How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken (37 page)

Indeed, when halfway through his study Boswell pauses to frame one of three “nonpolemical” questions that a responsible historian faced with the manuscripts in question might pose—“Was it a marriage?”—Boswell is, in his own words, “unequivocal”:

It seems more than likely that, to Boswell's own unequivocally modern audience, “same-sex unions” will be taken as meaning “gay marriages.” These are Boswell's own words. If the “unions” he's talking about here are any other than the kind of affective, mutual, primarily erotic partnerships that people today understand as constituting a marriage, then his elaborate dissertation becomes a pointless exercise. To deny this essential point, or to hide behind sophistries about the alleged neutrality of the English term “same-sex” as opposed to “gay,” is disingenuous.

At the center of Boswell's four-hundred-page thesis about medieval gay marriages stands the text of an early Christian ceremony known as the
akolouthia
(occasionally
eukh
ê),
eis adelphopoiêsin
, the “liturgy” (or “prayer”) “for the creation of brothers”—or the “creation of lovers,” depending on how figuratively you care to read the
adelpho-
(literally, “brother”) in
adel
phopoiêsis
. (This interpretive point, to which I shall return later, is the fulcrum of Boswell's thesis.) The service has survived in various versions in a large number of manuscripts from all over Europe. These documents date to the period between the tenth and fifteenth centuries. In order to provide proper cultural context for these strange texts, however, Boswell laudably devotes nearly a third of his study to what he sees as the Greek, Roman, and late antique “background” evidence; and it is to his handling of this material (often well over a millennium older than the manuscripts themselves) that I shall devote most of my own discussion. I do so because the foundation of Boswell's argument about the meaning of the
adelphopoiêsis
ceremony is, in fact, an interlocked series of interpretations of linguistic and cultural material that is primarily classical.

Since the
adelphopoiêsis
liturgy proved to be a novelty even to a highly trained medievalist like Boswell himself, it seems appropriate to give an example here. Of those furnished in Boswell's “Appendix of Documents,” the one that is most ample and that contains the greatest quantity of material that could be construed as being helpful to the author's argument is the eleventh-century manuscript known as Grottaferrata II. I provide it here in Boswell's own translation, along with my own bracketed transliterations of important phrases from the original Greek. (I retain the author's italicization of the rubrics of priestly activity.)

 

O
FFICE FOR
S
AME
-S
EX
U
NION

(akolouthia eis adelphopoiêsin)

iv.

 

A
NOTHER
P
RAYER FOR
S
AME
-S
EX
U
NION

(eukhê hetera eis adelphopoiêsin)

This, then, is the ceremony of “same-sex union.”

In beginning his discussion, Boswell describes this ritual as being swathed in mystery and even, perhaps, in danger. His own study of it, he informs us in the Preface, “was undertaken as the result of a notice about a ceremony of same-sex union sent to me by a correspondent who prefers not to be named.” The hint at an urgent desire for anonymity provides a nice, John Grisham-y touch sadly absent from most scholarly prose; but the dark intimation that these rites were unknown to scholars is misleading. Since the end of the nineteenth century, when Giovanni Tomassia studied the ceremony, and into the twentieth when it was taken up again by Paul Koschaker, the
adelphopoiêsis
has been known to scholars. They have argued that the ceremonies celebrated some kind of “ritualized” friendship along the lines of a blood-brotherhood—a formalized relationship for which the parallels from ancient Mediterranean cultures, as the title of Gabriel Herman's 1987 study
Ritualized Friendship in the Greek City
suggests, are as numerous and well attested as are the competing parallels, drawn from the context of ancient sexual and erotic conventions, that Boswell adduces in support of his own argument. And indeed, nothing in the first four sections of this text (which closely resembles the entirety of the other examples Boswell gives) provides sufficient support for Boswell's “gay marriage” reading of the
adelphopoiêsis
over and above the less controversial and better-supported readings. The emphasis on peace, mutual Christian love,
agapê
, and aversion to scandal conform to any number of nonerotic interpretations—for example, that the ceremonies formalized alliances or reconciliations between heads of households or perhaps clans.

But few would contest the stunning and controversial force of the Grottaferrata manuscript's fifth part, which is indisputably a liturgy of Christian marriage, and indeed even of the sixth, with its reference to the traditional crowns of the Orthodox wedding service. On the force of this single document, as it appears in Boswell's Appendix, the case for gay marriage would seem to be incontrovertible.

The problem is that this is not, in fact, a single document: the fifth and sixth parts are almost certainly
not
part of the
adelphopoiêsis
ceremony. Rather, these appear to be the first two parts of an entirely separate, bona fide marriage ceremony—one of various kinship-related rituals that appear to have been collected in this and other of the various manuscripts in which the
adelphopoiêsis
liturgy appears. And here we come to the first example of what turns out to be a pattern of methodological and argumentative sins, both of commission and omission, on Boswell's part. Among these are a presentation of the evidence that is so tendentious as to be misleading; a highly selective use of anomalous or unrepresentative evidence to support key premises of the arguments; and a pervasive failure to account adequately for nuance and context in citing original sources. Subtending all of these is a rhetorical strategy whose disingenuousness verges on fraud, given the popularizing aims of Boswell's book: and here I refer to Boswell's self-serving deployment of notes and ancillary scholarship, the overall effect of which is to suppress information crucial to the proper interpretation of the arguments presented in the text itself.

Boswell previews his ostensibly harmless footnoting strategy in an introductory admonition to his readers:

The author goes on to suggest that whole chapters may indeed be skipped by all except those interested in what he dismisses as “liturgical niceties”—the kind of stuff that is, he self-deprecatingly hints, “perhaps not fascinating for the general reader.” I stress here, and shall emphasize again, how at the very outset of this study Boswell insinuates into his (general) audience's mind the notion that his copious footnotes will
deal with mere technicalities (he uses the words twice): that is, arcane fodder for the abstruse activity of “experts” and “specialists.”

With this in mind, then, let us turn to the author's discussion of the Grottaferrata text. At the end of Part IV of Grottaferrata II, a line is drawn across the page following the Greek word
apoluetai
—that is, after the sentence that Boswell translates as “Then they shall kiss the holy Gospel and the priest and one another, and conclude.” This scribal line is a fairly standard indication that what follows constitutes a separate text, and hence in this case strongly suggests in itself that Patriarch Methodius's Ecclesiastical Canon of Marriage is not, in fact, related to the
adelphopoiêsis
at all. That this is in fact the case seems to be supported by the use of the verb
apoluô
here, which generally marks the conclusion of liturgies from this period—as indeed it does in every other
adelphopoiêsis
ceremony provided by Boswell in which that word appears.

But not for Boswell, who instead tries to get around both the scribal line and the
apolusis
formula in a number of ingenious ways. The first of these involves a clever rearrangement of the text, at least for the benefit of his Greekless readers. In the Greek text, the closing instruction to kiss the Bible and the priest appears, as I have said, as the
last
line of section IV—that is, the last section of the
adelphopoiêsis
. But in Boswell's English translation—the one, of course, that the book's intended audience must consult—
the author transposes this line so that it appears to be the
first
line of section V
—that is, Methodius's marriage canon. In so doing Boswell slyly creates one seamless ceremony where in the original there were almost certainly two. (This presentation is helped along by Boswell's misleading insertion of an anachronistic colon following the word “conclude” at the end of the line in question, as if the word's function was to announce what was to follow, rather than to conclude what preceded it.)