Title: The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology Author: Mark D. Jordan Published by: University of Chicago Press, 1997 ISBN: 0-226-41039-0 [hardcover, 189 pages]
In this beautiful reexamination of what it means to have a tradition, Catholic and otherwise, Mark D. Jordan offers a powerful and provocative study of the sin of erotic love between men. The Invention of Sodomy reveals the theological fabrication of arguments for categorizing genital acts between members of the same sex.
During the eleventh century, the Christian reformer and zealous hermit Peter Damian coined the term "Sodomy." With it, he created a new theological category by abstracting the complex of homoerotic acts and desires into a single essence elevating it to the level or preoccupying sin. In this startlingly original work of historical detection, Jordan explores the invention of Sodomy by medieval Christendom, examining its conceptual foundations in theology and gauging its impact on Christian sexual ethics both then and now.
Joining eminent scholarship with innovative methodology, Jordan traces the historical genealogy of this enduring cultural construct through many of the idiosyncratic world views of the Middle Ages -- world views at war with themselves in their attitudes toward sex, love, and eroticism. Moving deftly from poetic artifice through polemical treatise to confessor's manual and scholastic summa, he convincingly demonstrates that the medieval notion of Sodomy was fashioned out of conceptual instabilities and tensions. As Jordan gradually exposes these fault lines, the very idea of Sodomy, as a foundation for moral theology, begins to crumble, dramatically undermining some of the most basic definitions and deep-seated assumptions in both medieval and modern theologies of same-sex love. In each case, Jordan shows that the concept of Sodomy is so unstable that it makes the condemnation of Sodomy as a capital crime meaningless. In face, Sodomy as a theological category cannot be used for serious thinking.
For Jordan, it becomes clear that contemporary Christian theology must abandon the thoroughly vitiated notion of Sodomy if it is to speak with any cogency about the realities of homoerotic love. Sodomy is a name, he concludes, not for a kind of human behavior, but for a failure of theologians. Sodomy is the nervous refusal of theologians to understand how pleasure can survive the preaching of the gospel.
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