(Originally published 30 September 2017)
In this three-part series, I will examine the unpredictable and explosive nature of Jesus’ teachings on the Nuclear Family, and how new, quantum-level relationships in the utopian “Kingdom of Heaven” compare to contemporary revolutions in gender and sexuality.
“There is no sexual relationship.” — Jacques Lacan
Part I — The things we do for Love
Of the many impressions left by HBO’s mega-hit Game of Thrones, its most permanent impact may turn out to be a certain normalization of “kinship love” — the preferred term of incest advocates.
When Jaime Lannister pushes young Bran Stark to a crippling fall in the opening episode of Game of Thrones, we feel our own bodies break with the weight of what we’ve just witnessed. What Bran saw was so dangerous, so explosive, that Jaime could not risk letting the ten year old live to tell his tale.
What Bran saw, of course, was Jaime and his sister, Queen Cersei, engaged in adulterous, consensual incest. And while the adultery was enough to risk Jaime and Cersei’s lives, the incest could destroy their family and haunt their names for all time.
Jaime pushes Bran. “The things I do for love,” he says, bound by his heart to ignore the law, and lighting the fuse for the wars that would follow.
And so from the beginning of this all-too-real-fantasy show, we’re forced to wonder how much death and destruction could have been avoided if only Jaime and Cersei had been allowed to love each other? What if customs and legal systems enabled the twins to fall in love openly in their youth, free of shame for their affections?
Should we, today, hope to avoid this question, given our passion for sexual equality and affirming attitudes? When our own laws and customs — meant to encourage love for God and Neighbor, however secularized — condemn and prohibit love’s various forms, what will we do, and what rules will we need to break, out of loyalty to Love?
The scandal of incest is as near a universal prohibition as has ever existed — see Leviticus 18 in the Hebrew Bible, for example. Marriage codes, historically, are guarded with meticulous vigilance, protecting the privileges enjoyed by strategic marriage arrangements, and forbidding unions that would threaten a family’s status or condition. Like the wandering gossip about Jamie and Cersei’s relationship, rumors of incest could rot a reputation from the inside out. In the second-century AD, during the heights of the Roman Empire, professional sex cults and polyamorous religious festivals were commonplace. Yet the Romans grew suspicious of a new sect whose members were supposedly obscene incestuous profligates. They all intermarried, it was whispered, calling each other “brother” and “sister.”
The new cult, of course, was Christianity.
Athenagoras, a Christian of that era, wrote a defense of his young religion, claiming that Christians were obsessively chaste, avoiding sex and marriage altogether if possible. Sex is exclusively for procreation, Athenagoras says in his best imitation of Rick Santorum, comparing intercourse for pleasure to wasted seeds:
“For as the husbandman throwing the seed into the ground awaits the harvest, not sowing more upon it, so to us the procreation of children is the measure of our indulgence in appetite.”
And so contrary to rumors of bacchanalian agape feasts and sacramental orgies, Athenagoras believes Christians are more inclined to renounce sexual indulgences and massive sex-scandals than participate in them. Their Master, after all, forbade even adulterous lusting and encouraged lifelong singleness and chastity.
Yet while Athenagoras insists Christians maintain strict sexual purity, he never flatly denies the radical heart of the ancient protest:
Christians are brothers and sisters… and sometimes they have sex.
But even if there was not widespread swinging, incestuous marriage, or kinship love in the early Church, anyone who has read the New Testament knows where the rumors got started. Jesus himself saves some of his most incendiary commentary for the subject of Family relations.
“If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters-yes, even their own life — such a person cannot be my disciple.” Luke 14
“[T]here are those who choose to live like eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. The one who can accept this should accept it.” Matthew 19
“At the resurrection people will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven.” Matthew 22
“For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.” Matthew 12.
[Am I the only one reminded by these quotes of George Orwell’s 1984?
“We have cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman. No one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer. But in the future there will be no wives and no friends. Children will be taken from their mothers at birth, as one takes eggs from a hen. The sex instinct will be eradicated. Procreation will be an annual formality like the renewal of a ration card. We shall abolish the orgasm.”]
When Jesus says that we must hate our fathers, or that he has come to bring a sword to divide parents and children, or that Christians should live like eunuchs for the Kingdom of God, we might see these as metaphorical warnings:
“Following Christ brings persecutions, and can even require the renunciation of unsupportive family and friends. The costs of discipleship are steep.”
But what Jesus says in Matthew 12 — that we are all brothers and sisters of our Father in Heaven — isn’t that more radical than simply extending a metaphorical fraternity to anyone who does the will of God? “Who is my Mother, and who are my Brothers?” he says, Mary presumably within earshot. Jesus is specifically turning away his blood-relatives, dismissing the association of sexual relation — where “brother” means my blood-relative — with familial relation — where “brother” means a member of God’s family.
The implosive potential of family relations is radiating off this statement: the possibility that, at any moment, the Nuclear Family could go subatomic, producing a toxic excess of itself, a spilling-over of Family relations into the quantum field of universal brother-and-sisterhood. God’s children are somehow required to hate one version of Family relation, with its marital arrangements and privileges, while embracing a brand new, resurrected version of Family: “like the angels in heaven,” universal kinship marriage, a single Bride for a single Christ.
Saint Paul also encourages singleness and chastity, telling the Corinthian Christians multiple times to marry only insofar as it is their duty and responsibility (1 Corinthians 7). The two most prominent figures in Christian history, Jesus and Paul, had a new vision for Family, and it respected the old concept of marriage only insofar as it served as a mercy and a necessity. There were new rules for marriage: rules of equality, freedom, grace, and—echoing Paul’s differentiated instructions to various churches — based on circumstances (i.e., material conditions).
And so the ultimate scandal became a point of victory for the early Church, eliminating family privileges in favor of a new familial egalitarianism. Your family lineage, forward, backward, side-to-side, now encompasses billions across Creation. The rules of marriage are as transformed as the rules against eating pig and lobster: Family itself has been transfigured and resurrected, given new meaning under the law of Love. The first Christians knew this, and their responses were to abandon the privacy of their old lives, sharing all things in common (Acts 2) and scrapping deeply-ingrained religious customs (Acts 10). The question, for us as much as the first Christians, was how far this revolutionary transformation should go?
And some early Christians took the revolution much further than is often remembered. Church historians know of the Carpocratians, for example: a community of Greek Christians predating Athenagoras by a generation. Since information about the Carpocratians comes from second-hand sources and polemics against them, it’s impossible to know their true beliefs for certain. But what seems clear is that this particular Christian community attempted a radical communitarian version of the Gospel, rejecting not only private property, but private marriage. In true (patriarchal) brotherhood, the Carpocratians held all things in common, including each other’s wives! Brothers shared sister-wives at Agape (love) feasts, all in the name of Christ.
Even in his condemnation of two church members flagrantly committing incest (1 Corinthians 5), Paul leaves open the same cultural doors that allow progressive Christians to accept alternative sexualities today: Paul is condemning behavior that is immoral in the context and occasion to which he is writing. He even affirms later in his letter that Christians have the freedom in Christ to do “all things,” remaining vague about the unprofitable behaviors from which believers should refrain.
So in an hypothetical setting where kinship marriage is tolerated and no incest taboo exists, we might imagine Paul giving the same counsel that he provides to the Romans about eating food sacrificed to idols (Romans 15): Christians are liberated from all spiritual and ideological oppressions, fully capable of making ethical decisions as free subjects. They are transfigured, having undergone a transformation of the mind, and it is a strength for them to exercise their freedom over old religious prohibitions. It is weakness, Paul says, for Christians to suffer from artificial moral restraints, though “weak” brothers and sisters, bound to taboos and religiosity, still deserve respect and even a measure of deference, for their sake.
When his entire religion was based around being a distinct, set-apart, blood-related tribe, Jesus triggered the radioactive, unstable core of God’s Law by transfiguring the meaning of Blood. Having divine DNA is a matter of Faith, not birth, he says; a matter of allegiance, not privilege; like being part of the gluon field, the quantum-level plane that occupies all the empty space between subatomic particles, instead of being a power-hoarding nucleus of an atom, electron-satellites only zinging by at the fringes.
The Resurrection of Christ is intended to leave us with one choice left to make: to partake in the common Blood of Christ, joining all things in familial relation, or to remain unresurrected, divided into warring DNA-based factions. Athenagoras emphasizes the priority of actively choosing chastity in order to conform more closely to the pattern of Christ:
“Therefore, having the hope of eternal life, we despise the things of this life, even to the pleasures of the soul, each of us reckoning her his wife whom he has married according to the laws laid down by us, and that only for the purpose of having children…. Nay, you would find many among us, both men and women, growing old unmarried, in hope of living in closer communion with God. But if the remaining in virginity and in the state of an eunuch brings nearer to God, while the indulgence of carnal thought and desire leads away from Him, in those cases in which we shun the thoughts, much more do we reject the deeds. For we bestow our attention, not on the study of words, but on the exhibition and teaching of actions, — that a person should either remain as he was born, or be content with one marriage; for a second marriage is only a specious adultery.”
Passages like this are easy to find in the writings of the ancient Church. It was abundantly clear (to them) that sex itself was a distracting, earthly indulgence not made for citizens of the Kingdom of Heaven. Saint Jerome, one of the first doctors of Christian theology and fierce proponent of celibacy, compares Christians who take a vow of chastity to the portion of a harvest that is grown for its full fruition and enjoyment, as opposed to the portion used to reseed the fields.
“I praise wedlock, I praise marriage, but it is because they give me virgins. I gather the rose from the thorns, the gold from the earth, the pearl from the shell. ‘Doth the plowman plow all day to sow?’ Shall he not also enjoy the fruit of his labor? Wedlock is the more honored, the more what is born of it is loved. Why, mother, do you grudge your daughter her virginity? She has been reared on your milk, she has come from your womb, she has grown up in your bosom. Your watchful affection has kept her a virgin. Are you angry with her because she chooses to be a king’s wife and not a soldier’s? She has conferred on you a high privilege; you are now the mother-in-law of God.”
When the Law commands you to avoid incest, but the New Covenant of love commands you to think of your spouse as your sibling, all sex becomes stained with law-breaking. The early Church knew that, and so did its detractors, which is why, in part, the Church Fathers fought so feverishly against all sexual activity. Intercourse itself is only a mercy to the weak, a necessity only for those who must indulge their passions, and only, they decreed, according to human laws of marriage that commingle with the resurrected Church.
But when we cross into the trans-sanguineous (Beyond-Blood) quantum field at the heart of the Family, experiencing genuine brotherhood and sisterhood with a non-blood-relative, we necessarily redefine what it means to commit “incest.” We find out from the Law that forbids incest that we are, in fact, indulging in this taboo every time we have sex! Following God’s Law — that is, imitating Jesus — is what makes us all siblings in the first place.
Haven’t you, at some moment, known that you and your best friend share a kind of spiritual blood?
How many Christian grooms are told at their weddings that their Christian brides are also their sisters-in-Christ? We get a taste in these ceremonies of why so many ancient laws prohibiting incest extended the taboo to include sex with in-laws: because Blood, like Gender, is non-binary. You’re not just in or out, Jew or Gentile. Your identity as a relative — Mother, Sister, Brother, etc — is not tied to the laws of DNA.
In your church, your club, your office, your community, Family is bigger and deeper than blood.
“Whoever does the will of my Father” Jesus says, “is my… Mother.”
And so for these early Christians, the total transformation of Family demanded a choice: the discouragement of sexual intercourse as an incestuous necessity unfit for more devoted servants of Christ, or the agape orgies of the Carpocrations. There were, of course, other options, but the debate was between positions separated by a massive gulf. And one way or the other, the command given to God’s original man and woman to “be fruitful and multiply” would be forever infected — by this Trans-Blood of Christ — with incest.
[WARNING: GAME OF THRONES SEASON 7 SPOILERS AHEAD]
But what if the infection is more like an inoculation? Game of Thrones gives us incest first, with Jamie and Cersei, as a scandal, but later unveils it as a site of salvation: Jon and Daenerys, nephew and aunt, falling in love to fight off the Dead. Jesus tends to do the same thing, exposing the wound, the rupture at the heart of the Law, so that he can draw from the wound an impossible, unpredictable healing. We need to hate the infection, come face to face with it in absolute opposition, so that it can act as our armor, a shield of ultimate defense.
Jon Snow (Kit Harrington) with his aunt, Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke)
Christianity, like Game of Thrones, uses the radical rupture of kinship love, genuine love between siblings, as a vaccination, exposing our bodies to a sickness that will make us well. After the Resurrection of Christ and the pouring-out of the Holy Spirit, when everyone is your brother and sister and mother, sexual activity becomes intertwined with familial communion. Every duty that families have toward each other, to nurture and share and suffer with one another, gets ecumenically amplified, engulfing everything from diets to money to sex. Insofar as sex is a sacrament and spiritual gift, it is a discipline meant to foster the health of a single Church Family. It’s not like the Carpocratians, a communion of men sharing their wives like their milk or bread; but neither is sex a vehicle only for procreation, a necessary evil like Jerome describes. Sex is part of the health of the Body of Christ, working and sharing together.
But health and wellness in pop culture like Game of Thrones is not the same as healthy Christianity.
The HBO series asks us if we’re ready to normalize incestuous relationships for the sake of individual consenting lovers: When people are free to love whomever they choose, the show suggests, so much strife can be avoided and so many hard hearts can be softened.
Christians are right to pose themselves this same dilemma: how much despair and death lies at the feet of the Church’s taboos and prohibitions? The long, repressive history of Christianity has taught (some of) us not to ignore prophetic, liberatory words about Love, words that free us from the shackles forged by Jerome and Athenagoras and the other aptly-named “Patriarchs” of the early Church who failed to understand the difference between purity and “celibate” masculinity.
But Game of Thrones, in typical Hollywood-Gospel-fashion, asks us to accept consensual incest as one among many tolerable sexual arrangements. “Love is love, after all,” another resurrected tautology of sex-positive movements throughout history emphasizing bourgeois individual liberties with little communal vision.
Jesus, indignant and righteous, asks us if we’re ready to see all sex as an apocalyptic duty, structured like a spiritual discipline rather than a free choice: a Christian kinship Tantra prescribed for the profit of the Communion of Saints. Christ’s law of Love compels us to expand the Family to every soul: an explosion of kinship love, the responsibility of brothers and sisters in Christ, working to foster a Kingdom of Heaven here on Earth.
And with the advent of that quantum-level kind of entanglement, with all God’s children vibrating their loyalty to Love as a single sorority of a cosmos, the fissile implosion of the oldest prohibition sits just at arm’s length, a few episodes away.
…The things we do for Love.
In “Part II —The Tzimtzum of the Gluon Field” we’ll move from the scandal of universal incest to the trauma of the orgy-yet-to-come by looking at one of the most theologically-important films in recent years: Sausage Party.
Joshua Bean is a freelance and aspiring author, Master of Divinity (Cairn University 2011), and full-time parent.
©Joshua Craig Bean 2017 all rights reserved.