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"Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe," by John Boswell (Villard, 412 pp.; $25, hardcover). Reviewed by Gerald Bray, Anglican professor of divinity at Samford University's Beeson Divinity School, Birmingham, Alabama.

Professor Boswell of Yale, whose earlier work on Christian attitudes toward homosexuality achieved a certain notoriety in the early 1980s, has now returned to the field with a lengthy analysis of medieval liturgical texts, mainly from Eastern Europe, which deal with a phenomenon that he calls "same-sex union." Nowadays, such a phrase will most often be taken to imply gay marriage, though whether the documents cited by Boswell can bear this interpretation is another matter altogether. To be fair to Boswell, he admits that his evidence is ambiguous, and that the most that can reasonably be said is that homosexual relationships may have existed under the cover of ritual "brotherhood," which is what the documents he quotes actually deal with.

To understand and evaluate Boswell's argument, it is necessary to go back to the mentality that prevailed in premodern societies, and that still exists in many parts of the world today. In those cultures, relationships between the sexes invariably imply some kind of sexual union; the idea of a nonsexual male-female friendship simply does not exist. On the other hand, friendships between people of the same sex are frequent and encouraged. A man would normally be expected to spend most of his time with his friends of the same sex, whether plowing the fields, waging war, or just chewing the fat at the local tavern. Women would also live in a largely female world, where home and family would dominate their lives.

In the late twentieth-century West, this age-old pattern has been significantly disrupted. To begin with its most acceptable side, many men now refer to their wives as their "best friends," as if marriage and friendship were somehow identical. This false equation devalues marriage - at least, in its traditional monogamous form - and perverts friendship into a sexual relationship. The result is that marriages crack under a strain they were never meant to bear, and friendship (in the classical sense) has all but disappeared. C. S. Lewis made this point many years ago in his essay on friendship in "The Four Loves," and his conclusions have lost none of their validity since.

Boswell has read Lewis, but does not take up his argument, probably because it goes against what he wants to say, which is that homosexual unions were tolerated and even blessed by the medieval church. To this end he takes the many examples of same-sex friendship that exist in the ancient world and reduces them all to the framework in which gay marriage is the logical conclusion. It has long been known, of course, that the ancient Greeks practiced homosexuality (along with many other forms of sexual perversion), and that the Christian sexual ethic was developed, to a considerable extent, in reaction to this. It is also well known that heterosexual matrimony was basically a civil ceremony until well into the Middle Ages, when the church gradually acquired a near monopoly over it.

So the stage is set for Boswell, who wants to say that just as the church adopted pre-Christian matrimony and made it a sacrament, so also it took on board pre-Christian homosexual unions and created a sacramental bond only slightly different from that of heterosexual marriage. The fact that rites used to pledge fidelity in marriage crop up in ceremonies designed to bless same-sex "brotherhood" is taken to mean that gay marriage was both rampant and officially accepted, although virtually identical ceremonies can be found in pledges of allegiance (in the army or in the courtroom) and elsewhere. To crown it all, Boswell suggests that the cult of certain saints (notably the pair Serge and Bacchus, who were martyred in the early fourth century) served as a cloak for gay people to express their feelings and relationships within the wider culture.

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December 12 1994, Vol. 38, No. 14