Bentham, Jeremy.
Essay on Paederasty
. Lille, France: GayKitschCamp, 2003.
Crompton, Louis. “Jeremy Bentham’s Essay on ‘Paederasty’: An Introduction.
” Journal of Homosexuality
no. 3–4 and 4–1 (1978). (Fragments in Crompton, Louis.
Byron and Greek Love
. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1985.)
Hart, H. L. A.
Law, Liberty and Morality
. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press (The Harry Camp Lectures): 1963.
Leroy-Forgeot, Flora.
Histoire juridique de l’homosexualité en Europe
. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1997.
———, and Caroline Mécary.
Le Couple homosexuel et le droit
. Paris: Odile Jacob, 2001.
—Criminalization; Decriminalization (France); Devlin, Patrick; England; Philosophy; Tolerance.
VATICAN.
See
Catholic Church
VIAU, Théophile de
Théophile de Viau (1590–1626), a French baroque poet and dramatist, was born in Clairac to a
Protestant
family of minor nobility. His life was that of a poet-adventurer; he accompanied wandering comedians at the end of his adolescence, and became involved in different intrigues in the company of great lords of his time. He showed them how to live a life of elegant libertinage, something at which he happily excelled. After a sojourn in the United Provinces (now the Netherlands) and
England
, he returned to
France
, but in 1619 was driven out again due to his “rhymes unworthy of a Christian as much in faith as in dirt.” In 1622, he renounced his Protestant faith, but this concession would not disarm the querulous zeal of Jesuits Garasse and Voisin, who denounced him in 1623 and attacked his works and his contributions to the
Parnasse satyrique
( an anonymous manuscript of licentious verses believed to be his). Judged in absentia, the poet was condemned to be burned at the stake. While he was out of the country, the sentence was carried out in effigy, but the poet was eventually caught as he was heading toward England and imprisoned in Paris for almost two years. In the meantime, scholars and writers actively debated Théophile’s fate, resulting in numerous published pamphlets that were both for and against him. His lover, the young poet Jacques Vallée des Barreaux, and a few other friends pleaded the court on his behalf. In the end, he was banished again. However, the horrible conditions of an unjust detention from 1623 to 1625 would be the end of him: he died the following year.
During this affair, the various spies and witnesses, in concert with Jesuit determination and highly placed pressure, all contributed to what was at stake: by condemning Théophile the poet, authorities were condemning libertinage in France. Théophile was clearly an ideal target: because of his unapologetic behavior and beliefs, this “prince of poets” constituted, at least for his adversaries, a figure who was both eminently symbolic and relatively vulnerable. Attacks against Théophile were concentrated on two fronts, irreligiousness and sodomy, and the idea that both were irrevocably and naturally linked. From the start, Father Garasse, one of Théophile’s principal opponents, was determined to bring down both of these sins. In an enormous
in quarto
(booklet) of more than 1,000 pages supporting the indictment, entitled
La Doctrine curieuse des beaux esprits de ce temps, ou prétendus tels
(The curious doctrine of beautiful minds of the present times, or pretended as such)
,
he affirmed:
I call Impious and Atheists, those who are more advanced in malice, who have the impudence of proffering horrible blasphemies against God; who commit abominable brutalities, who publish in sonnets their execrable infamies, who make Paris a Gomorrah, who get the
Parnasse satyrique
printed, who have this unfortunate advantage that they are so unnatural in their way of living, that one would not dare to refute them point by point for fear of teaching their
vices
and making the whiteness of the paper blush.
This declaration by the Jesuit reveals the tension between his wish of anathema and the necessity of silence. This is a constant of moralist rhetoric: on these abominable questions, rather than eloquent diatribe, a cold silence is often best, which prevents those who would not have had thought of it to want suddenly to try it. Nevertheless—and this is the paradox stressed by Father Garasse—those who commit these deeds “have this unfortunate advantage” of being able to practice them without being explicitly blamed or condemned. In short, the silence, which was supposed to contain licentiousness, was at great risk of favoring it. Given this, was it not better to denounce it very loudly?
Such was the case for Father Garasse, who freely vented his ire in an inflamed monologue:
In times past, when there was still a bit of feeling and piety in the souls of good Frenchmen, on hearing the sole word of Sodomy, there would be talk of burning alive he who would only be suspected, and today, we see a book that is sold publicly in the palace’s galleries and which has on the front an execrable sonnet.… Alas! Flames of
Sodom
, where are you? Whereas men are closing their eyes! Why do you not devour this abomination! Why do you not avenge the quarrels of God your Master, whose name is being profaned? Why do you not reduce to ashes these books which are more shameless than the houses and walls of Seboim, of Adama, of Sodom and Gomorrah ever were?
But at the same time, Garasse feared that divine anger would not distinguish between the innocent and the guilty in the same fire: “God’s will that the same punishment happen and fall on the city of Paris, to purge the Sodomies and the brutalities of a hundred villains, who are able to bring down on us the fires of Heaven and engulf in their just punishment the innocence of 100,000 good souls.
Obsecro ne irascatur juror tuus Domine
.” The city thus had to be purged before God did it himself.
The trial of Théophile de Viau confirmed for many the link between sodomy and libertinage. This link was not evident at the beginning of the seventeenth century; the image of a sodomite certainly evoked sin, but in the wake of Théophile, the sodomite was more directly linked to the culture of
debauchery
, an image which subsists still in today’s representations.
Finally, Théophile’s case shows the paradoxical usage of silence in social discourse. Even if it was at the origin of his crime, the question of sodomy was often dodged and constituted a blind spot of the trial. With the exception of Garasse and a few others, attacks against Théophile subtly used detours and circumlocutions: was it best to remain silent, or to denounce publicly? Even today, on these questions, literary critics maintain an embarrassing silence. They admire the work of the poet, but prefer to forget certain personal aspects of the man, which in their eyes bring his reputation into disrepute, as if one could, especially with Théophile, separate the man from the poet. In this sense, they extend the opinion of the famous critic Antoine Adam, who, in 1935, was enthusiastic about Théophile, finding dramatic qualities of style, heart, and spirit, but to which he added: “Let us not talk about the infamous vice of which he was reproached, and in which it is not doubtful that he participated.”
Just as well no one ever talks about it—or nearly.
—Louis-Georges Tin
Adam, Antoine.
Théophile de Viau et la libre pensée française en 1620
. Paris: Droz, 1935; Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1965.
Godard, Didier.
Le Goût de Monsieur, l’homosexualité masculine au XVIIe siècle
. Montblanc: H & O Editions, 2002.
Lachèvre, Frédéric.
Le Libertinage devant le Parlement de Paris, le procès du poète Théophile de Viau
. Paris: Champion, 1909.
Lever, Maurice.
Les Bûchers de Sodome
. Paris: Fayard, 1985.
Saba, Guido.
Fortunes et infortunes de Théophile de Viau, histoire de la critique suivie d’une bibliographie
. Paris: Klincksieck, 1997.
Viau,Théophile de.
OEuvres complètes
. Edited by Guido Saba. Paris: Nizet, 1978–87.
—Abnormal; Against Nature; Bible, the; Censorship; Debauchery; Literature; Scandal; Sodom and Gomorrah; Theology; Vice; Wilde, Oscar.
VICE
Moral harm and vice are not the same thing. Vice is an elaborate and precise notion which does not encompass all possible forms of reprobation. Technically, vice is the opposite of virtue: it is an acquired disposition to commit harmful acts on others or oneself. For homosexuality to be considered a vice, one would first have to show that it is acquired, i.e. a question of will, and second, that it is harmful to others or oneself. We can note that contemporary everyday language most often defines vice according to the first of these characteristics, which means that one is a slave to desires that are unhealthy, while classic thought appears to give more weight to the second characteristic.
Demonstrating the harmful character of homosexuality has not been easy historically. In his book
Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality,
historian John Boswell traces the slow evolution of this idea, in particular the central role given to “Nature.” Homosexuality only became a specific vice when the idea was introduced that it bears harm to Nature itself, and thus God’s plan, of which it is the manifestation. The publication of theologian Alain de Lille’s
De Planctu naturae
(
The Complaint of Nature
) in the twelfth century is considered as an essential moment in the emergence of this notion of a sovereign nature. Nature is no longer the factual whole of spontaneously present beings in the world, but a legislator whose laws must be respected. Those who break these laws must be morally and severely condemned, as they adversely affect the order of the world.
In this perspective, the laws of nature can be discovered by observing animals, which are reputed to respect those laws. Curiously, an author such as Thomas Aquinas from the Middle Ages, who otherwise admitted the superiority and distinctiveness of humanity in relation to the rest of the animal kingdom, considered that in the matter of morals, animal behavior is the rule of human behavior. With bad faith that is surprising in such a rigorous author, Aquinas proposed the idea that given that homosexuality was not present in animals, it was morally wrong (this despite the fact the during the Middle Ages there was evidence put forward of homosexual behavior in certain animals, such as rabbits and weasels). But this argument applied to other human vices in addition to homosexuality, such as greed or drunkenness. As such, it is not sufficient evidence to make homosexuality the “supreme sin,” as Aquinas referred to it in his
Summa Theologica
.
To distinguish homosexuality as the preeminent vice
against nature
, Aquinas had to introduce the idea that it was not only harmful to nature in general, but also that it was contrary to the very nature of the subject. Homosexuality was thus not only harmful to others (including Nature and God), but also to oneself.
We find a more elaborate version of this idea in Kant and his notion of “duty toward oneself.” The central problem of Kantian sexual morality is the instrumentalization of bodies and the objectivization of persons. Kant perceived that erotic drive generally transforms the other into an object and does not respect it as a subject. This transformation into object obviously violates the moral imperative that postulates that one must never treat the other solely as a means, as he explained in
Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals
. Moreover, Kant believed that the agent himself, in the sexual relation, agrees to become a simple means and not an end, and in this, he breaches the fundamental moral imperative: “The natural utilization that one sex makes of the sexual organs of the other is a sensual delight for which one of the parties gives him or herself to the other. In this act, a man makes himself a thing, which contradicts the right of humanity in his individual self.”
The Kantian solution to this moral problem is
marriage
: through marriage, the two future sexual partners publicly pledge to always respect each other, and to never consider the other solely as a means, but also as an end. Therefore, there can be no morally acceptable sexual relations outside marriage. However, this idea does not necessarily prove the heterosexual character of marriage: one can well imagine a contracted pledge of respect between two persons of the same sex, which would then open the possibility for them to have morally acceptable homosexual relations.
As for those who considered homosexuality a particularly serious vice, Kant then developed a new argument, more or less
ad hoc:
the idea of procreation as a normal end of human sexuality, which homosexuality evidently contravenes. One can also see in this argument a simple reformulation of the classic belief of vice that harms Nature itself.
As we understand it, classic thinking neglects, or maybe suggests, the question—nonetheless morally central—of the voluntary character of homosexuality. It was only in the nineteenth century with the introduction of psychiatric categories that this idea became significant. Under the general classification of “sexual
inversion
,” French
medicine
distinguished the Uranian, who was the congenitally inverted, ill person who did not fall under moral judgment, from the pervert, who was voluntarily inverted. From a rhetorical point of view, it is only with this complete characterization that we can effectively speak of “vice.” But it is also at this level of precision that the notion became more fragile and contestable. The concept of homosexuality as a vice defined as an acquired (and assumed) disposition to harm others (Nature) or self (as moral subject), proved to be short-lived. The voluntary nature of the homosexual tendency was questioned and criticized. In the postwar years, the most progressive psychologists and moralists stressed the involuntary character of the homosexual drive and, thus, rejected its assimilation to a form of vice.
At the end of the twentieth century, it became more difficult to rigorously conceive homosexuality as a vice, in that it is no longer thought of as an object of will. Condemnation of homosexuality is no longer commonly based on upholding moral order, but on anthropological, sociological, or psychoanalytical criteria. Popular morality will doubtlessly continue for a long time to name as “vice” what it instinctively wishes to censor, but it will no longer have theoretical foundations that will allow it to rigorously justify this aversion. In the history of the notion of homosexuality as a vice, we see the deployment of an idea, constructed and refined over seven centuries, but which finally lost all momentum due to its own vacuity.
—Philippe Colomb