From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity by Kyle Harper

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 207 A brief conclusion emphasizes that slaves in history are not irrevocably invisible. The difficulty of seeing slaves is reduced by the self-conscious decision to look for them in the same physical spaces where attention has usually landed on other elements, such as art or the tools that slaves wielded. The ability to see is facilitated by recognizing that one physical environment could in fact be multiple, co-existing social environments, each responding to the needs of those inhabiting them: to see the unseen, it is necessary to cease to look only through the lenses that purposefully erased slaves. The difficulty of doing so, however, is demonstrated in this very study. Although the authors sometimes betray palpable impatience with previous scholarship that has implicitly adopted only the master’s viewpoint (e.g., 34, 89–90), the terminology of slaves’ “tactics” in dialogue with masters’ “strategy” renders the master the measure of slaves’ behaviour (as usual). Despite this vocabulary, however, the authors recognize that slaves might act for their own reasons (e.g., 15, 62), and the invocation of cross-cultural comparisons (esp. 141–142) suggests that even when slaves pursued their own ends, the master was ever present, if not as the point of reference, then at least as an interloper: we must decide to see the slave, but we cannot and should not erase the master as part of that vision. This is an interesting, beautifully illustrated, and methodologically inspiring book, and although many of its valuable insights must remain in the realm of possibility rather than incontrovertible fact, it surely expands historical perception of Roman slaves’ lives. University of Winnipeg Pauline Ripat From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity. By Kyle Harper. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 2013. Pp. x, 304. In an ambitious and lively study more strongly worded than argued, Harper presents an homage to Peter Brown’s Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York 1988). Harper here makes a substantive advance in studies of ancient popular morality by presenting a multi-genre approach to convey the complexities of sexual morality and its changes over time from the Romans to the early Christians in Roman society. Like Brown, Harper focuses on the effects of sexual morality on “real human bodies” (5), and he elaborates on the idea that a biblically creationist idea of free will motivated early Christian sexual renunciation. In addition, Harper seeks to determine how far early Christian sexual morality transformed its Roman antecedent, particularly with regard to male homosexuality and female prostitution. The strength of From Shame to Sin arises from Harper’s determination to convey the complexities of Roman and emergent Christian sexual mores from the second century c.e. through late antiquity. In an engaging style, he brings together considerable evidence from numerous primary-source genres and secondary-source compilations. His wideranging approach to sexual morality is an invigorating and promising way to enrich the study of popular morality in the ancient world. Harper repeatedly states, without citing solid evidence or setting forth a substantive argument to support his claim, that a creationist notion of free will was the essential feature that set early Christian sexual morality apart from its Roman social context. “The rise of the concept of free will and the sea change in the logic of sexual morality went hand in hand” (118) in early Christianity. What is more, “sex was integral to the development 208 PHOENIX of the concept of free will” (4). On Harper’s view, this inherently sexual aspect of free will, or this co-development of free will and sexual morality, led to an early Christian sexual austerity that was inclined toward a complete abstention from sexual activity. But then in late antiquity this changed. The view that free will could be anti-sexual faded under the influence of Augustine’s view that original sin and concupiscence precluded the will from being fully liberated from having a sexual nature. Harper does not explain why the anti-deterministic stance of free will was so sexually focused in early Christianity, if it was, or why free will took on...