Lynn Gazis-Sax of Noli Irritare Leones, who’s been on a bit of a roll examining Medieval and earlier theological attitudes towards homosexuality, brings up as an aside early theological attitudes about incest.

The live journal Thinking Out Loud reviews gay Catholic academic Mark Jordan’s The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology. It’s an interesting survey of medieval reasoning about sex, which sometimes differs from modern reasoning in non-obvious ways.

arguing that a priest who has sex with someone he is hearing confessions from is a form of incest—the priest being spiritual father—is much more about very medieval concerns about incest, defined extremely broadly

(I note, here, that incest has been defined to include a transgression that we’d now describe as professional sexual exploitation.)

The main body of her post, titled “Are we all sodomites now?” is pretty interesting too. Read the whole thing here.

This is actually a pretty cool point. Various apologists for incest point out, not at all incorrectly, that most of the horror stories about offspring with hemophilia and other recessive-gene diseases are actually fairly weak. (Tending as they do towards one widely-distributed and widely known royal family and large numbers of conveniently “othered” sub-groups like “gee-we-want-the-coal-under-their-property hillbillies.) And a heck of a lot of pre-metropolitan social organizations consist of very isolated groups where marriage as close as cousins was pretty inevitable**. And besides now there’s birth control, right?

Fine. Points taken. But!

As Lynn hints, if theologians considered sex between priest and parishioner incest then inbreeding is not what the prohibition was all about in the first place. Instead it was about improper abuse of, and I’m sure a little further research would support, improper concentration of power.

Slight digression: Recall, as various historians of relationships have noted (my go-to reference being Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage by Stephanie Coontz), the real tradition of “traditional marriage” wasn’t romance, or even individual preference, but economic arrangements between (politically significant) families. And while I can’t document this I’m guessing that a little research would show that political and economic considerations rather than actual consanguinity was behind, say, the Church’s otherwise incomprehensible decisions to prohibit an individual’s marriage to a 4th cousin in favor of… a marriage to a 3rd cousin.

It also makes significant the biologically ridiculous prohibitions on marriages between cousins in law who (especially if everyone’s keeping track) are almost by-definition not related either by blood or genetics.

I’m not given to approving the policies of ecclesiastical lawyers but in this case I think they got it right, because the real but relatively*** minor problems of possible inbreeding really aren’t as significant as the equally real but considerably bigger problems of power imbalances in such relationships.

For this reason all the arguments about the biological irrelevance of incest, no matter how sophisticated, fall flat: what’s usually objectionable about incest isn’t about inherited genes, it’s about inherent power****.

[And we’re not just talking about the middle ages here. A friend I used to work with moved out of her 20th-Century northern Minnesota town, she said, because she and everyone else in her town knew by third grade who she was going to have to marry. In a long-established, very isolated town of less than three hundred the choices were very limited unless you wanted to a) marry a first or second cousin or b) marry someone else, thus forcing their designated partner to marry a first or second cousin. Oh, or c) move away. She said she knew “her” forced pick was a big doodie-head and so before age 8 she had resigned herself to option C. —fl]

[*** No pun intended. —fl]

[****
This would be true, by the way, whether or not that was the literal liturgical reasoning behind the policies Lynn touched on in the quoted piece. Although, based on identification of incest between priest and parishioner as strongly overlapping what we’d call sexual harassment or exploitation of position, I’m pretty sure that really was the original line of thought. —fl]