The making of fornication: eros, ethics, and political reform in Greek philosophy and early Christianity

Abstract

The Making of Fornication: Eros, Ethics, and Political Reform in Greek Philosophy and Early Christianity, by Kathy L. Gaca. Hellenistic Culture and Society 40. Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003. Pp. xviii + 360. $60.00 (hardcover). ISBN 0520235991. Twenty years after his death, there remain many different Foucaults, and this, one suspects, is how late Michel would have wanted it (maybe each of us gets we deserve?). The whose work inspired title of Averil Cameron's lucid review essay-Redrawing Map: Early Christian Territory after Foucault (JRS 76 [1986]: 266-71)-is author of The History of Sexuality, specifically vol. 2, The Use of Pleasure, and vol. 3, The Care of Self, Even so, relevant figure may be less of these volumes than who, before his death, described contours of an as yet unpublished fourth volume on ancient Christianity. For a close, brief encounter, there is no better place to look than an extract from a 1980 lecture (now available as Sexuality and Solitude in Religion and Culture: Michel [ed. Jeremy R. Carrette; New York: Routledge, 1999], 182-87). Here identified the new type oi relationship which Christianity established between sex and subjectivity: Augustine's conception is still dominated by theme and form of male sexuality. But main question is not, as it was in Artemidorus, problem of penetration: it is problem of erection. As a result, it is not problem of a relationship to other people, but problem of a relationship of oneself to oneself, or, more precisely, relationship between one's will and involuntary assertions, (p. 186) For this Foucault, new religion of Augustine caused a rupture, separating bishop and his ilk from dream interpreter and strange but predictable calculus of coupling apparent in Oneirocritica. But there are many Foucaults. The one that Kathy Gaca selects as a foil in her important book is not of rupture and discontinuity but of between Christian and pagan sexual ethics. The Making of Fornication represents a sustained, cogent dissent from thesis, buttressed by a careful survey and analysis of Greek philosophy, writings of Paul and Philo, and diverse approaches to sexual morality among second-century Christians. Out of this investigation Gaca's main thesis emerges: early Christians adapted and altered classical Greek views nearly beyond recognition. Where philosophers saw in sexuality potential for social reform, most Christian authorities discerned instead fornication (porneia), something to avoid at all costs. Where did and others-the continuity scholars-go wrong? According to Gaca, they overlooked, among other things, Septuagint. The Making of Fornication, perhaps more than any recent comparable study, gives Septuagint its due, not only as a cache of images and language for Paul, Philo, and others, but as a conversation partner in its own right. Continuity scholars also misconstrued sexual ethics of Greek philosophy. Moreover, while social historians have plotted rise of ascetic practices and sensibilities among early Christians, they have yet, according to Gaca, to expose the motivating and religious principles behind this restrictive lifestyle. Surely stimulus was not one of merely irrational frenzy due to some undetectable potion that early Christians drank, Gaca drolly comments (p. 9). To correct these problems, Gaca applies a philosophical methodology, an approach, she pledges, that will not only deliver an accurate, subtle analysis of relevant and biblical texts but will also lay out underlying principles that shaped sexual morality of ancient Christianity (p. 10). The book's prose is dense, but on almost every page close reading repays effort (the erudition on display in footnotes alone is staggering). …