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About Celibacy, I have No Instructions From the Lord: An Inquiry in to the Origins of Clerical Celibacy

by Carl Triebs

207 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #04-0700; ISBN 1-4120-2871-X; US$20.00, C$23.00, EUR16.50, £11.50

This book focuses on how clerical celibacy came about and on possible explanations for its origins.

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About the Book      About the Author      Excerpts      Catalogue Information

About the Book

The insistence on clerical celibacy was established in much of the Western Church beginning in the Fourth Century. It expanded slowly and unevenly throughout Late Antiquity and the early middle ages and at the Second Lateran Council in 1139 became Church Law. This Law of Celibacy decreed that Holy Orders were a absolute impediment to any in the higher clerical orders attempting to contract marriage. Any such marriage was automatically null and void in the eyes of the Church.

Celibacy is not mandated by Scripture or Church doctrine. St. Thomas Aquinas wrote that "the obligation of observing continence is connected with Holy Orders, not essentially, but by the institution of the Church." After tracing the historical development of clerical celibacy, the book examines possible reasons why celibacy came to be imposed as a law of the Roman Catholic Church. This examination starts from three points of view that may be called material, cultural, and ideological. Material reasons are embedded in economic, political, and sociological factors. Cultural reasons address a society's thought and actions at various times about human sexuality, and the legacies the early churches received from their Jewish and pagan heritages. The ideological view examines scriptural, traditional, and theological justification for clerical celibacy.

These three views are not mutually exclusive. There should be no objection to any one of these approaches unless the approach excludes all others from consideration.

There is no single reason which clerical celibacy became a law of the Church. All of the reasons addressed played a role at one time or another, at greater and lesser degrees of intensity.

However, it is the thesis of this book that although material reasons gave impetus to its expansion and enforcement, and ideological reasons provided intellectual support to its protagonists, clerical celibacy was principally driven by cultural factors, of which sexual asceticism was paramount. Sexual asceticism was present from earliest times of Christianity, reach an apex of sorts in the late Fourth Century, and was the hub around which the other reasons revolved.

Sexual asceticism has remained a linchpin of ecclesiastical discipline and teaching throughout the history of the Church, which has a long tradition of teaching that the sexual act, even within holy matrimony, has an ineffable taint about it; a taint that makes it fitting and seemly for priests to abstain from marriage, even though on this matter, there are "no instructions from the Lord."

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About the Author

Carl R. Triebs studied church history under George Hunston Williams at Harvard in the 1950's. After thirty-five years as an administrator and systems engineer, Mr. Triebs retired, renewed his early academic interests, and began the researches that have led to this book.

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Excerpts

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Catalogue Information

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