Lesbian Images: Essays

by Jane Rule

  Only in the second century B.C. in non-biblical writings did the Jews begin to assert that “abominable things” were, in fact, homosexual acts, that the men of Sodom did not simply want the angels turned over to them for inspection and questioning but for sexual abuse. The Greeks at this time ruled Palestine, and the Jews were once again fighting to preserve their own culture, to keep themselves aloof from Hellenistic customs. By the first century A.D. moral thinkers, Philo and Josephus, clearly reflected the Greek threat and influence. Josephus wrote, “Now when the Sodomites saw the young men [the angels] to be of beautiful countenance, and this to an extraordinary degree … they resolved themselves to enjoy those beautiful boys by force and violence.”13 It was not rabbinical literature which was responsible for fixing and maintaining this narrowed interpretation of God’s wrath. Rather, Christians took it up and maintained a program of persecution of homosexuals, which included stoning to death, burying alive, and burning both men and women for the next sixteen centuries.

  The only reference to lesbian practice in the Bible anywhere is Paul’s pronouncement: “For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. Their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in their own persons the due penalty for their error.”14 Even here, it could be argued that Paul is not referring to lesbian practice among women but to “unnatural” practices between women and men. Paul, of course, would have preferred people to reject sexuality altogether, for even in its procreative aspect it emphasized the values of this world, that biological immortality of children so cherished by the Jews, instead of individual salvation in the next. He also obviously feared the religious significance of sacred prostitution of any sort, the idolatry of creature worshiping creature instead of the Christian God. When he claimed that “there is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Jesus Christ,”15 he did not mean that all people would achieve a pansexual state, nor did he mean that men and women were equal (women should be silent in church). He imagined, instead, ridding people of the trouble of being sexual at all.

  The mistrust, even hatred, of the body is Christian rather than Jewish. Jesus, as a teacher, was not responsible for such an attitude, for he was far more lenient with prostitutes than with pious hypocrites, and, though he did not count women among his twelve disciples, he associated freely with them. He might have been married; the requirement of a Jew to marry was strong. His love of John could have included erotic attachment since he rebelled against much of the ritual strictness of Jewish law and lived at a time when Greek influence was great. The earliest Christians were not prudish. They were persecuted because they were thought to be gravely immoral people, given to kissing each other in public, meeting—men and women together of all classes—far into the night at what were called love feasts where their “brotherhood” was expressed not only in sharing of food but in all manner of sexual excess. Whether or not these reports were true, Christians themselves began to counter such accusations with stricter and stricter pronouncements concerning their own behavior. Jesus’ doctrine of love became a doctrine of chastity. Mary’s virginity was insisted upon, and Jesus became a celibate, with masochistic focus on his bleeding body on the cross.

  Hermit holy men fasted not for forty days but for a lifetime in filth. Flagellation was used to humiliate the flesh until it was clearly a substitute for recognized sexual release. People courted martyrdom and committed suicide in what they thought of as an imitation of their savior, to be the sooner relieved of this world for the glory of the next. There were attempts by the church to control such excesses of zeal. Strict laws were passed against suicide, and at least one of the reasons for the formation of monasteries and nunneries was to collect and regulate the practices of those who chose holy celibacy. Ordinary people, without sacred calling, were allowed to marry and have children as a way to escape damnation. But even in marriage too many children indicated licentiousness.

  The fall of man, for long understood as the disobedience of Adam and Eve, became popularly interpreted as Eve’s sexual temptation of Adam, and women, who had had no really enviable position among the Greeks or Jews, were further degraded. “You are the devil’s gateway; you are the unsealer of that forbidden tree; you are the first deserter of the divine law; you are she who persuaded him whom the devil was not valiant enough to attack. You destroyed so easily God’s image, man. On account of your desert, that is, death, even The Son of God had to die.”16

  Because of the negative obsession with sex, early churchmen were detailed in their instruction not only to men but to women as well. John Chrysostom thought lesbian practice even more disgraceful than homosexuality among men because women should have more shame than men, presumably because women were sexually responsible for the fall. Lesbian attachments would intensify antagonism between the sexes since women would no longer be driven by their sexual desires to live peacefully with men.17 Augustine wrote to nuns over whom his sister was a superior to advise them specifically about their behavior. “The love which you bear to one another ought not to be carnal but spiritual; for those things which are practised by immodest women, even with other females, in shameful jesting and playing, ought not to be done even by married women or by girls who are about to marry, much less by widows or chaste virgins dedicated by a holy vow to be the handmaids of Christ.”18 The implication of this passage is that erotic play among women, before not taken all that seriously, must now be raised to the level of sin, not just for nuns but for lay women as well.

  As the church gained power and spread over the whole of the Roman Empire, various penitentials (manuals for confessors to guide in the administration of private penance) made the church’s attitude toward lesbian practice clear. Punishment for lay women was less severe, usually a penance of three years, for nuns seven years. Control over behavior in the nunneries was effected by such laws as proclaimed by the council in Paris in 1212 which forbade nuns to sleep together and required lamps to be burning throughout the night, regulations in observance in monasteries long before that. Thomas Aquinas in Summa Theologica was the only great scholastic theologian to discuss homosexuality in detail. He argued that it was worse than heterosexual lust because it was not only contrary to right reason but contrary to natural law.19 His teaching is still the chief reference for the church today.

  The harshness of punishment issued by the legal school of Orleans in 1260 is both staggering and ridiculous. For the first lesbian offense, a woman must be mutilated (her clitoris removed), mutilated again for her second, and for her third burned, with all her property given over to the king.20 No such punishments were carried out by the church. The offender was tried by church officials and then turned over to laymen for punishment. For this reason, churchmen complain that the church has been blamed for the brutality of secular law. The distinction is a fine one, for the church instructed the lawmakers on all moral issues, and, if over the centuries secular rulers castrated and burned men and women in order to save their cities from earthquake and fire, they did so as good Christians.

  From the beginnings of Christianity, the church was plagued by heresy. The most important, because the most recurring and widespread, came originally from the teachings of Zoroaster, who conceived of good and evil as equal forces contending with each other. The devil, for instance, is not native to the Jews but a late import into the Old Testament from Persia. The heretics believed that the world was created not by God but by the devil; therefore everything material was evil. Their rejection of the body was even more complete than that of celibate Christians. Because bearing children could only increase material evil, they were intolerant of marriage, and they did not believe that Christ was made flesh because that would have signified good had been incarnate in evil. Since only the spirit and not the body could be redeemed, they were less inclined to practice fasting and flagellation, more tolerant of sexual
behavior not associated with procreation.

  The great tradition of courtly love has been associated with these heretical beliefs. The troubadours sang of beautiful ladies to be served and adored in chastity “for the benefit of a public in which the majority favoured the Heresy.”21 Their songs resembled those of Arab poets, “who were mostly homosexual as were a number of the troubadours.”22 Woman as inspiration, as Muse, rather than as bearer of children, was safely isolated, the flesh indulged where there was no danger of increasing material evil. In that isolation, perhaps a number of the ladies were lesbians if the records of the church’s great Inquisition are accurate.

  Because lesbian practice was associated with heretical belief, confessions were sought by various means. A test called the Judgment of God, for instance, was used by the church in the twelfth century to establish the guilt of a heretic. The accused was handed a red-hot iron bar, in the belief that only liars and perjurers were burned.23 It is hard to credit the medieval mind with sincerity in this and other tests of innocence since it would seem no one could have escaped unharmed, but there were among the heretics those who had learned the controls of the body practiced in Egypt which reduced or even eliminated pain, and contemporary understanding of cause and effect was, of course, naive and intuitive rather than scientific.

  After a massive campaign to get rid of heresy, the church was faced with still another serious threat to its power in the practices of witchcraft. Some scholars have insisted that witchcraft had a continuous tradition from classical times. “The classical witch represented various palaeolithic fertility and totem cults, crossed with the magical tradition borrowed from Egypt and the East. So did the medieval witch, although by then the cult stream had been muddied by other tributaries.”24 In their view, while the great heresy represented an extreme rejection of the body, witches celebrated fertility and the human creature’s kinship with nature. Their “consorting with the devil” was really their union with the god of fertility, dressed in animal skins. Since covens were said to consist of twelve witches and one male warlock, the ritual orgies probably included the use of artificial phalluses for sacred pantomimes of the sexual act. Such “lesbian” practices in the celebration of fertility are only an absurd contradiction to those who can’t understand the pansexuality of ancient cults of all sorts, dedicated to the stimulation and celebration of all erotic energy.

  More skeptical scholars like Keith Thomas in Religion and the Decline of Magic find no evidence of the actual existence of witches’ covens, black sabbaths, and attribute the whole concept of consorting with the devil to the church itself rather than to the survival of ancient pagan rituals, the inquisitors exacting by torture confessions they themselves had invented from ignorant and poor women involved in nothing more than the practice of herbal medicine and ritual cursing also originally taught by the church. Those few who freely did confess to pacts with the devil had been taught to believe in the possibility from the fire and brimstone sermons of churchmen.

  Whether the church actually created the cults of witchcraft or perverted ancient fertility rituals into malevolent cults, church leaders conducted witch hunts up into modern times. They did not think of themselves as persecuting homosexuals and lesbians so much as burning worshipers of evil who drew their magic power from the devil.

  Meanwhile the church’s own institutions became the breeding grounds for a more exclusive kind of homosexuality than was known in Greece or the Arab world. Diderot’s Memoirs of a Nun, though his motive for writing it was not initially serious, is a fictional indictment of lesbian corruption in the nunneries, some of which is based on fact, leaking out in unofficial publications the church continually tried to suppress. It is no wonder that nuns often failed to observe the rules of celibacy at a time when young women could be offered to nunneries for a dowry of less value than they could be offered to husbands, when often the only recourse of a woman without means was to surrender herself to the church. If it was better for men to marry than burn, it was better for women to take holy vows than starve.

  Any catalogue of historical persecution of a particular group of people can seem a distortion if a wider perspective is not admitted. Given our own values, nobody lived comfortable or rational lives, but, while the church was busy trying heretics for burning, it was also feeding the poor, teaching the power of forgiveness and redemption within the faith, trying to combat ignorance and brutality in many areas.

  The best measure of what the church has done with its own history is the measure Christians themselves are now taking.

  For the majority, both in the ministry and laity, lesbians are still sinners of the grossest sort, committing acts against nature. Though churches no longer participate in witch hunts, their moral teachings still greatly influence the law. Liberal ministers in both England and North America have been admirable crusaders for law reform, not because they have rejected Aquinas’ judgment against homosexuality but because they believe in the separation of church and state. The trial of the homosexual should not be before the courts of law but before God, through whom there is the possibility of forgiveness and redemption. Since there never has been a law in England against lesbian practice, the efforts in that country have simply relieved men of certain sorts of harassment. Law reform in Canada theoretically applied to both men and women, but traditionally the law itself was applied only to men. In the United States such laws vary from state to state and are still in most parts of the country only beginning to be challenged. Because politicians are leery of an unpopular cause which might affect their ability to collect votes, only campaigns of respected citizens can force changes. If churches in the United States don’t follow the lead of those in England and Canada in pressing for reform, men and women will continue to be sent to prison under secular laws made as a direct result of Christian teaching.

  While some Christians are willing to accept responsibility for “humane” law reform, influenced by psychiatric argument as much as by religious charity, fewer are willing to accept lesbians into the church community, unless they are prepared to repent the sin of their sexuality and live heterosexual lives in marriage or celibate single lives. Since no woman is physically incapable of heterosexual relationship and since the general attitude toward a lesbian is that she turns to members of her own sex only when she is unable to attract a male, there is little sympathy for the woman who persists in her “perversion.” Novices in religious orders in whom the tendency toward lesbianism is noted in “special friendships” with other members of the community are often refused their final vows. Psychologists advising mother superiors suggest that anyone with such tastes, however latent, is suited only to a secular life where she might meet a man to cure her. The assumption is that a lesbian is not capable, as a heterosexual woman is, of practicing celibacy. Certainly it would be more difficult for a lesbian in a nunnery since the segregation of women from men in holy orders is, in the first place, offered as an aid against sexual temptation. The elaborate rules which have governed the daily lives of nuns until very recently indicate how great lesbian temptation is in a segregated society for women of any predisposition, so deep is the human need to use erotic energy.

  Only a very few people within the Christian community have moved from these traditional views at all. D. S. Bailey’s well-researched book Homosexuality and the Western Christian Tradition, written in 1955, is invaluable for understanding the history of attitudes toward homosexuality. He is, however, more concerned with clearing up historical misunderstandings and pressing for law reform than he is with finding a place for the homosexual in the church community. Also he concentrates his attention on men. When he does consider women, he is chiefly irritated with their unequal treatment under law in England. While he proposes liberalizing the law for men, excluding homosexual acts between consenting adults, he would like to see laws passed against lesbians for seducing minors, public exhibitionism, and interference with marriage. H. Kimball Jones, in his book Toward a Christian Understandin
g of the Homosexual, written in 1966, is concerned that the church take a much more active part than it has in seeing that there is an end to discrimination and persecution of homosexuals. He quotes the theologian Helmut Thielicke, who sees homosexuality as a pathological disorder, but “the predisposition itself, the homosexual potentiality as such, dare not be any more strongly depreciated than the status of existence which we all share as men in the disordered creation that exists since the Fall. …”25 But while Thielicke sees sublimation of sexual desire as the only proper solution,26 Jones wants the homosexual treated like any other sinner, that is any other human being, requiring him or her only to live as well as possible in terms of Christian ideals which no one perfectly serves. If a relationship with someone of the same sex is the best one can do, then the church should help that person to live responsibly in those terms, but Jones is not in favor of homosexual marriage. He wants the church to accept but not condone homosexuals, as it accepts childless marriages, for instance. The parallelism of his argument is awkward at this point since it exposes his basic lack of logic, for, if the church does accept childless marriages as marriages, its refusal to marry homosexuals is special discrimination. Jones seems to be saying that it is more moral for homosexuals to “live in sin” than to commit themselves to marriage. Jones speaks far too generously to be heard by most congregations for the minimizing of the “sin” of homosexuality and yet does not arrive at a position which would be acceptable to homosexuals wishing to be members of the Christian community, particularly those who find themselves in stable relationships they value.