The origin and development of the moral ideas

Nor are unnatural sins allowed to defile the land of the Lord. Whosoever shall commit such abominations, be he Israelite or stranger dwelling among the Israelites, shall be put to death, the souls that do them shall be cut off from their people. By unnatural sins of lust the Canaanites polluted their land, so that God visited their guilt, and the land spued out its inhabitants.171

This horror of homosexual practices was shared by Christianity. According to St. Paul, they form the climax of the moral corruption to which God gave over the heathen because of their apostasy from him.172 Tertullian says that they are banished “not only from the threshold, but from all shelter of the church, because they are not sins, but monstrosities.”173 St. Basil maintains that they deserve the same punishment as murder, idolatry, and witchcraft.174 According to a decree of the Council of Elvira, those who abuse boys to satisfy their lusts are denied communion even at their last hour.175 In no other point of morals was the contrast between the teachings of Christianity and the habits and opinions of the world over which it spread more radical than in this. In Rome there was an old law of unknown date, called Lex Scantinia (or Scatinia), which imposed a mulct on him who committed pederasty with a free person;176 but this law, of which very little is known, had lain dormant for ages, and the subject of ordinary homosexual intercourse had never afterwards attracted the attention of the pagan legislators.177 But when Christianity became the religion of the Roman Empire, a veritable crusade was opened against it.

Constantius and Constans made it a capital crime, punishable with the sword.178 Valentinian went further still and ordered that those who were found guilty of it should be burned alive in the presence of all the people.179 Justinian, terrified by certain famines, earthquakes, and pestilences, issued an edict which again condemned persons guilty of unnatural offences to the sword, “lest, as the result of these impious acts, whole cities should perish together with their inhabitants,” as we are taught by Holy Scripture that through such acts cities have perished with the men in them.180 “A sentence of death and infamy,” says Gibbon, “was often founded on the slight and suspicious evidence of a child or a servant, … and pederasty became the crime of those to whom no crime could be imputed.”181

This attitude towards homosexual practices had a profound and lasting influence on European legislation. Throughout the Middle Ages and later, Christian lawgivers thought that nothing but a painful death in the flames could atone for the sinful act.182 In England Fleta speaks of the offender being buried alive;183 but we are elsewhere told that burning was the due punishment.184 As unnatural intercourse, however, was a subject for ecclesiastical cognizance, capital punishment could not be inflicted on the criminal unless the Church relinquished him to the secular arm; and it seems very doubtful whether she did relinquish him. Sir Frederick Pollock and Professor Maitland consider that the statute of 1533, which makes sodomy felony, affords an almost sufficient proof that the temporal courts had not punished it, and that no one had been put to death for it for a very long time past.185 It was said that the punishment for this crime—which the English law, in its very indictments, treats as a crime not fit to be named186—was determined to be capital by “the voice of nature and of reason, and the express law of God”;187 and it remained so till 1861,188 although in practice the extreme punishment was not inflicted.189 In France persons were actually burned for this crime in the middle and latter part of the eighteenth century.190 But in this, as in so many other respects, the rationalistic movement of that age brought about a change.191 To punish sodomy with death, it was said, is atrocious; when unconnected with violence, the law ought to take no notice of it at all.

It does not violate any other person’s right, its influence on society is merely indirect, like that of drunkenness and free love; it is a disgusting vice, but its only proper punishment is contempt.192 This view was adopted by the French ‘Code pénal,’ according to which homosexual practices in private, between two consenting adult parties, whether men or women, are absolutely unpunished. The homosexual act is treated as a crime only when it implies an outrage on public decency, or when there is violence or absence of consent, or when one of the parties is under age or unable to give valid consent.193 This method of dealing with homosexuality has been followed by the legislators of various European countries,194 and in those where the law still treats the act in question per se as a penal offence, notably in Germany, a propaganda in favour of its alteration is carried on with the support of many men of scientific eminence. This changed attitude of the law towards homosexual intercourse undoubtedly indicates a change of moral opinions. Though it is impossible to measure exactly the degree of moral condemnation, I suppose that few persons nowadays attach to it the same enormity of guilt as did our forefathers. And the question has even been put whether morality has anything at all to do with a sexual act, committed by the mutual consent of two adult individuals, which is productive of no offspring, and which on the whole concerns the welfare of nobody but the parties themselves.195

From this review of the moral ideas on the subject, incomplete though it be, it appears that homosexual practices are very frequently subject to some degree of censure, though the degree varies extremely. This censure is no doubt, in the first place, due to that feeling of aversion or disgust which the idea of homosexual intercourse tends to call forth in normally constituted adult individuals whose sexual instincts have developed under normal conditions. I presume that nobody will deny the general prevalence of such a tendency. It corresponds to that instinctive repugnance to sexual connections with women which is so frequently found in congenital inverts; whilst that particular form of it with which legislators have chiefly busied themselves evokes, in addition, a physical disgust of its own. And in a society where the large majority of people are endowed with normal sexual desires their aversion to homosexuality easily develops into moral censure and finds a lasting expression in custom, law, or religious tenets. On the other hand, where special circumstances have given rise to widely spread homosexual practices, there will be no general feeling of disgust even in the adults, and the moral opinion of the society will be modified accordingly. The act may still be condemned, in consequence of a moral doctrine formed under different conditions, or of the vain attempts of legislators to check sexual irregularities, or out of utilitarian considerations; but such a condemnation would in most people be rather theoretical than genuine.

At the same time the baser forms of homosexual love may be strongly disapproved of for the same reasons as the baser forms of intercourse between men and women; and the passive pederast may be an object of contempt on account of the feminine practices to which he lends himself, as also an object of hatred on account of his reputation for sorcery. We have seen that the effeminate men are frequently believed to be versed in magic;196 their abnormalities readily suggest that they are endowed with supernatural power, and they may resort to witchcraft as a substitute for their lack of manliness and physical strength. But the supernatural qualities or skill in magic ascribed to men who behave like women may also, instead of causing hatred, make them honoured or reverenced.

It has been suggested that the popular attitude towards homosexuality was originally an aspect of economics, a question of under- or over-population, and that it was forbidden or allowed accordingly. Dr. Havelock Ellis thinks it probable that there is a certain relationship between the social reaction against homosexuality and against infanticide:—“Where the one is regarded leniently and favourably, there generally the other is also; where the one is stamped out, the other is usually stamped out.”197 But our defective knowledge of the opinions of the various savage races concerning homosexuality hardly warrants such a conclusion; and if a connection really does exist between homosexual practices and infanticide it may be simply due to the numerical disproportion between the sexes resulting from the destruction of a multitude of female infants.198 On the other hand we are acquainted with several facts which are quite at variance with Dr. Ellis’s suggestion. Among many Hindu castes female infanticide has for ages been a genuine custom,199 and yet pederasty is remarkably rare among the Hindus. The ancient Arabs were addicted to infanticide,200 but not to homosexual love,201 whereas among modern Arabs the case is exactly the reverse. And if the early Christians deemed infanticide and pederasty equally heinous sins, they did so certainly not because they were anxious that the population should increase; if this had been their motive they would hardly have glorified celibacy.

It is true that in a few cases the unproductiveness of homosexual love has been given by indigenous writers as a reason for its encouragement or condemnation. It was said that the Cretan law on the subject had in view to check the growth of population; but, like Döllinger,202 I do not believe that this assertion touches the real root of the matter. More importance may be attached to the following passage in one of the Pahlavi texts:—“He who is wasting seed makes a practice of causing the death of progeny; when the custom is completely continuous, which produces an evil stoppage of the progress of the race, the creatures have become annihilated; and certainly, that action, from which, when it is universally proceeding, the depopulation of the world must arise, has become and furthered the greatest wish of Aharman.”203 I am, however, of opinion that considerations of this kind have generally played only a subordinate, if any, part in the formation of the moral opinions concerning homosexual practices. And it can certainly not be admitted that the severe Jewish law against sodomy was simply due to the fact that the enlargement of the population was a strongly felt social need among the Jews.204 However much they condemned celibacy, they did not put it on a par with the abominations of Sodom. The excessive sinfulness which was attached to homosexual love by Zoroastrianism, Hebrewism, and Christianity, had quite a special foundation. It cannot be sufficiently accounted for either by utilitarian considerations or instinctive disgust.

The abhorrence of incest is generally a much stronger feeling than the aversion to homosexuality. Yet in the very same chapter of Genesis which describes the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah we read of the incest committed by the daughters of Lot with their father; 205 and, according to the Roman Catholic doctrine, unnatural intercourse is an even more heinous sin than incest and adultery.206 The fact is that homosexual practices were intimately associated with the gravest of all sins: unbelief, idolatry, or heresy.