Guest Post: Ewen Owen on a Historical Reference to Consanguinamory

I'm happy to bring you a submission from a friend. Ewen Owen has provided the short essay below. He considers something Christian philosopher Tomas Aquinas wrote about. If you don't care what Aquinas or any other religious philosopher wrote about, especially hundreds of years ago, it is easy to skip over this entry. But if you want to consider thoughts that still influence people today, you might want to read this.

If you're interested in submitting something relevant for this blog, write to me at fullmarriagequality at protonmail dot com and we can discuss it.
 

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For those who have never heard of him, Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) was one of the most influential philosophers of the Christian religion, ever. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Aquinas . He left us with buried gem. From his masterwork Summa Theologiae, question 154, Article 9, “Whether incest is a determinate species of lust?” (In other words, whether it’s necessarily a sin, even if it’s between consenting adults.) 

Aquinas gives three reasons. They are unusual, logical, and worth reading. Aquinas doesn’t bring up the far weaker and more common arguments against consanguinamory, e.g., “it’s icky” or “because the Bible said so.”  He wants to look under the hood, into the foundational justifications, the reasons why the Bible says what it says. 

I’m not going to try to refute what Aquinas said about consanguinamory here, but I want to point out something truly remarkable in his second argument.

The second reason is because blood relations must needs live in close touch with one another. Wherefore if they were not debarred from venereal union, opportunities of venereal intercourse would be very frequent and thus men's minds would be enervated by lust. Hence in the Old Law [Leviticus 18] the prohibition was apparently directed specially to those persons who must needs live together.

https://www.newadvent.org/summa/3154.htm#article9 (emphasis mine.)

In short, Thomas Aquinas knew about double love eight hundred years ago. He knew that it existed, and that it was far more intense than Regular relationships when it happened. 

How he came to know about double love and its intensity, I have no idea. He might have guessed it or inferred it. He might have read about it somewhere. He might have witnessed double love in a 13th-century consang couple. Or he could have even experienced it himself. 

There is some possibility that Aquinas could have known consang couples in his own family or among his peers. He was born into a wealthy and powerful Italian noble family. And, although his family wanted him to enter the abbacy, he might have seen things. Or done them. We simply don’t know.

Regardless of what he did know and how he knew it, Aquinas didn’t know everything about double love, or if he did know he exaggerated the effects. Consang couples do have a lot more sex, and a lot more intense sex, than Regulars. But they don’t get “enervated by lust.” Sex with consenting adult relatives doesn’t (usually) prevent consangs from living all the other parts of their lives.

I can’t resist a little counterargument here. Note the last part of Aquinas’ second reason, “the prohibition was apparently directed specially to those persons who must needs live together.” The second argument falls apart here, because consang couples don’t necessarily live together and because Regular couples usually do. If living with a sexual partner “enervated [his or her mind] by lust,” then there should be a lot more enervation going on than there really is, even among Regulars. And presumably consang couples would be okay, as long as they didn’t live together.

Aquinas himself abstained from sex and was not a supporter of sexual passion in general. But, to repeat, he did know enough about double love to use it as an argument against consanguinamory. Double love has been with us since the beginning of time.

Thanks to the person on Quora, name now forgotten, who brought this to my attention.

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Thanks, Ewan Owen. 

Yes, consanguinamory has always existed.