Clerical Celibacy in the West: c.1100-1700

Helen Parish

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317165156
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The debate over clerical celibacy and marriage had its origins in the early Christian centuries, and is still very much alive in the modern church. The content and form of controversy have remained remarkably consistent, but each era has selected and shaped the sources that underpin its narrative, and imbued an ancient issue with an immediacy and relevance. The basic question of whether, and why, continence should be demanded of those who serve at the altar has never gone away, but the implications of that question, and of the answers given, have changed with each generation. In this reassessment of the history of sacerdotal celibacy, Helen Parish examines the emergence and evolution of the celibate priesthood in the Latin church, and the challenges posed to this model of the ministry in the era of the Protestant Reformation. Celibacy was, and is, intensely personal, but also polemical, institutional, and historical. Clerical celibacy acquired theological, moral, and confessional meanings in the writings of its critics and defenders, and its place in the life of the church continues to be defined in relation to broader debates over Scripture, apostolic tradition, ecclesiastical history, and papal authority. Highlighting continuity and change in attitudes to priestly celibacy, Helen Parish reveals that the implications of celibacy and marriage for the priesthood reach deep into the history, traditions, and understanding of the church.

CHAPTER 1
‘If there is one faith, there must be one tradition’: Clerical Celibacy and Marriage in the Early Church

Central to the medieval and early modern debates surrounding the legitimacy and necessity of a celibate priesthood was the issue of whether the origins of clerical celibacy were to be found in the church of the apostles. The significance of biblical and apostolic precedent turned the example of the first centuries of the Christian era into a hunting ground for churchmen and protagonists on both sides of the debate. This focus is equally evident in modern scholarship, with recent studies of clerical celibacy returning to the theme of the inheritance of the primitive church, either as a necessary preamble to an understanding of the present and historical discipline, or as a topic in its own right.¹ As Stefan Heid has demonstrated, this approach is not without its problems; there are dangers in any attempt to read backwards from the modern discipline in an attempt to find an identical praxis in the early history of the church, not least if the apparent absence of a universal obligation to remain unmarried is read as an equal absence of any motivation or inclination towards a celibate clergy.² The assertion that there was no coherent and binding prohibition of marriage to the clergy of the early church becomes, in this approach, a validation of the assumption that compulsory celibacy in the modern church is the culmination of the erosion of clerical freedom by an increasingly institutional papal church in the centuries that followed.³ Such an approach has been substantially undermined by the contributions of Christian Cochini and Roman Cholij to the debate. Rather than searching for complete parallels between ancient and modern, Cholij and Cochini have suggested that the presence of a continent, if not unmarried, higher clergy in the primitive church requires that we ask a rather different question of the history of clerical celibacy. The issue, they suggest, is not whether a married man might be ordained as a priest (as many undoubtedly were) but whether enduring and exclusive continence was required of all those, married and unmarried, who entered higher orders.⁴ In whatever form the question is posed, however, it is clear that the precedent provided by the primitive church remains a critical component of the argument over the origins and history of clerical celibacy.

The debate over the ‘apostolic origins’ of clerical celibacy does not limit the chronology and polemical geography of the controversy to the immediate post-Christian era. It is, for example, evident that continence and celibacy had been prized among certain pre-Christian groups, and it was not just the primitive church, but also Jewish tradition that was used to provide fuel for subsequent debate and legitimation for later legislation. The Judaic precedent was to become particularly important as an argument for clerical celibacy developed from the principle that the Christian priesthood was a continuation of the Aaronic priesthood of the Old Testament.⁵ The requirement that the priests of the Old Law abstain from their wives during their period of service in the temple (Lev. 8:33) coupled with, for example, the expectation that the same demand was made of participants in a holy war, lent weight to the assertion that there was a link between sacred function, the encounter with the divine, and moral purity. Thus, for the duration of the revelation of God on Mount Sinai, Moses instructed that the Israelites refrain from sexual intercourse (Exodus 19:15). When David led his troops against the Philistines, the fact that they had abstained from intercourse permitted them to partake of the consecrated bread (1 Sam. 21:4–6). Yahweh would abide with his troops, it was promised, if the holiness of the camp was maintained (Deut. 23:10–15).⁶ The obligations imposed in the Pentateuch were underpinned by the assumption that the priest occupied a sacred sphere, and reinforced the sense of separation between priest and layman. A priest was set apart from his people by divine mandate: ‘Thus shalt thou separate the Levites from among the children of Israel: and the Levites shall be mine’ (Num. 8:14; Deut. 10:8). This separateness extended to laws which constrained the marriage of priests. It was forbidden for a priest to marry a woman who had been divorced, or who had been a prostitute, ‘for he is holy unto his God’ (Lev. 21:7). The sons of Aaron were deemed to be ceremonially unclean and not permitted to handle the sacred elements at the tabernacle until they had washed in the evening (Lev. 22:4–6), and it was unlawful for an individual to approach the sacred in a state of uncleanness. The demands placed upon the priests, and the constructs of purity upon which they were based, established the requirements of the state of holiness in which the priests dwelled, separate from the life of the people. Entry to that state was made possible by ritual purification, usually through washing, which has led Gerard Sloyan to suggest that the purity required of the priestly legislation was not contingent upon ethical virtue; rather, Sloyan suggests, the ritually fit person is not the one who has abstained but the one on whose body or clothing there remains no trace of such engagement.⁷

However, these stringent regulations did not amount to a complete deprecation of the physical, nor to a total rejection of the value of marriage. The universal nature of marriage in Jewish custom, the assertion in Genesis that it was not good for man to be alone, and the command to ‘be fruitful and multiply’ (Gen. 1:28) suggested that marriage and procreation were part of the divine plan. Indeed, inherent in the limitations placed upon the marriage of the Levites, for example in the obligation that a priest marry a virgin of his own people (Lev. 21:13–14), was the existence of the married priesthood itself, in which the office of the priest was hereditary. Sexuality was thus undoubtedly an important element in human life, but one that was to be controlled in proximity to the holy. Sacred and sexual activities were regarded as mutually exclusive, but the expectation was that continence and ritual purity would be practised for a specific time. The abstinence required of a priest before he served at the Temple was temporary rather than perpetual; there was, it has been argued, no sense in which marriage itself was ‘morally contaminating’, and no sense in which virginity was expected to be a permanent state.⁸ The legacy provided to the emergent Christian churches was in this sense ambivalent. The controls exerted over the conduct of the Levitical priesthood implied a relationship between sacred function and sexual abstinence, yet it is abundantly clear that marriage was held in high esteem and was certainly not prohibited to those who served at the temple. And as Christian Cochini has already noted, this insistence upon a liturgical ‘purity’ from those who served at the altar was alone among the Levitical prohibitions in its retention in the apostolic church; ‘if we go back to the Old Testament’s prescriptions concerning the sanctity of priests, we cannot help but be struck by the fact that only sexual interdictions survived the deep mutations that put a definitive end to the rules of purity and impurity’.⁹ The means by which such purity was to be preserved, for example in the avoidance of contact with the bodies of the dead, or in the ritual cleanness attained by washing, were not detailed in the new law, yet the Levitical insistence upon sexual abstinence was to remain a critical part of the foundations of the obligation to celibacy placed upon ministers in the Christian church.

One of the more problematic precedents for the association of celibacy with holiness and access to the sacred lies in the Essene communities in the centuries immediately prior to the birth of Christ. It has been suggested that the response of many Jews to the changes in the world around them in this period encouraged the radicalisation of the sexual codes that were already apparent in Levitical law.¹⁰ The accounts by two Jewish writers, Josephus and Philo, and by Pliny the Elder, all suggest that the Essenes led a communal life in which celibacy was both strictly observed, and indeed demanded of certain members for an indefinite period. Such a life of purity would reach fulfilment in the inheritance of the promised land. Yet the evidence is far from conclusive; the most famous documentary record, the Dead Sea Scrolls, makes no such link between the priestly sect and an obligation to complete continence, and the presence in the Qumran cemetery of the bodies of men and women and children suggests a separation that was less than complete. The validity of the Scrolls (and indeed the forensic excavations) as a record of Essene life has been vociferously challenged, particularly given this divergence between the textual and physical evidence.¹¹ Marriage appears to have been deferred rather than disavowed in the community, although it is worthy of note that even if perpetual celibacy was not required, the postponement of marriage beyond the age of puberty was unusual.¹²

There are also dangers in extrapolating from the Essene example to assume that such practices were common, or served as the building blocks of later Christian monasticism. The relationship between the Qumran community, the Scrolls, and the Essenes remains uncertain, and the account of Essene life provided by Philo may well be less than typical. It is not clear why the Essenic life of continence was expected of, or attractive to, specific sections of Jewish society.¹³ However, some degree of influence of Persian and neo-Pythagorean thought on Jewish communities would not be out of place, and would certainly accommodate effectively the structures described in Philo’s narrative of the Essenes. There were clearly those who perceived celibacy through the mirror of asceticism, and articulated the more radical principle that sexual intercourse debased and constrained the soul, and that its freedom could be won only through the practice of complete continence. The ascetic imperative of the Stoic and Epicurean philosophies, and even the celibacy of Indian monasticism, exerted a profound influence over the Mediterranean world.¹⁴ Platonic assertions of the superiority of the soul over the body, and the moral peril of sexuality, established a dichotomy between idea and matter that extended into the thought of the first Christian centuries. The nascent religion was born into a world already ‘fertilised with sexual asceticism’,¹⁵ both in this separation of spiritual and material, and in the separate life of religious communities.

The association of prophetic authority, continence, and repentance in the life of, for example, John the Baptist, perhaps exemplified this trend in the minds of early Christian writers and observers of the new religion. Certainly, the fact that Christ was unmarried at the start of his fourth decade occasioned little comment. However, despite the absence of a clear statement on the subject, both the personal example and the instruction of Jesus were to prove central to later debates over the merits and necessity of a celibate priesthood. While the proponents of clerical marriage posited that the Gospels provided little direct evidence that the prohibition of marriage was expected by Christ or practised with any rigour in the first Christian centuries, defenders of clerical celibacy have argued it to be a necessary feature of a priesthood modelled on Christ. An unmarried Christ is often assumed in writings on clerical celibacy and marriage,¹⁶ and the Second Vatican Council echoed this long tradition in its commendation of those priests who ‘have freely undertaken celibacy in imitation of Christ’.¹⁷ There is little agreement, however, as to why (or if) Christ remained celibate. The commendation of those who remained unmarried ‘for the sake of the kingdom’ (Matt. 19:12) might point to a more general preference for virginity or celibacy over marriage, but, as Gerald Sloyan has indicated, prec...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction – ‘For the sake of the kingdom of heaven’?: Shaping the Celibacy Debate
• 1 ‘If there is one faith, there must be one tradition’: Clerical Celibacy and Marriage in the Early Church
• 2 ‘Preserving the Ancient Rule and Apostolic Perfection’?: Celibacy and Marriage in East and West
• 3 ‘A concubine or an unlawful woman’: Celibacy, Marriage, and the Gregorian Reform
• 4 ‘In marriage they will live more piously and honestly’: Debating Clerical Celibacy in the Pre-Reformation Church
• 5 ‘The whole world and the devil will laugh’: Clerical Celibacy and Married Priests in the Age of Reformation
• 6 ‘Contrary to the state of their order and the laudable customs of the church’: Clerical Celibacy in the Catholic Church after the Reformation
• Conclusion – ‘One of the chief ornaments of the Catholic clergy’?: Celibacy in the Modern Church
• Bibliography
• Index