[218] St. Jerome, In Osee, i. 4. 14 (Migne, op. cit. xxv. 851). Cook’s note to 1 Kings, xiv. 24, in his edition of The Holy Bible, ii. 571. See also Lucian, Lucius, 38.
[219] Rosenbaum suggests (Geschichte der Lustseuche im Alterthume, p. 120) that the eunuch priests connected with the cult of the Ephesian Artemis and the Phrygian worship of Cybele likewise were sodomites.
[220] See Westermarck, The Moorish Conception of Holiness, p. 85.
[221] 1 Kings, xiv. 24; xv. 12; xxii. 46. 2 Kings, xxiii. 7. Job, xxxvi. 14. Driver, op. cit. p. 265.
The Hebrew conception of homosexual love to some extent affected Muhammedanism, and passed into Christianity. The notion that it is a form of sacrilege was here strengthened by the habits of the gentiles. St. Paul found the abominations of Sodom prevalent among nations who had “changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator.”[222] During the Middle Ages heretics were accused of unnatural vice as a matter of course.[223] Indeed, so closely was sodomy associated with heresy that the same name was applied to both. In ‘La Coutume de Touraine-Anjou’ the word herite, which is the ancient form of hérétique,[224] seems to be used in the sense of “sodomite”;[225] and the French bougre (from the Latin Bulgarus, Bulgarian), as also its English synonym, was originally a name given to a sect of heretics who came from Bulgaria in the eleventh century, and was afterwards applied to other heretics, but at the same time it became the regular expression for a person guilty of unnatural intercourse.[226] In mediæval laws sodomy was also repeatedly mentioned together with heresy, and the punishment was the same for both.[227] It thus remained a religious offence of the first order. It was not only a “vitium nefandum et super omnia detestandum,”[228] but it was one of the four “clamantia peccata,” or crying sins,[229] a “crime de Majestie, vers le Roy celestre.”[230] Very naturally, therefore, it has come to be regarded with somewhat greater leniency by law and public opinion in proportion as they have emancipated themselves from theological doctrines. And the fresh light which the scientific study of the sexual impulse has lately thrown upon the subject of homosexuality must also necessarily influence the moral ideas relating to it, in so far as no scrutinising judge can fail to take into account the pressure which a powerful non-volitional desire exercises upon an agent’s will.
[222] Romans, i. 25 sqq.
[223] Littré, Dictionnaire de la langue française, i. 386, ‘Bougre.’ Haynes, Religious Persecution, p. 54.
[224] Littré, op. cit. i. 2010, ‘Hérétique.’
[225] Les Établissements de Saint Louis, i. 90, vol. ii. 147. Viollet, in his Introduction to the same work, i. 254.
[226] Littré, op. cit. i. 386, ‘Bougre.’ Murray, New English Dictionary, i. 1160, ‘Bugger.’ Lea, History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, i. 115, note.