Family Life and Asceticism

"Cooper identifies two developments that dramatically reshaped how individuals in the Western Empire understood family and household as social institutions. The first, a frequently mentioned argument that reaches back to Gibbon, is that the Christian regard for asceticism (and especially sexual continence) deterred Romans from marrying and creating households, thus weakening the institutional cornerstone of the classical civic sphere. Here, Cooper deftly analyzes a persistent cultural debate among Christians to show that, while the vast majority of lay and clerical writers did recognize the potential tension between asceticism and marriage, many also attempted to reconcile the two by classifying family life as a second-tier form of asceticism. The second development, which has been less studied by previous scholars, is the emerging theological perception of marriage as an eternal bond: not simply a relationship that ideally should not be ended, but a spiritual union that could not be dissolved. Cooper argues that these two developments contributed to a distinctly Christian vision of marriage as the creation of a new family unit founded on a unique conjugal bond rather than as the manifestation of a reproductive contract between two families"

From a fascinating book review of a scholarly work on the emergence of the Christian family in the late Roman empire.