The most striking contrast between the Mosaic Dispensation and the Law of Christ is the materialism of the one, and the pure spiritualism of the other. The Hebrew prophet threatens worldly punishments, and promises fleshly rewards: the Son of Man teaches us to contemn the treasures of this life, and directs all our fears and aspirations towards eternity. The exaggeration of these teachings by the zeal of fervent disciples led to the ascetic efforts to subjugate nature, which present so curious a feature in religious history, and of which those concerning the relations of the sexes form the subject of our consideration.

This special phase of asceticism was altogether foreign to the traditions of Israel, averse as they were to all restrictions upon the full physical development of man. Enjoying, apparently, no conception of a future existence, the earlier Hebrews had no incentive to sacrifice the pleasures of the world for those of a Heaven of which they knew nothing; nor was the gross polytheism, which the monotheistic prophets combated, of a nature to lead to ascetic practices. The worship of Ashera—probably identical with the Babylonian Beltis or Mylitta—undoubtedly consecrated the sacrifice of chastity as a religious rite, and those who revered the goddess of fertility as one of the supreme deities were not likely to impose any restrictions on the exercise of her powers.1 We see, indeed, in the story of Judah and Tamar, and in the lamentation of the daughter of Jephthah, that virginity was regarded almost as a disgrace, and that child-bearing was considered the noblest function of woman; while the institution of levirate marriage shows an importance attributed to descendants in the male line as marked as among the Hindu Arya. The hereditary character of the priesthood, moreover, both as vested in the original Levites, and the later Tsadukim and Baithusin, indicates conclusively that even among the orthodox no special sanctity attached to continence, and that the temporary abstinence from women required of those who handled the hallowed articles of the altar (I. Samuel xxi. 4-5) was simply a distinction drawn between the sacerdotal class and the laity, for in the elaborate instructions as to uncleanness, there is no allusion made to sexual indulgence, though the priest who had partaken of wine was forbidden to enter the Tabernacle, and defilement arising from contact with the dead was a disability (Levit. x., xxi., xxii.),2 while the highest blessing that could be promised as a reward for obedience to God was that “there shall not be male or female barren among you” (Deut. vii. 14). In fact, the only manifestation of asceticism as a religious ordinance, prior to the Second Temple, is seen in the vow of the Nazirites, which consisted merely in allowing the hair to remain unshorn, in the abstinence from wine and in avoiding the pollution arising from contact with the dead. Slender as were these restrictions, the ordinary term of a Nazirate was only thirty days, though it might be assumed for life, as in the cases of Samson and Samuel; and the vows for long terms were deemed sufficiently pleasing to God to serve as means of propitiation, as in the case of Hannah, who thus secured her offspring Samuel, and in that of Helena, Queen of Adiabene, who vowed a Nazirate of seven years if her son Izaces should return in safety from a campaign.3 The few references to the custom in Scripture, however, show that it was little used, and that it exercised no visible influence over social life during the earlier periods.

When the conquests of Cyrus released the Hebrews from captivity, the close relations established with the Persians wrought no change in this aspect of the Jewish faith. Mazdeism, in fact, was a religion so wholesome and practical in its character that asceticism could find little place among its prescribed observances, and the strict maintenance of its priesthood in certain families who transmitted their sacred lore from father to son, shows that no restrictions were placed upon the ministers of Hormadz, or athravas,4 though in the later period of the AchÆmenian empire, after the purity of ancient Mazdeism had become corrupted, the priestesses of the Sun were required to observe chastity, without necessarily being virgins.5 With the conquests of Alexander, however, Judaism was exposed to new influences, and was brought into relation at once with Grecian thought and with the subtle mysticism of India, with which intercourse became frequent under the Greek empire. Beyond the Indus the Sankhya philosophy was already venerable, which taught the nothingness of life, and that the supreme good consisted in the absolute victory over all human wants and desires.6 Already Buddha had reduced this philosophy into a system of religion, the professors of which were bound to chastity—a rule impossible of observance by the world at large, but which became obligatory upon its innumerable priests and monks, when it spread and established itself as a church, thus furnishing the prototype which was subsequently copied by Roman Christianity.7 Already Brahmanism had invented the classes of Vanaprasthas, Sannyasis, and others—ascetics whose practices of self-mortification anticipated and excelled all that is related of Christian Antonys and Simeons—although the ancestor worship which required every man to provide descendants who should keep alive the Sraddha in honor of the Pitris of his forefathers postponed the entrance into the life of the anchorite until after he should have fulfilled his parental duties:8 and we know from the references in the Greek writers to the Hindu gymnosophists how great an impression these customs had made upon those to whom they were a novelty.9 Already the Yoga system had been framed, whereby absorption into the Godhead was to be obtained by religious mendicancy, penances, mortifications, and the severest severance of self from all external surroundings.10 All this had been founded on the primÆval doctrine of the Vedas with respect to the virtue of Tapas, or austere religious abstraction, to which the most extravagant powers were attributed, conferring upon its votaries the authority of gods.11 With all the absurdities of these beliefs and practices, they yet sprang from a profound conviction of the superiority of the spiritual side of man’s nature, and if their theory of the nothingness of mortal existence was exaggerated, yet they tended to elevate the soul, at the expense, it must be confessed, of a regard to the duties which man owes to society.

The influences arising from this system of religious philosophy, so novel to the Semitic races, were tardy is making themselves felt upon the Hebrews, but they became gradually apparent. The doctrine of a future life with rewards and punishments, doubtless derived from Chaldean and Mazdean sources during the Captivity and under the Persian Empire, slowly made its way, and though opposed by the aristocratic conservative party in power—the Tsadukim or Sadducees (descendants of Zadoc, or just men)—it became one of the distinctive dogmas of the Beth Sopherim or House of Scribes, composed of religious teachers, trained in all the learning of the day, sprung from the people, and eager to maintain their nationality against the temporizing policy of their rulers.12 At the breaking out of the Maccabean revolt against Antiochus Epiphanes we find the nation divided into two factions, the Sadducees, disposed rather to submit to the Hellenizing tyranny of Antioch, and the Chassidim (the Assideans of the Authorized Version), democratic reformers, ready for innovation and prepared to die in defence of their faith. In the triumph of the Hasmonean revolution they obtained control of the state, and in the development of the Oral Law by the scribes, supplementing the Torah or Written Law, they engrafted permanently their doctrines upon the ancestral belief. With the tenet of spiritual immortality, there followed as a necessary consequence the subordination of the present existence to life hereafter, which is the direct incentive to asceticism. The religious exaltation of the stormy period which intervened between the liberation from Antioch and the subjugation to Rome afforded a favorable soil for the growth of this tendency, and rendered the minds of the devout accessible to the influences both of Eastern and of Western speculation. How powerful eventually became the latter upon the Alexandrian Jews may be estimated from the mysticism of Philo.

With their triumph over Antioch, the name of the Chassidim disappears as that of an organized party, and in its place we find those of two factions or sects—the Perushim (Pharisees) or Separatists, who maintained an active warfare, temporal and theological, with the Sadducees, and the Essenes, mystics, who bound themselves by vows, generally including the Nazirate, and withdrew from active life for the benefit of spiritual growth and meditation.

The Essenes cultivated the soil and sometimes even lived in cities, but often dwelt as anchorites, using no artificial textures as clothing, and no food save what was spontaneously produced. They mostly practised daily ablutions and admitted neophytes to their society by the rite of baptism after a novitiate of a year, followed by two years of probation. Among those who did not live as hermits, property was held in common, and marriage was abstained from, and it is to this latter practice doubtless that reference was made by Christ in the text “There be eunuchs which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake.” The Essenes enjoyed high consideration among the people; their teachings were listened to with respect, and they were regarded as especially favored with the gifts of divination and prophecy. There can be no doubt that John the Baptist was an Essene; James of Jerusalem, brother of Jesus, was a Nazirite and probably an Essene, and Christ himself may reasonably be regarded as trained in the principles of the sect. His tendencies all lay in that direction, and it is observable that while he is unsparing in his denunciations of the Scribes, and Pharisees, and Sadducees, he never utters a word of condemnation of the Essenes.13

It is thus easy to understand the refined spirituality of Christ’s teachings, and the urgency with which he called the attention of man from the gross temptations of earth to the higher things which should fit him for the inheritance of eternal life. Yet his profound wisdom led him to forbear from enjoining even the asceticism of the Essenes. He allowed a moderate enjoyment of the gifts of the Creator; and when he sternly rebuked the Scribes and Pharisees for imposing, in their development of the Oral Law, burdens upon men not easily to be borne by the weakness of human nature, he was far indeed from seeking to render obligatory, or even to recommend, practices which only the fervor of fanaticism could render endurable. No teacher before him had ventured to form so lofty a conception of the marriage-tie. It was an institution of God himself whereby man and wife became one flesh. “What therefore God hath joined together let not man put asunder;” and though he refrained from condemning abstention from wedlock, he regarded it as possible only to those whose exceptional exaltation of temperament might enable them to overcome the instincts and passions of humanity.14

When the broad proselyting views and untiring energy of Paul, the apostle of the Gentiles, were brought to bear upon the little circle of mourning disciples, it was inevitable that a rupture should take place. No one in the slightest degree familiar with the spirit of Judaism at that day can have difficulty in understanding how those who still regarded themselves as Jews, who looked upon their martyr, not as the Son of God, but, in the words of Peter, as “Jesus of Nazareth, a man approved of God among you, by miracles and wonders and signs which God did by him in the midst of you,” and who held, as is urged in the Epistle of James, firmly to their Master’s injunction to preserve every jot and tittle of the Law, should regard with growing distrust and distaste the activity of the Pharisee Paul, who, like other Pharisees, was ready to encompass land and sea to gain one proselyte, and, more than this, was prepared to throw down the exclusive barriers of the Law in order to invite all mankind to share in the glad tidings of Salvation.15 The division came in time, and as the Gentile church spread and flourished, it stigmatized as heretics those who adhered to the simple monotheistic reformed Judaism which Christ had taught. These became known as the Ebionim, or Poor Men, Essenes, and others, who followed Christ as a prophet inspired by God, who accepted all of the apostles save Paul, whom they regarded as a transgressor of the Law, holding their property in common, honoring virginity rather than marriage, but uttering no precept upon the subject, and observing the Written Law with rigid accuracy. They maintained a quiet existence for four centuries, making no progress, but exciting no antagonism save on the part of vituperative heresiologists, whose denunciations, however, contain no rational grounds for regarding them otherwise than as the successors of the original followers of Christ.16

Meanwhile, Pauline Christianity, launched on the tumultuous existence of the Gentile world, had adapted itself to the passions and ambitions of men, had availed itself both of their strength and of their weakness, and had become a very different creed from that which had been taught around the Sea of Galilee, and had seen its teacher expiate on Calvary his revolt against the Oral Law. In its gradual transformation through the ages, from Essenic and Ebionic simplicity to the magnificent sacerdotalism of the Innocents and Gregories, it has felt itself bound to find or make, in its earliest records, some precedent for every innovation, and accordingly its ardent polemics in modern times have endeavored to prove that the celibacy of its ministers was, if not absolutely ordained, at least practised from the earliest period. Much unnecessary logic and argument have been spent upon this subject since the demand which arose for clerical marriage at the Reformation forced the champions of the church to find scriptural authority for the canon which enjoins celibacy. The fact is that prior to the sixteenth century the fathers of the church had no scruple in admitting that in primitive times the canon had no existence and the custom was not observed. The reader may therefore well be spared a disquisition upon a matter which may be held to be self-evident, and be contented with a brief reference to some of the authorities of the church who, prior to the Reformation, admitted that in primitive times marriage was freely permitted to the ministers of Christ.

No doctor of the church did more than St. Jerome to impose the rule of celibacy on its members, yet even he admits that at the beginning there was no absolute injunction to that effect; and he endeavors to apologize for the admission by arguing that infants must be nourished with milk and not with solid food.17 In the middle of the eleventh century, during the controversy between Rome and Constantinople, Rome had no scruple in admitting that the celebrated text of St. Paul (I. Cor. ix. 5) meant that the apostles were married, though subsequent commentators have exhausted so much ingenuity in explaining it away.18 A century later Gratian, the most learned canonist of his time, in the “Decretum,” undertaken at the request of the papal court, which has ever since maintained its position as the standard of the canon law, felt no hesitation in admitting that, before the adoption of the canon, marriage was everywhere undisturbed among those in orders, as it continued to be in the Greek church.19 The reputation of St. Thomas Aquinas as a theologian was as unquestioned as that of Gratian as a canonist, and the Angelic Doctor admitted as freely as the canon lawyer that compulsory celibacy was an innovation on the rules of the primitive church, which he endeavors to explain by an argument contradictory to that of St. Jerome, for he says that the greater sanctity of the earlier Christians rendered them superior to the asceticism requisite to the purity of a degenerate age, even as no modern warrior could emulate the exploit of Samson in throwing himself amid a hostile army with no other weapon than a jaw-bone. He even admits, what other authorities have denied, that Christ required no separation between St. Peter and his wife.20 There were in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries few more learned men than Giraldus Cambrensis, whose orthodoxy was unquestioned, and who, as Archdeacon of St. David’s, vigorously sought to enforce the rule of continence upon his recalcitrant clergy. Yet in a strenuous exhortation to them to mend the error of their ways in this respect, he admits that clerical celibacy has no scriptural or apostolic warrant.21 That this was universally admitted at the time is manifested by Alfonso the Wise, of Castile, about the middle of the thirteenth century, asserting the fact in the most positive manner, while forbidding marriage to the priests of his dominions, in the code known as Las Siete Partidas.22

Gerson, indeed, who, like most of the ecclesiastics of his time, attributes to the Council of NicÆa the introduction of celibacy, seems inclined to justify the change assumed to have been then made, by alluding to the forged donation of Constantine. That the temporalities of the church could only be entrusted to men cut off from family ties was an axiom in his day, and though he does not himself draw the conclusion, he clearly regarded the supposed accession to the landed estates of the church as a satisfactory explanation of the prohibition of marriage to its ministers in the fourth century.23 Shortly afterwards, Pius II., one of the most learned of the popes, had no scruple in admitting that the primitive church was administered by a married clergy.24 Just before the Reformation, Geoffroi Boussard, dean of the faculty of theology of Paris, published, in 1505, a dissertation on priestly continence, in which he positively assumes, as the basis of his argument, that the use of marriage was universally permitted to those in holy orders, from the time of Christ to that of Siricius and Innocent I.; and this may be assumed to be the opinion of the University of Paris, for Boussard formally submitted his tract to that body, and its approbation is to be found in the fact that he was subsequently elevated to its chancellorship, and was sent as its delegate to the Council of Pisa.25

Even after the Reformation, unexceptionable orthodox authority is found to the same effect. In 1564, Pius IV. admitted it in an epistle to the German princes, and explained it by the necessity of the times.26 Zaccaria, probably the most learned of Catholic polemics on the subject, endeavors to reconcile his belief in the Apostolic origin of clerical celibacy with the indubitable practice of the primitive church, by suggesting that while the Apostles commanded the observance of the rule by the clergy in general, yet in special cases they discreetly dispensed with it to avoid greater scandals; and that with the gradual increase of these dispensations the clergy came at length to assume the indulgence as a matter of course without asking for special licenses.27 More logical is the argument brought forward by a priest named Taillard, resisting in 1842 some efforts made to introduce priestly marriage in Prussian Poland. He coolly reasons that if celibacy was not enforced in the primitive church, it ought to have been—“if the celibacy of the priesthood be not from the beginning of Christianity, it ought to have been there, for, as our holy religion comes from God, it should contain in itself all the means possible to elevate the nations to the highest point of liberty and happiness.”28