orthodox Gospel texts showed Jesus attending the wedding feast at Cana and performing there his first miracle, turning water into wine. Jesus also condemned adultery and divorce. In 1 Timothy 2:15, Paul taught that “woman will be saved through bearing children.” And in Ephesians 5, he equated the marital love of husband and wife to the bond between Christ and his Church:

Wives, be subject to your husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the Church….Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the Church and gave himself up for her…. ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one.’ This is a great mystery….

All of these sources led the early Church Fathers to one conclusion: the purpose of marriage is procreation. While also celebrating lifelong chastity, they refused to abandon the need for children. As Justin explained in the mid-2nd Century: “We Christians either marry only to produce children, or, if we refuse to marry, are completely continent.” Two centuries later, John Chrysotom taught that “there are two reasons why marriage was instituted, that we may live chastely and that we may become parents.” In the year 400, Augustine, the Bishop of Hippo, wrote the book, The Good of Marriage. He argued that God desired man’s perpetuation through marriage. Offspring, he insisted, were the obvious and first “good” of marriage (the other two being fidelity and symbolic stability or sacrament). As Augustine explained:

What food is to the health of man, intercourse is to the health of the human race, and each is not without its carnal delight which cannot be lust if, modified and restrained by temperance, it is brought to a natural use [i.e., procreation].

Augustine also insisted that the act of procreation included “the receiving of [children] lovingly, the nourishing of them humanely, the educating of them religiously.”

A Lasting Morality

In this way, the bond of marriage to procreation became the social and moral foundation for emerging Western Christian Civilization. The sexual disorders of the late Roman Empire and the anti-human fanaticism of the Gnostics faced defeat by a new marital morality. And, as articulated by Augustine in the year 400 A.D., this moral order lasted for another 1,500 years.

The disorders and fanaticism are obviously back; the only real question is whether defenders of marital morality have the courage to defeat them again.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 15, 2005 12:00 AM