In MercatorNet
It is ironic that the proponents of
homosexuality so often point to ancient Greece as their paradigm because of its
high state of culture and its partial acceptance of homosexuality or, more
accurately, pederasty. Though some ancient Greeks did write paeans to homosexual
love, it did not occur to any of them to propose homosexual relationships as the
basis for marriage in their societies. The only homosexual relationship that was
accepted was between an adult male and a male adolescent. This relationship was
to be temporary, as the youth was expected to get married and start a family as
soon as he reached maturity.
The idea that someone was a “homosexual” for
life or had this feature as a permanent identity would have struck them as more
than odd. In other words, “homosexuality”, for which a word in Greek did not
exist at the time (or in any other language until the late 19th century), was
purely transitory. It appears that many of these mentoring relationships in
ancient Greece were chaste and that the ones that were not rarely involved
sodomy. Homosexual relationships between mature male adults were not accepted.
This is hardly the idealized homosexual paradise that contemporary “gay”
advocates harken back to in an attempt to legitimize behavior that would have
scandalized the Greeks.
What is especially ironic is that ancient
Greece’s greatest contribution to Western civilization was philosophy, which
discovered that the mind can know things, as distinct from just having opinions
about them, that objective reality exists, and that there is some purpose
implied in its construction.
The very idea of Nature and natural law arose as
a product of this philosophy, whose first and perhaps greatest exponents,
Socrates and Plato, were unambiguous in their condemnation of homosexual acts as
unnatural. In the Laws, Plato’s last book, the Athenian speaker says
that, "I think that the pleasure is to be deemed natural which arises out of the
intercourse between men and women; but that the intercourse of men with men, or
of women with women, is contrary to nature, and that the bold attempt was
originally due to unbridled lust." (Laws 636C; see also
Symposium of Xenophon, 8:34, Plato’s Symposium,
219B-D).
For Socrates, the sight of beauty is not to be
taken as something in itself, but as a reflection of divine Beauty and the
ultimate Good toward which Eros directs the soul. It is an error,
therefore, to be diverted by the reflection in one’s search for the ultimate
Good, which is the source of beauty. Beauty stirs and awakens the soul, but it
is philosophy that provides the means of perceiving and coming to know the
Good.
As a consequence of this metaphysical view,
Socrates sees the erotic attraction of a grown man (erastes) for a
beautiful male youth (eromenos or paidika) within the
perspective of the erotic drive for wisdom. This drive will be thwarted by a
life of self-indulgence and can proceed only with a life of self-discipline.
Therefore, the relationship between the erastes and the
eromenos should be of the older enlightening the younger in
philosophical education. This means that any physical touching by the older man
of the younger must be in regards to the latter “as a son,” as Socrates puts it,
and not further than that.
What went further than that, Socrates condemned.
He loathed sodomy. According to Xenophon in The Memorabilia (i 2.29f.),
Socrates saw that Kritias was sexually importuning the youth of whom Kritias was
enamored, “wanting to deal with him in the manner of those who enjoy the body
for sexual intercourse”. Socrates objected that “what he asks is not a good
thing.” Socrates said that, “Kritias was no better off than a pig if he wanted
to scratch himself against Euthydemos as piglets do against stones.”
In Phaedrus (256 a-b), Socrates makes
clear the moral superiority of the loving male relationship that avoids being
sexualized: “If now the better elements of the mind, which lead to a
well-ordered life and to philosophy, prevail, they live a life of happiness and
harmony here on earth, self-controlled and orderly, holding in subjection that
which causes evil in the soul and giving freedom to that which makes for
virtue…”
By their chastity, these Platonic lovers have,
according to another translation of the text, “enslaved” the source of moral
evil in themselves and “liberated” the force for good. This was the kind of
mentoring relationship of which Socrates and Plato approved. On the other hand,
“he who is forced to follow pleasure and not good (239c)” because he is enslaved
to his passions will perforce bring harm to the one whom he loves because he is
trying to please himself, rather than seeking the good of the other.
In the Laws, Plato makes clear that
moral virtue in respect to sexual desire is not only necessary to the right
order of the soul, but is at the heart of a well-ordered polis. The Athenian
speaker says:
“… I had an idea for
reinforcing the law about the natural use of the intercourse which procreates
children, abstaining from the male, not deliberately killing human progeny or
‘sowing in rocks and stones’, where it will never take root and be endowed with
growth, abstaining too from all female soil in which you would not want what you
have sown to grow.
“This law when it has
become permanent and prevails—if it has rightly become dominant in other cases,
just as it prevails now regarding intercourse with parents— confers innumerable
benefits. In the first place, it has been made according to nature; also, it
effects a debarment from erotic fury and insanity, all kinds of adultery and all
excesses in drink and food, and it makes man truly affectionate to their own
wives: other blessings also would ensue, in infinite number, if one could make
sure of this law.” (The Laws 838-839)
The central insight of classical Greek
philosophy is that the order of the city is the order of the soul writ large. If
there is disorder in the city, it is because of disorder in the souls of its
citizens. This is why virtue in the lives of the citizens is necessary for a
well-ordered polis. This notion is reflected in the Athenian’s statement
concerning the political benefits of the virtue of chastity.
The relationship between virtue and political
order is, of course, par excellence, the subject of Aristotle’s works. It was a
preoccupation of not only philosophy, but of drama as well. Just read The
Bacchae by Euripides. Euripides and the Classical Greeks knew that
Eros is not a plaything. In The Bacchae, as brilliantly
explicated by E. Michael Jones, Euripides showed exactly how unsafe sex is when
disconnected from the moral order. When Dionysus visits Thebes, he entices King
Penthius to view secretly the women dancing naked on the mountainside in
Dionysian revelries. Because Penthius succumbs to his desire to see “their wild
obscenities,” the political order is toppled, and the queen mother, Agave, one
of the bacchants, ends up with the severed head of her son Penthius in her lap —
an eerie premonition of abortion.
The lesson is clear: Once Eros is
released from the bonds of family, Dionysian passions can possess the soul.
Giving in to them is a form of madness because erotic desire is not directed
toward any end that can satisfy it. It is insatiable. “That which causes evil in
the soul” – in which Plato includes homosexual intercourse – will ultimately
result in political disorder.
For Aristotle, the irreducible core of a polity
is the family. Thus, Aristotle begins The Politics not with a single
individual, but with a description of a man and a woman together in the family,
without which the rest of society cannot exist. As he says in The
Politics, “first of all, there must necessarily be a union or pairing of
those who cannot exist without one another.” Later, he states that “husband and
wife are alike essential parts of the family.”
Without the family, there are no villages, which
are associations of families, and without villages, there is no polis. “Every
state is [primarily] composed of households,” Aristotle asserts. In other words,
without households – meaning husbands and wives together in families – there is
no state. In this sense, the family is the pre-political institution. The state
does not make marriage possible; marriage makes the state possible. Homosexual
marriage would have struck Aristotle as an absurdity since you could not found a
polity on its necessarily sterile relations. This is why the state has a
legitimate interest in marriage, because, without it, it has no
future.
If Aristotle is correct – that the family is the
primary and irreducible element of society – then chastity becomes the
indispensable political principle because it is the virtue which regulates and
makes possible the family – the cornerstone unit of the polis. Without the
practice of this virtue, the family becomes inconceivable. Without it, the
family disintegrates. A healthy family is posited upon the proper and exclusive
sexual relationship between a husband and wife. The family alone is capable of
providing the necessary stability for the profound relationship which sexual
union both symbolizes and cements and for the welfare of the children that issue
from it.
Violations of chastity undermine not only the
family, but society as a whole. This accounts for Aristotle’s pronounced
condemnation of adultery, which he finds all the more odious if committed while
the wife is pregnant: “For husband or wife to be detected in the commission of
adultery – at whatever time it may happen, in whatever shape or form, during all
the period of their being married and being called husband and wife – must be
made a matter of disgrace. But to be detected in adultery during the very period
of bringing children into the world is a thing to be punished by a stigma of
infamy proportionate to such an offense.” (The Politics, XVI, 18)
Aristotle understood that the laws were, or should be, ordered toward the
formation of a certain kind of person – toward the realization of a virtuous
citizenry.
This is why Aristotle forbids adultery, wants to
make it disgraceful in all circumstances, not only because it subverts virtue,
but because it attacks the political foundations of society. Adultery becomes a
political problem because it violates chastity, which is indispensable to a
rightly ordered polis. There is no comparable condemnation of adultery in
homosexual marriage in Aristotle because such an institution would have been
inconceivable to him, as it has been throughout history until recent times. That
is because it is a self-contradiction. Marriage cannot be based on an act which
is in itself a violation of chastity, because something cannot be its opposite.
A homosexual household would not make sense to Aristotle since it could not
contain parents and all the generational relations that spring from them, which
makes the polis possible. What did not make sense then still does not make sense
now, and for the same reasons.
