Of course, if I publish this, I'll look like someone who is obsessed with obsessive people who write obsessive laws, so maybe I should let it rot in oblivion like so many other posts. Besides, how can I be expected to solve a centuries-old theological dispute in a blog post?

So may the gods forgive my neglect of my obsession with obsessiveness! (While this is an awful dichotomy, I have decided to sail directly into the Scylla of "neurotic" obsessiveness as opposed to the Charybdis of "healthy" neglect.)

Anyway, regular readers know that I've often scratched my head over how the sin referred to as "sodomy" became more important than all other sins -- to the point where some people see sodomy theology as the overarching be-all of Christianity itself. Why the apparent obsession? And why did the same thing not happen with Judaism, which is after all said to be the source from which the original condemnation of homosexuality derived?

Don't expect to find the answer in the Bible. While a few references to same sex sin are there, they cannot be called obsessive by any rational standard. To find the obsessiveness, you have to go to medieval sources. Not just any old medieval sources, but the obsessed medieval priests and monks -- one of the most noteworthy being an 11th Century religious scholar named Peter Damian.

I stumbled onto Peter Damian while reading The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology by Mark D. Jordan. The author does a good job of explaining how "sodomy" became code language in which the name of a physical place evolved into unique form of condemnatory language of all people in all places and times who practiced certain behaviors (which, I'd add, have no logical connection to attempted angel rape actually described in the Bible). "Sodomy" as a term was a medieval creation -- and Peter Damian was its principal creator.

The more I read, the more it occurred to me that there might be a simple reason behind the development of the extreme animosity against homosexuality which found its way into Christian theology. For starters, guys like Damian were not ordinary people. He and others like him flagellated themselves regularly. This was called "the discipline." In an amazing leap of logic, he also devoted a good deal of time to "proving" that God can actually restore virginity (although Damian maintained it was "wicked" to ask whether God could actually undo the deed which caused the virginity to be lost.)

It occured to me that men drawn to living together in religious orders under vows of poverty and celibacy might tend to think about some sins more than other sins, for the simple reason that only certain sins would have been possible, much less present.

I mean, put yourself in their position: if you are living with people wearing the same primitive sack cloth attire, eating the same dull and uninspired foods, whipping yourself daily, surrounded by nothing worth stealing, no ordinary enemies to kill, no females to date, and no entertainment in the popular sense (like, say, killing Jews, or butting cats to death with your head), while your thoughts might not necessarily turn to having sex with your fellow flagellants, it could certainly be expected to happen in others, and it obviously did. A lot. And not only would those who did it have plenty of guilt to obsess over, but those who didn't could be expected to become even more obsessed with those who did.

Anyway, I never gave much thought to the plight of these medieval clerics before I read the book. Not that the author felt terribly sorry for them; I think he's mad at them over the fact that their theological distortions were written into Christian theology. True, the consequences are with us today in the form of the obsession with homosexuality that an occasional modern blogger like me will complain about, but I hardly think the obsessions of these medieval clerics should surprise anyone.

Even a critic of Jordan's book would seem to partially concede that point:

Why is it, asks Jordan, that so much energy is expended on denunciations of sodomy compared with the more lenient treatment of other sins in the medieval catalogue of vices, say, murder, usury, simony, or adultery?

Why, indeed. Medieval monastic and scholastic authors presumably had less pastoral experience than did the regular clergy with murder, adultery, and usury, or even with standard clerical sins such as simony, nicolaitism (clerical marriage), and concubinage. As members of male religious houses, however, Benedictine monks (like St. Peter Damian) had in common with Dominican friars (like Saints Albert and Thomas) a concern for the moral, spiritual, and psychological health of a same-sex religious community.

To whatever degree priests are actually more inclined to pederasty than anyone else, the association is not new, as the excerpt below indicates. Taken from an eleventh-century book-length invective against homosexuality among priests, the passage demonstrates that not only were homosexuality and pederasty common in the Middle Ages, but so little was being done about it that the author, Peter Damian, an Irishman, felt the need to speak out violently. His verbal assault is sweeping and relentless and, to the modern eye, somewhat comical. But despite his overblown rhetoric, Damian clearly believed that homosexuality and pederasty were the foremost faults with the medieval priesthood. Nine centuries of civilization have done little to erode the stereotype.

From The Book of Gomorrah: An Eleventh-Century Treatise Against Clerical Homosexual Practices by Peter Damian
translated by Pierre J. Payer

A Mournful Lament for the Soul Who Is Given over to the Filth of Impurity

O, I weep for you unfortunate soul, and from the depths of my heart I sigh over the lot of your destruction. I weep for you, I say, miserable soul who are given over to the filth of impurity. You are to be mourned indeed with a whole fountain of tears. What a pity! "Who will give to my head waters and my eyes a fountain of tears?" And this mournful voice is not now less suitably drawn from my sobbing self than was then spoken out of the prophetic mouth. I do not bewail the stone ramparts of a city fortified by towers, not the lower buildings of a temple made by hands; I do not lament the progress of a vile people taken into the captivity of the rule of the Babylonian king. My plaint is for the noble soul made in the image and likeness of God and joined with the most precious blood of Christ. It is brighter than many buildings, certainly to be preferred to all the heights of earthly construction. Therefore I especially lament the lapse of the soul and the destruction of the temple in which Christ had resided. O eyes wear yourselves out in crying aloud, overflow the rivers full of tears, water with continuous tears my sad, mournful face! . . .

Consider, O miserable one, how much darkness weighs on your soul; notice what thick, dark blindness engulfs you. Does the fury of lust impel you to the male sex? Has the madness of lust incited you to your own kind, that is, male to male? Does a [male] goat goaded by lust, ever sometimes leap on a [male] goat? Does a ram leap on a ram, maddened with the heat of sexual union?

In fact a stallion feeds calmly and peacefully with a stallion in one stall and when he sees a mare the sense of lust is immediately unleashed. Never does a bull petulantly desire a bull out of love for sexual union; never does a mule bray under the stimulant for sex with a mule. But ruined men do not fear to commit what the very brutes shrink from in horror. What is committed by the rashness of human depravity is condemned by the judgement of irrational animals.
Unmanned man, speak! Respond, effeminate man! What do you seek in a male which you cannot find in yourself? What sexual difference? What different physical lineaments? What softness? What tender, carnal attraction? What pleasant, smooth face? Let the vigour of the male appearance terrify you, I beseech you; your mind should abhor virile strength. In fact, it is the rule of natural appetite that each seek beyond himself what he cannot find within the cloister of his own faculty. Therefore, if contact with male flesh delights you, turn your hand to yourself. Know that whatever you do not find in yourself, you seek vainly in another [male] body. Woe to you, unfortunate soul, at whose ruin angels are saddened and whom the enemy insults with applause. You are made the prey of demons, the rape of the cruel, the spoils of wicked men. All your enemies open their mouths against you; they hiss and gnash their teeth. They say: "We have devoured her; this at last is the day we hoped for; we found it, we saw it."

The miserable flesh burns with the heat of lust; the cold mind trembles with the rancour of suspicion; and in the heart of the miserable man chaos boils like Tartarus. . . . In fact, after this most poisonous serpent once sinks its fangs into the unhappy soul, sense is snatched away, memory is borne off, the sharpness of the mind is obscured. It becomes unmindful of God and even forgetful of itself. This plague undermines the foundation of faith, weakens the strength of hope, destroys the bond of charity; it takes away justice, subverts fortitude, banishes temperance, blunts the keeness of prudence. And what more should I say since it expels the whole host of the virtues from the chamber of the human heart and introduces every barbarous vice as if the bolts of the doors were pulled out.

For it is this which violates sobriety, kills modesty, strangles chastity, and butchers irreparable virginity with the dagger of unclean contagion. It defiles everything, stains everything, pollutes everything. And as for itself, it permits nothing pure, nothing clean, nothing other than filth.

Not only does sodomitical practice defile everything again note the generality of Damian's word choice but it easily casts out the normative, permitting only things unclean. The threat of sodomy then is not simply a perversion or deviation of the norm but a full-scale displacement of the Same's instability onto the Other. Hence not only is sodomy itself irrational and able to conflate truth and error, but it is also a perversion so powerful that through it the normative social order and the reason subtending it can be overthrown and, ultimately, destroyed. Damian's statement is just as, if not more, revealing of the normative as it is of the deviant. From this perspective, the Liber Gomorrhianus divulges, probably unconsciously, the very state of the normative which its rhetorical, spiritual, and sexual politics attempt to occlude.

Well, there is a candidate for president who called homosexuality "the thermonuclear device--that is aimed at the soul of America," but I think that in general, such views are atypical today. Not merely because they're derived from medieval thinking, but because they're derived from atypical medieval thinking. I think that the people who wrote medieval "sodomy" theology that became Christian theology were truly tormented souls, personally obsessed with and quite possibly too close to the subject to write about it in an objective manner.

It is understandable in one sense that people obsess over things that matter to them personally. (After all, why would I be writing this post if it did not matter to me?) But why is it that obsessed emotional thinking tends to become dominant thinking on any particular subject to the point where logic and reason are crowded out? Are the vast majority of non-obsessed people like a bunch of sheep who are incapable of thinking for themselves?

A similar conflict of interest touches on why laws should not be -- but often are -- written by activists. Animal rights activists work for animal rights organizations and draft animal legislation. Environmentalists go to work for the EPA or Greenpeace and then draft environmental legislation. Members of identity groups write new laws calling for inclusion of their particular group. And so on.

I am getting so tired of writing about these things that I really ought to figure out how to take a break. But ignoring the obsessed does not stop them from obsessing, and ignoring activists does not stop activism. (Which means that every time I try to avoid obsessing over the obsessed activists, they draaag me back in!)

Seriously, if I can't fix gun control obsessions in Philadelphia, how the hell can I fix sodomy control obsessions in the early Middle Ages?

MORE: Not that it would matter much to anyone but a student of medieval theology, but according to Jordan, Damian sees sodomy as unique among sins because it is incapable of being repented (something Jordan sees as violative of Christian teaching):

Peter Damian's construction of sodomy renders it "as a sin that cannot be repented. [Damian's] conception violates the fundamental Christian teaching about sins of the flesh, namely, that they are always repentable. To conceive of a fleshly sin that cannot be repented is to set in motion an interminable dialectic. The dialectic can be stopped only by admitting that what has been categorized as an unrepentable fleshly sin is either not a sin or not fleshly."