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Sexuality is at the Heart of Christianity’s Place in the World

Sexuality is at the Heart of Christianity’s Place in the World

Last updated on: April 17, 2015 at 2:29 pm by Artur Rosman

Sexuality is at the Heart of Christianity’s Place in the World 2015-04-17T14:29:36-07:00 Artur Rosman

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The dean and creator of the field known as “Late Antiquity,” Peter Brown, says Kyle Harper’s From Shame to Sin reveals a chasm/canyon separating Christian sexual morality from the ancient Greeks and Romans (Hubert Sattler, Grand Canyon, exact completion date unknown, late 19th century; Source: Wikimedia Commons, PD-Old-100).

We have gone over some of the lineaments of the difference Christian sexual morality makes in the public square. It left its stamp on the sexual orientation of Catholic asceticism; possibly influenced the movement for gay marriage through Andrew Sullivan’s mainstreaming of the notion; and led to the disappearance of ancient homosocial gym culture (until recent times).

Kyle Harper’s recent book From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity provides us a convenient outline how much the generation of scholars revolutionized our views about sexuality during the period of transition from paganism to Christianity which has come to be known as Late Antiquity:

Over the last generation, as the history of sexuality became one of the great scholarly enterprises, the popular story in which Christianity put an end to pagan freedom with the body was exposed as a caricature, at best. In 1978 Sir Kenneth Dover published Greek Homosexuality, opening a new era in the study of ancient culture by arguing that the Greeks did not recognize permanent sexual orientation as a core feature of individual identity. In that same year, an article by Paul Veyne [republished in A History of Private Life, v. 1] exploded the myth that pre-Christian sexual culture as an uninhibited garden; in his strong reformulation, the Romans were already, long before Constantine’s celestial vision, pent-up pagan prudes who had sex timorously, at night, with their clothes on and the lamps off. The insights of Dover and Veyne were refined and greatly popularized in the late works of Michel Foucault, who showed that the history of sex could be about more than the changing balance of permissiveness and constraint; it could be about the categories of desire and morality, about the cultures that sustained differing visions of the human person as a sexual being. Above all, our understanding of early Christian sexuality has been revolutionized by the work of Peter Brown, whose The Body and Society restored to Christian asceticism its original symbolic energy and human urgency. Brown’s book inspired a whole generation of scholars by showing that the act of sexual renunciation was at the heart of a debate over the very meaning of Christianity’s place in the world. The pioneers of Christian virginity, in denying the material demands the social order placed on their sexual capacity, transformed themselves into intermediaries of an other-worldly order. Acts of the flesh were burdened with a symbolism they had never known before.

In other words, the revolution of the study of sexuality came through closely studying the Christian revolution in sexuality. From these recently published books we have learned that debates about sex were right in the middle of defining what early Christianity was. Therefore, anyone who objects to discussing the faith AND sex is more than a prude; that person is willfully ignorant of their own history.

One thing Brown doesn’t note is how frequently Harper unnecessarily pokes fun at what he calls Christian “prudishness.”

Few academics get lucky with the way the academic market stands today. But Harper hit a grand salami when Peter Brown wrote a glowing review of From Shame to Sin in the New York Review of Books. In prose I could only hope to emulate some day Brown explains the radical innovation during the period considered by Harper’s book thus:

One of the most lasting delights and challenges of the study of the ancient world, and of the Roman Empire in particular, is the tension between familiarity and strangeness that characterizes our many approaches to it. It is like a great building, visible from far away, at the end of a straight road that cuts across what seems to be a level plain. Only when we draw near are we brought up sharp, on the edge of a great canyon, invisible from the road, that cuts its way between us and the monument we seek. We realize that we are looking at this world from across a sheer, silent drop of two thousand years.

Antiquity is always stranger than we think. Nowhere does it prove to be more strange than where we once assumed that it was most familiar to us. We always knew that the Romans had a lot of sex. Indeed, in the opinion of our elders, they probably had a lot more than was quite good for them. We also always knew that the early Christians had an acute sense of sin. We tend to think that they had a lot more sense of sin than they should have had. Otherwise they were very like ourselves. Until recently, studies of sex in Rome and of Christianity in the Roman world were wrapped in a cocoon of false familiarity.

The Christian revolution was tied up with the issue of slavery and ultimately human dignity:

Harper’s book makes plain that the modern spate of works on sexuality and on the construction of gender in Roman and early Christian times, ingenious though they may be, are lightweight confections compared with this gross, ever-present fact of Roman life. We must look up from our literary games and see what is almost too big to be seen—the fact of slavery, towering above us like the trees of an immense forest of unfreedom that covered the Roman world. What mattered, in Roman law and in Roman sexual morality, had little to do with sex. It had everything to do with whose bodies could be enjoyed with impunity and whose could not be touched without elaborate formulas of consent.

The joys of sex were there for all. Harper shows how the puritanism of the Romans in relation to their own spouses has been greatly exaggerated. But the primary school of sexual endeavor remained, to an unusual degree, the bodies of slaves—along with the bodies of the poor and of prostitutes, who were all too easily sucked into the gravitational field of dishonor associated with outright slavery. Then Harper sums up his feelings: “The laws deflected lust away from the freeborn body, and slaves provided a ready outlet.”

Brown’s classic doesn’t get muddled in putting down asceticism as Harper does.

Thus, asceticism as freedom from being poked by the rich anywhere they wanted, was at the bottom of the revolution under consideration:

The excitement of his second chapter, “The Will and the World in Early Christian Sexuality,” lies in the manner in which he traces the sheer fierceness of Christian attitudes toward sexuality back to how sexual morality merged with the charged issue of freedom. Christians rethought these ideas in profound alienation from a society that took unfreedom for granted. They also dissociated themselves from a view of the cosmos that seemed to support a chill “indifference toward the brutalities accepted in the name of destiny.”

This is the second grand theme in Harper’s book. From Saint Paul onward, the great issues of sex and freedom were brought together in Christian circles like the enriched ore of an atomic device. For Paul, *porneia—*fornication—meant a lot more than premarital fooling around. It was a brooding metonym, “enriched” by an entire spectrum of associations. It stood for mankind’s rebellion against God. And this primal rebellion was shown most clearly in the topsy-turvy sexual freedom ascribed first by Jews and then by Christians to the non-Christian world.

But then, what was true freedom? Freedom also was a mighty metonym, of which the freedom to decide one’s sexual fate was only one, highly “enriched” part. Above all, it meant “freedom” from “the world.” And by “the world” Christians meant, bluntly, the Roman society of their own times, where unfreedom was shown in its darkest light by the trading and sexual abuse of unfree bodies. It no longer mattered, to Christians, with whose bodies, from which social categories, and in what manner sex might happen. From Paul onward, for Christians, there was right sex—sex between spouses for the production of children; wrong sex—sex outside marriage; and abhorrent sex—sex between same-sex partners. Wrong sex of any kind was a sin. And a sin was a sin. It was not a social faux pas, deemed an outrage in one situation and accepted in another.

Therefore, personal freedom, one of our most treasured and valued concepts, is not an eternal philosophical given, but an invention (a creative gift of grace in more theological language) born of the encounter between the Christian revelation and human sexuality. Therein lies the biggest chasm between our world and the strange and constrained world of the ancients.

I’m once again running out of time and space here, so we’ll have to continue the conversation some other time. But in some ways I wonder whether Christian asceticism might once again provide an escape from the ubiquity of sexuality, not always wanted, in our culture. The sexual revolution has left every damn thing sexualized, including kitchen products, tobacco pipes, and whiskey.

Suffice it to say that sexuality in the ancient world was not not quite as haha-merry as this Monty Python clip:

For more on the sexual core of Christianity see the Fabrice Hadjadj interview I recently translated for Ethika Politika.

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