d-shēdē bishē) that, among other things, caused the bride to strip off her clothes as she rode a donkey to the wedding. Only with some holy oil from Bar ʿEdta, and by replacing the singers with psalm-chanting priests and deacons, was the bride’s procession able to fend off the demons, get back on track, and make it to the church on time.
This passage encapsulates tensions between the requisites of Christian belonging, on the one hand, and practices associated with the institution of marriage, on the other, in the empires of the late antique Middle East, tensions that it is this chapter’s goal to explore. In the societies of late antiquity on both sides of the Roman-Sasanian frontier, marriage had long been understood as a foundation stone of social and political organization. It was the institution that legitimized sex so as to reproduce humans not only as a species but as social beings organized in specific household, lineal, and political forms. At the same time, the theological import of human sexuality to Christian tradition made marriage a locus of debate and reform in the eyes of bishops and other Christian thinkers. Christian thought and ecclesiastical regulation called for sweeping changes to its practice, enjoining monogamy, restricting divorce, and emphasizing chaste avoidance of sexual overindulgence (hence Rabban Bar ʿEdta’s opposition to the singers of Babta). Yet older marital practices did not simply disappear. Imperial, civil, and local legal traditions continued to set the norms by which marriage as a legal relationship was enacted, governed, and dissolved, and these were often at odds with Christian prescriptions. Ecclesiastical law in both the Roman and Sasanian empires never usurped that constitutive authority; rather, it encouraged pious modifications to an ancient social institution, and many of the associated elements it condemned lingered on in practice. Thus could the people of Babta seek simultaneously a Christian holy man’s blessing and transgressive entertainment at a wedding. These tensions at the nexus of marriage, law, and religious belonging in the late antique world form, in turn, the backdrop to developments in later centuries, when Christian bishops’ encounter with Islamic empire spurred them to bring marriage and the household wholly under the authority of ecclesiastical law.
MARRIAGE AND SEXUALITY IN THE LATE ANTIQUE IMAGINATION AND CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY
Although demonic interference was no doubt a singular and unexpected event, when the bride and groom from Babta went down to the waters of the Euphrates to marry, they were partaking in a wholly ancient institution that had been enacted untold numbers of times in the thousands of years of the Middle East’s recorded history. The challenges of various ascetic movements notwithstanding, an average observer of the societies of the late antique Roman and Sasanian empires could have taken marriage largely for granted as a common social institution—that is, as a collection of recognized “ways of doing things” that structured particular human actions and relationships, and which “provide[d] stability and meaning to social life.”2 Anthropologists maintain that while marriage is nearly ubiquitous in human societies, any universal, cross-cultural definition will be inadequate.3 Essentially all late antique eastern Mediterranean and Middle Eastern societies, however, shared a general sense of what marriage was and what it did. It was the enduring crux of biological and social reproduction; it enabled the formation of the other institutions that were the building blocks of social and political organization, the family and the household.4 Marriage rendered sex between a man and a woman licit and any resulting progeny legitimate (though some other institutions that were not marriage in strict terms could do the same). It established new ties between previously unrelated individuals and kin groups. By affiliating progeny to families and lineages, furthermore, marriage outlined the paths by which both material property and genealogical cultural capital—the status associated with ancestry—would devolve to new generations. Marriage, in other words, was the chief institution that facilitated the reproduction of both the human race biologically and the hierarchies of lived human societies, generation after generation.5
The peoples of the ancient Middle East were well aware of this fundamental connection between marriage and the broader associations to which humans belonged, and so they often assigned the institution particular cultural weight. Augustus, the first Roman emperor, enacted legislation promoting marriage and childbearing among Roman citizens for the good of the empire.6 In Zoroastrian cosmology, marriage with particular kin relations was a pious act that modeled the “divine and mythical unions” of the good god Ohrmazd with his daughter and mother.7 For early rabbinic Judaism, distinctive marital customs signaled the continuity of “one Israel” stretching deep into the biblical past.8 In a similar vein, marriage, as the legitimate channel of human sexuality, became an important locus in the development of Christian thought, which from its earliest days recognized a fundamental connection between sexuality and humans’ potential to achieve salvation. Characteristically Christian understandings of that connection, however, departed radically from most Greco-Roman, Zoroastrian, and Jewish traditions (not to mention later Islamic ones). Most ancient marital regimes and systems of sexual morality were organized around the reproductive imperative and placed great value on it. Essentially all Christian traditions, on the other hand, came to see abstention from sex as the highest, most pious mode of living in the material world in anticipation of perfection in the next one. The very utility of marriage and its reproductive purposes was uncertain at the least and wholly superfluous when this logic was followed to its extreme. A theology and ethics of sexuality rooted in the valorization of continence thus became an integral piece of Christian thought in the late antique and medieval Mediterranean world.9 It persisted in marked tension, however, with the practice and regulation of marriage as a social institution in the imperial legal orders of late antiquity.
Map 1. The Middle East in Late Antiquity
The notion that membership among the Christian faithful required chaste sexual practice was rooted ultimately in the teachings of Paul’s epistles, most famously in I Corinthians 7. Paul’s letter gives a “passing endorsement of continence as an optimal state,” which, while not providing a systematic theology of sexual renunciation, set the parameters of later Christian thought on the subject.10 Early Christian thinkers of later generations outlined a soteriological vision that valued virginity and continence—the eschewal of human sexuality altogether—as the most perfect way of life in an imperfect world and the surest path to salvation in the next. The institutions through which early Christians put these ideas into practice were highly varied and contested. More radical groups called Encratites by their opponents required celibacy of all the faithful; in northern Syria and Mesopotamia, lay celibates known as Sons and Daughters of the Covenant lived among their householder neighbors; cenobitic monasticism, celibates living in communities separate from lay believers, developed especially in Egypt before spreading elsewhere.11 By the fifth century, a rough pattern had begun to emerge that increasingly cordoned off sexual renunciation as the proper vocation of monks and high ecclesiastics.12 But virginity and continence retained their supreme rank on the scale of chaste sexual practice in the Christian imagination.
If sexual renunciation was of such value, however, where did that leave the vast majority of Christians—ordinary householders who had sex and had children, and without whom the church in society would no longer exist? Virginity and continence had theological weight; they were perfection in imitation of Christ and the angels, which sexually active lay marriage was not. Yet scripture carved out at least some place for the latter in Christian cosmology. Genesis 1:28 commanded humans to be fruitful and multiply. Ephesians 5:23 compared marriage to Christ’s relationship with the faithful—“the husband is the head of the wife just as Christ is the head of the church.” As Christianity grew from a marginal movement to the dominant religion of the Roman Empire and beyond, it became all the more imperative for Christian thinkers to expand on these teachings and articulate conceptions of sexual practice within marriage that, if not as perfect as continence, constituted at least an acceptable standard of chastity for everyday believers. In the late antique eastern Mediterranean, Christian teachings on chaste lay sexuality coalesced around three principles: the indissolubility of the marriage bond, the unlawfulness of sexual activity outside of monogamous marriage, and the procreative
