The Body and Society
Meeks, Wayne A.
BOOKS When celibates were a brash new elite Peter Brown, I think, would agree with something that the late Yale religious historian E.R. Goodenough once told his students. In Victorian society, as...
...Some ascetic Christians "believed that the universe itself had shattered with the rising of Christ from the grave...
...While the radical wing of the church, like the chorus of saints in the Apocalypse, sang Hallelu-jahsovertheirvisionofavanishingRoman order, urban leaders understood that the household had been the basic cell of the church and that the household both needed and undergirded a smoothly functioning social life in the cities...
...This is not a book to be read quickly...
...It is a bruising journey, but Peter Brown is an extraordinarily reliable guide...
...Brown is a disciplined but imaginative exegete, never blinded by the surface meanings of texts...
...Brown sees both...
...forces of a complex, living society...
...Others, mostly Roman historians, see the Christian developments only as symptoms, not causes of evolutionary changes that were already happening in late-antique society...
...In antiquity, Goodenough said, sex was more often a symbol for food...
...In two pivotal chapters, Brown treats the slow dampening, in the fourth and fifth centuries, of the tumultuous oppositions between town and desert, ordinary Christian and ascetic, into a gentle oscillation between two symbiotic worlds, "a tacit compact" in which the monks became mediators between a world that was not expected soon to end and the realm of God and the angel s. The monks now began to play the role often assigned to the anomalous in a settled society: channels and brokers of the sacred...
...His supercharged notion of "the flesh" became "a Rohrschach test" for future expositors...
...Paul's world is utterly different from Jesus', and it was Paul's fate in turn to be misread-on no topic more drastically than his views on sex-by each of the succeeding generations for whom his letters were authoritative scripture...
...In the Gospels we meet, not the world of Jesus, but the very different, more tense world of his disciples...
...Brown's extraordinary accomplishment is that he enables us to enter a little way into the world of these ghosts from the past, to think along with their logic, disturbing as it is to "modern sensibility...
...Fissures opened up not only between the church and "the world," but between Christian and Christian...
...What Brown for many years has found fascinating about the rise of Christianity is the odd interpenetrations and changes of front that occur when a novel ideology engages the inertia...
...Brown never yields to the temptation to exhibit the strangeness of hermits, virgins, and pillar saints as a sideshow of the mind, and he almost never romanticizes them...
...For example, where other scholars have searched the bizarre tales in the Apocryphal Acts for evidence of actual women's roles, perhaps recorded by female authors, Brown sees instead THE BODY AND SOCIETY Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity Peter Brown Columbia University Press, $45, 504 pp...
...Madison Avenue's manipulators of consumption understand that fact-simplis-tically, but perhaps better than church historians, whose craft was brought to its zenith by the Victorians...
...If the ghosts speak, as he says, "perhaps more gently than we had thought they might," that is in no small measure due to Brown's own special graciousness as much as to his uncommon eloquence...
...or the new elite, pursuing a carriere ouverte aux talents, ascetics and confessors...
...Who would govern: the old elites, incorporated directly into the church as patrons, as householders, as bishops (or new men imitating them in those roles...
...the fault lines had been there all along and needed only the shaking of radical images to gape open...
...In Victorian society, as Freud discovered, food could be a cryptogram for sex...
...He falters a little, I think, in his description of the Gnostics-the Gospel of Thomas becomes a star witness for Valentinianism, for example, which can hardly be right-and his reading of the heroes and heroines of the Apocryphal Acts as "a condensed image of the individual," standing against all the social forces of the age, may import too much of modernity, along with Northrop Frye's interpretation of the romance...
...Sex can in fact symbolize many things, in antiquity as now for us post-Victorians...
...They were really a brash new elite seeking to supplant the old...
...Wayne JL Meeks "the manner in which Christian males of that period partook in the deeply ingrained tendency of all men in the ancient world, to use women 'to think with.'" He is sensitive also to the often-forgotten fact that meanings change with contexts...
...Some observers, mostly modern Christian apologists, insist that Christianity brought to the world of the late Roman empire a unique and revolutionary ethos...
...By renouncing all sexual activity the human body could join in Christ's victory...
...It is very hard to distinguish between those things that, the more they change, the more remain the same, and the things that, even wearing familiar clothes, are at root different...
...With marriage at an end, the huge fabric of organized society would crumble like a sandcastle, touched by the 'ocean-flood of the Messiah.'" For Origen, on the other hand, virginity was "a physical concretization, through the untouched body, of the pre-existing purity of the soul...
...One of the things at stake in the battle of symbols was power...
...One of his favorite phrases is "bruise the modern sensibility," as in "The sheer physicality of such stories [about the dangers of temptation from women in Egyptian monasticism] bruises the modern sensibility...
...Though the ideology of the latter was often egalitarian, democratization is not exactly the right word for what they were trying to accomplish...
...The journey Brown would take us on, to the land of people long dead and more different from ourselves than we have been taught to think, is a difficult one...
...Though in different forms, the symbiosis of householders and monks took place both in East and West...
...Women could, in some cases, belong to the new...
...This book is about the communicative potential of sex and of sexual renunciation in that era during which the rise of Christianity to social and political dominance accompanied, and in part caused, a profound transformation of the ways people in the West thought about the body and, through the body, the self and society...
...Both the power and the variability of sexuality as "aprivileged ideogram" catch Brown's probing eye...
...These are very small quibbles, however, about a very large book...
Vol. 116 • April 1989 • No. 8
