Masculinity as Flight: Vulnerability, Devotion, Submission and Sovereignty in the Teachings of Silvanus

Abstract

Late Roman masculinity required dominance and control and favoured violent hierarchies. Yet scholars of early Christian martyr acts and ascetic literature frequently observe ambivalence or deviation from this norm. Rather than accumulate more and more exceptions to the traditional ideal (which was never really singular anyway) or continue collecting variations on this model of masculinity, the following essay seeks to shift the model by introducing a notion of masculinity as a plan of escape from vulnerability, not as a state of affairs or set of traits. Treating masculinity as a trajectory and a necessarily volatile process allows us to accommodate all the ambivalence and variety that has already been observed, because flight is always volatile, because human beings trying to be invulnerable is impossible, and because in the late Roman world, that plan of escape passed through a bottleneck of submission to specific other already-sovereign males. I illustrate the notion of masculinity as flight from vulnerability on the basis of an example of ascetic instruction between master and disciple known as the Teachings of Silvanus, tracing a jumbled narrative arc starting with intolerable vulnerability, passing through indulgence in submission and devotion, to the promise of total sovereignty. I wish to suggest that treating vulnerability as intolerable and fleeing from it is what is at the root of late ancient masculinity.