BMCR 2009.04.72: Teo on Brown, The Body and Society. Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity. Twentieth-anniversary edition with a new introduction. Columbia Classics in Religion

Peter Brown, The Body and Society. Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation
in Early Christianity. Twentieth-anniversary edition with a new
introduction. Columbia Classics in Religion.  New York:  Columbia
University Press, 2008.  Pp. lxvii, 504.  ISBN 978-0-231-14406-3.
$79.50.  ISBN 978-0-231-14407-0.  $27.50 (pb).

Reviewed by Kevin Kia-Choong Teo, Department of English, University of
Calgary ([email protected])
Word count:  1428 words
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The launching of anniversary editions of scholarly studies in the
classics often signifies a eulogistic tribute to the scholar himself.
Peter Brown, arguably one of the most prominent scholars of late
antiquity between AD 250 and 800, is the author of a dozen books,
including Augustine of Hippo, Authority and the Sacred: Aspects of the
Christianization of the Roman World, The Rise of Western Christendom,
and The Cult of the Saints. Such a range of erudition marks the range
of scholarly thought and approaches he brings to bear upon his whole
body of critical works, and this twentieth-century anniversary edition
of The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early
Christianity stands as a case in point. First published in 1988, The
Body and Society became a groundbreaking study in the practices of
permanent sexual renunciation, of continence, celibacy and lifelong
celibacy, among Christian circles from the first century to fifth
century AD. In lieu of using "practice", I use "practices" to describe
the act of sexual renunciation in the context of this book, especially
because Brown's book can be read as more than just a testimony to the
pluralistic expressions of sexual renunciation in the late Roman (and
early Christian) world. Its structure can also be read as an
intellectual journey through the theological-social terrains of early
Christianity. Its chapters can be read both as isolated chapters and as
units leading to one another, confounding the idea of Christianity in
the late Roman world as monolithic in its views and practices of sexual
renunciation.

The addition of a new scholarly introduction has the benefit of
situating the previously published work in the context of contemporary
scholarly reception of Brown's work. Brown's introduction lays out
various strands of his thought that still have relatively broad
resonances within the scholarly community in terms of categories like
"Divergent Christianities", "Body and Cosmos", "Different Bodies,
Different Worlds", "East and West", "Augustine: Before and After". The
question of why early Christians write perpetually about sex, despite
the otherworldly outlook of the Christian religion towards the
afterlife, is purportedly the main question which informs not only his
introduction, but also the rest of the book.[[1]] That the human body
is in itself the nexus upon which society and the cosmos is seen to
center is a late antique obsession, radically different from the
expectations of modern society about the body as simply a locus of
physical needs involving sex, food and drink.

Part One of the book, "From Paul to Anthony", surveys this spectrum of
attitudes towards sex, the body and marriage in the early Christian
milieu of the Roman world, notably by situating the role of the body
within then-emerging Galenic views of the body, male and female. For
example, in the thought of Galen, just as males possess a "decisive
surplus of "heat" and fervent "vital spirit"" in their bodies because
they have realized their full biological potential, females are failed
males because they lack such heat. The implications of such a
differentiation between male and female, of the latter as simply failed
males, bespeak a late antique anxiety of a man's deterioration into
"womanish" behavior, and, at the same time, the need to discipline a
woman into compliance with the public standards of orderly male life.
This model, found in Greek medical thought like Galen's, must be
distinguished from the Judeo-Christian model of dualism. Namely, it was
the juxtaposition between an evil inclination to give in to the love of
pleasure (the flesh) and a good inclination to yield to God in chastity
(the spirit), which Paul the Apostle and various post-apostolic fathers
like Justin Martyr took care to maintain. The emerging cult of martyrs
in the later second and third centuries, after the apostle Paul, needs
to be drawn into the orbit of this host of practices of sexual
renunciation, where, as Church Fathers like Irenaeus and Tertullian
state, a distinguishing mark of true prophecy or martyrdom's glory is
best encapsulated in the body of the virgin, or the sexually continent
person, where all sexual activity is suspended in order to mark the
body as an appropriate vessel for the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.
By contrast, Brown's study marks the emergence of radical heterodox
groups like the Marcionites, Tatian of Syria's Encratite movement and
the Valentinian Gnostics, which were broken off from the legislative
and disciplinary arm of the Church at Rome.  For such groups, the
control of the body and its pleasures via sexual renunciation was best
exercised by a total writing off of all sexuality: putting an end to
all sex, regardless of its licitness within marriage or not, was seen
to plug off the switch to this world that hurtles on towards the end of
this "present age" and to re-constitute the world anew.[[2]]

Brown's ability to assimilate a plethora of primary sources might also
be demonstrated in the attention he gives to women's prominent roles in
advancing sexual renunciation as a means of access to the holy in the
late Roman world. Such an area of attention is important especially
because women were largely involved in any Christian circle which
enjoyed membership from the upper classes of the aristocracy. Brown's
study in chapters like ""A Promiscuous Brotherhood and Sisterhood": Men
And Women in The Early Churches" thus provides a balance alongside his
other chapters' focus on the misogynistic Christian groups or preachers
which renounced sex by attributing its effects to the perpetuation of
sin or human mutability. An awareness of the emergence of the cult of
saints as a phenomenon which invokes the laudability of women alongside
their male compatriots is found in an example like Thecla in the
Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles, whose unflinching faith in the face of
martyrdom encapsulates that of "an ideal Christian in an age of
persecution".[[3]] Similarly, in Part Two of his book, "Asceticism and
Society in the Eastern Empire", chapters such as ""Daughters of
Jerusalem": The Ascetic Life of Women in the Fourth Century", attest to
this abundance of female examples in sanctity in figures such as the
virgin Macrina, sister of Gregory of Nyssa and Basil the Great, Melania
the Elder and Olympias of Constantinople who chose to remain in
widowhood after her marriage to a pagan.

Notably, Part Three of the book, "Ambrose to Augustine: The Making of
the Latin Tradition", marks a registered shift from Part Two's emphasis
on the practices of asceticism in the Eastern outposts of the Roman
Empire to a focus on the Latin patristic tradition, centering on the
iconic figures of Ambrose, Jerome and Augustine of Hippo. The plotting
of this trajectory of thought starts from Augustine of Hippo's earlier
predecessors, namely Ambrose of Milan.   Ambrose not only sought to
defend the Virgin Birth but also to assert her Perpetual Virginity
against other Christians, a move which embodied the virgin state that
Ambrose believed to be held up by the Church par excellence to all men
to emulate, especially among the clergy. Jerome, better known to
moderns as the translator of the Bible into its first Latin Vulgate
version, plays an equally important role in this germination of
Augustine's understanding of human sexuality's centrality as an
irreversible symptom of man's Fall here. According to Brown, Jerome's
contribution to the sexual interpretation of Paul the Apostle's notion
of the flesh, as opposed to the spirit, had effects like his letter
Against Jovinian, a highly misogamous tract which sent ripples of
inspiration as well as irritation throughout the Roman world for the
inflammatory views which it put forth against marriage, especially
among the clergy.

In revisiting this classic work of scholarship in the practices of
sexual renunciation within the late Roman world between the first and
fifth centuries AD, one has to ask oneself what remains to be said when
this work has already been reviewed, first in 1988 during its first
release, and now again in 2008. Considering the erudition and the
stylistic grace of Peter Brown's writing, as well as the scope of his
studies, which takes into account primary sources in the Coptic,
Syriac, Greek, and Latin, its meticulous scholarship is something to
which many recent studies in the field of asceticism in late antiquity
return.[[4]] The Body and Society, as a seminal work in the study of
late Roman practices of sexual renunciation, highlights for us how the
body cannot be taken as a natural or biological given, even in earlier
societies like late antiquity, but was a tool by which individuals and
groups might marshal their theologies of heaven and (or) hell.


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Notes:


1.   Peter Brown, The Body and Society. Men, Women, and Sexual
Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2008), p. xli.

2.   Brown, p.85.

3.   Brown, p.158.

4.   This includes titles such as Eliezer Diamond's Holy Men and Hunger
Artists: Fasting and Asceticism in Rabbinic Culture (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2003) and Caroline T. Shroeder's Monastic Bodies:
Discipline and Salvation in Shenoute of Atripe (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), just to name a few exemplars.