A young German man has been sentenced to two years and nine months in prison for incest with his half-sister.
I take my hat off and have to make a conscious effort to resist the urge to genuflect. It’s wonderful to see that modern Western states outdo the Bible in imposing moral strictures.
After all, the Old Testament is part of the Christian canon, and that book took a rather permissive view on what is a felony in Germany. For example, Abraham married his half-sister Sarah, and the Bible looks upon that union with benevolence.
Abraham’s brother married his niece, Lot did the dirty with his two daughters (he was the worse for wear at the time, but I doubt today’s German court would see that as extenuation), King David’s son had sex with his half-sister and, well, it’s a long list.
Eventually the Hebrews had enough, and the third book of the Bible, Leviticus, issued a compendium of prohibited relationships, providing for every permutation of kinship. However, perhaps in deference to Lot, sex between a man and his daughter was left out, which one has to treat as acceptance by omission.
As for marriage between cousins, something banned today in many Western countries, including 30 out of the 50 American states, rather than being proscribed that practice was actively promoted in Biblical times, and not just among Hebrews.
Part of the reason was endogamy, the desire to keep matings within a kindred group to hold outsiders at bay. But scriptural permissiveness also had a role to play in such social arrangements: what wasn’t explicitly prohibited was deemed to be implicitly condoned.
Still, before we go out of our way praising the Germans for their probity, we must consider its unlikely cohabitation with permissiveness. For, while holding the line on incest, German and other Western governments are firm in protecting, inter alia, the right of a man who used to be a woman to be impregnated by a woman who used to be a man.
It’s true that the Bible issues no injunction against that rather unorthodox possibility, but probably only because even God couldn’t envision anything quite like that. As for copulation between people of the same sex, it has now passed being accepted on its way to becoming compulsory.
Great pagan thinkers, such as Plato, saw nothing particularly wrong with homosexuality. But they saw plenty wrong with the family, as the concept is understood in Western tradition. Whenever private happiness was in conflict with public good, that latter had to prevail.
Plato described this pecking order with helpful honesty and unmatched mastery in his Republic and especially in Laws. The polis was everything; the individual qua individual, next to nothing.
The same went for that extension of the individual, his family, which was to be reduced to more or less the state’s breeding farm. For example, according to Plato, who can be credited with the invention of eugenics, it was up to the polis to pair off couples on the basis of the potential usefulness of their offspring to the common good.
Before Cleisthenes’s reforms created the polis around 500 BC, such views would have been unthinkable to the Greeks. Their society, like that of the ancient Hebrews, had revolved around the family, clan, kinship and other personal ties. But by Plato’s time the variably democratic polis had made the family redundant in every sense other than the good of the polis.
This is the first intimation in history of the relationship since then amply proved: democracy and family are at odds. They aren’t friends, nor even allies, but competitors: the stronger the one, the weaker the other.
Sensing this, John Locke, who laid out the groundwork for the liberal democratic state, countenanced not only divorce but even polygamy: “He that is already married may marry another woman with his left hand…” It is reassuring to see how solicitously our Lockean modernity is trying to make sure his prophesy can come true – if in Locke’s time hostility to marriage was still inchoate, by now it has grown to full maturity.
Inhaling the zeitgeist, society responds with alacrity. As late as in 1978, more than 90 per cent of British babies were born to married parents. Today, it’s only about half, which is over ten times less than the rate seen in the early parts of the 20th century.
This is of course an outrage, but someone rummaging through the New Testament would find some justification for a dim view of marriage. St Paul’s injunctions against homosexual relations are well-known, but it’s less often mentioned that he wasn’t an enthusiastic advocate of straight sex either.
Marriage, especially when including a physical element, reduces man’s ability to serve God, according to Paul. “It is good for a man not to touch a woman,” he wrote to the Corinthians. Then, recognising the realities of life, he added: “Nevertheless, to avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband.” Still, even if married they should refrain from how’s your father.
I’m not sure how Paul reconciled his views with Jesus’s implicit elevation of marriage to a sacrament. After all, it was at a wedding that he performed his first miracle.
Jesus also issued an injunction against divorce: “And I say unto you, Whosoever shall put away his wife, except it be for fornication, and shall marry another, committeth adultery: and whoso marrieth her which is put away doth commit adultery.”
Nevertheless, the church found Paul’s attitude to marriage to be a development of Jesus’s commandments, rather than their denial. Marriage is now a holy sacrament in the church, but due to vigorous rearguard resistance it acquired this status only in the late 12th century.
However, having acquired it, marriage began to be treated with the deference befitting a sacrament. Even now most Catholic churches refuse to marry divorcees who dissolved their marriage in civil courts. In the eyes of the state they are free to remarry; in the eyes of the church they are still married to their original spouses.
All this goes to show that new morality is neither moral nor especially new. Mankind has done much trial and error, mostly the latter, and one can use that experience to make sense of the hodgepodge of facts I’ve thrown together.
Different civilisations had their own views on sex, marital or otherwise. All of them tended to be consistent and cogent on their own terms, although not necessarily on other people’s terms. All of them recognised the social, spiritual and religious aspects of marriage, although their relative weight varied from one epoch to the next.
You may like or dislike our epoch, but one thing is undeniable: consistency and cogency aren’t its most salient characteristics. Statism is, and it doesn’t sit comfortably with a strong family as the core unit of society.
The operators of modern states sense this viscerally even if they don’t perceive it rationally. That’s why everything they do in the area of intersex relations promotes licence as a weapon against the family.
Easy divorce, abortion on demand, pre-teen girls on contraception, obsession with sex, equalising all sorts of perversions in status with heterosexual marital sex – all these systematically undermine the family.
The family fights back by setting up a demographic catastrophe: the current birthrate in most Western countries is well below that required for population renewal. Totalitarian countries like Russia and China use dictatorial fiats for demographic control, but with little success.
Rather than offering resistance, most churches treat this moral, social and demographic disaster with acquiescence if not approval. Most governments pay lip service to family values while continuing to act according to their innate imperative of treating the family as an adversary.
In light of all that, sending a chap down for some hanky-panky with his half-sister seems illogical. But then if you can find logic in modernity, you are a better man than I am.
P.S. Speaking of churches, Cardinal Dolan, the archbishop of New York, has kindly elucidated the meaning of Ash Wednesday. The first day of Lent is, according to him, “a kind of our Catholic Ramadan.” Thank you, your Grace, for explaining this so that the general public can understand.