About Preventing Children

Folk in Classical and Medieval times developed many methods for avoiding getting pregnant, but sometimes the inevitable happened. The Bible's statement to "be fruitful and multiply" made the Church's stance on aborting a pregnancy clear, but the rest of the culture did not always see it that way.

Avicenna (c.980 - 1037) offered this reasoning:

At times it may be necessary to induce abortion; that is, when the pregnant woman is young and small and it is feared that childbirth would cause her death, or when she suffers from a disease of the uterus or when a fleshy growth in the uterus makes it very difficult for the fetus to emerge. Also when the fetus dies in the womb of the woman. Know that when labour continues for four days it means that the fetus is already dead.

Methods of abortion could be dangerous to the women as well. Hippocrates had refused to use abortifacients because of the danger they posed to the mother. The early Church stated that women who abort a child should be exiled from the church. A synod in 314 modified that to 10 years of exile. The Church Father Basil the Great later softened that, saying it should be less if the woman shows repentance.

In another case, a woman was sentenced to death for aborting her child precisely because she did it with malicious intent to prevent her husband (whom she had come to hate) from having an heir. Roman law allowed that, if a woman were to do the same thing for the same reason but it post-divorce, then she should only be exiled.

The Church Father St. John Chrysostom criticized abortions, but gave the example of a sex worker who needed to abort a pregnancy or else she would lose her livelihood. He goes so far as to blame her male client, who was responsible for getting her pregnant, as the real murderer.

A 9th century Byzantine author of a biography of a Greek Patriarch Ignatios tells the story of a woman with a breech birth who is in intense pain. The doctors prepare for an embryotomy (removing the baby by cutting it into parts and removing them). The 6th-century Bishop Paul of Mérida, who trained as a doctor in his youth, doesn't scruple to perform an embryotomy to save a woman's life.

That late-term abortions can find their way into accounts of religious lives and can be justified by Christian saints suggests a very different attitude toward the health and safety of the mother than is sometimes taken these days.

Embrotomies would have been difficult for the surgeon and the patient. Let's talk next about some of the other surgical practices that were employed in the Middle Ages. 

Hair and Religion, Part 2

What does hair have to do with piety? Well, monks would get tonsured so that their outward appearance signified their role in society. As mentioned, hair outside the monastery was a way to make oneself more attractive, and so shearing most or all of it off was a way to make the individual less attractive and less "worldly."

On the other hand, excessive hair could also be a sign of piety. Anchorites—people who removed themselves from the world in order to devote themselves to prayer—could find separation by being enclosed in a small chamber (often connected to a church or monastery), or by becoming hermits, living away from others in the wilderness.

St. John Chrysostom (c.347 - 407, mentioned here) was a hermit. In the later Middle Ages, he is represented in illustrations as being excessively hairy. Another early hairy saint, Onuphrius, who became popular in Spain and Italy in the 13th and 14th centuries, proved his devotion by leaving his Egyptian monastery and living alone, naked, for 70 years near Thebes. He grew thick hair all over his body to protect himself from the elements.

Hairiness may have been seen as a a sign of such a strong rejection of worldly things that the saint was living simply, like a wild beast in the wilderness.

There were also several female hairy saints. Pictured above in a late 15th century manuscript is St. Mary of Egypt. Mary ran away from home in Egypt to Alexandria where she lived a dissolute life. Eventually turning to religion, she stopped focusing on her appearance, and is shown with matted and dirty hair as well as hair all over her body.

So if hirsute bodies could be a sign of turning from material cares toward spiritual purity, could the opposite take place? Here is where we turn away from the topic of "hair and religion" and look at simple "hair care." The artist Jean Bourdichon painted for King Louis XII the scene of Bathsheba bathing and being watched by King David [2 Samuel 11]. The water is transparent, and every part of her is visible in the water. The pink-red coloring of parts of her body show the she is pictured without pubic hair. If Michelangelo could carve it out of stone, there's no impediment to artists drawing it. The contention is that women must have shaved their pubic hair. Was this considered a choice for vanity's sake? Was it supposed to be a way to enhance sexuality or sensuousness? These questions are not answered in any contemporary texts.

Of course, there may have been an obvious reason for shaving hair around the genitals, one we rarely have to deal with in the Modern Age. Next time, let's look at the problem of lice in history.

Pagan Pope

Pope Innocent I was an early-5th century Italian pope. The Liber Pontificalis ["Book of Popes"] says he was the son of a man who was also named Innocent. It is believed, however, that the Liber was composed over a hundred years after Innocent's death—and its purpose seems to be one of papal propaganda—and so its accuracy is often questioned. Jerome, who was a contemporary of Innocent and wrote about the popes, claims Innocent was the son of Pope Anastasius I (died 19 December 401), who was Innocent's immediate predecessor as pope—a unique occurrence.

He was mentioned in Daily Medieval previously, when John Cassian appealed to him on behalf of the exiled (St.) John Chrysostom. This opportunity to weigh in would have pleased Innocent: he seemed to be concerned with formalizing and centralizing the authority of the Catholic Church in the person of the pope. He also wrote to various bishops, "confirming" authority they had been granted by previous popes, and thereby establishing the papacy itself as the authority. Through various letters (that still exist), we see Innocent using Roman Catholic practices to settle disputes and establish discipline and policy in far-flung dioceses.

Innocent did everything he could to quell heresies among the faithful, such as Montanism, which seemed to differ from mainstream Christianity in that inspiration received directly from the Holy Spirit superseded any words of Jesus or the popes; and Pelagianism, which taught that Original Sin did not stain each human, that Adam died through natural causes (and not because Sin had flawed him), that good works were possible without God's grace, and other beliefs.

So what's this rumor about allowing pagan practices (reported by the historian Zosimus)?

Well, Innocent was in Rome when Alaric I and the Goths arrived, bringing Arianism. Although the Goths respected Roman culture and wanted to rule it rather than destroy it, they so thoroughly overwhelmed the Roman forces and civil structure that perhaps there was pressure to accommodate their Arianism, and this is what Zosimus refers to. As it happens, Catholic Christianity was so ingrained in Roman society by that time that apparently there was no noteworthy rise in pagan ceremonies.

Innocent died on 12 March, 417. He was succeeded by Pope Zosimus (no relation to the historian), who also struggled with Pelagianism.

The Sometime Saint

• His feast day is Leap Day, so he's celebrated only every 4 years.
• He is revered in the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church, but for different reasons.
• He was never officially canonized.
• He was likely a heretic.

John Cassian (c.360-c.435) was a monk in southern Gaul, the son of wealthy parents. A well-educated young man, he visited Palestine as a youth and became acquainted with Eastern monasticism in Bethlehem. Desiring to delve more deeply into the ascetic life, he asked for a leave of absence from the monastery in Bethlehem and traveled to Egypt, where he visited Christian hermits for seven years. He was so impressed by their wisdom that he returned to Bethlehem to ask for an extended leave, and went back to Egypt for another several years.

From Egypt he traveled to Constantinople and became a disciple of St. John Chrysostom, who elevated him to the position of deacon. Chrysostom had local issues that led to his exile from Constantinople in 404, whereupon Cassian was sent to Rome to appeal to Pope Innocent I on Chrysostom's behalf. At that point, Cassian drops out of the public record for the next decade. We assume he was made a Roman Catholic priest, because in 415 we find him in Marseilles having founded two monasteries, one (over the tomb of St. Victor) for men and one for women. He seems to have lived out his days in Marseilles, writing a couple of works, one of which (Called "The Institutes" for short) explained the monastic life. He is buried at St. Victor.

Gregory the Great regarded him as a saint. Pope Urban V, who had been an abbot at the monastery at St. Victor, had "Saint Cassian" engraved on the silver casket that held his head. The Greek calendar of saints lists him. The modern procedure of canonization did not exist, however, and the Roman Catholic Church—although "recognizing" a feast day of 29 February—does not consider him an official saint. The Eastern Orthodox Church gave him slightly more recognition with a feast day of 23 July.

Despite these testimonies, he is considered the origin of the heretical refinement of Pelagianism called Semipelagianism. Whereas Pelagianism taught that coming to God (salvation) was an act of free will, and the orthodoxy of Augustine taught that God's grace was needed for salvation, Semipelagianism held that the initial steps toward salvation were an act of free will, but God's grace was necessary for the increase of faith that ultimately brought one to God.

It was a nice compromise, but the Second Council of Orange in 529 declared it a heresy along with Pelagianism, and reaffirmed the theology of Augustine. The 14 bishops of the Council declared that although faith was a free act, from the very beginning it was the result of God's influence. It was approved by the pope (probably Felix IV), and that was that.