Sworn brotherhood

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Sworn brotherhood ( fraternitas iurata ) referred to an artificial relationship between two friends in the European Middle Ages and early modern times , which was often sealed by ritual acts in the church. These rituals could also include mixing or exchanging blood by drinking ( blood brotherhood ). For a cross-cultural classification see brother (friendship) .

Since the publication of the book Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe by the historian John Boswell , there has been discussion in history, in the lesbian and gay movement , but also in the various churches, to what extent this institution can be regarded as proof that Christianity is same-sex Connections in the past have not only been recognized but also blessed.

history

Anno 779 in the chapter of Herstal (Belgium) in the Frankish imperial assembly under the reign of Charlemagne (* 747; + 814) the sworn brotherhood is forbidden; according to article “16. Of those who swear oaths to one another in guilds : that no one dares to do that. But something else should apply to their alms or in the event of fire or shipwreck. Even if they conclude agreements, no one should dare to swear an oath. ”Charlemagne found these unchristian guilds to be“ diabolic guilds ”, which the Saxons had to renounce by forcibly converting to Christianity.

The rite of Adelphopoiesis

The starting point of this discussion is the rite of the Orthodox Church , the Adelphopoiesis ('fraternization', Slav. Pobratimstwo or posestrinstwo , 'sisterhood'). As early as 1914, Pawel Florenski structured the liturgical core elements of this rite as follows:

  1. The future brothers (or sisters or brother and sister) are positioned in the church in front of the altar on which the cross and the gospel rest; the older of the two stands on the right, the younger on the left;
  2. Prayers and litanies are recited asking for the two to be united in love and reminding them of examples of friendship from church history;
  3. the two are tied together with a belt and their hands are placed on the gospel; each of them is given a candle;
  4. the verses ( 1 Cor 12.27-13.8  ELB ) ( Paul about love ) and ( Joh 17.18-26  ELB ) ( Jesus about oneness) are read out.
  5. further prayers like those in point 2 are read out;
  6. The Lord's Prayer is read aloud;
  7. the future brothers receive the pre-consecrated gifts from a common bowl;
  8. they are led around the altar while they hold hands and the congregation sings the following troparion : "Lord, look from heaven and see";
  9. they exchange kisses, and
  10. the congregation sings: See how good and beautiful it is when brothers live in harmony with one another. ( Ps 133.1  ELB )

One of the prayers said during this ceremony reads in German translation:

“Our Almighty God, who you were before the ages and who will be forever, who condescended to visit humanity through the womb of the Mother of God and the Virgin Mary, send your holy angel upon these your servants [name] and [name ] that they may love one another, just as your holy apostles Peter and Paul loved one another and Andrew and Jacob, John and Thomas, Jacob, Philip, Matthew, Simon, Thaddeus, Matthias and the holy martyrs Sergius and Bacchus as well as Damian and Cosmas , not through carnal love, but through the faith and love of the Holy Spirit that they may dwell in that love all the days of their lives. Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen."

John Boswell's assertion (see below) that sworn brotherhoods were legitimized as same-sex partnerships (i.e. including genital acts) accepted by the Orthodox Church in the form of adelphopoiesis is not tenable. The original purpose of Adelphopoiesis was to establish a spiritual relationship (like a baptism sponsorship) (see also below). Contrary to the claims to the contrary by Boswell's critics, the sworn brotherhood must in fact have been claimed by same-sex couples. This is evidenced by the orthodox canon law, which justifies the abolition of adelphopoiesis in Eastern Roman law and in the ecclesiastical canons with the fact that the sworn brotherhood was abused to "fulfill carnal desires and sensual passions".

Brotherhoods in the Western Church

In the Catholic Church , priests themselves were rarely involved in marriages until well into modern times (the formal requirement was only introduced by the Council of Trent , although in some countries this regulation was implemented much later in some countries). This and a few other things speak against the fact that the rite of Adelphopoiesis , which is available in Latin translation as ordo ad fratres faciendum , was widely used in the West. However, it is partially practiced today by the Old Catholic Church .

Even if not in the context of a mass and in front of a priest, brothers used to swear their oath over an altar stone and announce this to the community in front of the church door. Even more than the oath, however, it was the possible joint burial that gave the "artificial brotherhood" a religious integration. The spread of this practice is documented by old English and Irish cemeteries where a number of graves with the names of two men can be found. The inscriptions are often evidence of immortal affection: “Love united them as living. So may they also unite the earth as the dead. "

One of the earliest sources describing the rite of fraternization in the Latin West is the anti-Irish propaganda Topographica Hibernica by Giraldus Cambrensis (approx. 1146–1223). In accordance with the intention of the work, it is a satirical exaggeration that accuses the Irish of having perverted the Christian rite with pagan elements:

“Among the many other deceptions of its hostile nature, this one is particularly instructive. Under the appearance of religion and peace, they meet in a holy place with the man with whom they want to unite. First they form covenants of spiritual brotherhood [compaternitatis foedera]. Then they carry each other around the church three times. Then they go to church, and before the altar, in the presence of the relics of the saints, many oaths are sworn. Finally, they are inextricably linked through the celebration of a mass and the prayers of priests, as in an engagement.

But at the very end, to further strengthen their friendship and to finish things off, each one drinks each other's blood: this is what they retained from the rite of the pagans who use blood to seal oaths. How often at this very moment of engagement is blood shed by these violent and deceitful men, so malicious and hostile that one or the other is left drained of blood! How often is the engagement followed by a bloody divorce at this inappropriate hour, precedes it or even interrupts it in a way never heard of before. "

Two hundred years after Geraldus' polemic about the Irish fraternization rites, an official chronicle of the Civil War years of the first meeting between King Edward II of England and Piers Gaveston, 1st Earl of Cornwall states :

"When the king's son looked at him, he felt so much love that he made a brotherhood with him and, choosing, resolved to make an indissoluble bond of love with him before all mortals."

Such descriptions had a biblical model, the covenant between David and his 'brother' Jonathan:

“After David's conversation with Saul, Jonathan took David in his heart. And Jonathan loved David as he loved his own life. Saul kept David with him from that day and never allowed him to return to his father's house. Jonathan made a covenant with David because he loved him like his own life. "

( 1 Sam 18.1–3  ELB )

But secular literature also elevated the love between two sworn brothers to a romantic ideal. This is evidenced by numerous works, some of which were based on popular subjects, such as the story of Horn and his sworn brother Ayol, Adam Bell , the romance between Floris and Blancheflour , the Guy of Warwicke or the ballad of Bewick and Graham .

A mixture of secular and religious literature was the Latin version of Amys and Amylion , created by a cleric before the 14th century , a popular folk tale that can be traced back to various cultures from India to the Atlantic. In its Christianized version it is about two sworn brothers who fought for Charlemagne and were buried separately after their death. However, as the night went on, their bodies moved towards each other, and the next morning they were found lying side by side. The words that precede the description of this miracle are almost literally reminiscent of the grave inscription quoted above: "Just as God had united them in life through unity and love, so he did not want them to be separated from one another in death."

On the basis of the relative stereotype with which this formula was used, one can assume that it is an allusion to the Gospel of Matthew , where Jesus Christ justifies the indissolubility of marriage with the words: “But what God has united, may the human being does not separate. ”( Mt 19 : 6  ELB ).

Today's historical classification

The sworn brotherhood rite has received greater attention in recent years among historians concerned with the history of homosexuality , as it modifies in many ways the image of the Middle Ages and early modern times. John Boswell took it in his 1994 book Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe as evidence for his thesis that Christianity has not always represented anti- homosexual positions. However, he uses a modern term that had no meaning for the Middle Ages: the construction of the homosexual as an independent type of person.

The historian Alan Bray, who is no less well-known in gay & lesbian studies, explored the ritual of fraternization using the example of English sources. In his posthumously published work The Friend , he tries to reconstruct this institution from the mentality and structure of medieval society. Artificial relationships, for which the sworn brotherhood is only one example, had a central function in the premodern for the horizontal bracing of the individual households. Not only did the two 'brothers' afford each other gun protection , which in a society characterized by the feud was an aspect of general security of life that should not be underestimated. Rather, sworn brotherhoods also linked entire families, which is why such friendships were often encouraged by parents.

It must also be emphasized that this institution was not designed as an alternative to marriage. Rather, in the event of a later marriage and the formation of a family, it also exercised a permanent security function: If one of the two brothers died, the other saw himself obliged to support the family that he had left behind with the means available to him. Among other things, the institution of compaternitas ( sponsorship , literally co-parenting) served this purpose, with which responsibility for children - who often lived in several households during their youth - was collectivized to a certain extent.

The sworn brotherhood should therefore not only be seen as a romantic form of relationship, but, like marriage at that time, despite its literary and liturgical framework in terms of love and loyalty, must also be viewed from the aspect of its material security and supply function.

In contrast, today's Christian theologians, who often regard the results of such research as an attack on their teaching position, are particularly interested in the question of whether these relationships were chaste. However, this question can hardly be answered universally on the basis of the existing source material. Alan Bray writes about this:

“A second uncomfortable difficulty is proving Boswell's consistent view that sworn brotherhood could be a relationship between two men or women that was (or could become) sexual. The chronicle of the Cistercian -Klosters of Meaux in Yorkshire from the 14th century - a work of outstanding scholarship - reported that Edward II. "In Vitio sodomitico nimium delectabat" [especially the vice of sodomy enjoyed], and Gaveston modern biographer concludes understandably, that there is no question that Gaveston's and Edward's relationship was sexual. This, of course, has not been supported by the Church's canon law, but it is unlikely that Eduard and Gaveston were unique in this regard. There was also a comparable sexual ambivalence about the other forms of ritual kinship that Giraldus' entire portrayal evokes. Church courts disapproved of sexual relations before an engagement was celebrated in church and did not endorse sexual relations between the spiritual relatives of the compaternitas , the commatres and compatres ; but the disapproval of sexual relations after engagement was widely disregarded, and the special enjoyment of sexual relations with one's commatres and compatres was a good source of jokes throughout the Middle Ages. "

- Alan Bray

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ The Stephanos Project: Adelphopoiesis ( Memento from February 15, 2005 in the Internet Archive )
  2. ↑ Cf. Treitinger, Otto, The Eastern Roman Imperial and Imperial Idea according to their design in courtly ceremonies, Jena 1938, 195.
  3. ↑ See Agapius and Nicodemus, The Rudder (Pedalion), All the Sacred and Divine Canons, Chicago 1957, 997.
  4. ↑ Victoria Combe: Church 'has long blessed gays'
  5. ^ Alan Bray: Boswell and the Latin West and the debate over the blessing of friendship today
  6. ↑ Alan Bray, The Friend. Chicago; London 2003. p. 38 f. (translated from English)