Um, yeah. THAT thing!
I only just realized how old the idea of consummating a marriage is. I was looking at the info on Wikipedia about the code of Hammurabi and came across this:
“If a man takes a woman to wife, but has no intercourse with her, this woman is no wife to him.”
I think that is a fairly direct translation. In case you are wondering the code of Hammurabi was the code of law written by Hammurabi the sixth king of Babylonia.
Within the Catholic church a marriage not consummated can be revoked by the Pope himself:
"spouses have performed between themselves in a human fashion a conjugal act which is suitable in itself for the procreation of offspring, to which marriage is ordered by its nature and by which the spouses become one flesh."
How interesting.
Of course be careful before you do that little act as in the Catholic religion once you do, nothing can dissolve that marriage. Except leaving your church.
So here is the interesting thing; in the more modern case the reason for consummating the marriage is religious, but in the case of the Code of Hammurabi it was merely his code of laws. Of course Hammurabi did think he was chosen by the Gods to be king. But how many kings didn’t think that?
Why though? I mean besides the obvious why would a man and a woman not consummate the marriage, why is it necessary?
I have a feeling that at the time of when the church decided that a marriage must be consummated (when trying to find some info on if marriage had to be consummated in the middle ages all I found was when the church decided that “no man shall give his daughter or female relative o anyone without priestly blessing”) there were more then likely a lot of arranged marriages going.
However why the church would care about weather the marriage was sacred or not (other then that it wanted more follows from these marriages) I am not sure.
It really makes me wonder (yet again) just how much sex there really is in the bible. Yes, there is a lot of begetting, but I never really got past the all the initial begetting (and by god there was lot of it!). After a while I made the decision that the bible had every intention of listing exactly who begot who for the whole worlds population.
So I didn’t get to far in reading the bible. Why on earth I was reading the bible in the first place might be of consideration, but that is not what I am currently writing about.
Anyway, back to good old sex and religion.
So we know that centuries ago some Babylonian king decided in his code of law that any man that did not have intercourse with his wife, did not really have a wife. In other words a couple had to consummate their marriage to make it real in the eyes of the law.
Then somewhere in the middle ages (1076 according to the website I was looking at) the church decided that a priest had to bless a marriage for it to be real.
Then somewhere between then and now the church decided that the marriage had to be consummated for it to be real.
The Catholic church took its ideals from a culture that from what little I understand (but am reading up on right now) was rather harsh on Hebrews ( I cannot even begin to say how completely untrue that could possibly be, but was the impression I got from the introduction of my current reading: Myths of Babylonia and Assyria).
Where does that leave us now? I personally.. no I won’t go into my own views on marriage and sex as they are not fully formed. I am after all not married.
But these days marriage and sex within (or outside of) marriage seems to have lost a little bit of its tradition. Not that that is a bad thing, but sometimes one could with for a little bit more tradition and sanctity.
By the way, I want to make a couple notes: first of all I capitalize things like Catholic because I have a strong since of grammar and classical teachings, other then that it almost hurts to do so when I know that programs like word would auto capitalize Catholic and Christian but not Buddhist or Hinduism. Second, I use the word sanctity as a worldly, overall goodness. Lately that word has been bantered about with the subject of Gay and Lesbian marriage and that is most certainly not something you want to get me started on.
Christianos ad liones
Ad Meliora
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