In preparation for an academic conference I’ve been going through some texts from the Doctors of the Church concerning marriage. Among the many enjoyable aspects of this activity is the amusement to be had in reading some of the silly ideas the medievals had about sex and human reproduction. Mind you, I’m not at all the sort of person who opens a medieval text expecting it to be full of silly outdated ideas. If anything my expectations tend to run the opposite way — I’m a little startled when I run across a good idea that the ancients and medievals didn’t have first. Still, it must be admitted that human reproduction was something they didn’t understand all that well. They weren’t stupid, of course, but it just happens to be an area of knowledge where the true facts of the case can’t easily be discovered through ordinary observation. (Also, I get the impression that some of those folks — St. Thomas, for example — didn’t spend a lot of time around women.)

Anyway, I thought I would share with you all, in the spirit of good-natured fun, some of the sillier things that I’ve run across in the past few days from some of the Doctors. I might start out by saying that St. Augustine seems perhaps the least naive. (Perhaps this should not be surprising. The Bishop of Hippo had a bit more, err, experience than the Angelic Doctor.) Nonetheless he does, in his letter Contra Julianum, offer one rather interesting “fact” about human reproduction. The thing under discussion is the story of Abraham and Sarah, who, as you may recall, were granted the special favor of being permitted to conceive a son in their old age. When Sarah hears the news, she laughs with apparent incredulity, observing that both she and Abraham are already old. Augustine, taking this as a sign that both Abraham and Sarah needed special grace to have their fecundity restored, offers the following theory:

” Yet we should understand that Abraham’s body was said to be dead because he was not able to beget children of a female able to conceive. Advancing age is said to bring it about that an old man may be able to beget of an adolescent female when he is no longer able to do so of an older woman, though she may at that time be able to conceive of a younger man.”

Well, that’s certainly interesting. Do we have a possible argument for older women marrying younger men? In fact, Augustine even gives us some numbers to help us add up the possibility in our own time (or, at any rate, in the fifth century.) “But if their combined years exceed one hundred, it is asserted that they cannot procreate, even if the woman is fruitful, and, provided she menstruates, able to procreate from a young man; thus it has also been established by the law that no one shall have the ius liberorum (certain legal rights possessed by childless spouses) except when the combined age of the two spouses is greater than one hundred.”

You younger ladies should keep all of this in mind if you’re ever tempted to marry a man of 75 of so. But in all fairness, fertility can be diminished in older men, so even from a biological perspective this idea is not completely absurd.

Scripture seems to be the source of more than one misunderstanding. St. Jerome, in his commentary on Leviticus, noted that husbands were ordered to keep away from their wives at the time of menstruation. Though there was obviously a ritual element to this, he presumed that there must be a medical one as well, and so observed that, “men ought to keep away from their wives, because thus is a deformed, blind, lame, leprous offspring conceived: so that those parents who are not ashamed to come together in sexual union have their sin made obvious to all.”

It’s a bit sad to think what parents might have been blamed for their sexual misconduct on account of deformities in their offspring that they probably could not have prevented at all. One interesting thing about this error is that St. Augustine doesn’t make it — he observes at one point in the Contra Julianum that menstruous women cannot conceive — but St. Thomas does. He discusses the matter in ST IIIa, Q.64, and concludes that, while the ritual regulations that bound the Jews are not binding on Christians, sexual union during menstruation is still strongly discouraged because of the danger to the offspring that might thereby be conceived.

In fact St. Thomas, though wise in so many matters, has a number of wrong ideas in this particular field. He is well known to have claimed that, in the begetting of a child, the form comes from the father while only the matter is contributed by the mother. He gets this idea from Aristotle, and the Angelic Doctor even makes something of it theologically (though you have to wonder whether they hadn’t both noticed that children seem to resemble their mothers as often as they do their fathers?) But some other amusing ideas pop up in his discussions of men, women, and marriage. The most amusing to me was in ST IIIa Q. 65, when St. Thomas is discussing the subject of plural marriage. As we might expect, he decrees that plural marriage is at all times a poor way of fulfilling the ends of marriage, but that it is less contrary to the natural law for a man to have multiple wives than it is for a woman to have multiple husbands. “For the good of the offspring which is the principal end of marriage is, in one respect, entirely destroyed, and in another respect hindered. For the good of the offspring means not only begetting, but also rearing. Now the begetting of offspring, though not wholly voided (since a woman may be impregnated a second time after impregnation has already taken place, as stated in De Animalibus) is nevertheless considerably hindered, because this can scarcely happen without injury to both fetus or to one of them.”

So… St. Thomas is discouraging plural marriage because he’s afraid women might become double-pregnant? By two different men at the same time? Admittedly he seems only to have been taking Aristotle’s word for it, but were either of them dissuaded in this opinion by the fact that this had never, ever happened?

Anyway, as I say, it isn’t terribly often that we catch St. Thomas sounding so silly, but that only makes it more fun to have a few laughs at him when he is. It can be refreshing occasionally to remember that, as wise as these Doctors were, they didn’t know everything!

As of tomorrow the Doctor and I are going north to reunite (albeit briefly) with some of our fellow Catholic Cornellians. I for one am ready for a Good Time!