Wishful History

I was half-listening to Great Lives on Radio 4 this afternoon, as Matthew Parris and Bettany Hughes discussed the great Sappho. Given her passion for young women, was she, they wondered, particularly a problem for later Christian writers? Perhaps in the West, said Ms Hughes, but not apparently in the East. 'But then the Eastern Orthodox Church used to carry out same-sex marriages, so they might have had less of an issue with her', she went on.

Hang on. Let's rewind a minute. The Orthodox Church used to carry out same-sex marriages? Really? The same Orthodox Church which insists all its clergy grow enormous beards to demonstrate their sound, healthy maleness? If this was so, it would at the very least cast an interesting light on current debates regarding Christianity and same-sex relationships. Wouldn't it?

In fact it didn't take a great deal of Googling (one term, in fact, to wit 'same sex marriages Byzantine') to discover the source of this particular bit of pseudo-history. It's John Boswell's The Marriage of Likeness: Same-sex unions in Premodern Europe, published back in 1994 and subject to an AWFUL lot of criticism then and since; not a work I was otherwise familiar with. Boswell's case was, to summarise, that the Orthodox rite of 'brother-making' or adelphopoiesis was, in effect, a sanctioning of same-sex relationships. Even though he was careful to point out that such relationships were not 'marriages', his using the modern phrase 'same-sex union' to describe them implied that they were in all but name. It doesn't take much thought to work out that this was certainly not what the liturgists intended the adelphopoiesis for. John Boswell was both gay and a devout Roman Catholic, and it isn't a calumny to suggest that may have had some effect on how he interpreted his evidence. The most we can say, rather as Alan Tulchin argues about the rite of affrerement current in medieval France, was that a legal and religious condition intended for entirely other purposes may have been used by men who loved each other for a different one. I find that far more nuanced and believable.

But look at how it translates into popular consciousness: 'Orthodox Church carried out same-sex marriages'. Of course it didn't. Yet, because Bettany Hughes is 'a historian', anything she says about 'history' runs the risk of going unchallenged no matter how far it lies outside her own range of knowledge and experience. There's an awful lot of history, and (not being too rude), Ms Hughes's 2:1 and apparently incomplete post-doc doesn't equip her to know about all of it.

This isn't the first time I've encountered liberal Christians overstating historical evidence out of enthusiasm (to put it at its kindest). I remember being excited over hints that there were women bishops in earlier Christian centuries, only to discover the more sober truth that the title 'episcopissa' or 'episcopa' meant a bishop's wife or a mitred abbess. My own moment of temptation came over St Lide, the hermit and bishop who dwelt in the tenth and eleventh centuries in the Scilly Isles, and whose feast, as bishop, is mentioned in the Calendar of Tavistock Abbey. But Leland, the great 16th-century traveller and shrine-sampler, refers to Lide as female. A female bishop in 10th-century Scilly? One might like to believe such a thing, and so one is so very, very tempted to go further than the facts really justify. It's the Gladiator Girl syndrome. And the less said about that, the better.