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Please be advised that this information was generated on 2021-10-01 and may be subject to change. De totstandkoming van het concept mannelijkheid in het medisch-theologisch discours van Johannes Chrysostomus

Proefschrift

ter verkrijging van de graad van doctor

aan de Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen

op gezag van de rector magnificus prof. dr. J.H.J.M. van Krieken,

volgens besluit van het college van decanen

in het openbaar te verdedigen op maandag 14 oktober 2019

om 12.30 uur precies

door

Chris Len de Wet

geboren op 27 augustus 1982

te Johannesburg, Zuid-Afrika

Promotoren: Prof. dr. Jan G. van der Watt Prof. dr. Johannes van Oort

Manuscriptcommissie: Prof. dr. H.L. Murre-van den Berg Prof. dr. P.J.A. Nissen Dr. J.E.A. Ackermans Prof. dr. Ch. Hornung (Universität Bonn, Duitsland) Prof. dr. J. Stenger (University of Glasgow, Verenigd Koninkrijk)

The formation of masculinity in John Chrysostom’s medical-theological discourse

Doctoral Thesis

to obtain the degree of doctor

from Radboud University Nijmegen

on the authority of the Rector Magnificus prof. dr. J.H.J.M. van Krieken,

according to the decision of the Council of Deans

to be defended in public on Monday, October 14, 2019

at 12.30 hours

Chris Len de Wet

born on August 27, 1982

in Johannesburg, South Africa

iii

Supervisors: Prof. dr. Jan G. van der Watt Prof. dr. Johannes van Oort

Doctoral Thesis Committee: Prof. dr. H.L. Murre-van den Berg Prof. dr. P.J.A. Nissen Dr. J.E.A. Ackermans Prof. dr. Ch. Hornung (University of Bonn, Germany) Prof. dr. J. Stenger (University of Glasgow, United Kingdom)

SAMENVATTING

DE TOTSTANDKOMING VAN HET CONCEPT MANNELIJKHEID IN HET MEDISCH-THEOLOGISCH DISCOURS VAN JOHANNES CHRYSOSTOMUS

Chris L. de Wet, B.A., B.A. Hons., M.A., D.Litt.

Het doel van deze studie is een onderzoek naar de beschouwingen van Johannes Chrysostomus (349–407 AD) over de aard van mannelijkheid en de totstandkoming van dit concept. In tegenstelling met vorige studies over oudere beschouwingen van mannelijkheid die de nadruk legden op welsprekendheid, maatschappelijke participatie en militaire dienst, toont deze studie aan dat Chrysostomus zijn beschouwing over mannelijkheid construeert door gebruik te maken van een krachtig en nauwkeurig opgebouwd medisch-theologisch discours. In dit discours construeert hij in de eerste plaats God als zijnde de ideale verpersoonlijking van het Mannelijke; ten tweede stelt hij het probleem van menselijke mannelijkheid en de teloorgang van de menselijke mannelijke staat aan de orde; ten derde is een wedergeboorte nodig om de verloren mannelijke staat te herwinnen; ten vierde wordt er dan een protocol voorgeschreven om de groei tot mannelijkheid te bevorderen, waarvan het resultaat ten slotte een oud en afgeleefd lichaam is. Dit lichaam is volgens Chrysostomus het ware mannelijk lichaam, dat het lijfelijke aspect overstijgt. Het eerste hoofdstuk van de studie extrapoleert enkele aspecten van de fundamentele dynamiek van oude beschouwingen van mannelijkheid, en onderzoekt ook hoe Chrysostomus functioneert als medisch filosoof alsmede wat de kenmerken van zijn medisch referentiekader zijn. Het concept mannelijkheid is vooral een beredeneerde constructie in Chrysostomus; het is dus geen verrassing als blijkt dat zijn interpretatie van het scheppingsverhaal in Genesis 1–3 centraal staat in dit constructieproces. Chrysostomus vormt zijn ziening van mannelijkheid door middel van de constructie van God. In hoofdstuk 2 wordt zijn Gottesbild dus onderzocht, en wordt aangevoerd dat Chrysostomus God ziet als de ideale verpersoonlijking van het Mannelijke. God is geheel en al buitenlichamelijk en autonoom, en het zijn juist deze eigenschapppen die overeenstemmen met de onbereikbare ideale visie van mannelijkheid. Mannelijkheid word gezien als tegenovergesteld aan het lichamelijke en aan heteronomie.

In hoofdstuk 3 wordt bekeken hoe de schepping van de mensheid, in het bijzonder van Adam, naar Gods beeld, leidt tot een vermannelijking van de mensheid. Al vóór de zondeval wordt het beheer van de schepping aan Adam overgedragen, inclusief beheer over zijn hulp, de vrouw Eva. Hieruit volgt dat Chrysostomus de zondeval beschouwt als de grote mislukking die leidt tot het verlies van mannelijkheid. Zowel Adam als Eva falen in het uitoefenen van beheer over zichzelf en over de schepping. Het gevolg is dat drie mannelijke instellingen geïntroduceerd worden om de mislukking van het oerpaar recht te zetten, namelijk het huwelijk, de slavernij en het keizerlijk bestuur. Hoofdstuk 4 speurt het begin na van het herstel van de mensheid tot de mannelijke staat door middel van de geschiedenis van de christelijke leer van de verlossing of zaligmaking. Als gevolg van het verlies van mannelijkheid door de zondeval moet een nieuwe vorm van mannelijkheid geboren worden, een nieuw mannelijk geboorteproces moet weer plaatsvinden. Het beeld van geboorte wordt gebruikt om aan te tonen op welke wijze de mensheid kan terugkeren naar de originele mannelijke staat. Maar dit geboorteproces is androgeneratief van aard; het komt niet tot stand door geslachtsgemeenschap, maar door de wonderwerken van God, op een lijn te stellen met de bevruchting van de onvruchtbare vrouwen in de Hebreeuwse bijbel (Sarai en Rachel), de maagdelijke geboorte van Christus en ten slotte de geestelijke wedergeboorte. Wedergeboren zijnde moet mannelijkheid voorts groei tonen; dit onderwerp komt aan bod in hoofdstuk 5. In hoofdstuk 5 wordt het mannelijke protocol dat Chrystostomus zijn aanhangers oplegt, verder onderzocht. Aspecten zoals dieet (vooral het vermijden van vraatzucht), lichamelijke oefening, slaap en baden worden alle gereguleerd, met als doel de bevordering van mannelijke deugdzaamheid. Ascetisme (in de moderne zin van het woord, namelijk de heerschappij van de ziel over het lichaam), treedt nu naar voren als de vierde en grootste instelling die mannelijkheid vertegenwoordigt. Door het beoefenen van ascetisme wordt de pasgeboren christen in staat gesteld om zich te ontwikkelen tot de ideale mannelijke staat. Het doel van het protocol dat Chrysostomus voorstelt, zoals verklaard in hoofdstuk 6, is om het lichaam oud te laten worden voor zijn tijd; om de lichamelijke aard van degene die het ondergaat, te kruisigen. Het ouder worden dient als Gods weg tot ascese, en door het vlees te verloochenen kan het individu zich zijn persoonlijke martelaarschap toe-eigenen. Het door ouderdom afgetakelde lichaam is volgens vi

Chrysostomus een waar mannelijk lichaam. Ongeacht de beperkingen die ouderdom oplegt op het concept van mannelijkheid, kan men door zelfbeheersing en ingetogenheid een staat bereiken waar men uitstijgt boven ouderdom – namelijk gerotranscendentie. Ter afsluiting: Chrysostomus is niet per se gekant tegen de Romeinse traditionele schemata van mannelijkheid; het is eerder zo dat hij zekere aspecten van zijn ziening ontleent aan de conventionele Romeinse ziening van mannelijkheid en deze vervolgens transformeert, vooral ten opzichte van de concepten zelfbeheersing en de overheersing van ondergeschikte wezens, tot zijn versie van christelijke mannelijkheid. Chrysostomus presenteert dan dit nieuwe (alhoewel niet zo verschillende) begrip van christelijke mannelijkheid, waaraan een ascetisch element toegevoegd is, als een superieur alternatief tot andere, concurrerende zieningen van mannelijkheid.

vii

SUMMARY

THE FORMATION OF MASCULINITY IN JOHN CHRYSOSTOM’S MEDICAL- THEOLOGICAL DISCOURSE

Chris L. de Wet, B.A., B.A. Hons., M.A., D.Litt.

The purpose of this study is to examine John Chrysostom’s (349–407 AD) views on the nature of masculinity and its formation. Unlike previous studies on ancient masculinity that focused especially on masculinity in relation to eloquence, civic participation, and military service, this study illustrates that Chrysostom constructs his vision of masculinity by utilising a potent and meticulous medical-theological discourse. In this discourse, first, God as the ideal Masculine is constructed; second, the problem of human masculinity and the loss of the human masculine state is established; third, a new rebirth is required to regain the lost masculine state; fourth, after rebirth, a regimen in favour of growth toward masculinity is prescribed; and, finally, the result of this process is an aged and mortified body—which is a truly masculine body, for Chrysostom—which has overcome the corporeal. The first chapter of the study extrapolates some of the fundamental dynamics of ancient masculinity, and also examines how Chrysostom functions as a medical philosopher and asks what the characteristics of his medical framework are. Masculinity is mainly a discursive construction in Chrysostom’s thought, so it is not surprising to find that his interpretation of the creation narrative in Genesis 1–3 is central in this constructive process. Chrysostom fashions his vision of masculinity through the construction of God. Chapter 2 thus investigates Chrysostom’s Gottesbild, and argues that he describes God as the ideal Masculine. God is fully incorporeal and autonomous, which are also the unattainable ideals of masculinity. Masculinity stands in opposition to corporeality and heteronomy. Chrysostom’s measure of God then acts as the standard of masculinity. Chapter 3 looks at how the creation of humanity, notably Adam, in the image of God serves as a masculinisation of humanity. Before the Fall, Adam is required to exercise control over creation, especially over his helpmate, Eve. Chrysostom therefore understands the Fall into sin as the great failure and loss of masculinity. Both Adam and Eve fail to exercise control over themselves and creation. As a result, three

viii institutions of masculinity are introduced to remedy the failure of the primeval couple, namely marriage, slavery, and imperial governance. Chapter 4 traces the beginnings of humanity’s restoration to a masculine state through Christian salvation history. Since the loss of masculinity through the Fall, a new manliness must be reborn, a new manly natality re-established. The discourse of birth is used to show how humanity should return to the original masculine state. But this birth is androgenerative, not based on sexual intercourse, but through the miraculous works of God, such as the impregnation of the sterile women of the Hebrew Bible (Sarah and Rachel), the virgin birth of Christ, and finally, spiritual rebirth. Having had a rebirth, masculinity must now experience growth, which is the topic of chapter 5. Chapter 5 examines the masculine regimen Chrysostom prescribes to his audience. Aspects such as diet (especially the avoidance of gluttony), exercise, sleep, and bathing are all regulated with the purpose of cultivating masculine virtue. Asceticism (in its moderate garb), the rulership of the soul over the body, now acts as the fourth and greatest institution of masculinity. Through the practice of asceticism, the newly born Christian is enabled to grow towards the ideal masculine state. The aim of the regimen Chrysostom prescribes, argues chapter 6, is to age the body before its time, to mortify the corporeal nature of the subject. Aging acts as God’s ascesis, and by mortifying the flesh, an individual achieves a personal martyrdom. The aged and mortified body, in Chrysostom, is a masculine body. Despite the challenges old age may pose to masculinity, if one has self-control and modesty in one’s old age, a state of gerotranscendence is achieved. In conclusion, Chrysostom does not necessarily oppose the traditional scheme(s) of Roman masculinity, but rather borrows from and transforms several aspects of conventional Roman masculinities, particularly notions of self-control and the domination of subjugates, in constructing his brand of Christian masculinity. Chrysostom then presents this new (yet not wholly different) Christian masculinity, which exhibits a moderate ascetic impetus, as a superior alternative to other competing masculinities.

Ek wy dese arbeid aan my allerliefste, Zana

******

Allerliefste, ek stuur vir jou ‘n rooiborsduif want niemand sal ‘n boodskap wat rooi is skiet nie. Ek gooi my rooiborsduif hoog in die lug en Ek weet al die jagters sal dink dis die son. Kyk, my duif kom op en my duif gaan onder en waar hy vlieg daar skitter oseane en bome word groen en hy kleur my boodskap so bruin op jou vel. Want my liefde reis met jou mee, my liefde moet soos ‘n engel by jou bly, soos vlerke, wit soos ‘n engel. Jy moet van my liefde bly weet soos van die vlerke waarmee jy nie kan vlieg nie.

Breyten Breytenbach, Lotus, 1970

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ...... 3

CHAPTER 1: Introduction: Let Us Make Man ...... 6 A Curious Tale ...... 6 Approaching Masculinity in Late Antiquity ...... 11 Characterising Masculinity ...... 23 The Late Antique Transformation of Medical Knowledge: John Chrysostom as a Medical Philosopher and Therapist of the Soul ...... 50 John Chrysostom’s Medical Framework ...... 61 Conclusion ...... 71

CHAPTER 2: A Virile Theology: Chrysostom’s Gottesbild and the Masculinisation of God ...... 74 Introduction ...... 74 Ideal Yet Unattainable: Inventing the Divine Masculine ...... 79 Incorporeality ...... 90 Autonomy/Heteronomy ...... 98 Conclusion ...... 109

CHAPTER 3: Imaging Adam, Overseeing Eve: Human Dominion, Animality, and the Great Struggle of Masculinity ...... 111 Introduction ...... 111 The Image of Dominion ...... 115 A Palace Prepared for a King: Domination and Creational Succession ...... 140 Equality between Adam and Eve? ...... 147 Animal Control: Masculinity and the Bestial ...... 171 Conclusion ...... 181

CHAPTER 4: “What Kind of Birth Pains Produced Eve?”: Masculinity, Androgenerativity, and the New Spiritual Natality ...... 184 Introduction ...... 184 Perfection, Passion, and Wholeness: The Attributes of Androgenerativity ... 186

Towards a New Spiritual Natality: Androgenerativity and Salvation History ...... 207 Virgins and Monks: Symbols and Symptoms of Androgenerativity ...... 222 Conclusion ...... 229

CHAPTER 5: Volatile Anatomies: Regimen, Physiology, and the Psychic Politeia of the Masculine Body ...... 230 Introduction ...... 230 Regimen, Gluttony, and Masculinity ...... 232 On Exercise, Sleep, and Bathing ...... 265 Conclusion ...... 274

CHAPTER 6: Dead Man Walking: Gerotranscendence and Corporeal Mortification as Desiderata of Masculinity ...... 277 Introduction ...... 277 An Age-Old Subject ...... 279 A Cold and Dry Castration: Senescence as a Problem of Masculinity ...... 284 Gerotranscendence: Gerontology as Masculinising Discourse ...... 303 The Practice of Everyday Death: Mortification, Martyrdom, and Masculinity ...... 323 Conclusion ...... 334

CHAPTER 7: Conclusion: Man Made ...... 336

Abbreviations ...... 345

Primary Sources ...... 347

Secondary Sources ...... 357

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I have always had a fascination with the notion of masculinity. Having lost at a young age my father and later my stepfather, I was (privileged to be) raised by a generation of women. For most of my presence in their lives, these great women were themselves to an extent, yet with some exceptions, bereft of a stable male presence. I never really knew what it meant to be a man, or how to act like a man, or be manly. A part of my childhood I spent growing up in Apartheid South Africa, and even after the regime’s demise, while in high school, I felt the unyielding grip of toxic Afrikaner masculinity tightening around my personhood. I could never associate with that façade of manliness. I did not play much rugby. I do not hunt or fish. I did not excel in wood- and metalwork. I was never one of the “guys”. Later in life I came to the realisation that masculinity is something very personal and unique to who I am and where I came from—as a man I was made, and every day this aspect of my identity is fashioned. In order to have a firm grasp of late ancient culture and society, one needs to understand ancient constructs of masculinity. Chrysostom’s own views of masculinity remains unexplored. This current project aims to give some sense to the question of masculinity in Chrysostom.

I have so many people to thank for contributing to my better understanding of ancient (and modern) masculinities. It would be impossible to mention everyone. First and foremost, of course, I want to thank the supervisors of this doctoral project, professors Johannes (Hans) van Oort and Jan van der Watt, who both graciously agreed to guide me in this journey. I owe a special debt of thanks to Jan van der Watt who opened the doors for my further studies at Radboud University Nijmegen in the

Netherlands. They frequently involved me in their own projects, for which I am most

grateful. Of those who gave feedback on my work, either in direct correspondence, or at a conference, or in conversation, I would like to thank: Todd Berzon, David Brakke,

Jan Bremmer, Elizabeth Clark, Kate Cooper, Jitse Dijkstra, Ben Dunning, David

Eastman, J. Albert (Bert) Harrill, Susan Ashbrook Harvey, Susan Holman, Tom Hunt,

Maijastina Kahlos, Kobus Kok, Blake Leyerle, Mark Masterson, Margaret Mitchell,

Bronwen Neil, Lilly Nortjé-Meyer, Jeremy Punt, Helen Rhee, Tina Shepardson,

Blossom Stefaniw, Ville Vuolanto, Jamie Wood, and Jessica Wright. I also thank my colleagues at UNISA, Pieter Botha, Pieter Craffert, Gerhard van den Heever, and

Johannes Vorster, for their constant support of my work. I must also acknowledge the important contribution of the members of ReMeDHe (Working Group for Religion,

Medicine, Disability, and Health in Late Antiquity), especially Heidi Marx and Kristi

Upson-Saia, who fuelled the flames of my interest in the intersections between religion and medicine in antiquity.

My mother, Sarie, and my aunt, Jackie—part of those women who raised me— have always been pillars of strength and support in my life. I thank you for believing in me. While I was working on this study, I met the woman who became my wife. Zana, thank you for all your love, patience, and support while I was doing the final writing of this dissertation. Thank you for giving me time to write, time to think, and time to rest.

I am the most blessed of men to have received not only a beautiful and supportive wife, but also two amazing sons, Tiaan and Luan. I thank you all for reminding me life is not only about work, and for keeping me grounded in what truly matters. During the completion and defence of this thesis, my beautiful and ever-smiling daughter, Mia-

Mikayla de Wet, was born. When you can read this, one day, Mia-Mikayla, know that

Pappa loves you dearly, and everything I do, I do for you. To my ever-supportive and loving family-in-law, my mother- and father-in-law, Ria Lottering and Pieter Erwee,

and my brother- and sister-in-law, Stanley and Nadia Slater, thank you for accepting me and welcoming me into the family. You have enriched my life tremendously. Thank you all for being willing to listen and for supporting me in this endeavour.

To whom else can I dedicate this study than to my wife, Zana, for you have shown me what it means to be a husband, father, friend, and life-partner. Your gentle and silent strength inspires me every day.

“A man who doesn’t spend time with his family, can never be a real man.”

Don Vito Corleone, from the film, The Godfather (1972)

Pretoria, September 2019

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Let Us Make Man

A Curious Tale

Shortly after John Chrysostom (347–407 CE) returned from his monastic retreat in the wilderness outside of Syrian Antioch, before being formally ordained as a priest in this city, probably between 378 and 386,1 he wrote a treatise in which he defended the choice some young men made to enter into the monastic life. 2 In his Adversus oppugnatores vitae monasticae 3.12,3 Chrysostom tells the story of a rich young man who came to Antioch to study Greek and Latin rhetoric, as was expected of most elite young men at the time. Having famous teachers like Libanius, Antioch was indeed an

1 Some of the basic, albeit at times conflicting, modern biographical studies on Chrysostom include: Chrysostomus Baur, John Chrysostom and His Time, trans. M. Gonzaga, 2 vols. (Vaduz: Büchervertriebsanstalt, 1988); John N. D. Kelly, Golden Mouth: The Story of John Chrysostom—Ascetic, Preacher, Bishop (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998); Wendy Mayer and Pauline Allen, John Chrysostom (London: Routledge, 1999). I will not venture into disputes and minutiae regarding biographical details of Chrysostom’s life and identity. Necessary matters will be addressed as the study progresses. For more on the problematisation of Chrysostom’s identity, and alternative interpretive possibilities in approaching the preacher, see Wendy E. Mayer, “Shaping the Sick Soul: Reshaping the Identity of John Chrysostom,” in Christians Shaping Identity from the Roman Empire to Byzantium, ed. Geoffrey D. Dunn and Wendy E. Mayer, Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae 132 (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 140–64. 2 Many of the translations from Chrysostom’s works are my own, unless there is a good modern translation of a particular work available. Some translations have been adapted. For the primary texts of Chrysostom’s works I have attempted to use the most recent version available at the time of writing. Migne’s Patrologia graeca (PG) and the Sources chrétiennes series (SC) are mostly used. However, for the texts of Chrysostom’s homilies on the Pauline epistles and Hebrews, I will not use PG, but the texts edited by Frederick Field, Ioannis Chrysostomi interpretatio omnium epistularum Paulinarum, 7 vols. (Oxford: J.H. Parker, 1854–62). These texts will be indicated with an F, followed by the volume and page number. At times, when the numbering of the Migne and Field homilies differs, I will provide the number of the PG version in square brackets. I will give attention to the dating and provenance of a particular homily if the argument calls for it. For a full discussion of the provenance of many of Chrysostom’s works, see Wendy Mayer, The Homilies of St John Chrysostom—Provenance: Reshaping the Foundations, Orientalia Christiana Analecta 273 (Rome: Pontificio Istituto Orientale, 2005). 3 See PG 47.368.52–371.8. For an introduction to the treatise, including a discussion of provenance and dating, as well as a translation, see David G. Hunter, trans., A Comparison between a King and a Monk; Against the Opponents of the Monastic Life: Two Treatises by John Chrysostom (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 1988), 19–42, 151–54.

appropriate venue where elite youths may be educated in philosophy and rhetoric, and taught the ways of elite men. But the story of this young man is particularly curious, since there is another detail that Chrysostom provides. This youth had with him a pedagogue, which was nothing out of the ordinary—yet the pedagogue was a monk,

“one of those who live in the mountains.”4 Chrysostom went to the monk and asked why he had taken up such a shameful position—in late antiquity, the distinction between pedagogues and teachers was quite pronounced,5 with many pedagogues being either slaves or freed men.6

We then hear a very interesting account. The monk was petitioned by the young man’s mother to take up the role of pedagogue. His mother did not want him to follow the course that most young elite men followed during late adolescence, that is, getting married, having children, and joining the army. She desired for the boy to receive an education founded on Christian piety and ascetic devotion. The boy’s father, however, did not share the mother’s wishes. Being more traditional, he wanted to boy to follow the conventional route of the cursus honorum and start a family and secure a lineage.

The mother feared that the father would “enslave the child in the bonds of life prematurely, that he would deprive him of this [religious] zeal, that he would lead him into the army, and that he would render the child unable to live an upright life afterwards.”7

4 Adv. oppug. 3.12 (PG 47.369.2–3): τῶν ἐν ὄρεσι καθημένων ἐτύγχανεν ὢν. Translation: Hunter, Two Treatises, 152. 5 Lisa Maurice, The Teacher in Ancient Rome: The Magister and His World (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013), 7–8, 105–39. 6 For a full discussion of pedagogues in Chrysostom’s thought, see Chris L. de Wet, Preaching Bondage: John Chrysostom and the Discourse of Slavery in Early Christianity (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015), 141–58. 7 Adv. oppug. 3.12 (PG 47.369.17–21): πρὸ ὥρας αὐτὸν ἤδη καταδήσῃ τοῖς τοῦ βίου σχοινίοις, καὶ ταύτης αὐτὸν ἀποστήσας τῆς σπουδῆς, ἐπὶ τὴν ζώνην ἀγάγοι, καὶ τὴν ἐξ ἐκείνης ῥᾳθυμίαν ἅπασαν, καὶ ἀδύνατον αὐτῷ τὴν μετὰ ταῦτα κατασκευάσῃ διόρθωσιν. Translation: Hunter, Two Treatises, 152.

The monk agreed to act as pedagogue for the child, thereby fooling the father, and appeasing the mother. He did not, however, take the child into the mountains to live as a real monk. Rather, he accompanied the boy every day, as pedagogues do, and taught him the ephemeral rhythms of the monastic life while living in the city. The young man would still receive an elite education in Greek and Latin rhetoric, but this only served as a façade to hide the mother’s true intention of having the boy trained in ascetic virtue. The mother “would persuade the father that a training in rhetoric would be beneficial, even when he entered the military. ‘If I succeed,’ she said [to the monk],

‘you will be able to take him away alone to another place, where you can enjoy full freedom to form [διαπλάσαι] him without interference from his father or any of the household, and where you can make him live as if he were in a monastery.’”8

It was a risky plan. According to Chrysostom’s informant, if the father found out about the plan, he could cause serious trouble for all the monks living in and around

Antioch. The pedagogue-monk had to ensure that the boy does not become too zealous for the monastic life—the worst thing that could happen was for the boy to leave his home and parents, and flee into the desert. The monk knew that “he needed another bridle to lead him from excessive zeal to a moderate asceticism.”9 That bridle was studying rhetoric and living in the city. And so the plan unfolded, and the boy was trained both in the monastic life and in Greek and Latin rhetoric, which included much reading from non-Christian sources.

8 Adv. oppug. 3.12 (PG 47.369.28–34): πείσειν γὰρ αὐτὴν τὸν πατέρα, ὡς καὶ τὸν στρατιωτικὸν ἑλομένῳ βίον χρήσιμος αὐτῷ τῶν λόγων ἡ παίδευσις. ῍Αν οὖν τοῦτο ἰσχῦσαι δυνηθῶ, φησὶ, καταμόνας αὐτὸν ἔχων λοιπὸν ἐπὶ τῆς ἀλλοτρίας, οὔτε τοῦ πατρὸς ἐνοχλοῦντος, οὔτε τῶν οἰκείων τινὸς, μετὰ πολλῆς αὐτὸν τῆς ἐξουσίας διαπλάσαι δυνήσῃ, καὶ καθάπερ ἐν μοναστηρίῳ διάγοντα, οὕτω ποιῆσαι ζῇν. Translation: Hunter, Two Treatises, 152. 9 Adv. oppug. 3.12 (PG 47.369.56–58): ἑτέρου δεῖσθαι χαλινοῦ πάλιν τοῦ δυνησομένου πρὸς τὴν σύμμετρον αὐτὸν ἄσκησιν ἀπὸ τῆς ἐπιτεταμένης μεταστρέψαι ἐκείνης. Translation: Hunter, Two Treatises, 153.

The monk approached the boy like he was a statue, and in time, he fashioned the perfect ascetic man. The sculpture was subtle. When the boy appeared in public, he blended in with the crowd. He did not have the rough demeanour that monks usually had, and he did not sport monastic attire. One of the main duties of a pedagogue was to fashion the appropriate corporeal habitus of a boy, to use Bourdieu’s concept10—he had to teach a boy how sit, walk, eat, speak, and engage with people socially. The sculpture was strong:

His house was arranged according to the discipline of every monastery,

where there is nothing but the essentials. All his time was spent in reading

the holy books; although he was quite sharp in his studies, he spent only a

brief part of his day in pagan learning and devoted the rest to frequent

prayer and the sacred scriptures. He spent the entire day without food—and

not only one or two days, but many days. His nights were spent in the same

way: in tears, prayers, and such reading.… [H]e made for himself a garment

out of hair and… he slept in it at night.11

In short, the boy lived in the city as if it was a desert, and his quarters were like a monastery. He became resolute, and when his father confronted him some time later,

10 See Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Polity, 1990), 52; Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 166–68. 11 Adv. oppug. 3.12 (PG 47.370.31–45): καὶ γὰρ ἡ οἰκία αὐτῷ πρὸς ἀκρίβειαν μοναστηρίου παντὸς διέκειτο, οὐδὲν ἔχουσα τῶν ἀναγκαίων πλέον. Καὶ ὁ καιρὸς δὲ αὐτῷ ἅπας εἰς τὴν ἀνάγνωσιν τῶν ἁγίων ἀνηλίσκετο βιβλίων· καὶ γὰρ ὢν ὀξὺς μαθήματα προσλαβεῖν, τῇ μὲν ἔξωθεν παιδεύσει βραχὺ τῆς ἡμέρας ἀπένειμε μέρος, τὸ δὲ λοιπὸν ἅπαν εὐχαῖς συνεχέσι καὶ βιβλίοις ἀνέκειτο θείοις, καὶ ἄσιτος ἅπασαν διετέλει τὴν ἡμέραν, μᾶλλον δὲ οὐδὲ μίαν, οὐδὲ δύο μόνον, ἀλλὰ καὶ πλείους. Καὶ νύκτες δὲ αὐτῷ ταῦτα συνῄδεσαν, δάκρυα, καὶ εὐχὰς, καὶ τὴν τοιαύτην ἀνάγνωσιν…. καὶ ἱμάτιον αὐτῷ ἀπὸ τριχῶν κατεσκεύαστο, καὶ τούτῳ τὰς νύκτας ἐγκαθεύδοι. Translation: Hunter, Two Treatises, 154.

he was not able to shake the faith and ascetic zeal of his son. The monk accomplished his task. We do not hear anything more about the boy or the monk.

*****

A curious tale indeed. We have here two very distinct and contrasting views about what an elite male education, or παιδεία, should be—that of the father, who opted for a traditional classical male education, and that of the mother and, perhaps, Chrysostom, who believed that a good life was not to be found in marriage and the cursus honorum, but in the vita monastica. Yet, the pedagogue-monk manages to guide the boy in both.

He reads some pagan literature for his rhetorical studies, but reads even more from the scriptures. He looks just like the crowd, but in his soul and in his house, he lived the monastic life. He lived in the city as if it were a desert. It is also a cautionary tale. This story teaches us that the fashioning and education of masculinity in late ancient

Christian society was all but simple12—and in this tale, we have at least two very different views on what masculinity is, or should be. We can therefore speak of multiple masculinities in antiquity. The purpose of this study is to examine more closely John

Chrysostom’s views on masculinity and its formation, specifically as it is expressed in his medical-theological discourse. What is masculinity for John Chrysostom, what are its characteristics? How are men supposed to fashion themselves as masculine—the question of the masculine soul and body—and what theological presuppositions and authoritative traditions undergird this self-fashioning of masculinity? Let us first take a

12 The problem of complex and multiple masculinities in Chrysostom’s thought has already been noted, albeit somewhat cursorily, in an important essay by Jo Ann McNamara, “An Unresolved Syllogism: The Search for a Christian Gender System,” in Conflicted Identities and Multiple Masculinities: Men in the Medieval West, ed. Jacqueline Murray (New York: Routledge, 2011), 7–8.

step back and look at how masculinity may be understood and approached, before returning to this story again.

Approaching Masculinity in Late Antiquity

Studies on gender, both in ancient and contemporary contexts, can be conceptually challenging and theoretically robust. We should not approach late ancient culture as one that understood masculinity in the same way we understand it today. In very simple terms, one can say that masculinity implies what it meant to be a man—and in a society that was androcentric, meaning a society that was structured around male identity and privilege and governed by male authority, masculinity lay at the very core of that society’s structure.13 But due to its very close discursive and conceptual relationship with the notion of virtue, masculinity also entails what it meant to have social worth and honour. The study of masculinity in Roman-Christian antiquity is inevitably a study of the dynamics of this society’s social values, conceptualizations of authority, and institutional operations. Masculinity was an ideal for which all people would strive, and a status that many, not only women, were refused; these included slaves, foreigners, and heretics. The high standards of Roman manliness were even difficult for many men to attain.

Moreover, any reconstruction of masculinity in antiquity remains exactly that, a

(re)construction. We are therefore using a modern concept that is often utilised to make sense of our own society, to understand a society that is infinitely foreign and removed from us. Our first step in understanding masculinity, both in antiquity and modernity, is that masculinity is dynamic and subjective—it only exists insofar as it is operational

13 Mathew Kuefler, The Manly Eunuch: Masculinity, Gender Ambiguity, and Christian Ideology in Late Antiquity, The Chicago Series on Sexuality, History, and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 1.

in a particular gender order. Masculinity, of course, may persist when it is juxtaposed and contrasted to femininity; but I hope, in this study, to think beyond such binaries, and to show that masculinity need not only be read in contrast to femininity. Masterson rightly notes that masculinity

was a structure elaborated in a dichotomous relationship with femininity

and, as it was regarded as an attribute of elites, it was also in dichotomous

relationships with servility and foreignness. Ancient manhood was also

marked by an interest in the excellence of the male body and an indicative

connection to soldierly endeavor, both literally and metaphorically (e.g., by

competition in situations requiring verbal excellence).14

Along with femininity, masculinity may therefore be understood in its relation to slavery and mastery, for instance. I have elaborated extensively on how Chrysostom envisioned masculinity in terms of slavery and domination in my monograph,

Preaching Bondage: John Chrysostom and the Discourse of Slavery in Early

Christianity (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015). Hence, in the present study, I will focus less on matters related to masculinity and the household and slavery.

I will also not focus on matters related to war, soldiery, speech, and political participation. I am rather asking specifically how Chrysostom theologically undergirds his view of masculinity, and how this theological basis translates into a medicalised discourse that aims to shape and reshape the male body, via the intermediary dominating principle of the soul, in a very physical manner.

14 Mark Masterson, “Studies of Ancient Masculinity,” in A Companion to Greek and Roman Sexualities, ed. Thomas K. Hubbard, Blackwell Companions to the Ancient World (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014), 28.

The concept of masculinity can thus be utilised in order to give us insight into the dynamics of a particular society’s gender order and gender relationality, and may also give insight into status and ethnic relations. Using masculinity to approach ancient

Christian culture is not a futile or flawed excursus in itself. We constantly use modern concepts like religion, economics, sexuality, and so on, to help us better understand those who came before us. In sum, any picture of masculinity that can be derived from fragments of ancient sources, mere moments in the lifetime of an ancient author’s thought, is pieced together, fragmentary, and, at best, a scholarly reconstruction. But that is the best we can do, and it is certainly a worthwhile endeavour.

Due to the difficulty of characterising what could be called an early Christian gender “system” or “order,” I have opted for a more inclusive and expansive approach in this study. The approach to gender and masculinity that I will follow is what Raewyn

Connell and Rebecca Pearse call a social embodiment approach, 15 which may be classified more broadly as a moderate approach to masculinity;16 that is, positioning masculinity somewhere between essentialism and constructivism. The social embodiment approach, which has been revised somewhat by Connell and

Messerschmidt in order to make it more contextual and nuanced, 17 proposes that gendered bodies have agency, but are also socially constructed; it takes note of the materiality and physicality of gender (without being positivistic or dichotomistic), but

15 Raewyn W. Connell and Rebecca Pearse, Gender: In World Perspective, Kindle Edition. (Cambridge: Polity, 2014), loc. 1208–1290. The masculinity theory of Connell, who is one of the pioneers of New Men’s Studies, will be primary in the methodology of this study; see the seminal article by Tim Carrigan, Robert Connell, and John Lee, “Toward a New Sociology of Masculinity,” Theory and Society 14.5 (1985): 551–604. 16 The moderate approach to masculinity has been exemplified in Todd Reeser’s work on masculinity in the early modern era; Todd W. Reeser, Moderating Masculinity in Early Modern Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). For a more theoretical discussion of moderate masculinities, see Todd W. Reeser, Masculinities in Theory: An Introduction (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 49– 52. 17 Raewyn W. Connell and James W. Messerschmidt, “Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept,” Gender & Society 19.6 (2005): 829–59.

does not neglect its relational, discursive, and performative nature. Furthermore, social embodiment places much emphasis on the power dynamics of gender relationality. This approach, I believe, will be particularly useful for unveiling masculinity in Chrysostom from a social historiographical perspective. Practically, the focus on Chrysostom’s medical-theological discourse does justice to a social embodiment approach. I also understand masculinity to have the following characteristics, namely relationality, hybridity, discursivity, performativity, intersectionality, and materiality (or physicality). I explain these characteristics in detail in the next section.

Many of the approaches to ancient masculinity, from essentialist to constructivist studies, have been helpful and added much to our understanding of what manliness meant in antiquity. Essentialist approaches attempt to identify a core feature of the masculine, sometimes biological, psychological, and/or cultural, and conceptualises men and masculinity around this central feature. The problem is that there is little agreement among essentialists of what this core element of masculinity is. It is somewhat related to positivist approaches that aim to identify, empirically, what men

“really are.” For instance, some studies have emphasised that Roman masculinity was essentially determined by principles of penetrability (or passivity) and impenetrability

(or activity), also known as the priapic model (or teratogenic grid), a finding that has proven to be helpful in understanding some of the dynamics of Roman manhood,18 but one that is ultimately destabilised, but not totally discarded, in Chrysostom’s thought.19

18 See, for instance: Brent D. Shaw, “Body/Power/Identity: Passions of the Martyrs,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 4.3 (1996): 269–312; Jonathan Walters, “Invading the Roman Body: Manliness and Impenetrability in Roman Thought,” in Roman Sexualities, ed. Judith P. Hallett and Marilyn B. Skinner (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 29–46; Holt N. Parker, “The Teratogenic Grid,” in Roman Sexualities, ed. Judith P. Hallett and Marilyn B. Skinner (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 47–65; Kuefler, Manly Eunuch; Kyle Harper, From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). 19 De Wet, Preaching Bondage, 234–35; Benjamin H. Dunning, “John Chrysostom and Same-Sex Eros in the History of Sexuality,” in (Re)Visioning John Chrysostom: New Theories and Approaches, ed. Chris L. de Wet and Wendy Mayer (London: Routledge, 2018), Forthcoming.

Recent criticism of the priapic model in understanding late Roman masculinity is warranted.20

On the other hand, we have constructivist approaches to masculinity that emphasise the notion that masculinity does not really exist—it is something that is created by means of language or semiotics, that is, discourse, in relation to and as a result of the social institutions that deploy and sustain discourse and discursive practices. The notion of gender as a “becoming” was notably articulated by Simone de

Beauvoir,21 while the discursive nature thereof was popularised by the pioneering work of Michel Foucault. Basing his deductions especially on a reading of sexuality within

Christian pastoralism, Foucault said:

The Christian pastoral prescribed as a fundamental duty the task of passing

everything having to do with sex through the endless mill of speech.… But

after all, the Christian pastoral also sought to produce specific effects on

desire, by the mere fact of transforming it—fully and deliberately—into

discourse: effects of mastery and detachment, to be sure, but also an effect

of spiritual reconversion, of turning back to God, a physical effect of

blissful suffering from feeling in one’s body the pangs of temptation and

the love that resists it. This is the essential thing: that Western man [sic] has

been drawn for three centuries to the task of telling everything concerning

his sex; that since the classical age there has been a constant optimization

and increasing valorization of the discourse on sex; and that this carefully

20 See Mark Masterson, Man to Man: Desire, Homosociality, and Authority in Late-Roman Manhood (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2014), 28 who states: “[T]hinking in terms of cinaedus and vir will be a hermeneutic strategy too blunt... the vir cuts a more complex figure.” 21 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier (New York: Vintage, 2011).

analytical discourse was meant to yield multiple effects of displacement,

intensification, reorientation, and modification of desire itself.22

This understanding of masculinity as a discourse will indeed be very relevant for the study at hand, and I will elaborate on the discursivity of masculinity in due course.

Within constructivist approaches, the notion of gender as being corporeally performative is also very important. Judith Butler, who questioned the pre-existence of gender categories such as “men” and “women”, and the idea of a “gender core”, has emphasized the subversive performativity of gender. Relying on but ultimately also moving ahead of Michel Foucault’s notion of interiority in his Discipline & Punish,23

Butler explains:

[A]cts, gestures, and desire produce the effect of an internal core or

substance, but produce this on the surface of the body, through the play of

signifying absences that suggest, but never reveal, the organizing principle

of identity as a cause. Such acts, gestures, enactments, generally construed,

are performative in the sense that the essence or identity that they otherwise

purport to express are fabrications manufactured and sustained through

corporeal signs and other discursive means. That the gendered body is

performative suggests that it has no ontological status apart from the

various acts which constitute its reality [Butler’s italics].24

22 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley, vol. 1 of The History of Sexuality (New York: Vintage, 1978), 21. 23 Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1977), 135–94. 24 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 2006), 185; see also Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (London: Routledge, 2011), 1–98.

We see in Butler’s approach a departure from essentialism (or ontological status), and a re-evaluation of interiority as it is performed on the surface of the body, where gender happens. This approach has indeed been successfully applied in the conceptualisation of ancient masculinities, especially in the context of the martyrological writings.25 The approaches noted above conceptualise masculinity on profoundly different terms; none of them are without criticism.26

But any application of masculinity should not be so rigid as to classify an ancient author, like Chrysostom, strictly according to modern categories of gender theory. For instance, many studies on gender and masculinity in antiquity have especially focused on their constructive nature—manliness does not exist in itself, it is fashioned, and performed, even violently seized, according to varying ancient social standards. Here, for instance, we have the exemplary work of Maud Gleason and Erik Gunderson,27 who especially investigate the making of ancient masculinities in the context of speech and rhetorical performance. Such constructivist studies of ancient gender have been extremely helpful in highlighting its dynamics—gender in antiquity did indeed have a

25 See especially the work of Elizabeth A. Castelli, Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture Making, Gender, Theory, and Religion (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004); L. Stephanie Cobb, Dying to Be Men: Gender and Language in Early Christian Martyr Texts, Gender, Theory, and Religion (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). 26 Connell provides a useful overview and critical evaluation of different approaches to masculinity; Raewyn W. Connell, Masculinities (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 67–71. For a critique of Foucault’s constructivism, see especially Ross Morrow, “Sexuality as Discourse: Beyond Foucault’s Constructionism,” Journal of Sociology 31.1 (1995): 15–31. For an example of a feminist critique of Foucault’s History of Sexuality, see, for example, Amy Richlin, “Foucault’s History of Sexuality: A Useful Theory for Women?,” in Rethinking Sexuality: Foucault and Classical Antiquity, ed. David H. J. Larmour, Paul A. Miller, and Charles Platter (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 138–70. 27 While the approaches of Gleason and Gunderson do have their distinctive and very subtle differences, both focus on masculinity as being shaped through rhetoric; Maud W. Gleason, Making Men: Sophists and Self-Presentation in Ancient Rome (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995); Erik Gunderson, Staging Masculinity: The Rhetoric of Performance in the Roman World (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2000); Declamation, Paternity, and Roman Identity: Authority and the Rhetorical Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). See also Daniel Albrecht, Hegemoniale Männlichkeit bei Titus Livius, Studien zur Alten Geschichte 23 (Heidelberg: Verlag Antike, 2016).

very potent constructive and performative dimension to it. However, it would be incorrect to label an ancient figure, like Chrysostom, a constructivist in terms of gender.

Does Chrysostom, at times, understand masculinity as something that one fashions and performs? Absolutely—he believes, as will be shown in this study, that women are able to embody some of the admirable virtues he associated with ancient standards of manliness, and that men are indeed, made. The term used in Adv. oppug. 3.12 to describe the young man’s monastic training is διαπλάσσω, meaning to form, mould, or fashion.

Yet, and again heeding the advice of Connell, we cannot divorce understandings of gender from the medical and, especially, reproductive arena (e.g. sexual intercourse, childbirth, sexual difference, and sexual similarity) which actually structured ancient gender dynamics to a large extent. Chrysostom uses the medical discourse of his time to make sense of the physicality of gender. A reader of Chrysostom’s homilies should then not be surprised to find that, in many other instances, Chrysostom is blatantly and biologically essentialistic (even dichotomistic) in his understanding of gender, and, more generally, sexual difference. While women may embody masculine virtues in certain contexts, Chrysostom often enforces the distinction between the male and female “nature” (φύσις) as being essentially different (the male sex being “stronger,” and the female sex, “weaker”).28 So, although Chrysostom’s thought is, at times, then also essentialist, we should not hasten to label him categorically as an essentialist.

Despite differences in φύσις, men and women share the same substance or essence

(οὐσία) and soul (ψυχή).29 Such rigoristic categorisations are not helpful, and tend to distort the sources rather than bring them to light.

28 See, for instance, Hom. 1 Tim. 9.1 (F6.69–71). 29 Hom. Gen. 15.1 (PG 53.120.17–18).

These apparent contradictions are the very representation of the tension between the body and society—social embodiment—where bodies function both as “objects of social practice and agents in social practice.”30 Connell and Pearse explain further:

“Bodies have agency and bodies are socially constructed. Biological and social analysis cannot be cut apart from each other. But neither can be reduced to the other.”31 Some theorists have suggested that more emphasis needs to be placed on the materiality and biology of gender, especially in relation to health care, labour, reproduction, and gendered violence.32 It is a point to which Connell and Pearse are sympathetic, who state that underemphasising the materiality of gender “is hardly a problem in the global

South! Here issues such as poverty, nutrition, perinatal death, AIDS and patriarchal violence have always been central.”33 The emphasis on materiality (and the relationship between gender and healthcare) that Connell and Pearse ascribe to contexts in the global

South is one that I too can identify with,34 since I am also approaching this topic as informed by my own South African context and upbringing, where the same issues of healthcare, HIV and AIDS, gender discrimination, homophobia, and gendered violence are very significant. We thus cannot ignore the (medical) materiality of masculinity in this study. Masculinity in Chrysostom is both socially constructed and physically embodied, and I will attempt to retain this tension throughout the present study, and not attempt to dissolve it, for the tension present in Chrysostom is in itself illustrative.

These inherently varied and even contradictory predilections toward masculinity,

30 Connell and Pearse, Gender, loc. 1209. 31 Connell and Pearse, Gender, loc. 1209. 32 Myra J. Hird, “Feminist Engagements with Matter,” Feminist Studies 35.2 (2009): 329–46. 33 Connell and Pearse, Gender, loc. 1628. 34 For more on Connell’s notion of “Southern Theory,” which I found quite helpful for the present excursus, see Raewyn W. Connell, Southern Theory: Social Science and the Global Dynamics of Knowledge (Cambridge: Polity, 2008).

sometimes within a single author, testify to the struggle the ancients themselves had coming to grips with gender—a struggle we exhibit up to this day.

Paradigms of masculinity were also transformed throughout late antiquity.

Mathew Kuefler has noted that traditional Roman paradigms of masculinity slowly gave way to a new Christian ideal—the monk became the standard and, indeed, the pinnacle of what we might call late ancient Christian neo-masculinity.35 Chrysostom’s tale illustrates the point that these different masculine ideals, despite their seemingly conflicting values, foundations, and methods, did not develop and function totally divorced from or in opposition to one another. True there were men, like Libanius and

Themistius, who relished the civic life and traditional ideals of Roman manhood. And there were also the monks living outside the city, who fashioned their masculinity according to monastic standards. But then there were men in-between like the boy and his pedagogue-monk from Chrysostom’s story who demonstrate that the fashioning of masculinity was more of a negotiation, a give-and-take scenario, rather than a stable locus of social and gendered identity. Jo Ann McNamara has shown how difficult it is to identify what one might call a “Christian gender system.”36 Benjamin Dunning makes a similar point about the complexity and polymorphous nature of masculinity in ancient

Christianity, noting that “the androcentric stances the earliest Christians took on the origin, meaning, and ultimate destiny of the differences between women and men display a remarkable rough-and-tumble variety.”37 Dunning goes on to rightly conclude

35 Kuefler, Manly Eunuch. 36 McNamara, “Search for a Christian Gender System.” 37 Benjamin H. Dunning, Specters of Paul: Sexual Difference in Early Christian Thought, Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 4.

that there was a failure of coherence in the early Christian attempts at stabilising sexual identity and difference.38

Thus, in a study on the formation of masculinity in an author like Chrysostom, rather than seeing manliness as a fixed ideal, or the ancient author as essentialist or constructivist, we should perhaps approach masculinity as an unfinished quilt, a material yet performative tapestry of conflicting and complimentary colours and shapes that must blend in with the specific context in which it finds itself. This intertwined gender identification is what we have in Chrysostom’s own works. He preaches to an audience who is, for the most part, inhabitants of the city, individuals who did not necessarily opt for a rigorous monastic lifestyle. These were people who had households, business dealings, and held civic offices. Many of the elite men in his audience would have received some medical training for dealing with domestic health and healing issues, and had very specific boundaries of contact for male and female bodies.39 Some audience members were also military men.40 For his preaching to be effective, Chrysostom had to balance and negotiate ascetic ideals with secular realities.

He had to domesticate monastic masculinity and, to some extent, incorporate and accommodate it in relation to traditional Roman masculinity/-ies. I hope to show in this study that Chrysostom achieves this domestication of masculinity by means of a very meticulous and practical medical-theological discourse.

At the outset, then, it may appear as if Chrysostom is, like Paul, very incoherent with regards to his gender discourse. Chrysostom’s theological and often even ethical incoherence is a matter that has received much attention. Most importantly, David

38 Dunning, Specters of Paul, 5. 39 For the centrality of the household in ancient medical knowledge and practice, see Helen King, Hippocrates’ Woman: Reading the Female Body in Ancient Greece (London: Routledge, 1998), 127, 180–96. 40 Mayer and Allen, John Chrysostom, 37.

Rylaarsdam has attempted to make sense of Chrysostomic incoherence and inconsistencies by understanding his theology and ethics within the framework of divine pedagogy and adaptability (συγκατάβασις). Rylaarsdam argues that

Chrysostom’s theological interpretations mimic that of the divine teacher, as well as the apostle Paul, both of whom focused on the outcome and effect of their teaching, rather than its theological coherence. Thus, although its contents and methods might seem inconsistent, the salvific aim of divine pedagogy is always the same—to guide people to virtue and Christ. God and Paul therefore adapt their teaching according to the needs of the pupil.41

In principle, I agree with Rylaarsdam’s emphasis on the operations of adaptability in Chrysostom’s pedagogy. The question is whether συγκατάβασις can account for the gender inconsistencies of Chrysostom that we will note throughout this study. In some cases, συγκατάβασις may well explain inconsistent gender discourse in

Chrysostom’s thought, however, I believe that the inconsistency and incoherence that

Dunning points out to be present in the earliest Christian gender discourses, is also present in Chrysostom, and thus not directly a result of συγκατάβασις. At times

Chrysostom is thoroughly androcentric and enforces andronormative hierarchies with force, and at other times he seems to negate these same hierarchies. It is therefore necessary to provide a (re)assessment of the fundamentals of Chrysostom’s gender discourse, and, in some way, determine not only where the inconsistencies may be, but also why these inconsistencies are present, and what their function and social effects were.

41 See esp. David Rylaarsdam, John Chrysostom on Divine Pedagogy: The Coherence of His Theology and Preaching, Oxford Early Christian Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 13–156.

Characterising Masculinity

Masculinity is a multidimensional phenomenon. In order to better understand the dynamics of masculinity in Chrysostom, six characteristics of masculinity relevant for

Chrysostom’s context will be highlighted, namely: a) relationality; b) hybridity; c) discursivity; d) performativity; e) intersectionality; and, f) materiality (physicality).

These characteristics of masculinity will become apparent as this study develops, and they will be revisited and conceptually broadened in the conclusion, but here I wish to provide a very basic and preliminary description of the dynamics of each, using the narrative from Adv. oppug. 3.12 as an illustrative example. Of course, all of these characteristics are interrelated and in most cases overlap.

First, masculinity, as Connell explains, is relational in various ways: “To speak of masculinities is to speak about gender relations,” writes Connell. “Masculinities are not equivalent to men; they concern the position of men in a gender order,” she explains,

“[t]hey can be defined as the patterns of practice by which people (both men and women, though predominantly men) engage that position.” 42 This relationality is characterised by very distinct power flows.43 The relationality of manliness concerns the distribution of power within human interactions.

The reader familiar with studies on ancient gender may immediately notice that

I attempt to avoid using the term “patriarchy,” and all its derivatives. It has become somewhat of a cliché to say that ancient Christian society was patriarchal; yet, there are numerous problems with the terminology. In the first case, there are critical-theoretical problems. Patriarchy fails to account for the complex power relations imbedded in ancient masculinities. Patriarchalising late ancient society means that one assumes a

42 Raewyn W. Connell, “Masculinities/Raewyn Connell,” n.d. [Accessed 20 September 2016]. Online: http://www.raewynconnell.net/p/masculinities_20.html. 43 Connell, Masculinities, 74–75.

rather simple dichotomous system of male power; but such a simplification just will not do, at least not for the study at hand.44 Patriarchy is a discursive construction of modern gender studies that I do not always find particularly helpful for understanding late ancient Christianity.

In terms of late ancient Christian cultural history, patriarchy is also problematic for two reasons. First, with the rise of asceticism and sexual renunciation, and less emphasis on human sexual reproduction, which is especially evident in Chrysostom,45 patriarchalism (with the emphasis on the πατήρ, that is, “father”) seems an inappropriate concept to use. Second, we see numerous cultural and rhetorical shifts taking place in late antiquity that actually detracted power from what may be called

“patriarchal” nodes of authority. Kuefler has shown, plausibly, that patriarchy was in crisis during late antiquity,46 and both Virginia Burrus47 and John McGuckin48 note that the language of the creeds and confessions, especially that of the equality between the

Father and the Son also changed the landscape of power relations, and not in favour of patriarchy or the patria potestas. I have also demonstrated the centrality, in

Chrysostom’s thought, of the idea of God and Christ as Master or Slaveholder (and not only Father and Son).49 By this I am not saying the role of the father should be totally disregarded—fathers (and their absence) were still influential and played a significant role in late ancient masculine formation. But to use fatherhood as a universal structuring

44 See also Connell and Pearse, Gender, loc. 1507. 45 Peter R. L. Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 305–22. 46 Kuefler, Manly Eunuch. 47 Virginia Burrus, “Begotten, Not Made”: Conceiving Manhood in Late Antiquity, Figurae: Reading Medieval Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000). 48 John A. McGuckin, St. Gregory of Nazianzus: An Intellectual Biography (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001), 281. 49 De Wet, Preaching Bondage, 45–81.

critical-theoretical framework, which patriarchy is, runs the danger of neglecting other equally and/or more important structuring frameworks.

Rather than patriarchy, the term I prefer to use in this study, although I concede that it is also not perfect, is kyriarchy. 50 Kyriarchy better captures the relational dynamics pervasive in ancient masculinity. Kyriarchy does account for male dominance, including the rule of the father, but it also captures the complexities of ancient power dynamics, and avoids simple dichotomies. Central to kyriarchy is slavery and domination, and these concepts are inseparable from the formation of masculine identity. Kyriarchal power was a feature of elite authority. Elite potestas manifests itself, primarily, in dominium/δεσποτεία—dominion or rulership. Men, including fathers but also sons, women, and even other slaves, had the capacity to exhibit dominion over inferiors, but also themselves, as we will see below and throughout the study. Even slaves (who had “wives” and children, and who owned other slaves) could have this power, and it indeed, in Chrysostom’s mind at least, installed in them a sense of masculinity. Thus, as I have shown, doulology—the discourse of slavery—runs parallel to kyriarchy and masculine formation. Doulology does not only concern institutional slavery, but includes discourses of enslavement related to the slavery to

God, sin, the passions, and relationships between persons not strictly categorised, in legal terms, by the slave/free dichotomy. Kyriarchy also frames masculinity in terms that are not necessarily dependent on masculine/feminine binaries—women were key enactors and catalysts of kyriarchal power, since they did most of the daily overseeing

50 This is a term used by Elizabeth Schüssler-Fiorenza, and one that I have applied in a previous study on Chrysostom and slavery; see Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, “Introduction: Exploring the Intersections of Race, Gender, Status, and Ethnicity in Early Christian Studies,” in Prejudice and Christian Beginnings: Investigating Race, Gender, and Ethnicity in Early Christian Studies, ed. Laura Nasrallah and Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2010), 1–25; De Wet, Preaching Bondage, 1– 44.

of slaves.51 Not all men were necessarily fathers, but all men were expected to be masters, even if only over their own passions. More details on the dynamics of masculinity in terms of kyriarchal relationality will become evident as the study develops.

In the context of late antiquity, the power dynamic of gender relations was kyriarchal, which implied the overall domination of elite freeborn men over their subordinates. In the Roman world, the male head of the household was called the paterfamilias and dominus (literally, “father” and “master”). Most directly then, the household was the context in which men exercised the power of kyriarchy, the patria potestas and dominium, which a paterfamilias retained until death. Household management, or οἰκονομία, as Kristina Sessa has indicated, was thus a highly masculine discourse—a man’s honour was determined by his ability to dominate his subordinates and keep his house in order.52 The focus was on domination, and less on fatherhood per se. A father that did not exercise proper dominium was quite shameful, and certainly not manly. Of course, in some alternative monastic households, like those of the subintroductae, these roles changed dramatically.53

These subordinates included, first and foremost, his wife (materfamilias), and then the children and the slaves. The first axis of domestic relationality was a man’s relationship with his wife,54 which had to be a type of partnership, since much of the patria potestas was practically catalysed through the wife—she was often responsible

51 For a fuller discussion of kyriarchal power and doulology in Chrysostom, see De Wet, Preaching Bondage. 52 Kristina Sessa, The Formation of Papal Authority in Late Antique Italy: Roman Bishops and the Domestic Sphere (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 3–5. 53 I have already explored the issue of the subintroductae and its relation to kyriarchy and enslavement; see esp. Chris L. de Wet, “Revisiting the Subintroductae: Slavery, Asceticism, and ‘Syneisaktism’ in the Exegesis of John Chrysostom,” Biblical Interpretation 25.1 (2017): 58–80. 54 For a discussion of the first two axes of domestic relations and obligations, see Kate Cooper, The Fall of the Roman Household (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 109–10.

for raising infants and, as domina, had to oversee the slaves and household productivity.55 Chrysostom describes the husband as a king and the wife as a general.56

The second axis represents the parent-child relationship, and finally, the axis signifying the relationship between masters and slaves. These were the main spheres of kyriarchal domination. Domestic kyriarchal power was also reproductive. A man was expected to raise his son to one day become a paterfamilias and dominus himself, to marry, establish his own household, and own and dominate his own slaves. Chrysostom’s Adv. oppug. and De inani gloria et de educandis liberis57 are excellent examples of how

Christian pastoral power also attempted to regulate, structure, and transform kyriarchal reproduction.

In the recently and posthumously published fourth volume of his iconic History of Sexuality series, Les aveux de la chair (2018), we see Michel Foucault also struggling, in detail with some of the complexities of Chrysostom’s thoughts on marriage, the regulation of the family, and how these concepts build on traditional

Roman masculinity, and also their Christian transformation. Foucault emphasises that

Chrysostom can only label the married life as a blessing if it is strictly regulated:

On le voit : lorsque Chrysostome, tempérant certains aspects de ses

premiers écrits, met en face de la virginité la famille conjugale

convenablement réglée, et lorsqu’il en fait un lieu de tranquillité privée

opposé aux agitations publiques et susceptible de conduire au bien qu’on

recherche, il n’y a là rien qui soit, en son principe, spécifiquement chrétien.

55 For Chrysostom’s view of the wife as domina or δέσποινα, see Sacr. 1.2.46–50 (SC 272.66–68; with reference to his own mother, Anthusa); Virg. 67.6–9 (SC 125.336). 56 Hom. 1 Cor. 34.6 (F2.425). 57 See SC 188.

Tous ces thèmes étaient déjà formés. Sans doute ne faut-il pas méconnaître

que Chrysostome les réinscrit dans des références proprement chrétiennes :

la hiérarchie « naturelle » entre l’homme et la femme, il la rapporte à la

Création ; dans les vertus du mariage, il voit la promesse de récompenses

futures — « par là, nous pourrons plaire au Seigneur, passer vertueusement

toute la vie présente, et obtenir enfin les biens promis à ceux qui aiment

Dieu »; et les prospérités d’une vie conjugale bien réglée sont pour lui

l’effet d’une bénédiction.58

However, domestic relationality is complex within itself, and we should not assume that the model of Roman kyriarchy (and, so to speak, “patriarchy”) was a one- size-fits-all. Strictly speaking, as Richard Saller has shown, a woman could legally become a paterfamilias and have her own property after the death of her father or after emancipatio.59 Moreover, if we look at the narrative from Adv. oppug. 3.12, we see the materfamilias exercising her own agency, as a domina, in deceiving the paterfamilias about his son’s education. In this episode, there is a clear tension in domestic relations.

The father had the legal right to determine which education his son should undergo, and we clearly see that the mother and her monk ally could not openly oppose the father’s potestas. Thus, the boy continues to follow the path of conventional elite male education, that of the study of Greek and Latin literature and rhetoric in preparation for the vita militaris and cursus honorum. But at the same time, the mother resists the patria potestas by hiring the pedagogue-monk and secretly giving her son a monastic

58 Michel Foucault, Les aveux de la chair, ed. Frédéric Gros, vol. 4 of Histoire de la sexualité (Paris: Gallimard, 2018), 267. 59 Richard P. Saller, “Pater Familias, Mater Familias, and the Gendered Semantics of the Roman Household,” Classical Philology 94.2 (1999): 182–97; see also Cooper, Fall of the Roman Household, 111–14.

education. In a sense, it is a Trojan horse strategy that the mother follows. By having the monk assume the rather degrading role of a pedagogue, the father would be less suspicious of any conflicting educational agenda. It also illustrates how dependent fathers were on pedagogues. The mother seems to have identified and exploited a weakness in the kyriarchal education system, namely the catalysation elite male power through the intermediary of the pedagogue. I have argued elsewhere that pedagogues and nurses were the poignant symbols of absent Roman fathers and mothers and the decadence of elite Roman lifestyles.60 Furthermore, the mother and son, in some way, also resisted the expectation of reproducing legitimate family heirs by having the son become a monk, and possibly forsaking having a household of his own. Thus, in this story we see the tensions of domestic relationality wrought by monasticism on a very practical level.

Masculine relationality also operated on levels outside of the domestic sphere.

Masculinity was influenced by men’s relationships with other men—homosociality, which includes same-sex desire,61 patronage relationships, and friendships were all factors that accounted for one’s masculine identity. Furthermore, a man was expected to exercise his power in the military sense, and dominate outsiders and enemies of the fatherland. Traditionally, a man was expected to generate legal heirs who will carry on the family name, and then lead a successful career in military or civic service. Whereas

60 De Wet, Preaching Bondage, 127–69; see also Sandra R. Joshel, “Nurturing the Master’s Child: Slavery and the Roman Child-Nurse,” Signs 12 (1986): 3–22. 61 See especially Masterson, Man to Man, 1–40. For Chrysostom’s views on same-sex desire, see Adv. oppug. 3.8 (PG 47.360.45–363.24); Hom. Rom. 5[4] (F1.44–52); see also André-Jean Festugière, Antioche païenne et chrétienne: Libanius, Chrysostome et les moines de Syrie, Bibliothèque des Écoles Françaises d’Athènes et de Rome 194 (Paris: De Boccard, 1959), 195–209; John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 131–32, 156– 58; Bernadette J. Brooten, Love between Women: Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism, The Chicago Series on Sexuality, History, and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 344–48; Chris L. de Wet, “John Chrysostom on Homoeroticism,” Neotestamentica 48.1 (2014): 187– 218; Dunning, “Chrysostom and Same-Sex Eros.”

domestic masculine relationality revolved around the household (οἶκος), military and civic masculine relationality concerned the city (πόλις), the collective οἶκος.62 Once again, the father of the boy in Adv. oppug. 3.12 is described as “an accomplished soldier,

[who] wanted his son to follow in his footsteps (ἐπὶ τὴν πατρῴαν τάξιν),” while the mother wanted the son to emulate monastic πολιτεία.63 The mother feared that the father, after becoming aware of the son’s and mother’s monastic ambitions, would force the son into an early marriage,64 so as to generate heirs, and then send him off to the army. Again, we clearly see a resistance against traditional kyriarchal operations of reproduction.

However, we should not consider the monastic life in contrast to a military career. The language of spiritual warfare and the soldiery of Christ contributed to the militarisation of monastic identity.65 Moreover monks often operated like real soldiers, and we should not assume that spiritual warfare excluded physical and material confrontations and violence. It was simply a different army. In our tale, Chrysostom does not hesitate to describe the acts of the mother and the monastic life of the child in military terms. For many young men, the monastic life may have been an attractive alternative to the army, which was highly barbarised during late antiquity.66

62 Kate Cooper, “Gender and the Fall of Rome,” in A Companion to Late Antiquity, ed. Philip Rousseau, Blackwell Companions to the Ancient World (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 192–93; Masterson, Man to Man, 176–78. 63 Adv. oppug. 3.12 (PG 47.369.10–12): ἅτε καὶ ἐν πολέμοις πολλὰ κατωρθωκὼς, βούλεται τὸν υἱὸν ἐπὶ τὴν πατρῴαν τάξιν ἀγαγεῖν. Translation: Hunter, Two Treatises, 152. 64 Although the text seems somewhat ambiguous, the phrase “enslave him in the bonds of life [καταδήσῃ τοῖς τοῦ βίου σχοινίοις]” probably refers to marriage in Chrysostom’s thought, which often preceded military service. Chrysostom is fond of speaking about marriage as a type of slavery or a “chain”; see Virg. 41.1.11–15 (SC 125.236). 65 This is especially evident in the work of Kuefler, Manly Eunuch, 105–24; and David Brakke, Demons and the Making of the Monk: Spiritual Combat in Early Christianity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); more generally, see Daniel F. Caner, Wandering, Begging Monks: Spiritual Authority and the Promotion of Monasticism in Late Antiquity, Transformation of the Classical Heritage 33 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 66 John W. G. H. Liebeschuetz, Barbarians and Bishops: Army, Church, and State in the Age of Arcadius and Chrysostom (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 1–87.

Finally, late ancient masculinity also entails a sort of self-relationality or reflexivity. Men exercised outward dominance on their household and enemies of the land, but a man was also expected to exhibit self-dominance and mastery of his own passions. Virtue was a defining characteristic of masculinity and the greatest corporeal performance of masculinity in antiquity and especially in Chrysostom’s thought.67 In classical Greek philosophy, virtue (ἀρετή) was understood as a door fixed on four hinges—the cardinal virtues, which are prudence (φρόνησις), moderation and discipline

(σωφροσύνη), justice (δικαιοσύνη), and fortitude (ἀνδρεία). The whole aretalogical framework was androcentric. In Christian antiquity, and in Chrysostom specifically,

σωφροσύνη was considered a prime characteristic of a “real” man. The term

σωφροσύνη, in Chrysostom, had many connotations, and was especially related to notions of self-control, moderation, chastity, abstinence, austerity, mental health, and discipline. The young man from Adv. oppug. is described as an exemplum of monastic discipline, a man who mastered a rigorous ascetic regime at a very young age.

The second characteristic of masculinity that should be outlined is that of hybridity. According to Bridges and Pascoe: “Hybrid masculinity refers to men’s selective incorporation of performances and identity elements associated with marginalised and subordinated masculinities and femininities.”68 Research on hybrid masculinities builds on Connell’s framework of hegemonic and subordinated masculinities, but also problematises it—Kuefler also uses the hegemony/subordination scheme in his analysis of masculine formation and reproduction in the late antique

67 Chris L. de Wet, “Virtue and the (Un)Making of Men in the Thought of John Chrysostom,” in Men and Women in the Early Christian Centuries, ed. Wendy Mayer and Ian Elmer, Early Christian Studies 18 (Strathfield: St. Paul’s, 2014), 227–50. 68 Tristan Bridges and C. J. Pascoe, “Hybrid Masculinities: New Directions in the Sociology of Men and Masculinities,” Sociology Compass 8.3 (2014): 246.

West.69 Hegemonic masculinity represents the male-dominated gender order, including its social power relations and cultural value systems; it is juxtaposed to subordinated masculinity, which is constructed in relation to the hegemonic, and marked as feminine and inferior. It includes men dominating women, but it also includes the feminisation of certain groups of men, thereby excluding them from hegemonic masculine categories. 70 Most importantly, hegemonic masculinity “embodies a ‘currently accepted’ strategy,” and may be replaced by a subordinated masculinity, which in turn becomes the new hegemony.71 Kuefler’s application of hegemony and subordination in late ancient masculinity is stated thus:

The new Christian masculinity moved a previously subordinated

masculinity into position as a hegemonic masculinity by means of the

rhetoric of manliness and unmanliness. In other words, men adhering to a

subordinated masculinity (the Christian ideal for men) successfully

challenged the manliness of the men adhering to the hegemonic masculinity

(the classical ideal for men) in such a way as to appeal to men to transfer

their allegiance from the one to the other.

Kuefler’s thesis is an important one for the current study. It must be asked whether one could include Chrysostom’s formulations of masculinity in this hypothesis. If, for now, we only read our story in Adv. oppug. 3.12, it seems that the shifts of power were not so simple. If we assume Kuefler’s conclusions are valid for

69 Kuefler, Manly Eunuch, 4–7. 70 Connell, Masculinities, 76–80. 71 Connell, Masculinities, 77.

the West, and I stress “if,” it does not mean that the same assumptions are valid for the

East or Chrysostom specifically—the issue needs to be problematised on a higher level of abstraction in individual authors. I am not attempting, in this study, to provide a synthesis of Eastern Christian views on hegemonic and subordinated masculinities. I am concerned with one major author, Chrysostom, which I will compare at times with other views from West and East, such as with Augustine. The aim is thus not so much to synthesise as it is to destabilise and problematise generalisations of ancient gender, thereby emphasising the diversity and personal nature of masculinity. The concept of hegemonic masculinity has received ample criticism, and adherents to the concept of hegemonic masculinity, including Connell, had to rethink and reformulate the theory’s fundamentals, especially emphasising the complex dynamics of gender hierarchies, the agency of women, which is apparent in Adv. oppug. 3.12, along with recognising different geographies of masculinity, in our case, for instance, West and East, and even regional differences, such as urban and rural contexts.72 It is indeed true that, on a micro- level, some formerly subordinated masculinities did challenge and replace hegemonic masculinity—I have argued elsewhere that the masculinisation and popularisation of the “slave of God” discourse is an example of such a usurpation.73 It becomes more problematic when arguing on a macro-level. The debate is of course, not new. Foucault forwarded the idea of Christianisation as feminisation, when the vir emulates the virgo.74 Elizabeth Clark has convincingly criticised Foucault’s paradigm, especially highlighting the virile discourses of soldiery, mastery, and domination in early

72 For a summary of the critiques against hegemonic masculinity, as well as its reformulation, see Connell and Messerschmidt, “Hegemonic Masculinity.” 73 De Wet, Preaching Bondage, 88–89, 188–89. 74 Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley, vol. 2 of The History of Sexuality (New York: Vintage, 1985), 80–93.

Christianity.75 In the end, Virginia Burrus makes a good point that “both Foucault and

Clark have it right: while Foucault’s account highlights the feminised self-styling of the late-antique man, Clark’s gloss points up his thinly veiled masculinised aggression.”76

Burrus then rightly sees masculinity as rather paradoxical. 77 Kuefler’s premises of masculine adaptation and transformation in the various spheres of the gender order, such as the household, battlefield, and civic-ecclesiastical offices are not without merit.

But I would be hesitant to argue for a total usurpation of classical hegemonic masculinity by a subordinated one, be it Christian, monastic, or whatever—at least not in Chrysostom’s thought, as Foucault also admitted.78

Thus, in Chrysostom’s context it is perhaps more appropriate to speak of hybrid masculinity, in which case there is indeed an overt symbolic distancing from classical hegemonic masculinity, along with an incorporation of the traits associated with marginalised and subordinated masculinities. However, it is also not a total departure from classical hegemonic masculinity, especially since most of his moderate audience would not opt for such a total departure from traditional values of Roman manliness.

Chrysostom does value the monastic masculine ideal, but he also believes that these two conceptualisations of masculinity could co-exist, and even complement each other.

Chrysostom states:

75 Elizabeth A. Clark, “Foucault, the Fathers, and Sex,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 56.4 (1988): 619–41. 76 Burrus, Begotten, Not Made, 169–70. 77 A point also made by Kuefler, Manly Eunuch; and Masterson, Man to Man, 34–40. 78 Foucault, Les aveux de la chair, 266–70.

But since most parents79 persist in their desire to see their children80 live a

life of letters, as if they knew for certain that they would reach the summit

of eloquence, let us not argue about this, let us not say that he will fail to

obtain his goal. Rather, we will grant for the sake of argument that the child

will fully achieve the goal of his study and reach the acme of success. But

suppose we are faced with a two-fold choice: either he frequents the school-

rooms and enters the contest for knowledge, or he goes to the desert to

struggle on behalf of the soul. Tell me, where is it better to excel? If it

should happen in both areas, I am quite in favor of that. But if one or the

other must be sacrificed, it is better to choose what is superior.81

Chrysostom’s own upbringing may have been somewhat similar to that of the boy described above.82 From his biographical accounts, Chrysostom’s father, Secundus, occupied a civil office under the military commander of the Oriens, but we are not sure whether he was a Christian—he died while John was still an infant. Chrysostom’s mother, Anthusa, was a Christian and was devoted to raising her son in the best way possible. As with devout Christian widows, Anthusa did not remarry. Later in life,

Chrysostom also studied rhetoric, perhaps even under the famed teacher Libanius,

79 The Greek here in the text reads “fathers” (τῶν πατέρων). 80 The Greek here reads “son” (τὸν υἱὸν). 81 Adv. oppug. 3.13 (PG 47.371.9–20): ᾿Επεὶ δὲ πολλοὶ τῶν πατέρων, ἕκαστος ἔγκειται τὸν υἱὸν ἐπιθυμῶν ἐν λόγοις ζῶντα ὁρᾷν, ὡς ἀκριβῶς εἰδὼς ὅτι πρὸς τὸ τέλος πάντως ἥξει τῶν λόγων, ὑπὲρ τούτου μὲν μὴ φιλονεικῶμεν, μηδὲ ὅτι διαμαρτήσεται λέγωμεν, ἀλλὰ δῶμεν τῷ λόγῳ καὶ περιέσεσθαι πάντως αὐτὸν τῆς σπουδῆς, καὶ πρὸς ἄκρον ἀφίξεσθαι. ῎Εστω δὲ αἵρεσις ἡμῖν προκειμένη διπλῆ, καὶ εἰς διδασκαλεῖα μὲν φοιτῶν, ὑπὲρ τῆς μαθήσεως ἐχέτω τὸν ἀγῶνα, εἰς δὲ ἐρημίας ὑπὲρ τῆς ψυχῆς· ποῦ βέλτιον, εἰπέ μοι, κρατεῖν; ῍Αν μὲν γὰρ ἑκατέρωθεν συμβαίνῃ, κἀγὼ βούλομαι· ἂν δὲ θάτερον λείπηται, βέλτιον ἑλέσθαι τὸ κρεῖττον. Translation: Hunter, Two Treatises, 154–55. 82 We often read of those highly influential mothers and sisters who shaped their sons and brothers to become influential leaders in the church—Monnica for Augustine, Nonna for Gregory of Nazianzus, and Macrina and Emmelia for Gregory of Nyssa.

although this is not confirmed.83 Nevertheless, Chrysostom had knowledge of classical rhetoric and literature, as is clear from his works, and was a gifted public speaker, as is clear from his posthumous appellation, the “golden-mouthed”—a very manly nickname. Eloquence was an important facet of ancient masculine formation. 84

Although he received a classical education, Chrysostom also temporarily retreated to the monastic life, and only returned later, perhaps due to health reasons or career ambition, to start with the clerical cursus honorum, starting out as a deacon, later becoming a priest, and going so far as to become the bishop of Constantinople.

Chrysostom’s masculinity is a perfect example of what we can call hybrid masculinity. Although we do not have much certainty about Chrysostom’s tenure in the monastic life,85 he does seem to embody the typical tensions of what has been termed the monk-bishop complex.86 This interesting subjective stance, I argue, incorporated masculine features from both hegemonic and subordinated masculinities. The hegemonic masculine elements include, at least, participation in the clerical cursus honorum, training in classical rhetoric, involvement in politics and the exhibition of public authority, and serving as a spiritual paterfamilias to the household of God. Yet as monk, Chrysostom also opposes other elements of classical Roman masculinity, upholding the celibate life as superior to marriage and producing legitimate heirs, not appearing to concern oneself with the accumulation of wealth, and valuing spiritual warfare over and above real military exploits. However, these categorisations of

83 Pierre-Louis Malosse, “Jean Chrysostome a-t-il été l’élève de Libanios?,” Phoenix 62 (2008): 273–80. 84 Gleason, Making Men, 139–58. 85 For an insightful critique of Chrysostom’s monastic life, see Wendy Mayer, “What Does It Mean to Say That John Chrysostom Was a Monk?,” Studia Patristica 41 (2006): 451–55. 86 Andrea Sterk, Renouncing the World Yet Leading the Church: The Monk-Bishop in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 141–60; see also Philip Rousseau, “The Spiritual Authority of the ‘Monk-Bishop’: Eastern Elements in Some Western Hagiography of the Fourth and Fifth Centuries,” The Journal of Theological Studies 22.2 (1971): 380–419.

masculinity are, in themselves, not always simple and clear-cut. At times, monks were still involved in civic affairs,87 and spiritual and physical warfare were not necessarily mutually exclusive. Rather than opposing and usurping one another, these different standards of masculinity overlapped, intersected, and even merged in some instances.

The third characteristic of masculinity is its discursivity. Burrus has convincingly demonstrated how the discourse of masculinity influenced fourth-century creedal formulations, which, in turn, had a transformative effect on social concepts of manliness.88 Masculinity does indeed function as a very potent subjectivising discourse in Chrysostom’s thought. The language of masculinity expressed itself in the corporeal grammar of virtue formation. Similarly, by means of the discourse of vice, men could be effeminised as a measure of slander.89 This was also very common in Chrysostom’s rhetoric. Jews and heretics, like the Manichaeans and Marcionites, were often at the receiving end of the rhetoric of unmanliness. 90 The discourse of masculinity in

Chrysostom’s thought is perhaps nowhere so apparent as in his homilies on the

Maccabean martyr-mother.91 “So, what quality of hers deserves our wonder first?”

87 This was especially the case with the destruction of the imperial statues in Antioch (387 C.E.); Stat. 17 (PG 49.171–180); see also Christine Shepardson, Controlling Contested Places: Late Antique Antioch and the Spatial Politics of Religious Controversy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 147– 54. Peter Brown has also shown that Syrian monks often acted as patrons and mediators in civil disputes in and around the villages of the Syrian landscape; Peter R. L. Brown, “The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity,” Journal of Roman Studies 61 (1971): 80–101. 88 Burrus, Begotten, Not Made. 89 See, for example, Jennifer W. Knust, Abandoned to Lust: Sexual Slander and Ancient Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006); Diana M. Swancutt, “‘The Disease of Effemination’: The Charge of Effeminacy and the Verdict of God (Romans 1:18–2:16),” in New Testament Masculinities, ed. Stephen D. Moore and Janice C. Anderson, Semeia Studies 45 (Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature, 2003), 193–234; Brittany E. Wilson, Unmanly Men: Refigurations of Masculinity in Luke- Acts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 90 Susanna Drake, Slandering the Jew: Sexuality and Difference in Early Christian Texts, Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 78–98; Chris L. de Wet, “Paul, Identity-Formation and the Problem of Alterity in John Chrysostom’s Homilies In epistulam ad Galatas commentarius,” Acta Theologica Supplementum 19 (2014): 18–41. 91 For an in-depth analysis of the Maccabean martyr-mother in Chrysostom’s thought, see Raphaëlle Ziadé, Les martyrs Maccabées: de l’histoire juive au culte chrétien: les homélies de Grégoire de Nazianze et de Jean Chrysostome, Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae 80 (Leiden: Brill, 2007); Chris

Chrysostom asks, “[t]he weakness of her gender…?” He then continues: “For even if she was a philosopher, she was still a mother.... [S]he also shared a woman’s nature….” 92 Chrysostom juxtaposes the mother’s feminine weakness with her masculine endurance. “She scorned her nature”93 as a woman—“if, that is, one should call her a woman”94—and a mother, Chrysostom continues, and uses the language of the contest (ἀγών), another highly masculine discourse, throughout the entire first homily to describe the interior disposition of the mother. In the second homily,

Chrysostom admonishes his audience:

Let fathers imitate her…. For whatever degree we achieve harsh self-

discipline and philosophy, the woman’s philosophy outstrips our

endurance. So then, let no one who has reached a peak of courage and

endurance think it beneath their dignity to have the old woman as their

teacher…. [T]hrough invoking the same bold speech as her we can be

considered worthy of the same race [i.e. contest] as her….95

L. de Wet, “Claiming Corporeal Capital: John Chrysostom’s Homilies on the Maccabean Martyrs,” Journal of Early Christian History 2.1 (2012): 3–21. 92 Macc. 1.5, 6 (PG 50.619.56–58, 620.33–36): Τί οὖν αὐτῆς πρότερον θαυμάσαι ἄξιον; τὸ τῆς φύσεως ἀσθενὲς...; Εἰ γὰρ καὶ φιλόσοφος ἦν, ἀλλὰ μήτηρ.… καὶ γυναικείας μετεῖχε φύσεως…. Translation: Wendy Mayer, trans., The Cult of the Saints, Popular Patristics Series (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2006), 139–40. 93 Macc. 1.7 (PG 50.621.3–4): κατεφρόνησε φύσεως. Translation: Mayer, Cult of the Saints, 141. 94 Macc. 1.8 (PG 50.621.34–35): εἴ γε γυναῖκα δεῖ αὐτὴν καλεῖν. Translation: Mayer, Cult of the Saints, 142. 95 Macc. 2.6 (PG 50.626.23, 26–30, 35–36): Ταύτην μιμείσθωσαν πατέρες…. ὅπου γὰρ ἂν ἀφικώμεθα σκληραγωγίας τε καὶ φιλοσοφίας, προφθάνει τὴν καρτερίαν ἡμῶν τῆς γυναικὸς ἡ φιλοσοφία. Μηδεὶς τοίνυν τῶν εἰς ἄκρον ἐληλακότων ἀνδρείας καὶ καρτερίας ἀνάξιον εἶναι νομιζέτω τὴν γυναῖκα τὴν γεγηρακυῖαν διδάσκαλον ἔχειν…. δυνηθῆναι τὸν αὐτὸν αὐτῇ δρόμον ἀράμενοι τῆς αὐτῆς αὐτῇ καταξιωθῆναι παῤῥησίας… Translation: Mayer, Cult of the Saints, 152–53.

What we have above, in Chrysostom’s masculinisation of the Maccabean martyr- mother, is the political construction and idealisation of “man” through the discursive catalyst that is the virtuous or “manly woman,” who has conquered the “weakness of her nature” (τὸ τῆς φύσεως ἀσθενὲς), especially as related to her motherly love for her children. In Chrysostom’s deployment of this aged female body as the site of ideal masculinity, manliness now transcends the body, and operates on the level of discourse, but is then reflected back onto the body, and calls for interiorisation and performance.

In Chrysostom’s characterisation of the mother, she is not a simply a suffering passive martyr, but an active agent who has mastered her emotions and the evil male persecutors. Chrysostom uses the woman as a paradoxical exemplum to teach his audience virtue, and she is described in the most masculine of terms. Along with the discourse of the contest, Chrysostom also deploys the discourse of philosophy (she is called a philosopher [φιλόσοφος], and her performance an exhibition of philosophy

[φιλοσοφία]), as a correlate of masculinity, which here refers to someone who exhibits a life of virtue and self-control, all masculine character traits.96 The philosophical life is likened to harsh military training (σκληραγωγία). This same discourse of philosophisation is used to describe the young man in Adv. oppug. 3.12 who is reaching the pinnacle of monastic masculinity. “[H]e perfectly followed the discipline of the monks and continually gave glory to God who had put on him the light wings of philosophy.”97 In describing the boy, Chrysostom employs the Platonic concept of the mature and winged soul that is ascending to a higher level of being—the pinnacle of

96 The discourse of philosophy is often used to describe the ascetic endurance and discipline of the Christian martyrs; see also Hom. Act. 42.2 (PG 60.301.14–17); Hom. Tit. 4.1 (F6.297–98); Gillian Cloke, This Female Man of God: Women and Spiritual Power in the Patristic Age, AD 350–450 (London: Routledge, 1995), 67–69; Mayer, Cult of the Saints, 140–41; De Wet, Preaching Bondage, 182–83. 97 Adv. oppug. 3.12 (PG 47.370.46–49): Καὶ τὰ ἄλλα δὲ αὐτῷ πρὸς τὴν ἀκρίβειαν τῶν μοναχῶν ἀπήρτιστο, καὶ τὸν Θεὸν ἐδόξαζε συνεχῶς ἐκεῖνος, τὸν οὕτω κοῦφα τῆς φιλοσοφίας ταύτης ἐνθέντα αὐτῷ τὰ πτερά. Translation: Hunter, Two Treatises, 154.

philosophy.98 In this sense, Chrysostom, like many other authors of late antiquity, annunciates the young man’s masculinity in relation to his peers, but more importantly, in terms of his psychic transcendence.99

Moreover, the exemplary martyr-mother serves as a teacher (διδάσκαλος) of courage (ἀνδρεία) and endurance (καρτερία), i.e. philosophy. The discourses of teaching, which imply discipline and formation, as well as the virtues of courage and endurance, are all trademarks of the highest standards of masculinity. Despite her gender, she occupies the manly role of a teacher, and teaches the essentials of manliness. Most importantly, she has exhibited the virtue of boldness of speech

(παῤῥησία), another key factor in manliness. Through the paradox of the martyr- mother, Chrysostom discursively constructs ideal masculinity, and he does not hesitate to use both classical and monastic virtues of manliness. In Adv. oppug. 3.12 the training of the young man consisted of both classical and monastic masculine virtues—his classical education was used to enhance his monastic training, although the latter would eventually supplant the former, especially as the boy moved from being schooled in non-Christian to Christian literature. The boy’s mother is also described in military terms. She has the ability to persuade (πείθω) the father and the monk, proper men, with her words, character, and emotions, just like a good rhetor. 100 She “contrived a stratagem” (συντίθησι μηχανήν), gives the monk a command (ἐντολή) like a general, and devises a successful plan (οὐ γέγονεν αὐτῇ μάταιος ἡ μηχανή).101 I have already

98 See, for instance, Plato, Phaed. 249a–c (LCL 36.480–83); María A. Fierro, “Two Conceptions of Body in Plato’s Phaedrus,” in The Platonic Art of Philosophy, ed. George Boys-Stones, Dimitri El Murr, and Christopher Gill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 42–44. Chrysostom often uses this Platonic image of the psychic wings of desire; see Konstantinos Bosinis, “Two Platonic Images in the Rhetoric of John Chrysostom: ‘The Wings of Love’ and the ‘Charioteer of the Soul,’” Studia Patristica 41 (2006): 433–38. 99 Masterson, Man to Man, 37–38. 100 Adv. oppug. 3.12 (PG 47.369.28, 49–50). 101 Adv. oppug. 3.12 (PG 47.369.21–22, 51–52); see Hunter, Two Treatises, 152–53.

noted that one could perhaps read, in the subtext at least, a tactics of a Trojan horse in the mother’s plans. There is also a sense of irony in Chrysostom’s rhetoric here.

Although the father is an “accomplished soldier [ἐν πολέμοις πολλὰ κατωρθωκὼς],” the mother, effectively and tactically, outwits him. The masculine descriptions of both mothers are remarkably similar—both give up their children, so to speak, and both qualify for what Chrysostom calls true motherhood. “For giving birth is not the defining characteristic of a mother,” Chrysostom says, “for that is a matter of nature.” What is then the defining characteristic? “[I]nstead, a mother’s defining feature is raising [her child],” Chrysostom answers. 102 Through their masculine actions, both women exhibited their agency (προαίρεσις). One wonders if Chrysostom thought of his own mother, Anthusa, in these instances. Both of these mothers are presented as exempla for fathers to follow, and their actions are highlighted as exceptional means for fashioning masculinity.

Related to the discursive nature of masculinity is also its performativity. In this case, Butler argues that gendered acts, gestures, and practices are performative, and that an essential and interiorised “gender core” (or, in Foucault’s terms, the soul103) is only a fabrication—Butler proposes that the body is not “being,” but rather that gendered bodies are “styles of the flesh.”104 Furthermore, she considers gender as a strategy

“which has cultural survival as its end,” and explains: “[A]s a strategy of survival within compulsory systems, gender is a performance with clearly punitive consequences.”105

Butler’s thesis therefore implies that gender performativity, when taking place under

102 Macc. 1.8 (PG 50.621.23–25) οὕτω τρεφέτωσαν τὰ παιδία· οὐ γὰρ τὸ τεκεῖν μητρὸς, τοῦτο γὰρ τῆς φύσεως, ἀλλὰ τὸ θρέψαι μητρὸς. Translation: Mayer, Cult of the Saints, 142. 103 Foucault, Discipline & Punish, 29. 104 Butler, Gender Trouble, 185, 189–90. 105 Butler, Gender Trouble, 190.

duress of or in resistance to certain established gender orders, signifies bodily acts that are subversive.106 In Adv. oppug. 3.12, we clearly see this politics of performativity playing out, and playing out subversively at that. Having delineated the discursivity of the masculine discourse of the narrative above, we can now make more sense of the performativity of the narrative. The formation of monastic masculinity in the young man, as prompted by the agency of the mother, is indeed a strategy (μηχανή) of cultural survival, but also one of subversion and resistance, as the military discourse implicates.

However, the tactics of this subversion are based on deception, and disrupt the linearity between the (supposed) gender core, or soul, and the boy’s gendered performances.

Chrysostom does assume an inner core in the young boy, or perhaps more appropriately stated in Foucault’s psychic framework, he exhibited a “beauty of soul”

(ψυχὴν κάλλους). 107 Beauty is manliness—this terminology of psychic erotics is

Platonic, highlighting the boy’s transcendence, 108 which is also qualified, as noted above, by another Platonic image referring to the winged soul of the boy. Although he viewed the soul as material, 109 in Chrysostom’s thought, however, the soul is not gendered, which is why both men and women can follow in the example of Paul or

Christ, and participate in the contest of the soul.110 It is, however, the performance of the boy’s body that empowers this core, even if it is only a fantasy or illusion, as Butler

106 Butler, Gender Trouble, 107–93. 107 Adv. oppug. 3.12 (PG 47.370.22). 108 Masterson, Man to Man, 41–43. 109 Wendy Mayer, “Medicine in Transition: Christian Adaptation in the Later Fourth-Century East,” in Shifting Genres in Late Antiquity, ed. Geoffrey Greatrex and Hugh Elton (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), 11– 26. 110 Ign. 1 (PG 50.587.20–44); see also Frederick G. McLeod, The Image of God in the Antiochene Tradition (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1999), 203–8; N. Verna Harrison, “Women and the Image of God According to St. John Chrysostom,” in In Dominico Eloquio—In Lordly Eloquence: Essays on Patristic Exegesis in Honor of Robert Louis Wilken, ed. Paul M. Blowers et al. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002), 259–79; Megan K. DeFranza, Sex Difference in Christian Theology: Male, Female, and Intersex in the Image of God (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2015), 98– 100.

would have it. So although the soul has no gender in Chrysostom’s thought, masculine performances have the ability to fortify and beautify the soul. Despite the differences in Chrysostom’s thought and Butler’s theory regarding the presence or illusion of a gendered or gender-neutral core, the “styles” of the boy’s flesh are indeed intriguing.

According to Chrysostom, his soul is shaped by acts that are contrary to it:

And what is truly marvelous is that, when he appeared in public, he seemed

no different from the crowd. For he had no wild and rough demeanor, nor

did he wear an unusual cloak, but he was like the rest in clothing,

expression, voice, and all other respects. For this reason he was able to

capture many of his comrades within his nets, since on the inside he

concealed much philosophy.111

We do not see a performance of overt resistance and attrition here; rather, the performance of the soul is covert. When he is in public (traditionally, the arena of men), he subverts the gender order favoured by his father through deception and infiltration; privately, his psychic and corporeal linearity is restored, and he lives the life of a monk, performing the monastic life in the reading of Christian sacred texts, fasting, simplicity, vigils, and prayer. The young man’s social and gendered intelligence is hereby highlighted, notably in his ability to embody in one moment the habitus of classical

Roman masculinity, and at another time, to epitomise a monastic manly habitus.112 This

111 Adv. oppug. 3.12 (PG 47.370.22–29): Καὶ τὸ δὴ θαυμαστὸν, ἔξω μὲν φαινόμενος, οὐδὲν διαφέρειν ἐδόκει τῶν πολλῶν· οὔτε γὰρ ἦθος εἶχεν ἠγριωμένον καὶ κατεσκληκὸς, οὔτε ἐξηλλαγμένην στολὴν, ἀλλ' ἦν κοινὸς καὶ τῷ σχήματι καὶ τῷ βλέμματι καὶ τῇ φωνῇ καὶ τοῖς ἄλλοις ἅπασιν. ῞Οθεν καὶ πολλοὺς τῶν ὁμιλούντων αὐτῷ εἴσω τῶν αὐτοῦ δικτύων ἠδυνήθη λαβεῖν, πολλὴν ἔνδον ἔχων ἐγκεκρυμμένην τὴν φιλοσοφίαν. Translation: Hunter, Two Treatises, 153. 112 For the importance of public outward appearance in Chrysostom’s thought on gender, see Aideen M. Hartney, John Chrysostom and the Transformation of the City (London: Duckworth, 2004), 12–14; Luke

secrecy, however, is not simply due to fear, but rather humility. “All these things the monk his pedagogue reported to us in secret,” Chrysostom whispers, “[f]or if the child had found out that any of these things had been disclosed, he would have been quite indignant.”113

Secrecy is, of course, a central issue in gendered performance. The secrecy of the boy operates on three levels. We may compare, ludically perhaps, the secrecy of the boy’s life to the closet of modern Western homosexuality. The secrecy of the boy’s state is indeed a personal essence, operating on a psychic level. He does not only hide his monastic identity out of fear of persecution or marginalisation—his secret life corresponds to the monastic virtue of humility and sincerity. In order to avoid the vices of pride and vainglory, secrecy is maintained—as is evident in the entire theme of Inan., vainglory was considered highly shameful and effeminate by Chrysostom.114 We read that the boy only confronts his father much later. Secondly, his secrecy is also based on conduct. In his study on gender identity and secrecy in modern Northern Nigeria, where

Islamic criminal law has been instituted, Steven Pierce has shown that secrecy of non- normative Hausa sexualities also has conduct as its object. In this case, because desire takes shape in the context of the family’s productive and reproductive demands, secrecy becomes “a way of finessing the contradictions and ambiguities that these demands create in daily life and daily desire.”115 We have a similar functioning of secrecy in Adv. oppug. 3.12 in the context of the Roman household. The monastic life, as we will show

Lavan, “The Agorai of Antioch and Constantinople as Seen by John Chrysostom,” Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 50.S91 (2007): 157–67. 113 Adv. oppug. 3.12 (PG 47.370.41–43): ῞Απερ ἡμῖν ἅπαντα ὁ παιδαγωγὸς λάθρα ἀπήγγειλε· καὶ γὰρ ἦν ἀφόρητος ὁ παῖς, εἴ τι τούτων ᾔσθετό ποτε ἐξενεχθέν. Translation: Hunter, Two Treatises, 154. 114 Blake Leyerle, Theatrical Shows and Ascetic Lives: John Chrysostom’s Attack on Spiritual Marriage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 48–64. 115 Steven Pierce, “Identity, Performance, and Secrecy: Gendered Life and the ‘Modern’ in Northern Nigeria,” Feminist Studies 33.3 (2007): 562.

below, had consequences for the family’s productive and reproductive structures, and for now the boy’s monastic soul is veiled under the habitus of classical Roman manhood. Secrecy, even if only temporary, is not only a characteristic of the boy’s sincerity and simplicity, his beauty of soul, but it is also a technology to manage the incongruity between his soul and the style of his public flesh. The boy must appear as if he is being classically “manned” in order to hide the truth that he is actually being

“monked.” Thirdly, the secrecy is also a type of camouflage with which he can ensnare comrades in his nets. Secrecy becomes a type of military strategy by which the boy can start spiritually reproducing other Christians and/or monks.

The deception is, of course, only temporary as any metamorphosis—here in the drama the boy is still the chrysalis, blending in on the outside, but changing on the inside. But the butterfly with the “light wings of this philosophy” does emerge when the time is right. He surfaces from his monastic closet. We hear from Chrysostom that the boy emerged as a monk and confronted his father. “When his father attacked him later, after much time had passed, and rushed against him with great force,” Chrysostom tells us, “not only did he fail to make any impact on the building, but he even made it appear to be stronger.”116 At the end, as in any tale of manliness, there is a battle between the protagonist and the antagonist, the great performance and test of masculinity, and in this battle, the transmogrified young monk proved to be stronger (ἰσχυροτέραν) than his classically masculine father.

The performativity of the pedagogue-monk is also very interesting. His is essentially a reverse metamorphosis. He proceeds from being a monk, to assuming the role of a pedagogue. As Chrysostom notes, being a pedagogue is a very lowly position,

116 Adv. oppug. 3.12 (PG 47.370.13–17): ῞Οτε γὰρ πατὴρ αὐτοῦ προσβαλὼν ὕστερον χρόνου παρελθόντος πολλοῦ, καὶ μετὰ σφοδρᾶς ἐνσείσας τῆς ῥύμης, οὐ μόνον οὐκ ἔκλινέ τι τῆς οἰκοδομῆς, ἀλλὰ καὶ ἰσχυροτέραν ἀπέφηνε. Translation: Hunter, Two Treatises, 153.

usually reserved for slaves or freed men. Generally, occupying the position of a slave or pedagogue was a very unmanly disposition. 117 But this is also the deceptive performance of the monk—the boy’s deception remains intact as long as the pedagogue-monk plays along. The monk’s masculinity is also shaped via the disruption of the linearity between his soul and his somatic stylistics. The monk is also a teacher disguised as a pedagogue. Although he appears in a lowly and dishonoured position, like a slave, he is actively reproducing himself in the young boy, just as the boy’s father would wish to reproduce himself in his son. Indirectly, by assuming a slavish position and remaining close to the body of the boy, moulding and shaping it, the monk does exercise some power over the household of the boy’s father and over rights of reproduction.

If we look at the relationship between the pedagogue-monk and the boy through the lens of homosociality, the tale is further problematised. Masterson has convincingly shown how central education (παιδεία) stood in matters of homosociality, including same-sex desire.118 But one wonders about the homosociality between the boy and the monk. The power relationship between a young man and a pedagogue was extremely complicated. The pedagogue, although he may have been a slave, dominated over the boy as a surrogate of the patria potestas; yet, as the boy became a vir and dominus in his own right, he also started to treat the pedagogue as one to be dominated.119 But as a spiritual guide and teacher, the monk would have been superior in status to the boy. If we look at some of the principles of teaching monastic discipline, the discipleship

117 De Wet, Preaching Bondage, 141–54. 118 Masterson, Man to Man, 1–40. 119 De Wet, Preaching Bondage, 143–47.

would have been harsh and absolute.120 How did they act and treat each other in different contexts? Could there even have been a kindling of same-sex sexual desire, especially within this context of secrecy and deception (not to mention Chrysostom’s almost sexy description of the boy’s strength and physical appearance, along with his beautiful soul)?121 I believe the proper conduct of both would have been an extremely difficult balance to strike. And faltering in appropriate homosociality and not managing the challenges of same-sex passion, in whatever way, would result in the collapse of this most meticulously designed façade. And the stakes were very high in this game of deception.

Another characteristic of masculinity is that it is intersectional. Intersectionality theory has been successfully applied in gender studies to highlight the complexity of social identity, and to lay bare the dynamics of discrimination, marginalisation, and social injustice.122 Intersectionality rightly assumes that gender is not sufficient in itself to make sense of one’s social identity. Gender cannot and should not be understood apart from its intersections with ethnicity, class, ability, religion, age, and so on. In Adv.

120 Graham Gould, The Desert Fathers on Monastic Community, Oxford Early Christian Studies (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), 52–58. 121 Homoerotic passion between monks was a very real possibility; although covering a later period, see esp. Derek Krueger, “Between Monks: Tales of Monastic Companionship in Early Byzantium,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 20.1 (2011): 28–61. More generally, see Virginia Burrus, The Sex Lives of Saints: An Erotics of Ancient Hagiography, Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). 122 Key studies on intersectionality include: Kimberlé W. Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum 140 (1989): 139–67; “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43.6 (1991): 1241–99; S. Laurel Weldon, “The Structure of Intersectionality: A Comparative Politics of Gender,” Politics & Gender (2006): 235–248; Jennifer C. Nash, “Re-Thinking Intersectionality,” Feminist Review 89.1 (2008): 1–15. In Biblical and Early Christian Studies, much work has been done on intersectionality; see Fiorenza, “Exploring the Intersections”; Marianne B. Kartzow, Destabilizing the Margins: An Intersectional Approach to Early Christian Memory (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2012); Bernadette J. Brooten, “Enslaved Women in Basil of Caesarea’s Canonical Letters: An Intersectional Analysis,” in Doing Gender—Doing Religion: Case Studies on Intersectionality in Early Judaism, Christianity and Islam, ed. Ute Eisen, Christine Gerber, and Angela Standhartinger, Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament II 302 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013), 325–55.

oppug. 3.12, we get a glimpse of masculinity from the perspective of Romanness, but also as Romanness. There is an interesting tension present in the narrative. Chrysostom does negate traditional Roman masculinity as invalid, but simply asserts through the tale that monastic masculinity trumps traditional Roman masculinity. Roman manliness is defined by the strong impulse to procreate, thereby establishing a legitimate line of inheritance, and also by the primacy of military service, despite the barbarisation of the

Roman army (there is a paucity of information regarding non-Roman Syrian or Gothic masculinities, for instance). The assumption is that the boy does not have a physical disability, despite so many people in antiquity having some form of disability.123

Although the boy is on his way to becoming a monk, his background is still an elite one. The masculinity of non-elite, poor, and even enslaved men was shaped in very different ways from what we have read thus far. The boy is still young—but what about men in old age? How did they shape their masculinity? We should thus not assume that the formation of manliness we have in Adv. oppug. 3.12 is universal. These intersectional complexities of ancient masculinity will be explored throughout this study.

Finally, we also have the physicality and materiality of masculinity, an aspect that cannot be ignored, especially in the ancient context. Although Chrysostom notes that the boy looked exactly like his “secular” peers, as time passes, the boy’s body would certainly have changed due to the rigorous ascetic regimen Chrysostom describes. The purpose of the ascetic regimen was to ensure that sexual desire is curbed by means of the cooling and drying of the body.124 Traditionally, at least, a man’s body

123 For Chrysostom’s views on disability, see Hennie Stander, “Disabled Men and Women in Early Christianity: A Study of Chrysostom’s Writings,” Ekklesiastikos Pharos 95 (2013): 332–45. 124 Teresa M. Shaw, The Burden of the Flesh: Fasting and Sexuality in Early Christianity (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1998), 79–160.

was considered warmer than a woman’s, and corporeal cooling and drying, as we shall see in this study, had very physical consequences for one’s masculinity.

Perhaps more importantly, we need to understand that behind this narrative of the boy and his pedagogue-monk functions a very pervasive discourse about the control of fertility and reproduction. In the first instance, the narrative concerns a male child who receives tutelage from a male pedagogue-monk. Although there are cases of girls having pedagogues, 125 conventionally at least, a young boy was placed under the guidance of a pedagogue and a girl under the supervision of the nurse. 126 In fact,

Chrysostom’s two treatises on how to raise children, namely Adv. oppug. and Inan., both focus on how fathers ought to raise their sons. Adv. oppug. 3.12 therefore, basically, questions who is in control of the fertility and reproduction of the household.

The father would have the son marry, produce legitimate heirs as soon as possible, and then join the army or the civil service. This would ensure survival of the family name, the possible strengthening of socio-political family ties, and reflect honour back to the father. One of the greatest problems that monastic life posed to traditional classical masculinity is the negation of procreation (παιδοποιία), a point that Chrysostom makes very clear in his De virginitate.127 It therefore a struggle between the father and mother for the reproductive agency of the boy, and the mother’s victory is, essentially, a victory over reproductive rights. Furthermore, Chrysostom sketches the possibility of kyriarchal violence quite vividly. The plot “might stir up serious trouble for his mother, his pedagogue, and monks everywhere.”128

125 William V. Harris, Ancient Literacy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 239. 126 Henri I. Marrou, A History of Education in Antiquity, trans. George Lamb, Wisconsin Studies in Classics (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982), 267–68; Christian Laes, Children in the Roman Empire: Outsiders Within (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 113–22. 127 See Virg. 19.1.2–13 (SC 125.156–58). 128 Adv. oppug. 3.12 (PG 47.369.59–61): καὶ τῇ μητρὶ καὶ τῷ παιδαγωγῷ, καὶ τοῖς πανταχοῦ μοναχοῖς πόλεμον ἐγείρῃ χαλεπόν. Translation: Hunter, Two Treatises, 153. For Chrysostom’s views on domestic

Thus, a study on the formation of masculinity in the thought of Chrysostom must take account of the complex and polymorphous nature of manliness and virility in late antiquity. A moderate approach, with an emphasis on social embodiment, utilising concepts from a broad spectrum of theoretic approaches thus proves to be adequate to analyse masculinity and its numerous expressions and complex manifestations in

Chrysostom.

The Late Antique Transformation of Medical Knowledge: John Chrysostom as a

Medical Philosopher and Therapist of the Soul

Because of the focus on the social embodiment of masculinity in this study, I will rely heavily on the nature and dynamics of medicine and healthcare in late ancient society.

Much attention will be given to Chrysostom’s views on medicine, anatomy, the medical relationship between body and soul, and his version of a healthy regimen—these concepts, in fact, lie at the centre of Chrysostom’s understanding of the formation of masculinity. At the outset, then, it is necessary to elaborate on the nature of

Chrysostom’s role as a new type of medical philosopher common to late ancient society. This is important to do since Chrysostom also fashions his own masculinity when he assumes the role of a medical philosopher.

Chrysostom, of course, was not a “professional” physician, but he does exhibit in his works a rather advanced medical knowledge. Like many others, Chrysostom was eclectic in his medical knowledge—he did not follow one specific medical theorist or school but, as I will show in the course of this research, he combined various elements from different physicians and medical schools. Yet, above all else, Chrysostom was

violence, see Joy A. Schroeder, “John Chrysostom’s Critique of Spousal Violence,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 12.4 (2004): 413–42.

particularly shaped by Galen, and Chrysostom’s medical framework must be understood in the context of the transformation of medicine in late antiquity, one the one hand, and on the other, read within the persistence of Galenism and its rise to popularity in the late antique East.

With the welcome development of the New History of Medicine approach to medical historiography,129 scholars of antiquity, especially late antiquity, have begun to view the developments of medical philosophy in a new light. In older studies of medicine that covers the late antique period, there seems to be a general disappointment at the so-called lack of progress and tedious summarisation of medical encyclopaedists like Oribasius, the physician of the emperor Julian, as well as Aetius and Paul of

Aegina. In 1902, Iwan Bloch, in his contribution on Byzantine medicine in the

Handbuch der Geschichte der Medizin, described the medical developments of this period as being extremely slow, even static—the last hour of the medical night awaiting the fabulous dawn of later Byzantine and especially Arabic medicine.130

This view, however, has been refuted some time ago as medical historians began to examine the sources in a different way, and also, to start looking for clues of medical history in unlikely sources. The view now is that medicine underwent a transformation during the late antique period. This view of late ancient medicine, in turn, seems to be influenced by Peter Brown’s understanding of late antiquity not so much as period of decline, but rather one of transformation. Instead of viewing Christianity as the major

129 See especially the following edited volumes: Stefan N. Willich and Susanna Elm, eds., Medical Challenges for the New Millenium: An Interdisciplinary Task (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 2001); “Roman Pain and the Rise of Christianity,” in Quo Vadis Medical Healing: Past Concepts and New Approaches, ed. Susanna Elm and Stefan N. Willich, International Library of Ethics, Law, and the New Medicine 44 (Dordrecht: Springer, 2009), 41–54. 130 Iwan Bloch, “Byzantinische Medizin,” in Handbuch der Geschichte der Medizin, ed. Theodor Puschmann, Max Neuburger, and Julius Pagel, 3 vols. (Jena: G. Fischer, 1902), 492–588.

contributing factor to the decline of the Roman Empire, Brown postulated the notion that Christianity was simply the stage on which late antiquity staged its transformation.

The Christian transformation and adaptation of Roman medicine, however, is in itself rather complex. From what is possible to reconstruct, we see now that the late ancient world, especially the East, was profoundly influenced by Galenism in its medical thought. The medical encyclopaedist Oribasius’s Collectionum medicarum reliquiae is dominated by extracts from Galen. Galen was one of the first physician’s to be called iatrosophist, a medical philosopher.131 In his insightful history of Galenism,

Owsei Temkin notes that from the time of Oribasius, in the late fourth century, up the period of the Arab conquests, Galenism not only experienced a triumph, but was also developed into a more scholastic form.132 Furthermore, philosophy and medicine were integrated into the Christian syllabus of higher education in late antiquity.133 It was important to teach men of late antiquity some medical knowledge, since the paterfamilias often had to act as a lay physician in his household.134 If a doctor was visiting a town, he had to practice his art in close cooperation with the paterfamilias, especially when it involved the treatment of women or the examination of slaves.

Medicine and masculinity went hand-in-hand.

As both physician proper and iatrosophist, Galen had a lasting influence. Galenism was particularly popular among Christians of late antiquity and onwards. The Byzantine

131 Jane Stevenson, The “Laterculus Malalianus” and the School of Archbishop Theodore (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 48. 132 Owsei Temkin, Galenism: Rise and Decline of a Medical Philosophy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1973), 64. See also Temkin, “Byzantine Medicine: Tradition and Empiricism,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 16 (1962): 95–115. For the relationship between Galen and Christianity, see Richard Walzer, Galen on Jews and Christians (London: Oxford University Press, 1949); Dale B. Martin, Inventing Superstition: From the Hippocratics to the Christians (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 109–24. For the scholastic nature of Galenism in late antiquity, see Andrew T. Crislip, From Monastery to Hospital: Christian Monasticism and the Transformation of Health Care in Late Antiquity (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 101. 133 See Walzer, Galen on Jews and Christians, 1; Stevenson, Laterculus Malalianus, 48–49. 134 Crislip, From Monastery to Hospital, 43–45.

poet George of Pisidia referred to Galen as a second, but forgotten, Christ,135 while an iconic eighteenth-century mural in the Lavra trapeza of a monastery on Mount Athos includes Galen, among several other non-Christian thinkers like Aristotle and Socrates, in the tree of Jesse leading up to the virgin Mary and Christ.136 Some adoptionist

Christian groups almost considered Galen a church father.137

Galen’s medical body is predominantly a male body.138 Besides issues related directly to the female body, Chrysostom’s general understanding of anatomy (which is also very much focused on the male body) exhibits many of Galen’s views, as will be demonstrated in this study. Galen was, of course, not the only influence. When it came to the study of ancient gynaecology, for instance, which referred to the treatment of the female body generally, Soranus was probably more influential than Galen in the East.139

Oribasius includes Soranus’ description of the female genitalia in his collection.140

Soranus was also particularly popular among Christian authors due to his positive stance on virginity and its health benefits.141 In his laudation of virginity, Chrysostom repeats the Soranic view that the bodies of virgins are stronger and more beautiful than those of women who had children. 142 I have argued elsewhere that Chrysostom’s understanding of concepts like contraception and abortion are very similar to that of

Soranus.143 Chrysostom therefore uses Soranic medical knowledge within his ethical-

135 Vivian Nutton, “From Galen to Alexander: Aspects of Medicine and Medical Practice in Late Antiquity,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 38 (1984): 4. 136 Paul Huber, Athos: Leben, Glaube, Kunst (Zürich: Atlantis, 1982), plate 193. 137 See Walzer, Galen on Jews and Christians, 77; Temkin, “Byzantine Medicine,” 106. 138 Vivian Nutton, Ancient Medicine (London: Routledge, 2012), 235. 139 Owsei Temkin, trans., Soranus’ Gynecology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1956), xxiii–xlix; King, Hippocrates’ Woman, 231. 140 See Soranus, Gyn. 1.3.6–18 (Ilberg 4.6–12) in Oribasius, Coll. med. 24.31 (Raeder 6.2.1.41–46). 141 Gyn. 1.7.30–32 (Ilberg 4.20–22). 142 Subintr. 1.52–56 (Dumortier 47); Virg. 57.4.56–65 (SC 125.310–13). 143 De Wet, Preaching Bondage, 371.

theological framework to promote the monastic and virginal life. In this case, medical knowledge is used as a typical form of power-knowledge to show that prelapsarian monastic practices, practices that are inherently masculinising, are not only spiritually but also physically beneficial. Soranus’ dietary advice was also popular. The fifth- century physician Caelius Aurelianus translated Soranus’ De morbis acutis et chronicis, which contains a long section on diet and obesity.144 It will be shown in chapter 5 of this study that there is indeed overlap in the thought of Soranus, Caelius, and

Chrysostom regarding issues of diet, gluttony, and obesity—all aspects that are directly physically related to the fashioning of masculinity.

The medical encyclopedists of late antiquity therefore selected certain sections from earlier medical works, and omitted others. Oribasius also supplements Galen, for instance, with sections from the works of Rufus of Ephesus. For example, Oribasius’ notes on plague have a section from Rufus in which he actually refutes Galen.145 Rufus was very popular, and even wrote a self-help medicinal compendium for laypersons, a work now lost, probably directed to the paterfamilias of the household on how to treat basic health problems of those under his potestas.146 Another lost work of Rufus was written for potential buyers of slaves on how to examine chattels for physical defects.147

In both these lost works, we see how medicine and medical knowledge played a crucial part in masculine and kyriarchal structures of dominion. We have the same with Galen’s

144 See Israel E. Drabkin, trans., Caelius Aurelianus: On Acute Diseases and on Chronic Diseases (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1950). 145 Coll. Med. 44.14 (Raeder 3.131); see also Roberto de Lucia, “Doxographical Hints in Oribasius,” in Ancient Histories of Medicine: Essays in Medical Doxography and Historiography in Classical Antiquity, ed. Philip J. van der Eijk (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 486–87. 146 Nutton, Ancient Medicine, 7. 147 Much of Rufus’ thoughts on the examination of slave bodies is probably preserved in the eleventh- century Arabic treatise Risāla jāmi‘a li-funūn nāfi‘a fi shirā l-raqīq wa-taqlīb al-‘abīd (General Treatise on the Skills Useful for Purchasing and Examining Slaves), by Ibn Buṭlān; Simon Swain, Economy, Family, and Society from Rome to Islam: A Critical Edition, English Translation, and Study of Bryson’s Management of the Estate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 261. Chrysostom attests to the same practice of doctors examining slaves; Sacr. 4.2.17–20 (SC 272.240).

De methodo medendi ad Glauconem.148 Medicine was not as professionalised as it is in current Western biomedical contexts.

Moreover, because of the importance of domestic medical care, the writing of medical treatises by laypersons for a lay public was very popular in late antiquity.149 A good example of this is the late fourth-century court official and empiricist Marcellus of Bordeaux’s De medicamentis. 150 Marcellus, who is possibly mentioned by

Libanius,151 is an important figure in that although he was probably not strictly speaking a professional physician,152 he did practise as a medical writer and even treated some people for illnesses. He combines knowledge from the magical arts and from medicine, showing again that a distinction between what we term today as “rational” medicine and “superstitious” religious knowledge is an invalid and forced Western biomedical dichotomy. Marcellus’ example is important in that it shows how a non-physician, like

Chrysostom, could operate almost as a type of iatrosophist, perhaps not exactly like

Galen, but who could nevertheless mix religious beliefs with medical knowledge and apply it for the sake of masculine and kyriarchal power structures.

But how were Roman, and especially Galenic, medicine and medical knowledge transformed in late ancient Christianity? I would like to highlight two important events

148 See K11.1–146. 149 Susan P. Mattern, Galen and the Rhetoric of Healing (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 152. 150 See Marcelli de Medicamentis, ed. Maximilian Niedermann and Eduard Liechtenhan, Corpus Medicorum Latinorum 5 (Berlin: Academie-Verlag, 1968). 151 If it is Marcellus of Bordeaux that Libanius refers to (and he is called a doctor), he had a talent to cure headaches; see Ep. 64.1–2 in Scott Bradbury, ed., Selected Letters of Libanius from the Age of Constantius and Julian, Translated Texts for Historians 41 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2004), 98–99. 152 See Jerry Stannard, “Marcellus of Bordeaux and the Beginnings of the Medieval Materia Medica,” Pharmacy in History 15 (1973): 47–53; Carmélia Opsomer and Robert Halleux, “Marcellus ou le mythe empirique,” in Les écoles médicales à Rome, ed. Philippe Mundry and Jackie Pigeaud (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1991), 159–78. See also Plinio Prioreschi, A History of Medicine: Roman Medicine (New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 1998), 519–24.

in this regard. First, we have the development of the late antique hospital as an auxiliary to and a symptom of the monastery and monastic life. The works of Timothy Miller153 and Andrew Crislip154 are definitive of the important social and cultural changes that healthcare systems underwent in late antiquity. With the renunciation of all family ties, the household could no longer provide healthcare for ascetics. The infirmary of the monastery, a type of proto-hospital, became like a spiritual and surrogate family, a family that now fulfilled the therapeutic role of the household. This was a very important move in the medicalisation of Christian discourse and practice in late antiquity.

The second event I would like to stress is that of the Christian transformation of the Graeco-Roman medical treatise. Most important in this regard is the work of Wendy

Mayer, who focuses her investigation directly on the corpus of John Chrysostom, noting that the Christian homily in late antiquity, among its many other roles, also functioned as a medical treatise for the therapy of the soul.155 Medical theories like those of Galen and Soranus were also condensed into these homilies and so too transformed, and the homilies acted as a species of medical advice for the layperson, not unlike those lay treatises of Rufus and Marcellus—but with one important difference—here, the medical advice has been filtered through complex and meticulously constructed

153 Timothy S. Miller, The Birth of the Hospital in the Byzantine Empire, Supplement to the Bulletin of the History of Medicine 10 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). 154 See Crislip, From Monastery to Hospital; Thorns in the Flesh: Illness and Sanctity in Late Ancient Christianity, Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). 155 Mayer, “Medicine in Transition”; “The Persistence in Late Antiquity of Medico-Philosophical Psychic Therapy,” Journal of Late Antiquity 8.2 (2015): 337–51. See also Courtney Wilson Van Veller, “Paul’s Therapy of the Soul: A New Approach to John Chrysostom and Anti-Judaism” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Boston University, 2015) who views Chrysostom’s engagement with Paul, in the context of his anti-Judaistic rhetoric, from the perspective of the therapy of the soul. On the nature of psychic therapy more generally, see Christopher Gill, “Philosophical Therapy as Preventive Psychological Medicine,” in Mental Disorders in the Classical World, ed. William V. Harris, Columbia Studies in the Classical Tradition 38 (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 339–60, who speaks of “philosophical therapy”.

Christian theological and ethical frameworks.156 The most important act the modern reader needs to undertake is to divorce him- or herself from the Western biomedical dichotomy between rational, or natural, and supernatural healing and medicine, and the post-Enlightenment dichotomy between body and soul, and the view of the soul as immaterial. 157 Helen King has convincingly demonstrated that as early as the

Hippocratics, there was no supposed discord or even competition between doctors and

“folk healers” like, for instance, priests of Asclepius.158 Their relationship was much more harmonious than previously thought, and each of these, the doctors and priests, fulfilled a complementary role in the administration of ancient healthcare. Religion, magic, and medicine were comfortable bedfellows. It should not be surprising, then, to see John Chrysostom, a priest, and later a bishop, dispensing medical advice to his lay congregation during a church service.

As Mayer argues, we see in the late antique homily the rise of a very distinct type of psychic therapy, a medical treatment of the soul, so to speak.159 The people of the ancient Roman world believed that the soul was indeed material; it was only composed of a material that is thinner and lighter than that of the body. But the materiality and, essentially, the health of the soul had a direct effect on the body, and vice versa. Teresa Shaw, thus, rightly notes that one’s dietary regimen, exercise, and physical environment could directly influence the health of the soul.160 The therapy of the soul also implied correcting harmful emotions, especially emotions that were the

156 See also the very important work of Anne E. Merideth, “Illness and Healing in the Early Christian East” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Princeton University, 1999). 157 See especially Dale B. Martin, The Corinthian Body (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 3–37. 158 King, Hippocrates’ Woman, 99–113. 159 Mayer, “Psychic Therapy,” 337–40. 160 Shaw, Burden of the Flesh, 27–78.

result of incorrect and skewed belief systems. As Susanna Elm notes: “Thus, a philosopher’s principal work as physician of the soul was to use the therapeutic power of words to aid the logos, word or reason, in maintaining a harmonious balance of the soul.”161

It also means that the medical-metaphorical language Chrysostom utilises in his homilies had a direct physical impact on the psycho-somatic health of his hearers in mind. When Chrysostom calls heresy a mental illness, we need to understand that heresy, for Chrysostom, had a very real effect on the physical and mental wellbeing of an individual. Heresy made the body sick.162 With the transformation of the homily into a medical treatise, we also see the construction of a new corps of psycho-somatic

“physicians,” most notably for Chrysostom, in the person of the apostle Paul. 163

Chrysostom considers Paul a specialist physician of the soul, but that does not divorce

Pauline teachings from physical wellbeing.164 If we are to understand the homily as a medical treatise, it is then also important to understand preachers like Chrysostom as quasi-iatrosophists, medical philosophers. While the monastic protohospital cared mostly for coenobites and probably inhabitants of the small, poorer villages that so typically characterised late antique monastic landscape, the homily represented a packaged combination of Graeco-Roman, especially Galenic, medical advice and monastic psycho-somatic healthcare.

161 Susanna Elm, Sons of Hellenism, Fathers of the Church: Emperor Julian, Gregory of Nazianzus, and the Vision of Rome (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 174. 162 See Chris L. de Wet, “Paul and Christian Identity-Formation in John Chrysostom’s Homilies De laudibus sancti Pauli apostoli,” Journal of Early Christian History 3.2 (2013): 43; Wendy Mayer, “Madness in the Works of John Chrysostom: A Snapshot from Late Antiquity,” in The Concept of Madness from Homer to Byzantium: History and Aspects, ed. Hélène Perdicoyianni-Paleologou (Amsterdam: A.M. Hakkert, 2016), 349–79. See also Claire E. Salem, “Sanity, Insanity, and Man’s Being as Understood by St. John Chrysostom” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Durham University, 2010). 163 See esp. Wilson Van Veller, “Paul’s Therapy of the Soul,” 64–93. 164 Margaret M. Mitchell, The Heavenly Trumpet: John Chrysostom and the Art of Pauline Interpretation (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2002), 269.

While authors like Crislip and Mayer adequately emphasize the physical nature of late ancient Christian healthcare frameworks, we also need to ask what the political motive might have been for the usurpation of Graeco-Roman medical knowledge by

Christian homilists. In this case, we must turn to the work of Foucault, who has written histories of the prison, 165 asylum, 166 and the clinic 167 in such a way that it has permanently altered our understanding of these institutions of discipline. Foucault’s

Madness and Civilization,168 but especially relevant for this discussion, his Birth of the

Clinic,169 have illustrated that any development or transformation of a given healthcare system always had power implications for society. The rise of both the late antique proto-hospital and the psycho-therapeutic homily represents a colonisation, a reappropriation, of various languages, practices, and spaces of normalisation, pathologisation, and even teratogenisation (that is, making someone or something a monster).170

By transforming Graeco-Roman medical knowledge, the early Christian monks and homilists also gained the privileges wrought by utilising the languages and practices of pathology, nosography, and even something as significant as medical prognosis, and early forms of the medical examination (that is, the medically corrective gaze). All of these facets of medical knowledge and discourse have some bearing on

165 Foucault, Discipline & Punish. 166 Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Vintage, 1988). See also Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974–1975, ed. Valerio Marchetti and Antonella Salomoni, trans. Graham Burchell (London: Verso, 2003). 167 Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic (London: Routledge, 1989). 168 Foucault, Madness and Civilization, 189–209. 169 Foucault, Birth of the Clinic, 24–43. 170 Foucault has masterfully demonstrated this in his Abnormal, 55–200. See also Michel Foucault, Psychiatric Power: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1973–1974, ed. Jacques Lagrange and Arnold I. Davidson, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2008), 39–92.

the formation of masculinity. These new Christian “psychic therapists” did differ somewhat from regular physicians, as Chrysostom makes clear. Their authoritative medical apparatus, according to Chrysostom, was the λόγος, the word of scripture.171

This medical-philosophical framework provided these Christian medical philosophers with technologies for social control and identity formation, and gave them very powerful and effective weapons to label their opponents as psycho-somatically ill

(pathologisation) and even turning them into mad monsters (teratogenisation).172 For instance, heresy and Jewishness, in Chrysostom becomes an entire nosological field.

Heresy is often described as a type of phrenitis, a psychic fever.173 Aside from salvific concerns, being a heretic was unhealthy and physically dangerous.174 It also means that homilists like Chrysostom could utilise medical philosophy in their understanding of gender to construct their new vision for Christian masculinity.175

Medical discourse was a masculinising discourse—as Helen King rightly notes:

“the sick role is feminized, while the doctor embodies what are considered to be the masculine virtues.”176 Thus, when Chrysostom refers to God, Paul, or himself as a physician of the soul, he is shaping the masculinity of that particular referent. The socio- political implications of Christian psycho-somatic medical frameworks were far-

171 See esp. Scand. prologue–1.6 (SC 79:52–59); Mayer, “Psychic Therapy,” 339–45. 172 De Wet, “Paul and Christian Identity-Formation,” 42–43; “Problem of Alterity,” 22–31. 173 Augustine often made the link between phrenitis and heretic madness, or as Jean-Paul Rassinier calls it, déraison; see Jean-Paul Rassinier, “L’hérésie comme maladie dans l’oeuvre de Saint Augustin,” Mots: Médecine santé et politique 26.1 (1991): 65–83; Jessica Wright, “Brain and Soul in Late Antiquity” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Princeton University, 2016) esp. chapters 3 and 4. 174 For a detailed exposition on how Chrysostom pathologises heresies like Marcionism, Arianism, and Manichaeism, as well as Jews, see De Wet, “Problem of Alterity,” 22–36. 175 This is a point I have argued previously elsewhere; De Wet, “Paul and Christian Identity-Formation,” 42–44. 176 King, Hippocrates’ Woman, 1.

reaching. In their analyses of Chrysostom’s homilies, both Merideth177 and Mayer,178 for instance, conclude that medico-philosophical preaching had very real consequences for the care of the poor. Chrysostom for instance considered avarice a threat to one’s health and an illness of the soul.179

John Chrysostom’s Medical Framework

Having positioned Chrysostom’s medical framework and his status as a new type of medical philosopher or “physician of the soul” within the transformation of medicine and medical knowledge in late antiquity, we can now ask more pertinent and focused questions about his medical presuppositions as they relate to his conceptualisation of masculinity. These presuppositions are important for several chapters in this study, notably those concerning birth and reproduction (chapter 4), regimen (chapter 5), and aging and corporeal mortification (chapter 6). Chrysostom’s medical, ethical, and theological frameworks are inseparable, and totally reliant on each other—one cannot understand Chrysostom’s views on gender and masculinity without a knowledge of these frameworks individually as well as their interrelational dynamics. Masculinity manifests itself corporeally. It fixes itself within the body and permeates its psychic and physiological dimensions. Only after this corporeal colonisation does masculinity position itself outwardly in culture, society, and politics. Thus, the physicality of masculinity, its embodiment, calls for a thorough analysis of Chrysostom’s understanding of the body in the medical or anatomical sense. But an important caveat should be noted here, eloquently formulated by King:

177 Merideth, “Illness and Healing,” 111–51. 178 Mayer, “Medicine in Transition,” 15–17, 24–25. 179 Hom. Matt. 74. (PG 58.684.29–47).

The body is where we meet the problems of history most acutely; doing the

history of medicine involves walking a tightrope between recognition and

over-familiarity, between knowing “the same” and failing to understand

“the other”. Either we make the past in our own image, or we are struck

dumb by its difference, unable to say anything about it whatsoever.180

One must account for the “strangeness” of ancient medical discourse, which often tends to incorporate words, concepts, objects, and processes that appear familiar to us, but that operate in very different ways. Chrysostom’s medical discourse is no exception to this caveat. Concepts like soul, bodily fluids, brain, breath, and the like require thorough discussion before venturing into how masculinity is physically manifest in Chrysostom’s thought.

To start, it is quite important to note that Chrysostom believed in the materiality of the soul,181 and thought that the psychic mastery of the soul directly impacted one’s physical state due to the interrelatedness of the bodily humours and temperaments. In order to comprehend Chrysostom’s understanding of psychic control over the corporeal, and the psycho-somatic health of an individual, we need to investigate his views on the structure and function of and relationship between the body and the soul.

Chrysostom assumed a Platonic division of the soul, as found in the Timaeus,182 and especially emphasised the role of the rational element of the soul when it came to

180 Helen King, The One-Sex Body on Trial: The Classical and Early Modern Evidence, The History of Medicine in Context (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 88. 181 Shaw, Burden of the Flesh, 129–60; Mayer, “Medicine in Transition,” 14. 182 See LCL 234.

self-control and moderation.183 Galen, from his experiments on dissection noted in his treatise De usu partium, also accepted this Platonic division of the soul, and directly rejected Aristotelian and Stoic formulations of soul. The soul is therefore divided into three parts, namely the rational, appetitive, and irascible—each of these divisions of the soul also had its physical counterpart, respectively, in the brain, heart, and liver.184 The function of organs like the stomach, spleen, lungs, gall bladder, and so on, all had some relation with these three main organs.

Galen, like Plato, gave much primacy to the liver as the origin of the arteries, and believed that the liver was first formed in the foetal stages. In Galenic thought, it was the liver that received digested (that is, cooked or concocted) food from the stomach, and turned it into blood, thus vitalising the body. The spleen and gall bladder were the liver’s supportive organs. Blood from the liver passed through the heart, from right to left, where it joined with refined air, that is, vital life essence or vital spirit185

(πνεῦμα ζωτικόν, which was somewhat different from the psychic spirit, or πνεῦμα

ψυχικόν, of the brain, and the more ambiguous natural spirit, or πνεῦμα φυσικόν, which will be discussed later in the study),186 that came from the lungs and skin.187 In males, this refined blood was “cooked” by the heat of the body, and became semen. Some

183 Phillip De Lacy, “Galen’s Platonism,” American Journal of Philology 93.1 (1972): 27–39; Mayer, “Medicine in Transition,” 14–15. 184 Mayer, “Medicine in Transition,” 15. 185 The term πνεῦμα is most common translated as “spirit” or “air”—in order to retain some of the original nuances and complexities of the term, I will leave it untranslated for the most part in this study. 186 In Graeco-Roman thought, πνεῦμα remained something mysterious and even mystical. For more on Galen’s distinction between these types of πνεῦμα, see his An arter. sang. 4 (K4.733–34); Anat. admin. 7.16 (K2.646–49 [see Ivan Garofalo, Galenus: Anatomicarum Administrationum libri qui supersunt novem, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1986)]); Meth. med. (K10.839–40); see also Susan P. Mattern, The Prince of Medicine: Galen in the Roman Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 156–57. For the later development of Galen’s notion of πνεῦμα, see C. E. Quin, “The Soul and the Pneuma in the Function of the Nervous System after Galen,” Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 87.7 (1994): 393–95. 187 Mattern, Prince of Medicine, 156–57. For an excellent analysis of Galen’s view of the soul and brain, as compared to Stoic views, see Christopher Gill, Naturalistic Psychology in Galen and Stoicism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 85–167.

believed that women, who lacked the higher male temperature, were unable to concoct semen. Galen and Chrysostom, as will be shown in chapter 3, firmly believed that women also concocted semen. Galen said that all excess semen must be expelled in both men and women for the sake of their wellbeing.188

Although Chrysostom is more Soranic than Galenic in his thoughts on the effects of sexual intercourse and childbirth—that sexual intercourse and childbirth were not essential to health—the notion that food consumption affected the libido is well attested in Chrysostom, as I will illustrate in chapter 5. It will also be demonstrated that

Chrysostom believed that sexual intercourse will reduce lust, since marriage is given to control passion, but this does not mean that it is ideally healthful. For Chrysostom, sex is a necessary evil for those who are weak with little self-control. Desire, as Foucault notes, was a danger that, Chrysostom felt, constantly lurked inside all human flesh:

Il s’agit d’une force qui, dans la nature, est plus forte que toutes les autres

forces : plus impérieuse, plus tyrannique que celles qui peuvent nous lier

aux autres hommes ou nous faire désirer les choses ; epithumia qui

paradoxalement joint deux qualités d’ordinaire incompatibles : durée et

vivacité [with reference to Chrysostom’s Hom. Eph. 20.1]. Et d’autre part,

il s’agit d’une force qui, si elle apparaît soudain, était cachée au fond de

nous-mêmes ; elle est « tapie dans notre nature », et nous n’en avons pas

conscience.189

188 Shaw, Burden of the Flesh, 70. 189 Foucault, Les aveux de la chair, 256–57.

Yet the problem of desire does not have to be managed by means of marriage and intercourse—simply controlling one’s diet will also do the trick. As Aline Rousselle has shown, one’s diet determines one’s sexual drive, and gluttony often results in excessive sexual desire; this was a major problem for early Christian monks.190 Galen basic theory that one’s regimen can determine one’s sexual drive was key in

Chrysostom’s medical framework. Vivian Nutton summarizes this Galenic vitalism thus:

Each part of the body had thus the potentiality, as a result of its elemental

organisation, to feed on this nutritious blood, to assimilate whatever it

needed to grow and to function, and to excrete potentially harmful residues

that it no longer needed. The body was a living universe, responding to

changes and actively seeking whatever it needed in order to exist and to

function.191

In this sense, and in accordance with Platonic theory, health became a matter balance and proportion (μέτρια and συμμετρία) and illness was imbalance (ἀμετρία) of the bodily composition (κρᾶσις).192 The balance of the body, to Galen, became manifest in the four humours, namely blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. Each of the humours corresponded to an element of the body. Blood corresponded to heat, black bile to coldness, yellow bile to dryness, and phlegm to moisture. The mixtures of

190 Aline Rousselle, Porneia: On Desire and the Body in Antiquity, trans. Felicia Pheasant (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1996), 160–78. 191 Nutton, Ancient Medicine, 233. 192 Shaw, Burden of the Flesh, 53–68; Mayer, “Medicine in Transition,” 14–15.

various humours affected the soul, hence the notion of temperaments. 193 Most important for this analysis, Galen related the properties of various foods to the humours.194 Galen literally believed that you are what you eat. People who ate the meat of lions or donkeys became as such, while he linked the apparent hard skin of Egyptians to their diet of salty fish, lentils, vipers, and so on.195 Eating the correct foods in the correct quantities and at the right time resulted in health, and the opposite, illness.

Because of this link between dieting and the humours, dieting also implied living in the right geographical environment and climate, getting enough sleep, having the right amount of sex, and exercising enough. Thus, Galen understood that some foods had heating, cooling, moistening, or drying properties, and they must be taken as the health of the particular patient requires. Heating and moistening foods and drinks, like meat and wine, or even excessive bathing (which moistened the body), can cause a build-up of blood and hence semen, leading to an excess of sexual desire. People with an overactive libido were advised to consume cooling and drying foods.196

Chrysostom fully agreed with Galen’s theory of the humours: “This body of ours, so short-lived, and small, consists of four elements [στοιχείων]: namely that which is warm, that is, of blood; of what is dry, that is, of yellow bile; of what is moist, that is, of phlegm; of what is cold, that is, of black bile. And someone must not think that this topic is foreign to the spiritual principles we are discussing.”197 Chrysostom uses the ideal of humoural balance as the foundation for his teaching about the dangers of

193 Mattern, Prince of Medicine, 53–54,111–12, 233–34. 194 See especially Aliment. fac. (K6.453–748); Owen Powell, trans., Galen: On the Properties of Foodstuffs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 195 Nutton, Ancient Medicine, 240. 196 See Rousselle, Porneia, 160–78; Shaw, Burden of the Flesh, 79–128. 197 Stat. 10.4 (PG 49.113.7–12): Καὶ γὰρ τὸ σῶμα τὸ ἡμέτερον τὸ βραχὺ τοῦτο καὶ μικρὸν ἐκ τεττάρων συνέστηκε στοιχείων, θερμοῦ μὲν τοῦ αἵματος, ξηροῦ δὲ τῆς χολῆς τῆς ξανθῆς· καὶ ὑγροῦ μὲν τοῦ φλέγματος, ψυχροῦ δὲ τῆς μελαίνης χολῆς. Καὶ μή τις ἀλλότριον ἡμῶν εἶναι νομιζέτω τοῦτον τὸν λόγον·

excess and luxury, as well as the good order of things established by God. In his first sermon In Genesim, Chrysostom muses: “We eat bread every day; so how, tell me, is the very nature of bread transformed into blood, phlegm, choler, and the other humours in us?”198

If we turn to Chrysostom’s views on the relationship between physical health and the health of the soul, we see remarkable similarities to the views of Plato and

Galen. With regards to the relationship between somatic and psychic health,

Chrysostom states: “What would be more foolish than a soul, if from the start it had the senses deadened? If the deadening of a single member, I mean the brain, injures the entire soul, if all the rest should be deadened, for what would it be useful?” In this discussion of the consequences of brain damage, Chrysostom highlights the importance of the brain as the rational faculty of the soul from which the senses derive. Chrysostom continues: “Show me a soul without a body. Do you not hear doctors saying that the presence of disease unfortunately debilitates the soul?”199 Disease affects the soul, and the soul is nothing without the body.

In another homily, while musing on the mysterious glory of human creation,

Chrysostom describes the brain with great detail, including the brain as the “fountain of the senses” (ταῖς αἰσθήσεσιν ἁπάσαις… τὰς πηγάς), 200 without neglecting the protective function of the cranial cap and the two membranes (μῆνιγγες) of the brain.

198 Serm. Gen. 1.3.184–86 (SC 433.160–61): Πῶς οὖν, εἰπέ μοι, ἡ τοῦ ἄρτου φύσις αὕτη εἰς αἷμα μεθίσταται καὶ φλέγμα, καὶ χολὴν, καὶ τοὺς λοιποὺς ἐν ἡμῖν χυμούς; translation: Robert C. Hill, trans., St. John Chrysostom: Eight Sermons on the Book of Genesis (Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2004), 31. 199 Hom. Act. 2.3 (PG 60.32.34–40): Τί δὲ μωρότερον ψυχῆς γένοιτ' ἂν, εἰ ἐξ ἀρχῆς τὰς αἰσθήσεις εἴη πεπηρωμένη; Εἰ γὰρ ἑνὸς μέρους μόνον πήρωσις, τοῦ ἐγκεφάλου λέγω, τὸ πᾶν αὐτῆς βλάβη γίνεται· εἰ μέλλοι καὶ τὰ ἄλλα πεπηρῶσθαι, ποῦ χρήσιμος ἔσται; ρῶσθαι, ποῦ χρήσιμος ἔσται; Δεῖξόν μοι χωρὶς σώματος ψυχήν. ῍Η οὐκ ἀκούεις ἰατρῶν λεγόντων· Νόσος γὰρ παροῦσα δεινῶς ψυχὴν ἀμαυροῖ; 200 Stat. 11.3 (PG 49.123.37–38).

Chrysostom understands the brain to be the source of psychic πνεῦμα, which animates the entire body:

In the same way as the πνεῦμα, which descends from the brain through the

nerves, gives sensory perception [αἰσθητικόν] not in a simple manner to all

the members, but according to the proportion required by each member—

to that member which can receive more, it gives more, to that which can

receive less, less, for the πνεῦμα is the source [of sensory perception]—so

too is Christ.201

Chrysostom’s views here are consonant, again, with Galen—the brain encapsulates the rational soul from which consciousness emanates. The brain received its own store of

πνεῦμα from the nose and mouth and stores it in the cerebrospinal fluid (hence

Chrysostom’s view that the brain is a fountain distributing psychic πνεῦμα), which then animates the body. Finally, cerebral politics become an isomorphism for the Christic body politic. Chrysostom thus sees the verse in Ephesians 6:17 about the helmet of salvation as referring to the salvation of the rational part on the soul that lies in the brain. 202 We have here already what we may call the Christian colonisation and politicisation of the brain and all its faculties.

Most importantly, Chrysostom considers the ordo corporis, the bodily order or

κρᾶσις, as a microcosm for the workings of God. God’s Head and Spirit are analogous to the physical head and spirit, that is, πνεῦμα. We thus also see how Chrysostom’s

201 Hom. Eph. 11.3 (F4.220): καθάπερ τὸ πνεῦμα τὸ ἀπὸ τοῦ ἐγκεφάλου καταβαῖνον, τὸ διὰ τῶν νεύρων, τὸ αἰσθητικὸν οὐχ ἁπλῶς δίδωσι πᾶσιν, ἀλλὰ κατὰ ἀναλογίαν ἑκάστου μέλους, τῷ μὲν δυναμένῳ πλέον δέξασθαι, πλέον, τῷ δὲ ἐλάττω, ἔλαττον τοῦτο γάρ ἐστιν ἡ ῥίζα, τὸ πνεῦμα· οὕτω καὶ ὁ Χριστός. 202 Hom. Heb. 5.5 (F7.75).

medical framework is informed by his political theology. In his commentary on

Ephesians 4:15–16, in Homilia in epistulam ad Ephesios 11.4, he provides a clear ecclesiastic politic of iatrosophy: “For excess is an evil everywhere. Also with the bodily elements [τῶν στοιχείων], when they lose their proper proportion and goes into excess, they maim the whole body. This is what being ‘fitly framed and knit together’

[Eph. 4:16] means.” According to Chrysostom, God created the body to be in balance— the notion of μέτρια and συμμετρία. Excess is illness, and also effeminate. “Consider then of what great importance it is, that each element should remain in its own proper place, and not impinge on another which is not related to it,” Chrysostom expiates,

“[f]or as there are in the body such receptive organs, as we have seen, so is it also with the πνεῦμα, its entire origin being from above.” The body is used as a model for the heavenly politeia. Chrysostom continues: “For example, the heart is the recipient of the

πνεῦμα, the liver of the blood, the spleen of the bile, and the other organs, some of one thing, others of another, but all these have their source from the brain.”203 We see here how Chrysostom appropriated his medical knowledge, on a very high level of abstraction, to the service of his theology and ethics. His views on medicine were strategically interlaced with his theology.

By using the body as a conceptual system, he combines his theological protology and anthropogony with very clear Galenic medical philosophy. The politics of medical philosophy become clear—the body becomes structured and is thereby

203 Hom. Eph. 11.4 (F4.221): Πανταχοῦ γὰρ ἡ πλεονεξία κακόν. Καὶ ἐπὶ τῶν στοιχείων, ὅταν τὴν οἰκείαν ἀφέντα συμμετρίαν πλεονάσῃ, τὸ πᾶν λυμαίνεται. Τουτέστι, “συναρμολογούμενον, καὶ συμβιβαζόμενον.” ῞Ωστε ἕκαστον ἐπὶ τῆς οἰκείας μένειν χώρας, καὶ μὴ τῆς ἑτέρας καὶ μηδὲν αὐτῷ προσηκούσης ἐπιβαίνειν, ἐννόησον ὅσον ἐστί. Σὺ τὰ μέλη συντιθεῖς, ἐκεῖνος ἄνωθεν ἐπιχορηγεῖ. Καθάπερ γὰρ ἐπὶ τοῦ σώματός ἐστιν ὄργανα τοιαῦτα δεκτικὰ, οὕτως ἐστὶ καὶ ἐπὶ τοῦ πνεύματος, τῆς ῥίζης ἄνωθεν οὔσης πάσης· οἷον ἡ καρδία, τοῦ πνεύματος· τὸ ἧπαρ, τοῦ αἵματος· ὁ σπλὴν, τῆς χολῆς καὶ ἄλλα ἄλλου· πάντα δὲ ταῦτα ἀπὸ τοῦ ἐγκεφάλου τὴν αἰτίαν ἔχει. Galen makes a very similar point regarding the συμμετρία of the humours; see Hum. (K19.491); Mark Grant, trans., Dieting for an Emperor: A Translation of Books 1 and 4 of Oribasius’ Medical Compilations with an Introduction and Commentary (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 6.

governed, orderly, in proportion, and masculine. This also becomes Chrysostom’s theologico-political ideal, a means of instilling technologies of control into society. As there is bodily κρᾶσις, so too must there be ecclesiastical κρᾶσις. But this κρᾶσις, both corporeal and ecclesiastical, entails the proper order of members, and thus, the correct distribution of rule and domination over both the physical and social body. Anatomical order must mirror social and political order. Medicine informed the discourse of what is natural, good, and orderly—anything outside of these boundaries is pathologised and labelled dangerous. Thus, Chrysostom uses the image of Plato’s charioteer:

Thus, as I said, sin which from its inception has no one to hinder its further

progress, becomes violent and uncontrollable, analogously to rabid horses,

which, casting the bit from their mouth and throwing the rider off their back

head over heels, are ungovernable by those they encounter, and if no one

stops them, frantically throw themselves down a precipice. Accordingly,

the enemy of our salvation drives such persons mad in order to afflict them

with myriad evils by isolating them from those who could heal them.204

Jessica Wright makes an important point in this regard: “Sickness of the soul,

Chrysostom insists, is not the loss of psycho-somatic control, but rather it is the failure to exert it. Spiritual health, similarly, does not necessarily manifest as freedom from bodily disorders—even those which touch upon the soul—but rather in faith in God and

204 Bab. Jul. gent. 55.1–10 (SC 362.162–63): Οὕτως ὅπερ ἔφην ἀρχὴν ἁμαρτία λαβοῦσα καὶ μηδένα εἰς τὸ πρόσω προβῆναι κωλύοντα ἔχουσα δυσανάσχετος καὶ ἀκάθεκτος γίνεται κατὰ τοὺς μεμηνότας τῶν ἵππων οἵ, ἐπειδὰν τὸν χαλινὸν ἀπὸ τοῦ στόματος ἐκβαλόντες καὶ τὸν ἐπιβάτην ῥίζοντες ἀπὸ τῶν νώτων ὕπτιον τοῖς ἀπαντῶσιν ἀφόρητοι γένωνται, μηδενὸς αὐτοὺς κωλύοντος ὑπὸ τῆς ἀτάκτου ῥύμης φέροντες ἑαυτοὺς κατεκρήμνισαν. Διά τοι τοῦτο εἰς μανίαν τὰς τοιαύτας ἐκφέρει ψυχὰς ὁ τῆς σωτηρίας ἡμῶν ἐχθρὸς ἵνα αὐτὰς ἐν ἐρημίᾳ τῶν θεραπευσόντων ἀπολαβὼν κατακόψῃ καὶ μυρίοις περιβάλῃ κακοῖς. Translation: Margaret A. Schatkin, trans., Saint John Chrysostom: Apologist, The Fathers of the Church 73 (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2001), 106–7.

freedom from sin.”205 The masculine politics of psychic control operates within a view of the body as an interconnected system of humours and temperaments. These are the major medical foundations of Chrysostom’s medical-theological discourse. More on the practical implementation and implications of the medical frameworks in the formation of masculinity discussed above will especially be highlighted and applied in chapters 4–6 of the present study.

In conclusion, without a clear understanding of how medical discourse intersects with Chrysostom’s theological discourse, we will never be able to fully comprehend the social embodiment and formation of masculinity in Chrysostom’s thought.

Conclusion

Having laid a critical-theoretical framework and methodology for the study of masculinity in Chrysostom, with specific attention to medical-theological discourse, the purpose of this final part in my introduction is also to provide the reader with an overture of what will follow in the broader study.

Chapter two starts with some of the basics of Chrysostom’s theology and especially his view of who and what God is, or his Gottesbild. It is therefore crucial to examine how Chrysostom conceptualizes masculinity in his commentary on Genesis

1–3, a section of scripture that will constantly surface throughout this study.

Chrysostom’s conceptualisation of God is by no means innocent. He constructs God as the ultimate but unattainable Masculine by highlighting God’s incorporeality and autonomy.

205 Jessica Wright, “Between Despondency and the Demon: Diagnosing and Treating Spiritual Disorders in John Chrysostom’s Letter to Stageirios,” Journal of Late Antiquity 8.2 (2015): 366.

While God will represent an ideal form of masculinity to Chrysostom, the creation of humanity, specifically the Adam and Eve narrative, introduces the great crisis of masculinity—the topic of the third chapter of this study. Humanity finds itself in a struggle between its divine and psychic ruling principle and its unpredictable corporeal animality. Recovering from the lapse in masculinity that Adam and Eve experienced is what the majority of the rest of the dissertation will investigate.

In chapter 4, I will attempt to account for the discursive shift in reproductive modes we find in Chrysostom’s reading of Genesis 1–3. This shift will be characterised as one from androgenerativity (human reproduction springing forth from the masculine body), to sexual reproduction, and back to androgenerativity. It starts with the formation of the first man, Adam, and the creation of Eve out of Adam. Then I will investigate the impregnation of Sarah, Mary, and the eventual spiritual rebirth of all Christians.

Androgenerativity therefore unfolds with Christian salvation history, and it will be shown that the human subject’s first earthly natality will be replaced by a new spiritual and highly masculine natality.

Chapter 5 aims to delineate the masculine dynamics of psychic control of the body. This chapter will highlight the practical and physical implications of the theological formulations set out in chapters two, three, and four. Because of the crisis of masculinity experienced by human beings, and the subsequent call to strive for a new spiritual natality, what disciplines should a man embody in order to become masculine?

This chapter will ask how Chrysostom envisions the formation of masculinity through aspects of regimen, namely diet, exercise, sleep, and bathing.

Finally, chapter 6 investigates the end product of the masculinising regimen examined in chapter 5. Since the dynamics of psychic control were to cool and dry the body, as will be shown in chapter 5, the aim of psychic control was the aging and

mortification of the body. This final chapter will demonstrate how the discourses of gerontology and corporeal mortification represent the zenith of masculinisation.

Imbued with a divine transcendence, the aged and mortified body will become symbol of a return to the ideal Masculine as elaborated in the first chapter of this study.

CHAPTER 2

A Virile Theology: Chrysostom’s Gottesbild and the Masculinisation of God

Introduction

Chrysostom’s reading of Genesis 1–3 provides us with a logical starting point for understanding his views on sexual difference and the fashioning of masculinity—in fact, Chrysostom’s sermons and homilies on Genesis1 serve as an excellent window into

Chrysostom’s overall social thought. 2 It therefore comes as no surprise that

Chrysostom’s interpretation of the creation narrative has been an object of investigation

1 There are two extant collections of Chrysostomic works on Genesis: there is an early collection of eight “sermons,” and then a later series of 67 “homilies.” These were preached during the feast of Lent while Chrysostom was ministering in Antioch. For matters of provenance and dating, see especially the introductory material in Robert C. Hill, trans., St. John Chrysostom: Homilies on Genesis 1–17, The Fathers of the Church 74 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1999), 2–19; St. John Chrysostom: Eight Sermons on the Book of Genesis (Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2004), 1–20; Laurence Brottier, Jean Chrysostome: Sermons sur la Genèse, Sources chrétiennes 433 (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 1998), 11–134; see also Alessia A. Aletta, “Un codice poco noto in minuscola libraria antica: il Morgan 655,” Bolletino della Badia Greca di Grottaferreta 55 (2001): 43–62; Walter A. Markowicz, “The Text Tradition of St. John Chrysostom’s Homilies on Genesis and Mss. Michiganenses 139,78 and Holkhamicus 61” (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Michigan, 1953); “Chrysostom’s Sermons on Genesis: A Problem,” Theological Studies 24 (1963): 652–64. When referring to the homilies on Genesis, I will use the numbering in the translations of Hill for readers who may wish to follow in the translation rather than the Greek text. However, references to PG or SC are given in all instances. For the sermons on Genesis I use the numbering given in the SC. 2 For some general studies on the early Christian reading of the creation narrative, see Yves M. -J. Congar, “Le thème de Dieu-créateur et les explications de l’Hexaméron dans la tradition chrétienne,” in L’homme devant Dieu: mélanges offerts au Père Henri de Lubac, vol. 1 of Théologie Series 56–58 (Paris: Aubier, 1963), 189–222; Johannes Zahlten, Creatio mundi: Darstellungen des sechs Schöpfungstage und naturwissenschaftliches Welt im Mittelalter, Stuttgarter Beiträge zur Geschichte und Politik 13 (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1979); Gillian Clark, “The Old Adam: The Fathers and the Unmaking of Masculinity,” in Thinking Men: Masculinity and Its Self-Representation in the Classical Tradition, ed. Lin Foxhall and John Salmon, Leicester-Nottingham Studies in Ancient Society 7 (London: Routledge, 1998), 170–82; Peter C. Bouteneff, Beginnings: Ancient Christian Readings of the Biblical Creation Narratives (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2008), 121–83; Paul M. Blowers, Drama of the Divine Economy: Creator and Creation in Early Christian Theology and Piety, Oxford Early Christian Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Andrew Louth, “The Fathers on Genesis,” in The Book of Genesis: Composition, Reception, and Interpretation, ed. Craig A. Evans, Joel N. Lohr, and David L. Petersen, Supplements to Vetus Testamentum 152 (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 561–78; Wynand de Beer, “The Patristic Understanding of the Six Days (Hexaemeron),” Journal of Early Christian History 5.2 (2015): 3–23; Anna Marmodoro, “Gregory of Nyssa on the Creation of the World,” in Causation and Creation in Late Antiquity, ed. Anna Marmodoro and Brian D. Prince (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 94–110.

for several decades.3 With some exceptions, most of these studies particularly focused on Chrysostom’s “sexism” or “sexual politics,” addressing primarily the issue of gender relations between men and women, especially his understanding of the status of and relationship between Adam and Eve—we are fortunate to have many of these studies, which have laid a major foundation for understanding gender relations in Chrysostom’s thought. The study of masculinity in Chrysostom, however, presses us to examine a much broader and pervasive power scheme that permeates the sources, to show connections beyond male and female, Adam and Eve, which nevertheless underpin the very basis of sexual difference and similarity. I therefore aim to locate Chrysostom’s elaborations on the formation of masculinity, sexual difference, and gender relations within a much broader protological and hierarchical framework, namely how

Chrysostom views God and divine dynamics. To Chrysostom, hierarchy and order

3 See, for instance, Elizabeth A. Clark, “Sexual Politics in the Writings of John Chrysostom,” Anglican Theological Review 59.1 (1977): 3–20; “Genesis 1–3 and Gender Dilemmas: The Case of John Chrysostom,” in Körper und Seele: Aspekte spätantiker Anthropologie, ed. Barbara Feichtinger, Stephen Lake, and Helmut Seng, Beiträge zur Altertumskunde 215 (München: K. G. Saur, 2006), 159–80; Benjamin H. Dunning, “Chrysostom’s Serpent: Animality and Gender in the Homilies on Genesis,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 23.1 (2015): 71–95; David Ford, Women and Men in the Early Church: The Full Views of St. John Chrysostom (South Canaan, PA: St. Tikhon’s Seminary Press, 1996); Sebastian Haidacher, “Zur 18. Genesis-Homilie des hl. Chrysostomus,” Zeitschrift für katholische Theologie 18 (1894): 762–64; N. Verna Harrison, “Women and the Image of God According to St. John Chrysostom,” in In Dominico Eloquio—In Lordly Eloquence: Essays on Patristic Exegesis in Honor of Robert Louis Wilken, ed. Paul M. Blowers et al. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002), 259–79; Aideen M. Hartney, John Chrysostom and the Transformation of the City (London: Duckworth, 2004), 85–132; Jo Ann C. Heaney-Hunter, “The Links between Sexuality and Original Sin in the Writings of John Chrysostom and Augustine” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Fordham University, 1988); Rosa Hunt, “Reading Genesis with the Church Fathers: Metaphors of Creation in John Chrysostom’s Homilies on Genesis,” European Journal of Baptist Studies 12.2 (2012): 21–33; Isabella Sandwell, “How to Teach Genesis 1.1– 19: John Chrysostom and Basil of Caesarea on the Creation of the World,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 19 (2011): 539–64; “A Milky Text Suitable for Children: The Significance of John Chrysostom’s Preaching on Genesis 1:1 for Fourth-Century Audiences,” in Delivering the Word: Preaching and Exegesis in the Western Christian Tradition, ed. William J. Lyons and Isabella Sandwell, BibleWorld (Sheffield: Equinox, 2012), 80–98; Korinna Zamfir, “Men and Women in the House(Hold) of God: Chrysostom’s Homilies on 1 Timothy 2,8–15,” Sacra Scripta 6.2 (2008). Two other helpful comparative studies with Augustine include Elaine Pagels, “The Politics of Paradise: Augustine’s Exegesis of Genesis 1–3 Versus That of John Chrysostom,” Harvard Theological Review 78.1–2 (1985): 67–99; Elizabeth A. Clark, “‘Adam’s Only Companion’: Augustine and the Early Christian Debate on Marriage,” Recherches Augustiniennes 21 (1986): 139–62.

(τάξις) are crucial for social and cosmic stability.4 There is also a revelatory aesthetic to the order of creation. To Chrysostom, the beauty of creation provides an analogy for knowing God. “What relevance to us, you ask, has the account of creation?” someone may ask: “Well, it does have relevance to us, dearly beloved,” Chrysostom assures his audience, “if ‘the creator is perceived by analogy in the immensity and beauty of created things’ [Wis. 13:5; compare Rom. 1:20], we are guided to the creator to the extent that we dwell upon the beauty and immensity of created things.”5 Chrysostom follows, here, a very ancient Christian rule of revelation, namely that the order of creation mirrors the order of God; that the act of creation had purpose, and that nature is simple and can serve as a moral and theological blueprint or model. This means that if we understand

Chrysostom’s view of creation and God, we will better understand his theology and ethics, and how he envisions the role of masculinity within these.

The hierarchical framework of creation that we will discover in Chrysostom’s interpretation of Genesis is tripart—we have divinity at the very pinnacle of the hierarchy (who is Creator, not creation), then follows humanity, and finally, animals or non-rational beings. If we are to understand Chrysostom’s views on masculinity and gender relations, we need to situate them within this broader cosmic framework, which is something that has only been done in basic terms by some. In this chapter and the next, I will examine how the divine, the human, and the animal each play their role in the foundation of Chrysostom’s vision of Christian masculinity. What I therefore aim to provide in these chapters is an extensive account of how Chrysostom envisions,

4 For the nature and importance of order in Chrysostom’s social thought, see Hartney, Transformation of the City, 117–32; Ford, Women and Men in the Early Church, 115–37. For a more general discussion of this issue, see Blowers, Drama of the Divine Economy, 24–27, 67–100. 5 Serm. Gen. 1.1.29–34 (SC 433.142–45): Καὶ τί πρὸς ἡμᾶς, φησὶν, ὁ περὶ κτίσεως λόγος; Πρὸς ἡμᾶς μὲν οὖν, ἀγαπητέ. Εἰ γὰρ «ἐκ μεγέθους καὶ καλλονῆς κτισμάτων ἀναλόγως ὁ γενεσιουργὸς θεωρεῖται», ὅσῳπερ ἂν τῇ καλλονῇ καὶ τῷ μεγέθει τῶν κτισμάτων ἐνδιατρίψωμεν, τοσούτῳ πρὸς τὸν γενεσιουργὸν χειραγωγούμεθα. Translation: Hill, Sermons on the Book of Genesis, 23.

positions, and deploys masculine dominion, using his reading of Genesis 1–3 as a trajectory. Yet Chrysostom’s reading of Genesis 1–3 is not uninfluenced. We need to understand that Chrysostom reads the first three chapters of Genesis through the lens of his all-time hero, the apostle Paul, and particularly Paul’s interpretation of Genesis found in 1 Corinthians 11:2–16. Moses and Paul intersect, dialogue, and are used to qualify one another, as Chrysostom meticulously constructs his vision of Christian masculinity. It means that while Chrysostom structures his interpretation of Genesis 1–

3 to mirror ideal masculine dynamics—namely the domination of the psychic over the corporeal, and the domination of the elite male slaveholder over his subordinates

(wife/women, children, and slaves)—the resultant interpretation, in turn, serves to justify the same structuring dynamics of masculinity in Christian society.

But a critical analysis of how Chrysostom understood Genesis, theologically and socially, is no simple task. In almost every sermon and homily of Genesis,

Chrysostom repeatedly reminds us of the precision (ἀκρίβεια) of God’s words in

Genesis, that nothing is said and done willy-nilly, that is “without purpose” (οὐχ

ἁπλῶς). 6 The work of Robert Hill and David Rylaarsdam, among others, on

Chrysostom’s use of these terms and expressions,7 and their close relationship to his notion of adaptation or condescension (συγκατάβασις), are very revealing. Both note that these terms work in tandem with one another, as hermeneutical principles, that enable exegetes to comprehend God’s revelation in detail, but without the dangers of

6 These terms and phrases have an exceptionally high frequency in Chrysostom’s works, as many studies have pointed out; see Maurice H. Flanagan, “Chrysostom on the Condescension and Accuracy of the Scriptures” (Ph.D. Dissertation, St. Patrick’s College, 1946); Robert C. Hill, “Akribeia: A Principle of Chrysostom’s Exegesis,” Colloquium: The Australian and New Zealand Theological Review 14 (1981): 32–36; “On Looking at Synkatabasis,” Prudentia 13 (1981): 3–11; David Rylaarsdam, John Chrysostom on Divine Pedagogy: The Coherence of His Theology and Preaching, Oxford Early Christian Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 13–155. 7 Hill, “Akribeia”; “On Looking at Synkatabasis”; Reading the Old Testament in Antioch, Bible in Ancient Christianity 5 (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 63–84 for a general overview; Rylaarsdam, Divine Pedagogy, 113–15.

being too detailed or speculative, like the heretics. The implication, of course, is that

Chrysostom read Genesis with ἀκρίβεια, and his theological constructions and categorisations are detailed, complex, and most of all, socially, ethically, and theologically strategic. In this chapter I aim to deconstruct Chrysostom’s vision of who and what God is, as far as he was able to articulate it,8 with some of my own critical

ἀκρίβεια, since Chrysostom, too, does not present scriptural expositions οὐχ ἁπλῶς— his expositions are strategic. A simple comparison of expository material between his earlier sermons on Genesis and the later expanded series of homilies that followed will yield numerous parallels, which indicates that Chrysostom had a precise agenda and premeditated ideological frame of reference for reading Genesis and applying it socio- ethically.9

Thus, this first chapter examines Chrysostom’s reading of Genesis 1–3, specifically enquiring into how and where masculinity and theology intersect.

Chrysostom’s Gottesbild10—that is, his vision of who and what God is and how he behaves represents a fine architecture of masculinity. As I will demonstrate, for

Chrysostom God is the ideal and unattainable Masculine. In the overarching

8 Chrysostom does acknowledge the difficulty and limitations associated with speaking about God; see Hill, Homilies on Genesis 1–17, 173. 9 Various parallels are indicated throughout Hill’s translations of the homilies and sermons. 10 My use of the technical theological term Gottesbild (“god-image” or concept of God) denotes a person’s mental conceptualisation of who and what God is (thereby including the notion of Gottesvorstellung), and also the “form” in which God is communicated in ancient texts (or “god- language”). I prefer using the term Gottesbild since it captures those visual, almost ekphrastic, constructions of the divine, especially anthropomorphic constructions, that are indispensible for this chapter’s analysis of the relation between Chrysostom’s theology and view of masculinity. Hanne Løland has especially highlighted the importance of understanding how God is imagined in gendered language; Hanne Løland, Silent Or Salient Gender?: The Interpretation of Gendered God-Language in the Hebrew Bible, Exemplified in Isaiah 42, 46 and 49, vol. 32 of Forshungen zum Alten Testament (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008), esp. 28-30. For more technical and psychosocial deliberations on these terms, see Urs Winter, Frau und Göttin: Exegetische und ikonographische Studien zum weiblichen Gottesbild im Alten Israel und in dessen Umwelt, Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis 53 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1983); Tryggve N. D. Mettinger, “The Study of the Gottesbild: Problems and Suggestions,” Svensk Exegetisk Årsbok 54 (1989): 135–45; Margita Reyßer-Aichele, Gottesbild und Emotionen: Theologisch- anthropologisches Konzept und empirische Untersuchung, Internationale Hochschulschriften 608 (Münster: Waxmann, 2014).

protological hierarchy that Chrysostom provides in his Genesis commentary, God of course occupies the highest position of order and dominion. Divinity universally surpasses humanity and animality in terms of rulership. It is thus necessary to delineate the specifications and mechanics of Chrysostom’s conceptualisation of God. The examination will commence with an analysis of the explicit masculine imagery

Chrysostom uses when speaking about God and his character and behaviour—images like father, son, lord/master/slaveholder, landowner, and craftsman. Thereafter, I will delineate two fundamental theological principles that are somewhat less explicit, but that undergird Chrysostom’s entire construction of the masculine God, namely incorporeality and autonomy. These characteristics and principles of the divine are essentially what separates and differentiates the divine from humanity and animality.

Their intersection and distribution in Chrysostom’s conceptualisation of God is what enables absolute divine rule and domination. Let us consider these interesting characteristics and principles relating to Chrysostom’s Gottesbild more closely.

Ideal Yet Unattainable: Inventing the Divine Masculine

In Chrysostom’s commentary of Genesis 1–3, there are some very explicit instances in which God is described in highly masculine terms. Aside from the typical descriptions of God as a father and a son, we also have images of God as a slaveholder, landowner, and craftsman. In Chrysostom’s Genesaic imagination, God is presented as the ultimate and most perfect Masculine. God’s masculine character is one that should be duplicated within every individual to the extent that it is humanly possible, yet complete mimesis of the divine Masculine is impossible—the divine Masculine is at the same time glaringly coveted and yet utterly unattainable. The dangerous desirability of the divine

Masculine in fact undergirds the whole creation account. Adam is created in God’s

image (εἰκών), and by being created in God’s image he receives an attenuated investiture of God’s ruling principle, his rule (ἀρχή) and dominion (δεσποτεία).11 This transference of power is also exhibited in Chrysostom’s argument about God’s likeness

(ὁμοίωσις), in which we find a rather different and perhaps unexpected species of apotheosis. Chrysostom discloses:

As the word “image” indicated a similitude of command, so too “likeness,”

with the result that we become like God to the extent of our human power—

that is to say, we resemble him in our gentleness and mildness and in regard

to virtue, as Christ also says, “Be like your Father in heaven” [Matt. 5:45].

You see, just as on this wide and spacious earth some animals are tamer and

others more ferocious, so too in the wide spaces of our soul some of our

ideas are more lethargic and resemble brute beasts, others more ferocious

and savage. So there is need to control and tame them and submit them to

the rule of reason.12

Image is the duplication of power as it applies to external cosmic rule, that is, dominion over the earth and its animals. Likeness, however, serves as its inverse equivalent, the duplication and production of power as internal psychic rule—that is, virtue (ἀρετή)—and so we enter the plateau of the soul. Likeness also serves to

11 Serm. Gen. 2.2.124–59 (SC 433.192–95). 12 Hom. Gen. 9.7 (PG 53.78.20–32): ῞Ωσπερ Εἰκόνα εἶπε τὴν τῆς ἀρχῆς δηλῶν εἰκόνα, οὕτω καὶ ῾Ομοίωσιν, ὥστε κατὰ δύναμιν ἀνθρωπίνην ὁμοίους ἡμᾶς γίνεσθαι Θεῷ, κατὰ τὸ ἥμερον λέγω καὶ πρᾷον ἐξομοιοῦσθαι αὐτῷ, καὶ κατὰ τὸν τῆς ἀρετῆς λόγον, ὥσπερ καὶ ὁ Χριστός φησι, Γίνεσθε ὅμοιοι τοῦ Πατρὸς ὑμῶν τοῦ ἐν τοῖς οὐρανοῖς. ῞Ωσπερ γὰρ ἐν τῇ πλατείᾳ ταύτῃ γῇ καὶ εὐρυχώρῳ τῶν ζώων τὰ μέν ἐστιν ἡμερώτερα, τὰ δὲ θηριωδέστερα, οὕτω καὶ ἐν τῷ πλάτει τῆς ψυχῆς τῆς ἡμετέρας τῶν λογισμῶν οἱ μέν εἰσιν ἀλογώτεροι καὶ κτηνώδεις, οἱ δὲ θηριωδέστεροι καὶ ἀγριώτεροι. Δεῖ τοίνυν κρατεῖν καὶ περιγίνεσθαι, καὶ τῷ λογισμῷ τὴν ἀρχὴν τούτων παραδιδόναι. Translation: Hill, Homilies on Genesis 1– 17, 120–21.

differentiate human beings from animals. Being created in the image and likeness of

God makes humanity capable of both external and internal dominion respectively.

Thus, along with the duplication of masculine divinity, we also find a most interesting deployment and duplication of animality. As there exists cosmic animality over which humanity must rule, so too there exists a psychic bestial that must be dominated. Virtue is when the soul, through reason, controls (κρατεῖν) and tames (περιγίνεσθαι) the epistemic beasts roaming its interior plains. Virtue is never separated from the

Masculine. Virtue is simply Its interior psychic operationalisation. Image and likeness, rule and virtue, capacitate the soul with a governing power, which Chrysostom calls the

κῦρος of the soul 13 —it is this capacitation that structures and authorises the kyriarchality of the soul.

But virtuosity had very real corporeal effects—due to the inextricable links between animality and raw irrational corporeality in Chrysostom’s thought, 14 the animalisation of thought connects it very deeply to embodied experience. This is no dichotomy between the psychic and the cosmic or corporeal realms of dominion—they are intricately and, in this case, subtly, interwoven in Chrysostom’s tapestry of power.

This is why the state of the soul, its health, is able to affect the state of the body directly.

Psychic wellbeing and corporeal health, as noted in the previous chapter, are connected in ancient medical thought by means of the link between the bodily humours and temperaments. Chrysostom divides psychic animality into the savage and the lackadaisical. This move is of course again clearly modelled on Plato’s image of the charioteer of the soul. It is significant that both Plato and Chrysostom present the passions as animals, while the charioteer, reason, is never bestialized. The metaphor is

13 Hom. Rom. 14[13].2 (F1.202). See also chapter 6. 14 Dunning, “Chrysostom’s Serpent,” 77.

in fact quite violent since man must exercise force of mind over the passions just as animals must, at times, be aggressively tamed.15 All three domains of the soul are implied here in Chrysostom’s vision of psychic aggression—the rational “rule of reason,” typically seated in the brain, the spirited part, found in the heart, and the appetitive part, which is in the region of the liver.16

This application of image and likeness in Chrysostom marks a crucial moment in the hermeneutics of the (masculine) subject. Michel Foucault has famously traced the development of the care of the self in minute detail, and he has displayed some very subtle shifts in how the care and mastery of the self was conceptualised in different periods and schools of thought, and this finding which links virtue to apotheosis provides an important clause to that history. Reading with his own gifted ἀκρίβεια,

Foucault especially noted the complex relationship between virtue, ἄσκησις, and spirituality,17 and how these function within modes of mastery. To add to this, we can now deduce from our reading of Chrysostom that practices of masculinisation, cultivations of virtue, are seen as essentially apotheotic. By becoming masculine, man receives a measure of divinity. The more the bestial is bridled, the more the divine is cultivated in the actions of the soul. He does not simply become like God, but becomes

15 For an excellent exposition on how the image of the charioteer inspires (but also problematises) male aggression, see Timothy Francisco, “Marlowe’s War Horses: Cyborgs, Soldiers, and Queer Companions,” in Violent Masculinities: Male Aggression in Early Modern Texts and Culture, ed. Jennifer Feather and Catherine E. Thomas (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 47–66. 16 Wendy Mayer, “Medicine in Transition: Christian Adaptation in the Later Fourth-Century East,” in Shifting Genres in Late Antiquity, ed. Geoffrey Greatrex and Hugh Elton (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), 14– 15. 17 Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1981–1982, ed. Frédéric Gros et al., trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2006), esp. 1–24, 315–70. Foucault’s lectures on the topic, now published, provides a detailed and unabridged elaboration of the care of the self, and an indispensible prolegomenon to the third volume of his History of Sexuality; see Michel Foucault, The Care of the Self, trans. Robert Hurley, vol. 3 of The History of Sexuality (New York: Vintage, 1988).

likeness of God—note the subjectivising terminology. 18 Burrus has eloquently illustrated how transcendence (and even otherness, as Brown notes19) became a defining feature of late ancient masculinity,20 a point that I will also discuss and develop in chapter 6. The implication is that by participating in exercises of domination, mastery whether of the self or others, man becomes godly and godlike. This principle underlines the manliness of the late ancient monk. It also illustrates, disturbingly, the potent conceptual and ideological scaffolding that supported practices like slavery and female subjugation.

Chrysostom’s interpretation, therefore, establishes Adam as a type of overseer, both cosmic and psychic at the outset, almost like the ancient estate manager

(ἐπίτροπος, οἰκονόμος, or vilicus), who receives a measure of the Master’s power. Yet the danger is that in receiving this measure of mastery, this psychic inoculation of masculinity we find in the divine-human ruling principle, humanity may strive to become Master. This tension we find in the narrative of Eve, the tree, and the serpent.

According to Chrysostom, Eve set her sights on the attribute of divine parity (ἰσόθεος).21

There must be a balance in the tension between the imitability and unattainability of the

Masculine. Masculinisation via cosmic dominion and virtuosity must, in the earthly dispensation at least, remain an unconsummated apotheosis.

At this stage a distinction is required: God is Masculine—but he is not male

(just as not all males are necessarily masculine). This point is established in

18 Peter R. L. Brown, “The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity,” Journal of Roman Studies 61 (1971): 80–101; Virginia Burrus, “Begotten, Not Made”: Conceiving Manhood in Late Antiquity, Figurae: Reading Medieval Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000). 19 Brown, “Rise and Function of the Holy Man,” 93–94. 20 Burrus, Begotten, Not Made, esp. 18-35. 21 Hom. Gen. 16.10 (PG 53.129.45).

Chrysostom’s discussion of μορφή, or form. Chrysostom carefully explains with an intertext from 1 Corinthians 11:7 thus:

Yet, despite such great precision in terms, there are still those spoiling for

a fight who would want to say “image” is used in terms of form, we will

say to them: that means he is not only man but also woman, for both have

the same form. But this would make no sense. I mean, listen to Paul’s

words: “It is not proper for a man to cover his head, being image and glory

of God, whereas the woman is man’s glory” [1 Cor. 11:7]. One is in

command, the other is subordinate, just as God had also said to woman from

the beginning, “your yearning will be for your husband, and he will be your

master” [Gen. 3:16]. You see, since it is on the basis of command that the

image was received and not on the basis of form, man commands

everything whereas woman is subservient—hence Paul’s words about a

man, that he is constituted God’s image and glory, whereas woman is man’s

glory. If, however, he had been speaking about form, he would not have

distinguished between them, man and woman being identical in type, after

all.… I mean, he [Paul in Acts 17:29] says not only that the deity is to be

distinguished from bodily figure but that human imagining could not shape

anything of the kind.22

22 Hom. Gen. 8.10 (PG 53.72.62–73.15, 73.29–31): Εἰ δὲ ἔτι καὶ μετὰ τὴν τοσαύτην τῶν εἰρημένων ἀκρίβειαν φιλονεικοῦντες λέγοιεν, κατὰ τὴν τῆς μορφῆς εἰκόνα εἰρῆσθαι, ἐροῦμεν πρὸς αὐτούς· οὐκοῦν οὐ μόνον ὁ ἄνθρωπος, ἀλλὰ καὶ ἡ γυνὴ δηλονότι· τὴν αὐτὴν γὰρ μορφὴν ἑκάτεροι ἔχουσιν. ᾿Αλλ' οὐκ ἂν ἔχοι τοῦτο λόγον. ῎Ακουε γὰρ τοῦ Παύλου λέγοντος· ᾿Ανὴρ μὲν γὰρ οὐκ ὀφείλει κατακαλύπτεσθαι τὴν κεφαλὴν, εἰκὼν καὶ δόξα Θεοῦ ὑπάρχων· ἡ δὲ γυνὴ δόξα ἀνδρός ἐστιν. ῾Ο μὲν γὰρ ἄρχει, ἡ δὲ ὑποτέτακται, καθὼς καὶ ὁ Θεὸς ἐξ ἀρχῆς πρὸς αὐτήν φησι, Πρὸς τὸν ἄνδρα σου ἡ ἀποστροφή σου, καὶ αὐτός σου κυριεύσει. ᾿Επειδὴ γὰρ κατὰ τὸν τῆς ἀρχῆς λόγον τὸ τῆς εἰκόνος παρείληφε, καὶ οὐ κατὰ τὴν μορφὴν, ὁ δὲ ἄνθρωπος ἄρχει πάντων, ἡ δὲ γυνὴ ὑποτέτακται, διὰ τοῦτό φησι περὶ τοῦ ἀνδρὸς ὁ Παῦλος, ὅτι εἰκὼν καὶ δόξα Θεοῦ ὑπάρχει, ἡ δὲ γυνὴ δόξα ἀνδρός ἐστιν. Εἰ δὲ περὶ μορφῆς ἔλεγεν, οὐκ ἂν διεῖλεν· ὁ γὰρ αὐτὸς τύπος καὶ ἀνδρὸς καὶ γυναικός.... Οὐ μόνον γὰρ τύπου σωματικοῦ. ἔφησεν ἀπηλλάχθαι τὸ Θεῖον, ἀλλὰ μηδὲ ἐνθύμησιν ἀνθρώπου δυνατὴν εἶναι ἀναπλάσαι τι τοιοῦτον. Translation: Hill, Homilies

Now we see the strategic interchanges between image, likeness, and form in the construction of Chrysostom’s vision of ideal masculinity. It should be noted here that

Chrysostom reads ἄνθρωπος in Genesis 1:26 as man, that is, equivalent to ἀνήρ.23 The image and likeness between God and man enforces, especially after the Fall, the difference between man and woman. But the uniformity between male and female in terms of their type (τύπος), in turn, constitutes an essential difference from the divine.

The isomorphism between male and female is based on their corporeality, while the amorphism between the divine and the human is based on incorporeality. Image highlights sexual difference, but form emphasises sexual similarity, and human similarity more generally. Foucault makes a similar point with regards to Chrysostom’s understanding of the “substantially unified” relationship between Adam and Eve, and also broadens this relationship to the kinship (and, interestingly, incestuosity) of all humanity:

De sa volonté d’abord comme Créateur [with reference again to Hom. Eph.

20.1]. C’est à partir de l’homme et de sa chair même qu’il a façonné la

femme. Issus de la même substance, Adam et Ève étaient substantiellement

unifiables. Et leurs descendants sont encore de la même substance. «

Aucune essence étrangère ne peut donc pénétrer dans la nôtre. » Tout au

long des générations, l’humanité est restée liée à elle-même, et limitée à sa

propre substance. Dans ce rapport à l’unité primitive, d’où le genre humain

est parti sans en sortir jamais, l’inceste joue deux rôles. Inévitable à

on Genesis 1–17, 111. See also Hom. 1 Cor. 26 (F2.307–25). 23 Hill, Homilies on Genesis 1–17, 111n16.

l’origine des temps, il est ontologiquement valorisé, puisqu’il rapporte tous

les individus à l’identité d’une seule et meme substance.24

For Chrysostom then, the body is, in fact, a trajectory for establishing sexual similarity and not difference—a point that will receive much attention in the next chapter. This aspect of Chrysostom’s Gottesbild underscores the ultimate abstraction of corporeal maleness, or biological sexual difference, from masculinity.

The masculinisation of God is clearly exhibited in Chrysostom’s theological imagery. The image of God as a master, who lets out creation like a landowner rents out his property, is very common in Chrysostom’s Genesaic expositions. Adam had to watch over the garden as “an instance of considerateness in expression to the effect that he might be fully aware that he was subject to a master who had regaled him with such enjoyment, and along with that enjoyment entrusted him with its protection.”25 In this sense Adam is seen as a type of overseer or a steward who watches over a master’s estate. Moreover, God “did this in the manner of a kindly master entrusting his huge residence to someone and prescribing some humble coin to be given by him as a pledge for keeping the ownership intact for himself.” But as in any rental contract, there were conditions: “Well, in quite the same way our loving Lord lavished on the human being the enjoyment of everything in the garden, and bade him abstain from one tree only,”

Chrysostom states, along with the reason for this command, “so as to be in a position to know that he is subject to the Lord, whom he should obey and to whose commands

24 Michel Foucault, Les aveux de la chair, ed. Frédéric Gros, vol. 4 of Histoire de la sexualité (Paris: Gallimard, 2018), 257 (my italics). 25 Hom. Gen. 14.9 (PG 53.113.43–46): ἀλλὰ συγκατάβασίς ἐστι τῶν ῥημάτων, ἵνα ὅλως εἰδέναι ἔχῃ, φησὶν, ὅτι ὑπόκειταί τινι δεσπότῃ τῷ τὴν τοσαύτην ἀπόλαυσιν αὐτῷ χαρισαμένῳ, καὶ μετὰ τῆς ἀπολαύσεως τὴν φυλακὴν ἐπιτρέψαντι. Translation: Hill, Homilies on Genesis 1–17, 185.

he should submit.”26 The language of God’s absolute dominion is clear. The discourse of landholding functions very pervasively here, in which God is depicted as a wealthy landowner who gives land to humans, just as land was given to tenant farmers, or coloni, during this period. Even though coloni were not strictly slaves, according to

Roman law, they were bound as “slaves of the land from which they were born”—their movement was much restricted and the landowner had power over them similar to how a master had power over a slave.27 Chrysostom explains:

[God] wished to reveal his own dominion through this slight command. To

make a comparison with a generous master who provides a great home full

of wonders for someone’s enjoyment: he is prepared to take not the due

price but some small part so as in his own interests to protect his title of

dominion and to ensure that the person may have precise understanding that

he is not the owner of the property but enjoys its use out of his grace and

beneficence. In just the same way does our Lord entrust everything to the

human being, providing him with a way of life in the garden and enjoyment

of everything in it; lest he be gradually perverted in his thinking and come

to regard visible things as self-sufficient and get inflated ideas of his own

importance, he bids him stay away from the one tree, setting a severe

penalty for transgression so that he may be aware he is under his dominion

and along with everything else is a partaker of his generosity.28

26 Hom. Gen. 14.13 (PG 53.115.7–12): Οὕτω δὴ καὶ ὁ φιλάνθρωπος ἡμῶν Δεσπότης πάντων τῶν ἐν τῷ παραδείσῳ τὴν ἀπόλαυσιν αὐτῷ χαρισάμενος, τοῦ ἑνὸς ξύλου μόνου ἀποσχέσθαι ἐκέλευσεν, ἵνα εἰδέναι ἔχῃ, ὅτι ὑπὸ Δεσπότην ἐστὶν, ᾧ προσήκει αὐτὸν πείθεσθαι, καὶ τοῖς ὑπ' ἐκείνου προσταττομένοις εἴκειν. Translation: Hill, Homilies on Genesis 1–17, 187–88. 27 CJ 52.1.393 in Arnold H. M Jones, The Later Roman Empire, 284–602: A Social Economic and Administrative Survey (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1964), 2:796–801, 1328. 28 Hom. Gen. 16.18 (PG 53.133.12–29): … [ὁ θεός] διὰ τῆς μικρᾶς ταύτης ἐντολῆς τὴν οἰκείαν αὐτῷ δεσποτείαν δεικνύναι ἐβούλετο· καὶ ὡσανεὶ δεσπότης φιλότιμος οἶκον μέγαν καὶ θαυμαστόν τινι

Let us examine this text more closely. God is a generous slaveholder (δεσπότης

φιλότιμος and φῐλάνθρωπος δεσπότης 29 ) and landowner who gives a command

(ἐντολή), having creation as his “title of dominion” (τὰ τῆς δεσποτείας, that is, part of his dominica potestas). Adam is “not the owner of the property” (οὐ τῆς κτήσεως

δεσπότης), and in the following expression, Chrysostom explicitly confirms the mastership of God and the subservience of Adam. Adam should never become

“gradually perverted in his thinking and come to regard visible things as self-sufficient and get inflated ideas of his own importance [ἵνα μὴ κατὰ μικρὸν ὑποσυρεὶς τὴν

διάνοιαν, νομίσῃ αὐτόματα εἶναι τὰ ὁρώμενα, καὶ πλέον τι τῆς οἰκείας ἀξίας

φαντασθῇ].” This type of perverted thinking would characterise Eve’s thinking during the Fall—in their first sin, as we will expound in detail in the next chapter, humanity disregarded divine autonomy and rebelled against their own subordinate position in the cosmic hierarchy. His reference to Adam viewing material creation as “self-sufficient

[αὐτόματα]”, here, is probably also an instance of veiled polemic against the

Manichaeans, who understood Matter (ὕλη) to be self-sufficient. More on this will be said below. At the same time, as in most doulological discourses of Roman antiquity,

God’s generosity (φιλοτιμία), grace (χάρις), and beneficence (φιλοτιμία τῆς χρήσεως) as master and patron are constantly stressed. This is the language of traditional Roman manliness par excellence.

παρεσχηκὼς πρὸς ἀπόλαυσιν, οὐ τὴν ἀξίαν τιμὴν, ἀλλὰ βραχύ τι μέρος λαμβάνειν βούλεται, ὥστε καὶ αὐτῷ τὰ τῆς δεσποτείας φυλάττεσθαι, κἀκεῖνον ἀκριβῶς εἰδέναι, ὡς οὐ τῆς κτήσεως δεσπότης ἐστὶν, ἀλλὰ χάριτι καὶ φιλοτιμίᾳ τῆς χρήσεως ἀπολαύει· οὕτω καὶ ὁ Δεσπότης ὁ ἡμέτερος πάντα τὰ ὁρώμενα ἐμπιστεύσας τῷ ἀνθρώπῳ, καὶ τὴν ἐν τῷ παραδείσῳ διαγωγὴν, καὶ πάντων τῶν ἐν αὐτῷ παρεσχηκὼς τὴν ἀπόλαυσιν, ἵνα μὴ κατὰ μικρὸν ὑποσυρεὶς τὴν διάνοιαν, νομίσῃ αὐτόματα εἶναι τὰ ὁρώμενα, καὶ πλέον τι τῆς οἰκείας ἀξίας φαντασθῇ, κελεύει τοῦ ἑνὸς ἀπέχεσθαι ξύλου, σφοδρὸν τὸ ἐπιτίμιον ὁρίσας, εἰ παραβαίη, ἵνα εἰδέναι ἔχῃ, ὡς ὑπὸ δεσπότην ἐστὶ, καὶ ὅτι καὶ τῶν λοιπῶν μετέχει διὰ τὴν τοῦ δεσπότου φιλοτιμίαν. Translation: Hill, Homilies on Genesis 1–17, 219–20. 29 See Hom. Gen. 16.18 (PG 53.133.9).

God, then, rules as a slaveholder over his slaves and estate. He speaks and convenes within himself only, and most of all, he fashions creation and life as an expert craftsman (τεχνίτης ἄριστος and δημιουργός).30 The ancient discourse of demiurgy or craftsmanship (δημιουργία), especially in its Christianised garb,31 is a potent discourse of masculinity. We see here a move away from the age-old feminine concepts of divine creation as giving birth (although birth, as we will see in chapter 4, makes a stunning masculine return in Chrysostom’s thought). God does not give birth to creation, he fashions it—he is less mother (μήτηρ) and more δημιουργός. 32 Chrysostom rather reserves maternality for his understanding of the church. 33 This also signifies a valuation of non-coital reproduction, and enforces Chrysostom’s stance against sexual intercourse and procreation. Chrysostom demonstrates this point to some virgins whom he warned against the pitfalls of marriage, sexual intercourse, and procreation. 34

30 For τεχνίτης ἄριστος, see Hom. Gen. 15.7 (PG 53.120.61); see also Hom. Gen. 2.11 (PG 53.30.25), 5.10 (PG 53.51.14); see Hom. Gen. 16.18 (PG 53.133.11) for the combination of δημιουργός and ποιητής. The term δημιουργός is one of the primary appellations Chrysostom uses for God, with variants occurring more than 300 times in the homilies on Genesis. Its origins are from Plato, but its post-Platonic transformations are numerous and complex, and there is no simple dichotomy between Platonic and early Christian uses of the term; see Ilinca Tanaseanu-Döbler, Theurgy in Late Antiquity: The Invention of a Ritual Tradition, Beiträge zur Europäischen Religionsgeschichte 1 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013), 186–256; for a general overview of the usage of this term in early Christianity, see Carl S. O’Brien, The Demiurge in Ancient Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), esp. 11- 14; Christopher Stead, Philosophy in Christian Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 105–8; Stephen Parcell, Four Historical Definitions of Architecture (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2012), 59–104 for the interesting medieval reception of the δημιουργός in relation to architecture. 31 In contrast, the discourse of demiurgy in Manichaeism, for instance, is rather feminine; see J. Kevin Coyle, “Prolegomena to a Study of Women in Manichaeism,” in The Light and the Darkness: Studies in Manichaeism and Its World, ed. Paul Mirecki and Jason BeDuhn, Nag Hammadi and Manichaean Studies 50 (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 79–92. 32 Chrysostom’s works are not totally bereft of feminine divine imagery, see for instance: Hom. Jo. 26 (PG 59.153.1–158.9), 79.1 (PG 59.427.28–428.18). For a general overview of the masculinisation of God in early Christianity, see Colleen Conway, Behold the Man: Jesus and Greco-Roman Masculinity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); and several essays in Stephen D. Moore and Janice C. Anderson, eds., New Testament Masculinities, Semeia Studies 45 (Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature, 2003); Susanna Asikainen, Jesus and Other Men: Ideal Masculinities in the Synoptic Gospels, Biblical Interpretation 159 (Leiden: Brill, 2018). For an overview of the language of childbirth in early Christianity, see esp. A. Rebecca Solevåg, Birthing Salvation: Gender and Class in Early Christian Childbearing Discourse, Biblical Interpretation 121 (Leiden: Brill, 2013). 33 Catech. 1.3.11–13 (SC 366.118–19). 34 Virg. 14.6.77–82 (SC 125.142–45), 17.5.58–75 (SC 125.154–55); Peter R. L. Brown, The Body and

Chrysostom believes that God has the ability to multiply the human race without sexual intercourse and birth. This is how the angels were made, and also Adam and Eve, whose prelapsarian state is often described by Chrysostom as angelic in his interpretation of

Genesis.35 It is a superior reproduction by means of making, a ποίησις, a reproduction that lies solely and centrally in the realm of the masculine—it is a mode of reproduction that I term will androgenerativity. I will elaborate much more on androgenerativity in chapter 4, however at this point I want to highlight it as a representation of God’s masculine δημιουργία.

These images attest to the masculinisation of God rather literally and explicitly.

However, there are two discourses in Chrysostom’s thought, but also common in other early Christian authors, as I will show, which represent the supporting conceptual pillars of God as the ideal Masculine. These are the discourses of God’s incorporeality and his absolute autonomy.

Incorporeality

God is eternally and unimaginably different from all the others in the cosmic hierarchy.

Chrysostom is therefore very diligent in noting that God’s image (εἰκών), in which man

(not woman) was created, refers to his character of rulership (ἀρχή and δεσποτεία), and certainly not his form (μορφή).36 Humanity is by no means a reflection of the divine form; the human bodily form is not a derivation of Gottesbild. Chrysostom makes it

Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 306–7. See also chapter 4. 35 Hom. Gen. 15.14 (PG 53.123.29–35), 16.19 (PG 53.133.50–52), 17.1 (PG 53.134.46–47). 36 See esp. Harrison, “Women and the Image of God,” 259–79; Maria-Fotini P. Kapsalis, “Image as Authority in the Writings of John Chrysostom” (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Toronto, 2001); Ivar Kh. Maksutov, “Greek (Chrysostom) and Syriac (Ephrem) Aspects of ‘Authority’ and the Image of God,” Scrinium 4 (2008): 311–17. This was a general interpretative tendency among so-called Antiochene exegetes; Frederick G. McLeod, The Image of God in the Antiochene Tradition (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1999); N. Verna Harrison, “Women, Human Identity, and the Image of God: Antiochene Interpretations,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 9 (2001): 205–49.

clear that God has no human form (ἀνθρωπόμορφος), but “is without shape, without appearance, without change, and to attribute limbs and forms to the one who has no body [is blasphemous].”37 God has no body in which to suffer, no limbs with which to become disabled or weak.38 The first principle underlying Chrysostom’s Gottesbild is that of God’s incorporeality. In support of the masculinity of God, we have in

Chrysostom, then, an absolute decorporealisation of the divine:

So recognizing our limitations, and the fact that what is said refers to God,

let us accept the words as equivalent to speaking about God; let us not

reduce the divine to the shape of bodies and the structure of limbs, but

understand the whole narrative in a manner appropriate to God

[θεοπρεπῶς]. For the deity is simple [ἁπλοῦν], free of parts and shape

[ἀσύνθετον καὶ ἀσχημάτιστον]; should we form an impression from

ourselves and want to ascribe an arrangement of limbs to God, we would

be in danger of falling into the irreverence pagans are guilty of.39

The decorporealisation of God marks a very important moment in the overall theology and social thought of Chrysostom, and orthodox Christianity more generally.

If God were to have a body or a bodily form, he would be subject to weakness and thus

37 Hom. Gen. 8.8 (PG 53.72.20–22): τὸν ἀσχημάτιστον, καὶ ἀνείδεον, καὶ ἀναλλοίωτον εἰς μορφὴν ἀνθρωπίνην κατάγειν, καὶ, σχήματα καὶ μέλη περιτιθέναι τῷ ἀσωμάτῳ. Translation: Hill, Homilies on Genesis 1–17, 109. See also Hom. 1 Cor. 26 (F2.307–25); Serm. Gen. 2.1.99–2.112 (SC 433.188–91); Hill, Sermons on the Book of Genesis, 47–49. 38 Through this principle Chrysostom also wholly avoids the heresy of patripassianism. 39 Hom. Gen. 13.9 (PG 53.107.17–25): ᾿Εννοοῦντες τοίνυν καὶ τὴν ἑαυτῶν ἀσθένειαν, καὶ ὅτι περὶ Θεοῦ ἐστι τὰ λεγόμενα, οὕτω δεχώμεθα τὰ εἰρημένα, ὡς εἰκὸς περὶ Θεοῦ λέγεσθαι, μὴ εἰς σωμάτων σχηματισμὸν καὶ μελῶν σύνθεσιν τὸ Θεῖον κατάγοντες, ἀλλὰ θεοπρεπῶς ἅπαντα νοοῦντες. ῾Απλοῦν γὰρ καὶ ἀσύνθετον καὶ ἀσχημάτιστον τὸ Θεῖον· ἐπεὶ εἰ μέλλοιμεν ἐξ ἑαυτῶν ὁρμώμενοι, καὶ μελῶν σύνθεσιν περιτιθέναι τῷ Θεῷ, λανθάνομεν ἑαυτοὺς εἰς τὴν ῾Ελληνικὴν ἀσέβειαν ἐκπίπτοντες. Translation: Hill, Homilies on Genesis 1–17, 173.

have no claim to universal rule. The implication, for Chrysostom, is that a god who has a body is no god at all—divine corporealisation becomes a problem of θεοπρέπεια, that is, a problem of proper and authentic divinity. 40 In Chrysostom, divine decorporealisation is a reactionary and polemical strategy against the so-called “Greek” religion.41 He carefully emphasises the incorporeality of God, but at the same time, also teaches that God does imitate forms familiar to humans as an act of συγκατάβασις—it was a careful balance that Chrysostom needed to strike. 42 He uses metaphors and instances of συγκατάβασις to explain some attributes of God, but at the same time, his theology is quite apophatic—he describes God through knowledge of what God is not.43

Chrysostom’s use of negative adjectives—in which an alpha-privative is simply added—like ἀσύνθετος (free of parts) and ἀσχημάτιστος (shapeless) here, and

ἀκατάληπτος (incomprehensible) elsewhere,44 in his apophatism, have been dubbed, rather creatively and accurately by Andrew Louth, as a “theology of the alpha- privative.”45

40 In his homilies on Genesis, Chrysostom mostly uses the adverbial form θεοπρεπῶς, which occurs 12 times in the homilies (but not in the sermons). It must also be listed among the various exegetical principles utilised by Chrysostom. Scripture is always θεοπρεπῶς, and interpretation must always be θεοπρεπῶς. On early Christian θεοπρέπεια more generally, see Mark Sheridan, From the Nile to the Rhone and Beyond: Studies in Early Monastic Literature and Scriptural Interpretation, Studia Anselmiana (Rome: Pontificio Ateneo Sant’Anselmo, 2012), 277–93. 41 On Chrysostom’s construction of Greek religion, see Isabella Sandwell, Religious Identity in Late Antiquity: Greeks, Jews and Christians in Antioch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 3– 5, 200–201. 42 Hom. Gen. 42.7 (PG 54.387.30–37); see esp. Rylaarsdam, Divine Pedagogy, 58–59. 43 See Andrew Louth, “Apophatic and Cataphatic Theology,” in The Cambridge Companion to Christian Mysticism, ed. Amy Hollywood and Patricia Z. Beckman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 138–39. For the Greek background of apophatic theology, see Frances M. Young, “The God of the Greeks and the Nature of Religious Language,” in Early Christian Literature and the Classical Intellectual Tradition: In Honorem Robert M. Grant, ed. William R. Schoedel and Robert L. Wilken, Théologie Historique 54 (Paris: Beauchesne, 1979), 45–74. For its general background in late antiquity, see several essays in Chris Boesel and Catherine Keller, eds., Apophatic Bodies: Negative Theology, Incarnation, and Relationality (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010). 44 See Chrysostom’s De incomprehensibili Dei natura (SC 28). 45 Louth, “Apophatic and Cataphatic Theology,” 138–39.

It is rather difficult to determine exactly what Chrysostom had in mind when he spoke about the “Greeks” understanding God as having a body and limbs. If

Chrysostom’s emphases on the difference of form (μορφή) between humans and the divine and God’s shapelessness (ἀσχημάτιστος) are anything to go by,46 it may be an allusion to certain Neoplatonic views on theurgy, in which divine form and illumination can be transposed onto the material world.47 The allusion is difficult to prove explicitly, since Chrysostom only had limited access, via Eusebius of Caesarea, to the key text—

Plato’s Timaeus.48 Generally, however, it is safe to say that divine incorporeality is juxtaposed with Greek idolatry more broadly. This is evident in Chrysostom’s Homilia in Epistulam ad Romanos 4[3].3,49 in which Romans 1:18–25 is interpreted, where the corporealisation of God in the statues is labelled as typically Greek. There is also a reference to Plato who revered his “Egyptian teachers,” which could be an allusion to

Neoplatonism. In this regard, Chrysostom writes:

And so, while they attempt to go the way leading to heaven, and having

destroyed the light from themselves, and instead, turning themselves over

to the darkness of their own reasoning, and seeking the Incorporeal One

[τὸν ἀσώματον] in bodies, and the Shapeless One [τὸν ἀσχημάτιστον] in

shapes, they suffered a most deplorable shipwreck.50

46 Hom. Gen. 8.10 (PG 53.72.62–73.15); Hill, Homilies on Genesis 1–17, 110–11. 47 Patricia Cox Miller notes the significance of figures like Iamblichus and Plotinus in shaping early Christian (in)corporealities—she points out that Iamblichus referred to theurgy as “putting on the shape [σχῆμα] of the gods” (Mys. 4.2 [Des Places 148]); Patricia Cox Miller, The Corporeal Imagination: Signifying the Holy in Late Ancient Christianity, Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 32, see also 31–35. 48 Samuel Pomeroy, “Reading Plato through the Eyes of Eusebius: John Chrysostom’s Timaeus Quotations in Rhetorical Context,” in (Re)Visioning John Chrysostom: New Theories and Approaches, ed. Chris L. de Wet and Wendy Mayer (London: Routledge, 2018), Forthcoming. 49 F1.39–40. 50 Hom. Rom. 4[3].2 (F1.38): οὕτω καὶ οὗτοι τὴν πρὸς τὸν οὐρανὸν φέρουσαν ὁδὸν βαδίζειν ἐπιχειροῦντες, καὶ τὸ φῶς ἀφ' ἑαυτῶν ἀφελόντες, εἶτα ἀντ' ἐκείνου τῷ σκότῳ τῶν λογισμῶν ἑαυτοὺς

According to Romans 1:23, then, the Greeks supplemented the true God with inauthentic “images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles.” 51 They therefore worship the creature and not the Creator—animality is placed above divinity and humanity. Ironically, in the case of the Fall, Eve would be accused of a similar offense, she herself desired to be equal to God (ἰσόθεος). 52

Furthermore, the ethical threat of the Greek corporealisation of God is that it leads to the corruption of their own bodies—divine corporealisation, in Chrysostom’s thought, leads to human corporeal corruption, a theme treated in detail in the following homily,

Hom. Rom. 5[4],53 which covers Romans 1:26–27. They are given over to the lusts of the flesh, and engage in the most unmasculine indulgence in the passions, especially exhibited in same-sex passion.54 Ethically, the Greek corporealisation of God negates any claim to masculine corporeality they may possess.

But perhaps more importantly, the incorporeality of God also refutes some of

Chrysostom’s opponents within Christianity, namely the Anthropomorphites and the

Anomeans. Rylaarsdam rightly notes that these controversies in the early church directly impacted on Chrysostom.55 Chrysostom bemoans Anomean claims that the

ἐπιτρέψαντες, καὶ ἐν σώμασι τὸν ἀσώματον, καὶ ἐν σχήμασι τὸν ἀσχημάτιστον ἐπιζητοῦντες, ναυάγιον ὑπέστησαν χαλεπώτατον. 51 NA28: ὁμοιώματι εἰκόνος φθαρτοῦ ἀνθρώπου καὶ πετεινῶν καὶ τετραπόδων καὶ ἑρπετῶν. Translation: NIV. 52 Hom. Gen. 16.10 (PG 53.129.45). 53 See F1.44–52. 54 See Chris L. de Wet, “John Chrysostom on Homoeroticism,” Neotestamentica 48.1 (2014): 187–218; Benjamin H. Dunning, “John Chrysostom and Same-Sex Eros in the History of Sexuality,” in (Re)Visioning John Chrysostom: New Theories and Approaches, ed. Chris L. de Wet and Wendy Mayer (London: Routledge, 2018), Forthcoming. 55 Rylaarsdam, Divine Pedagogy, 59; see also Krastu Banev, Theophilus of Alexandria and the First Origenist Controversy: Rhetoric and Power, Oxford Early Christian Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 29–34; Paul A. Patterson, Visions of Christ: The Anthropomorphite Controversy of 399 CE, Studien und Texte zu Antike und Christentum 68 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2012), 29–30; Elizabeth A.

nature of God could be known, and states that they are even worse than the Greeks, since the Greeks only provide an imprecise statement (ἐξήγησις) and an outline

(ὑπογραφή) of the divine, while the Anomeans provide a specific definition (ὅρος).56

These heretical groups, along with the Greeks, are dismissed as irrational and mad. The mystery and incomprehensibility of God’s incorporeality is ineffable—it differs from all that is created, even those essences that are of a light and thin materiality,57 like the soul, or air, or any other element:

Therefore, He has no beginning, and is unbegotten, and undetermined, and

infinite, thus, difficult to comprehend. But let us consider his incorporeality,

whether we can figure this out by reasoning. God is incorporeal. What is

incorporeal? Only a mere word—for the understanding has gained nothing,

it has impressed nothing upon itself. For if it is imaginable, it comes to

nature, and what constitutes body. So the mouth does speak, but the

understanding does not know what it is saying, except for one thing, that it

is not body. This is all it knows.58

Clark, The Origenist Controversy: The Cultural Construction of an Early Christian Debate (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992). 56 Incomp. 5.357–65 (SC 28.302–3); see also Paul W. Harkins, trans., St. John Chrysostom: On the Incomprehensible Nature of God, The Fathers of the Church 72 (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1984), 153; Raymond J. Laird, “John Chrysostom and the Anomoeans: Shaping an Antiochene Perspective on Christology,” in Religious Conflict from Early Christianity to the Rise of Islam, ed. Wendy Mayer and Bronwen Neil, Arbeiten zur Kirchengeschichte 121 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013), 129–50. 57 For more on this type of materiality in early Christianity, see Gregory A. Smith, “How Thin Is a Demon?,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 16.4 (2008): 479–512. 58 Hom. Col. 5.3 (F5.228): Τὸ μὲν οὖν ἄναρχον αὐτοῦ καὶ ἀγέννητον καὶ ἀπερίγραφον καὶ ἄπειρον, οὕτως ἄπορον· τὸ δὲ ἀσώματον ἴδωμεν, μήποτε λογισμῷ ἐξετάσαι δυνώμεθα. ᾿Ασώματός ἐστιν ὁ Θεός. Τί ἐστιν ἀσώματος; ῾Ρῆμα ψιλὸν μόνον· ἡ γὰρ ἔννοια οὐδὲν ἐδέξατο, οὐδὲ ἐνετύπωσεν ἑαυτῇ· κἂν γὰρ ἀνατυπώσῃ, εἰς φύσιν ἔρχεται, καὶ τὰ τοῦ σώματος ποιητικά. ῞Ωστε λέγει μὲν τὸ στόμα, οὐκ οἶδε δὲ ἡ διάνοια τί λέγει, ἢ ἓν μόνον, ὅτι οὐκ ἔστι σῶμα· τοῦτο μόνον οἶδε.

Divine incorporeality is fundamentally impossible to understand; its very annunciation is instantaneously its semantic and lexical verge. Imagination is always embodiment—this represents the very crisis that apophatic theology aims to address.

Those who attempt to say too much about God has a psychic illness, according to

Chrysostom. “What then is the cause of such a sickness [ἀρρωστίας]? It is a meddlesome and curious mind-set [γνώμη], it is desiring to know all the causes of everything that exists,” Chrysostom warns, “and contesting the incomprehensible and ineffable providence of God, and shamelessly over-investigating that which is boundless and unsearchable.”59 The bodily and psychic integrity of such busybodies are therefore imperilled.

In addition to the limits of loquacity and dangers of psychic illness, in his polemic against the Greeks and the Christian heretics, Chrysostom forwards an ironic politics of vision. By attempting to see God, whether with one’s reason or physically with the eyes (as in the case of a statue, for instance), one transgresses the boundaries of

θεοπρέπεια—the Greeks and the heretics are thus both guilty of the same scopic scandal. In the quotation above from the fourth homily on Romans, Chrysostom said that the reasoning of the Greeks was darkened, so that they cannot see the true light.60

He makes a similar point regarding the heretics. “I mean, they are in a similar predicament to people who are ill and suffering impairment of their bodily vision,”

Chrysostom says, “just as the latter have a revulsion for the sunlight on account of their weakness of vision and invalids turn away from the healthier foods, so too those ailing in spirit and handicapped in their mind’s vision have lost the power to look directly at

59 Scand. 2.1 (SC 79.60–61): Τίς οὖν ἡ αἰτία τῆς ἀρρωστίας τῆς τοσαύτης ἐστίν; Ἡ πολυπράγμων καὶ περίεργος γνώμη, καὶ τὸ βούλεσθαι πάντων τῶν γινομένων εἰδέναι τὰς αἰτίας ἁπάσας, καὶ φιλονεικεῖν τὴν ἀκατάληπτον καὶ ἄρρητον τοῦ Θεοῦ πρόνοιαν, τὴν ἀπέραντον καὶ ἀνεξιχνίαστον περιεργάζεσθαι ἀναισχύντως καὶ πολυπραγμονεῖν. 60 Hom. Rom. 4[3].2 (F1.38).

the light of truth.”61 Using the language of disease and disability, Chrysostom casts his own vision of the spiritual state of his opponents. Their pagan and heretical mind-set has become an illness that disables them from looking at the light. Ironically, by trying to see too much, they have become blind. By attempting to corporealise God, they have compromised their own spiritual and bodily integrity—and the bodily impairment is serious, since it relates to the eyes, considered as some of the most honourable parts of the body.62

As Patricia Cox Miller rightly notes, the “eyes of the flesh” and the “eyes of faith” or of the spirit were linked in Chrysostom’s thought. Spiritual blindness means that one cannot adequately “envision” with the fleshly eyes.63 Georgia Frank is correct to say that Chrysostom’s point was “not to reject bodily perceptions but to learn how to see more clearly and attentively through them.” 64 Blindness to the light is specifically related to the inability to see the true power of God, and is thus linked to irrationality and madness. 65 The discourse of disability, especially visual disability, is used extensively in Chrysostom’s polemic against heretics and Greeks. In addition to accusations of sexual turpitude that accompanied the worship of created beings, the polemic of bodily disintegrity and disability, accompanied by the language of weakness

61 Hom. Gen. 8.8 (PG 53.72.25–32): Τοιοῦτον γὰρ οἱ νοσοῦντες, καὶ οἱ τὰς ὄψεις ταύτας τὰς σωματικὰς ἀσθενῶς διακείμενοι. Καθάπερ γὰρ οὗτοι καὶ πρὸς τὸ ἡλιακὸν φῶς ἀπεχθάνονται διὰ τὴν τῆς ὄψεως ἀσθένειαν, καὶ οἱ νοσοῦντες καὶ τὰ ὑγιεινότερα τῶν σιτίων ἀποστρέφονται· οὕτω δὴ καὶ οὔτοι νοσοῦντες τὴν ψυχὴν, καὶ τὸ τῆς διανοίας ὄμμα πεπηρωμένοι, πρὸς τὸ φῶς τῆς ἀληθείας ἐνατενίσαι οὐκ ἰσχύουσι. Translation: Hill, Homilies on Genesis 1–17, 109–10. 62 Hom 1 Cor. 30 (F2.364–76). 63 Miller, Corporeal Imagination, 84–85. Focusing specifically on how Chrysostom tells his audience to “see” the invisible in the visible martyr relics of Babylas, Miller’s analysis of vision and corporeality in Chrysostom is most helpful in bringing together physical and spiritual aspects of sight; see also Rylaarsdam, Divine Pedagogy, 229–30, 243–46, 260–67. For Chrysostom’s distinction between the “eyes of the flesh” and the “eyes of faith,” see Catech. 3.3.9–22 (SC 366.220–22). This rhetoric of bodily and spiritual eyesight is also present in the homilies on Genesis; see Hom. Gen. 10.8 (PG 53.86.2–5). 64 Georgia Frank, “‘Taste and See’: The Eucharist and the Eyes of Faith in the Fourth Century,” Church History 70 (2001): 636; see also Miller, Corporeal Imagination, 206n14. 65 Miller, Corporeal Imagination, 85.

and powerlessness (e.g. ἀσθένεια and οὐκ ἰσχύουσι in Hom. Gen. 8.8), function too as an attack on the masculinity of his opponents.66

Autonomy/Heteronomy

From Chrysostom’s explanation above, his view is once again very clear: when something is created, it is body. Createdness presupposes embodiment. But the link between divinity and incorporeality, and createdness and corporeality, also serves in the interest of the second principle of Chrysostom’s Gottesbild buttressing the masculinisation of God, namely that of autonomy and heteronomy. The notion of divine autonomy assists us in laying bare the conceptual dynamics of all Chrysostom’s doulological metaphors for God. By disavowing the divine of corporeality, an absolute and universal measure of mastery is attributed to it. God is the ultimate master and ruler over all, because he has no body, he is essentially uncreated or unbegotten (ἀγέννητος), with no beginning (ἄναρχος). He is therefore the only One who is autonomous.67 The term ἄναρχος also carries a sense of being “unruled,” that is, not being under the government or control of anything. Embodiment is subjugation—I refer to this as the heteronomy of the body.68 Corporeal heteronomy implies that any created being, which has some sort of body or materiality, is subject to be ruled and dominated by the incorporeal. Bodies can never rule themselves; they are made to be ruled—animals are ruled by humans, and humans are ruled by God, or later by sin.

The concepts of divine autonomy and corporeal heteronomy stole the show in the theological controversies of the fourth century, particularly with regard to the nature

66 Hennie Stander, “Disabled Men and Women in Early Christianity: A Study of Chrysostom’s Writings,” Ekklesiastikos Pharos 95 (2013): 332–45. 67 Hom. Col. 5.3 (F5.228). 68 Chris L. de Wet, Preaching Bondage: John Chrysostom and the Discourse of Slavery in Early Christianity (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015), 24–44.

and role of the Holy Spirit in the Trinity. In his battle against Eunomius and the

Pneumatomachoi (“spirit-fighters”), who promoted the doctrine of subnumeration

(ὑπαρίθμησις —that is, subordination based on numbered rankings), Basil of Caesarea had to forcefully defend the status of both the Son and especially the Holy Spirit as uncreated and autonomous in relation to the Father. Basil’s twentieth chapter of his De

Spiritu Sancto is crucial in this regard, arguing for the autonomy of the Spirit (and at the same time justifying physical slavery among human beings).69 Basil writes:

Whom, then, do you call free? Him who is free from rule? Him who neither

has power to rule another nor can himself be ruled? But there is no nature

of this sort among the things that exist, and to think this concerning the

Spirit is plainly impious. So, if he is created, he is clearly a slave [δουλεύει]

along with everything else, and “everything,” Scripture says, “is your

slave” (Ps 118.91); but if he is above creation, he participates in the

kingship.70

And with regard to the Son:

Let us not, then, think of this economy through the Son as a compulsory

service done out of a slave-like subjection, but rather as a voluntary

69 A point which I have discussed in detail: Chris L. de Wet, The Unbound God: Slavery and the Formation of Early Christian Thought, Routledge Studies in the Early Christian World (London: Routledge, 2018), 78–103. 70 Spir. 20.51.43–50 (SC 17.206): Τίνα οὖν λέγεις ἐλεύθερον; Τὸν ἀβασίλευτον; τὸν μήτε ἄρχειν ἑτέρου δύναμιν ἔχοντα, μήτε ἄρχεσθαι καταδεχόμενον; ᾿Αλλ' οὔτε ἔστι τις τοιαύτη φύσις ἐν τοῖς οὖσι, καὶ τοῦτο ἐννοῆσαι κατὰ τοῦ Πνεύματος, ἀσέβεια περιφανής. ῞Ωστε εἰ μὲν ἔκτισται, δουλεύει δηλαδὴ μετὰ πάντων. «Τὰ γὰρ σύμπαντα, φησί, δοῦλα σά»· εἰ δὲ ὑπὲρ τὴν κτίσιν ἐστί, τῆς βασιλείας ἐστὶ κοινωνόν. Translation: Stephen Hildebrand, trans., St Basil the Great: On the Holy Spirit, Kindle ed., Popular Patristics Series 42 (Yonkers, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2011), loc. 1398.

solicitude that acts according to the will of God the Father and tender-

heartedness for his own creation.71

Basil writes these words against his opponents and accuses them of turning a part of the godhead into a slave. They argued that the Spirit was a superior but created being, similar to the angels.72 Such a derogatory and blasphemous feminisation of the Son and the Spirit would prove unacceptable to Basil. Basil’s opponent, Eunomius, never actually calls the Holy Spirit a “slave” (δοῦλος or any of its synonyms); he uses the language of free servanthood, using terms like ὑπουργός and ὑπηρέτης for the Son and

Holy Spirit respectively, both words implying a type of servant (with military, medical, and cultic connotations). 73 Thereby, Eunomius attempted to avoid the negative stereotypes of slavery. But Basil shrugs this off as nonsense, and argues that, in actual fact, Eunomius and the Pneumatomachoi reduce the Spirit to a slave—for Basil,

Eunomius’ was a shameful and effeminate Gottesbild. The fourth-century Nicene trinitarian formulations, like those we see in Basil, were therefore accompanied by a

71 Spir. 8.18.29–36 (SC 17.138): Μὴ τοίνυν ἐκ δουλικῆς ταπεινότητος ἠναγκασμένην ὑπηρεσίαν νοῶμεν, τὴν διὰ Υἱοῦ οἰκονομίαν, ἀλλὰ τὴν ἑκούσιον ἐπιμέλειαν, ἀγαθότητι καὶ εὐσπλαγχνίᾳ, κατὰ τὸ θέλημα τοῦ Θεοῦ καὶ Πατρός, περὶ τὸ ἴδιον πλάσμα ἐνεργουμένην. Οὕτω γὰρ εὐσεβήσομεν, ἐν πᾶσι τοῖς ἐπιτελουμένοις καὶ τελείαν αὐτῷ μαρτυροῦντες τὴν δύναμιν, καὶ οὐδαμοῦ τοῦ βουλήματος τοῦ πατρικοῦ διιστῶντες. Translation: Hildebrand, On the Holy Spirit, loc 751. 72 Spir. 16, 20 (SC 17.171–83, 204–6). 73 Apol. 27.1–6 (Richard P. Vaggione, ed., Eunomius: The Extant Works, Oxford Early Christian Texts [Oxford: Clarendon, 1987], 70–71); on the social connotations of the servant-terminology, see Jörg Rüpke, From Jupiter to Christ: On the History of Religion in the Roman Imperial Period, trans. David M. B. Richardson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 84–85; see also Jennifer L. Larson, Greek Nymphs: Myth, Cult, Lore (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 207. For a discussion of the Hellenistic use of the term ὑπηρέτης, see Borimir Jordan, “The Meaning of the Technical Term Hyperesia in Naval Contexts of the Fifth and Fourth Centuries B.C.,” California Studies in Classical Antiquity 2 (1968): 183–208. According to TDNT, the word differs from δοῦλος, and usually refers to a paid servant.

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universal and detailed masculinisation and kyriarchisation of God and a total doulologisation of creation.74

We see striking similarities between the rhetoric of Basil and Chrysostom.75

Chrysostom fully subscribed to the notion of corporeal heteronomy,76 and by defending the notions of divine autonomy and corporeal heteronomy, Chrysostom also legitimises

Nicene trinitarian and pneumatological foundations. “For by nature he [Christ] was

Lord and we were slaves,” Chrysostom explains. 77 Nature here refers to Christ’s divinity, his incorporeality and autonomy—heteronomy is a most basic feature of human nature to Chrysostom. He fiercely guarded the heteronomy of God and Christ, which often required him to perform some complicated exegetical manoeuvres. For instance, while defending the divinity and heteronomy of Christ, this time against some

Arian detractors, Chrysostom had to show that when Paul calls God the head of Christ like the husband is the head of the wife (1 Cor. 11:3), the term “head” (κεφαλή) had different meanings in different contexts:

But do you understand the term “head” differently in the case of the

husband and the wife, from what you understand in terms of Christ?

Therefore in the case of the Father and the Son, we must also understand it

differently. “But how must we understand it differently?” someone says.

74 On divine masculinisation, see esp. Burrus, Begotten, Not Made. On cosmic doulologisation, see De Wet, Preaching Bondage, 45–81; Unbound God, 40–77. 75 With regard to the Holy Spirit, specifically, see Hom. 2 Cor. 7 (F3.82–99). 76 For an extensive discussion of heteronomy in Chrysostom, see De Wet, Preaching Bondage, 45–81. More generally, on Chrysostom’s Christology, see also Ashish J. Naidu, Transformed in Christ: Christology and the Christian Life in John Chrysostom, Princeton Theological Monograph Series 188 (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2012), 83–167. 77 Hom. Jo. 71.1 (PG 59.386.17–18): Φύσει γὰρ αὐτὸς Κύριος ἦν, καὶ ἡμεῖς δοῦλοι. Nature (φύσις), in this case, should not be understood in terms of Aristotelian natural slavery; see De Wet, Preaching Bondage, 24–34. It rather points to the natural cosmic headship of Christ and the natural heteronomy of creation.

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According to the context. For had Paul meant to speak of rule and

subjection, as you say, he would not have introduced the example of a wife,

but rather of a slave and a master. For if the wife is under subjection to us,

it is then as a wife, as free [ἐλευθέρα], as equal in honour [ὁμότιμος]. And

the Son, too, even though he did become obedient to the Father, it was as

the Son of God, it was as God. For as the obedience of the Son to the Father

is greater than what we find among persons towards those who begot them,

so also is his freedom greater. Surely it will not then be said that the

conditions of the Son’s relation to the Father are greater and more intimate

than those among human beings, and of the Father’s to the Son being less.

For if we admire the Son that he was obedient even as unto death, and the

death of the cross, and consider this the great wonder about him, we ought

to admire the Father as well, that he begot such a son, not as a slave under

command, but as free, exhibiting obedience and giving counsel. For the

counselor is no slave. But again, when you hear of a counselor, do not

understand it as though the Father was in need, but that the Son shares the

same honour with him who begot him. Do not, then, stretch the example of

the husband and the wife to apply to everything.78

78 Hom. 1 Cor. 26.2 (F2.311): Ἀλλ' ἑτέρως ἐκλαμβάνεις ἐπὶ γυναικὸς καὶ ἀνδρὸς τὴν κεφαλὴν, καὶ οὐχ ὡς ἐπὶ τοῦ Χριστοῦ; Οὐκοῦν καὶ ἐπὶ τοῦ υἱοῦ καὶ τοῦ πατρὸς ἑτέρως ἐκληπτέον ἡμῖν. Καὶ πῶς ἑτέρως ἐκληπτέον, φησί; Κατὰ τὸ αἴτιον. Καὶ γὰρ εἴπερ ἀρχὴν ἐζήτει εἰπεῖν, ὡς σὺ φὴς, καὶ ὑποταγὴν ὁ Παῦλος, οὐκ ἂν γυναῖκα παρήγαγεν εἰς μέσον, ἀλλὰ δοῦλον μᾶλλον καὶ δεσπότην. Εἰ γὰρ καὶ ὑποτέτακται ἡμῖν ἡ γυνὴ, ἀλλ' ὡς γυνὴ, ἀλλ' ὡς ἐλευθέρα, καὶ ὡς ὁμότιμος. Καὶ ὁ υἱὸς δὲ, εἰ καὶ ὑπήκοος γέγονε τῷ πατρὶ, ἀλλ' ὡς υἱὸς θεοῦ, ἀλλ' ὡς θεός. Ὥσπερ γὰρ πλείων ἡ πειθὼ τῷ υἱῷ πρὸς τὸν πατέρα, ἢ τοῖς ἀνθρώποις πρὸς τοὺς γεγεννηκότας, οὕτω καὶ ἡ ἐλευθερία μείζων. Οὐ γὰρ δήπου τὰ μὲν τοῦ υἱοῦ πρὸς τὸν πατέρα μείζονα τῶν ἀνθρώπων καὶ γνησιώτερα, τὰ δὲ τοῦ πατρὸς πρὸς τὸν υἱὸν ἐλάττονα. Εἰ γὰρ θαυμάζομεν τὸν υἱὸν, ὅτι ὑπήκουσεν, ὡς καὶ μέχρι θανάτου ἐλθεῖν, καὶ θανάτου σταυροῦ, καὶ θαῦμα αὐτοῦ μέγα τιθέμεθα τοῦτο· θαυμάζειν δεῖ καὶ τὸν πατέρα, ὅτι τοιοῦτον ἐγέννησεν, οὐχ ὡς δοῦλον ἐπιταττόμενον, ἀλλ' ὡς ἐλεύθερον ὑπακούοντα καὶ σύμβουλον ὄντα· ὁ γὰρ σύμβουλος οὐ δοῦλος. Σύμβουλον δὲ ὅταν ἀκούσῃς πάλιν, μὴ ὡς τοῦ πατρὸς ἐνδεῶς ἔχοντος ἄκουε, ἀλλ' ὡς τοῦ παιδὸς ὁμοτίμως πρὸς τὸν γεγεννηκότα. Μὴ τοίνυν εἰς πάντα ἕλκε τὸ παράδειγμα τοῦ ἀνδρὸς καὶ τῆς γυναικός.

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In this most interesting passage, Chrysostom elaborates on the limits of exegetical paradigmatism and the theological comparability of ancient social structures to the

Godhead, and the rhetoric is almost identical to that of Basil. The conundrum of 1

Corinthians 11:3, to Chrysostom, can be easily resolved if one understands that the type of subjection a wife shows to her husband is not the same as that of a slave. This was common knowledge, and Chrysostom was very aware of it.79 In this case, Chrysostom states that the wife is equal in honour (ὁμότιμος) to the husband (however, it should be noted that the issue of the wife being equal in honour to the husband is a highly contested and inconsistent point in Chrysostom, as we will illustrate in detail in the next chapter). The argument in this case requires the ὁμοτιμία of the wife, since it needs to mirror the ὁμοτιμία between Christ and the Father. In other cases, Chrysostom sees the

ὁμοτιμία as something long lost after the Fall. The notion of ὁμοτιμία was crucial and common in early Christian trinitarian debates and was almost synonymous with

ὁμοούσιος, consubstantiality.80 The social circumstances permitted this type of analogy where a father and a son are ὁμότιμος. John McGuckin has argued that the

Cappadocians, especially Gregory of Nazianzus, were the forerunners in the theorisation of a doctrine that proposed equality of honour and communality between fathers and sons, “the very opposites of the common Roman understanding of the semantics of fathers and sons.”81 He also notes, quite interestingly, that this type of thinking sprouted from the Cappadocians’ own personal experiences with their fathers, which was not always irenic.

79 For a detailed discussion of Chrysostom’s views on the difference between the subjugation of a wife and a slave, see De Wet, Preaching Bondage, 97–105. 80 See the masterfully written work by Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government, trans. Lorenzo Chiesa and Matteo Mandarini (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), 220–21. 81 John A. McGuckin, St. Gregory of Nazianzus: An Intellectual Biography (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001), 281.

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Overall, I think McGuckin’s observation is accurate; however, the social circumstances of the fourth century were already receptive for this kind of thinking regarding the equality between fathers and sons. As noted in the previous chapter,

Mathew Kuefler has argued that masculinity was in crisis in the fourth century, and that the figure of the Roman paterfamilias, particularly, lost much of his power and authority—the patria potestas was in decline.82 This crisis and decline in the patria potestas probably supported father-son ideologies like those of the Cappadocians and that of John Chrysostom in the present case. By this time, the fatherhood of God had also become, perhaps, a somewhat static metaphor (although not a dead metaphor by any means), with the status of God as Father formalised and institutionalised within creedal developments. Moreover, Chrysostom also acknowledges that the relationships between human fathers and sons are not necessarily the same as that between the divine

Father and Son (another social paradigm that should be applied with care). Although the figure of the father may have lost some of its potency, we must not assume that masculinity in general was in decline. The crisis of late ancient masculinity argued by

Kuefler necessitated a transformation in masculine ideology. In the case of Chrysostom, as my arguments will continue to demonstrate throughout this study, discourses of masculinity in addition to fatherhood were spirited and almost universally utilised to make sense of Christian theology and ethics.

Thus, Chrysostom puts less emphasis on the traditional views of fatherhood, and prefers to use the image of the slave and the master to further his argument. Unlike the patria potestas, the dominica potestas was flourishing.83 And as with Basil’s retort to

82 Mathew Kuefler, The Manly Eunuch: Masculinity, Gender Ambiguity, and Christian Ideology in Late Antiquity, The Chicago Series on Sexuality, History, and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 37–103. 83 Kyle Harper, Slavery in the Late Roman World, AD 275–425 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 3–10; De Wet, Preaching Bondage, 1–44.

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Eunomius, Chrysostom states, rightly, that the main difference here is that a wife is, according to ancient social standards, free (ἐλεύθερα)—in the same way, Christ is free and works according to his own volition. He is not subservient or subjugated, but operates within his own free volition. Freedom (ἐλευθερία) is what characterizes divine

ὁμοτιμία. Like Basil, Chrysostom goes to great lengths to explain that the relationship between Christ and the Father is not the relationship of a master and a slave.

But at the same time, most interestingly, this slavery language is exactly what

Eunomius tried to avoid—but rather than using the example of a husband and wife,

Eunomius used the example of free servanthood. Ironically, Chrysostom actually does the same as Eunomius, using the language of free servanthood; he views Christ as an advisor or counselor (σύμβουλος, in the Latin sense, legatus or even consul84)—a term that also has military, and hence masculine, connotations. Although unlike Eunomius,

Chrysostom makes it clear that a σύμβουλος can never be a δοῦλος. Chrysostom may be alluding to Romans 11:34 which states that no human being can be a counselor to

God. Chrysostom also believes that in Genesis 1:26, when God says, “Let us make man,” the Father is conferring with Christ, his counselor.85 The major distinction may lie in the use of simple choice of which compound nouns to use as appellations for

Christ’s or the Holy Spirit’s role in the Trinity.

Prepositions and prepositional affixes played an important role in the Trinitarian discourse of the fourth century. 86 Eunomius’ terms for the Holy Spirit, namely

ὑπουργός and ὑπηρέτης, both start with the prepositional affix ὑπ-, deduced from ὑπό

84 LSJ. 85 Hom. Gen. 8.8 (PG 53.72.5), 14.16 (PG 53.116.9–10); Serm. Gen. 2.2.114 (SC 433.190–91); see also Blowers, Drama of the Divine Economy, 125–27. 86 See, for example, Christopher A. Beeley, Gregory of Nazianzus on the Trinity and the Knowledge of God: In Your Light We Shall See Light, Oxford Studies in Historical Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 296–97.

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(under), which definitely denotes a sense of subjugation and dependence. Basil’s reductionistic response against Eunomius is therefore not surprising—subjugation implies servility. Chrysostom’s language is perhaps theologically safer than that of

Eunomius, since his term, σύμβουλος, starting with σύμ-, a prepositional affix deduced from σύν (with, together), is more neutral, denoting a sense of communality and participation. In this sense, by emphasising the lordship of the Father but at the same time focusing on the freedom of Christ and his communal participation in and consultation with the divine counsel or will (βουλή), Chrysostom retains the kyriarchality of the Godhead. This very same discursive framework is pointed out by

Paul Blowers with regard to Gregory of Nyssa, specifically in his own refutation of

Eunomius.87

In another instance in which he defends divine autonomy, we see Chrysostom especially perturbed by the Manichaean belief that Matter (ὕλη) was uncreated: “A

Manichean comes and says, Matter is uncreated; say to him, In the beginning God made heaven and earth [Gen. 1:1].”88 Hill is correct in noting that Genesis 1:1 becomes, practically, an anti-Manichaean mantra to Chrysostom.89 If Matter is not created, it too is autonomous, which was a notion that Chrysostom was not willing to accept since it jeopardised God’s absolute rule and the fact that he is the sole creator. Matter, in this

Manichaean sense, is then self-acting (αὐτόματη) and independent of God; it can also not be the product of a benevolent God.90 Chrysostom further states that, according to

87 See Gregory of Nyssa, Contr. Eunom. 2.68–69 (SC 524.340–41) in Blowers, Drama of the Divine Economy, 125. 88 Serm. Gen. 1.2.157–60 (SC 433.156–57): Προσέρχεται μανιχαῖος λέγων ὅτι «ἀγένητός ἐστιν ἡ ὕλη». Eἰπὲ πρὸς αὐτὸν, «Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἐποίησεν ὁ Θεὸς τὸν οὐρανὸν, καὶ τὴν γῆν», καὶ πάντα τὸν τῦφον αὐτοῦ κατέστρεψας εὐθέως. Translation: Hill, Sermons on the Book of Genesis, 30 (his italics). 89 Hill, Sermons on the Book of Genesis, 151n15.

90 Scand. 4.12.1–4 (SC 79.88–89).

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Manichaean belief, the Demiurge “set aside only one part of creation,”91 which was a view indeed held by some Middle Platonists like Hermogenes.92 Chrysostom did seem to have some knowledge of Manichaean cosmogony. The Manichaeans understood

Matter to be the Principle of Darkness, being evil, and viewed it in distinctly female terms.93 This may also have been an issue for Chrysostom since, as we will see in chapter 4, the female was created from the male, and therefore subjugated. For

Chrysostom, the uncreated and self-acting female Manichaean Matter was a doctrine squarely opposed to the notion of divine masculine autonomy.

As we also noted above, the image of God as δημιουργός was a masculine one.

The Manichaeans, along with the Marcionites and Valentinians, as Chrysostom complains, rejected the idea of God as δημιουργός.94 To them, the δημιουργός was distinct from God—she was an evil female presence. But Chrysostom keeps emphasising: creation is made by God, and therefore good; although the body is heteronomous and therefore subjugated, it remains beautiful and noble.95 There had to be a balance. “And some have admired it so much above its worth so as to consider it

God,” Chrysostom says of creation, “while others have been so ignorant of its beauty as to assert it to be unworthy of God’s creative force, and to attribute the greater part of

91 Scand. 4.12.2–3 (SC 79.88–89): ἓν αὐτῆς ἀποτεμόντες μέρος. 92 See Hippolytus, Haer. 8.17.2 (Marcovich 336.6–10); see esp. Byard Bennett, “Didymus the Blind’s Knowledge of Manichaeism,” in The Light and the Darkness: Studies in Manichaeism and Its World, ed. Paul Mirecki and Jason BeDuhn, Nag Hammadi and Manichaean Studies 50 (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 55. For Tertullian’s similar attack on Hermogenes’ cosmogony in Adversus Hermogenem, see Geoffrey D. Dunn, Tertullian, The Early Church Fathers (London: Routledge, 2004), 36. 93 Coyle, “Women in Manichaeism,” 90; Blowers, Drama of the Divine Economy, 178–81. 94 Serm. Gen. 1.3.214–20 (SC 433.162–65); on the Demiurge in Marcionism, and its early Christian refutations, see Blowers, Drama of the Divine Economy, 93–96. There were, of course, important differences between Middle Platonic, Manichaean, Marcionite, and Valentinian demiurgies—but to Chrysostom, they are all the same in that Matter, in some way or another, remains uncreated; see Bennett, “Knowledge of Manichaeism,” 38–67. 95 See also Clark, “The Old Adam,” 173–76.

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it to a certain evil Matter.”96 In Manichaean belief, generally, material creation was all but a blueprint for the divine will. Chrysostom considers pantheistic religion the opposite extreme of Manichaeism. Aesthetics were crucial to Chrysostom—one had to admire the beauty of creation, and use it as a pointer to a benevolent and autonomous creator.

Considering the principle of divine autonomy and corporeal heteronomy, we may also deduce that Christian liberty remained highly paradoxical—God and Christ are always in the positions of masters. Even when someone is emancipated from sin, they still remain under the rule of God—the paradox of Christian freedom. Commenting on

Romans 6:18, Chrysostom explains how God frees people from sin by using the metaphor of kidnapping,97 a scourge very common in the late antique slave trade:

There are two gifts of God that he [Paul] here points out. The “freeing from

sin,” and also the “making them slaves to righteousness” [Rom. 6:18],

which is better than any freedom. For God has done the same as if someone

were to take an orphan, who had been kidnapped by barbarians into their

own land, and were not only to free him from captivity, but were to appoint

a kind father over him, and lead him to great dignity. And this has been

done for us.98

96 Hom. 2 Cor. 21.4 (F3.223–24): καὶ οἱ μὲν οὕτως αὐτὸν ὑπὲρ τὴν ἀξίαν ἐθαύμασαν ὡς αὐτὸν νομίσαι εἶναι θεόν· οἱ δὲ οὕτως αὐτοῦ τὸ κάλλος ἠγνόησαν, ὡς ἀνάξιον εἶναι φάναι τῆς τοῦ θεοῦ δημιουργίας, καὶ ὕλῃ τινὶ πονηρᾷ τὸ πλέον αὐτοῦ ἀναθεῖναι. 97 For more on the kidnapping of Romans by barbarians, see Noel Lenski, “Captivity, Slavery and Cultural Exchange between Rome and the Germans from the First to the Seventh Century CE,” in Invisible Citizens: Captives and Their Consequences, ed. Catherine M. Cameron (Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press, 2008), 80–109. 98 Hom. Rom. 12[11].4 (F1.167): Δύο ἐνταῦθα δείκνυσι τοῦ θεοῦ δωρεὰς, τό τε ἁμαρτίας ἐλευθερῶσαι, καὶ τὸ δουλῶσαι τῇ δικαιοσύνῃ, ὅπερ ἐλευθερίας ἁπάσης ἄμεινόν ἐστι. Καὶ γὰρ ταὐτὸν πεποίηκεν ὁ θεὸς, οἷον ἂν εἴ τις παῖδα ὀρφανὸν λαβὼν ὑπὸ βαρβάρων εἰς τὴν αὐτῶν ἀπενεχθέντα γῆν, μὴ μόνον τῆς αἰχμαλωσίας ἀπαλλάξειεν, ἀλλὰ καὶ πατέρα αὐτῷ κηδεμονικὸν ἐπιστήσειε, καὶ εἰς μεγίστην ἀξίαν ἀγάγοι. ὃ δὴ καὶ ἐφ' ἡμῶν γέγονεν.

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Sin, in this case, is portrayed as a savage barbarian slaver and kidnapper, while God is sketched as the civilised and caring Roman hero, who even takes up the role of a father—once again, a very masculine image. We find a similar image elsewhere in the homilies, where sin is replaced with the devil, who is depicted as a pimp who enslaves and prostitutes the flesh, while Christ is the prince who sets her free.99 This is the most significant and profound difference between divinity and humanity in Chrysostom’s thought, and will serve as a point of departure for many other discussions in this study.

Humanity and animality differ from the divine in that they are created as bodies. It must be understood that corporeal heteronomy is a subset within the discourse of slavery.

Thus, the language within which corporeal heteronomy was expressed was doulological—at this juncture, God is proclaimed as the ultimate master, the universal slaveholder, and all embodied beings are supposed to be slaves of God. This included angels, humans, and animals.

Conclusion

This first important finding then, in this detailed excursus of how Chrysostom conceives of masculinity in his commentary on Genesis 1–3, is that he establishes God as the ideal

Masculine. Chrysostom constructs his vision of masculinity through the meticulous construction of his Gottesbild. This is a pivotal demonstrandum for Chrysostom, since he has now established the ultimate, but unattainable, Masculine standard by which to measure all other human aspirations toward masculinity. Essentially, it means that no human being can achieve absolute masculinity. Some come close, in Chrysostom’s thinking, like Adam before the Fall, or the apostle Paul, or some monks; but no one

99 Hom. 1 Cor. 18.3 (F2.209); see also De Wet, Preaching Bondage, 240.

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actually reaches a state of ideal masculinity. Chrysostom describes God as a father, son, slaveholder, landowner, and craftsman. But in a more pervasive sense, it is God’s incorporeality and autonomy that establish him as the ultimate and ideal masculine. In the next chapter, I will examine those occupying the median of the cosmic hierarchy— namely humanity as we have them in Adam and Eve. Their tale, as I hope to illuminate, represents the great masculine struggle between the divine and the bestial, between the soul and the passions, between those who are supposed to rule and dominate, and the subjugated.

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CHAPTER 3

Imaging Adam, Overseeing Eve: Human Dominion, Animality, and the Great

Struggle of Masculinity

Introduction

Since the late fifteenth century, 1 it has become almost customary to view John

Chrysostom as a relentless proponent for the vilification of all females—a misogynist— while at the same time cultivating a rhetoric that absolutely and universally valorises

Christian masculine virtue. 2 The misogyny viewpoint is perhaps understandable, considering the common obloquy against women in many of Chrysostom’s works and in traditions of his life written by his later biographers, especially with his alleged battle against the empress Eudoxia,3 or in his invective against female cohabiting ascetics, or subintroductae.4 Wolf Liebeschuetz has gone so far as calling Chrysostom’s alleged

1 Chrysostom is a curious and prominent source regarding the “evil of women” in the Malleus Maleficarum (or The Hammer of Witches) by Heinrich Kramer (Institoris) and Jacob Sprenger, a 1487 handbook for the interrogation and prosecution of witches; see Malleus Maleficarum Q.6 (1.47B) in Christopher S. Mackay, The Hammer of Witches: A Complete Translation of the Malleus Maleficarum (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 162; see also Wendy Mayer, “John Chrysostom and Women Revisited,” in Men and Women in the Early Christian Centuries, ed. Wendy Mayer and Ian Elmer, Early Christian Studies 18 (Strathfield: St. Paul’s, 2014), 211–12 for an overview of scholarship on the matter of Chrysostom as a misogynist. 2 On Chrysostom’s rhetoric of masculine virtue, see Chris L. de Wet, “Claiming Corporeal Capital: John Chrysostom’s Homilies on the Maccabean Martyrs,” Journal of Early Christian History 2.1 (2012): 3– 21; “Virtue and the (Un)Making of Men in the Thought of John Chrysostom,” in Men and Women in the Early Christian Centuries, ed. Wendy Mayer and Ian Elmer, Early Christian Studies 18 (Strathfield: St. Paul’s, 2014), 227–50; Susanna Drake, Slandering the Jew: Sexuality and Difference in Early Christian Texts, Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 78–98. 3 See, for instance, the work of Claudia Tiersch, Johannes Chrysostomus in Konstantinopel (398–404): Weltsicht und Wirken eines Bischofs in der Hauptstadt des Oströmischen Reiches, Studien und Texte zu Antike und Christentum 6 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2002), 202–68. 4 While her work on gender in Chrysostom is certainly useful, Aideen Hartney largely bases her arguments about Chrysostom’s understanding of gender and gender roles on his invective against female subintroductae, which could give a misogynistic impression; Aideen M. Hartney, “Manly Women and Womanly Men: The Subintroductae and John Chrysostom,” in Desire and Denial in Byzantium: Papers from the Thirty-First Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, University of Sussex, Brighton, March 1997, ed. Liz James (Aldershot: Ashgate Variorum, 1999), 41–48; John Chrysostom and the

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misogynistic disposition a “psychological handicap,” which contributed to his failures in Constantinople.5 This characterisation fits in with yet another common theory that

Chrysostom only later in Constantinople started to cultivate sensible relationships, even friendships, with women of elite status; Olympias, of course, being a prime example.

The theory also contends that Chrysostom’s misogyny was at its worst during his ministry in Antioch.6

These views have, however, been refuted rather convincingly by several scholars, and we have seen more moderate views on Chrysostom and women being propagated. One of the major findings in this research is that the invective against

Eudoxia, and the construction of Chrysostom’s bitter battle with the empress, was perhaps more propagandistic than realistic.7 Quite interestingly, Wendy Mayer has also analysed Chrysostom’s correspondence to women within his Antiochene and

Constantinopolitan ministries, concluding that Chrysostom’s apparent Antiochene misogyny is unfounded. Despite minor differences in the status of the female correspondents in Chrysostom’s epistolary corpus, those in Constantinople often being of a higher social status (since Chrysostom, too, occupied a more prestigious position in Constantinople), we have similar relationships being cultivated with women both in

Transformation of the City (London: Duckworth, 2004), 85–102. However, we should also guard against overly apologetic readings that label Chrysostom’s invective against women as mere “rhetorical exaggeration,” which is even less helpful; see especially David Ford, Women and Men in the Early Church: The Full Views of St. John Chrysostom (South Canaan, PA: St. Tikhon’s Seminary Press, 1996), 92, 90–113. Elizabeth Clark’s work on the subintroductae in Chrysostom better captures the tension between what could be seen, on the one hand, as misogyny and female friendships, on the other; Elizabeth A. Clark, Jerome, Chrysostom, and Friends: Essays and Translations (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 1979), 1–106. 5 John W. G. H. Liebeschuetz, Ambrose and John Chrysostom: Clerics between Desert and Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 231. 6 For a more detailed discussion of this theory, see Mayer, “John Chrysostom and Women Revisited,” 211–21. 7 Wendy Mayer, “Constantinopolitan Women in Chrysostom’s Circle,” Vigiliae Christianae 53.3 (1999): 265–88; “Doing Violence to the Image of an Empress: The Destruction of Eudoxia’s Reputation,” in Violence in Late Antiquity: Perceptions and Practices, ed. Harold A. Drake (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 205–13.

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Antioch and in Constantinople, many of them long-term.8 There are also more nuanced studies of Chrysostom’s treatises against the subintroductae.9 We also have studies looking more positively (or at least moderately) at Chrysostom’s use of biblical female imagery and exemplarity. 10 We should also not assume that Chrysostom is overly positive about men in his works. As will be seen throughout this book, Chrysostom often censures men for not living by the high standards of Christian masculinity. This does not necessarily make Chrysostom a misandrist.

We are therefore left with acclamatory and castigating material about females in Chrysostom’s works and, with the exception of his letters, we find that his statements regarding women, and men for that matter, do not necessarily reflect how he may have engaged with them personally.11 Whether he was a misogynist or (probably) not may even be an argumentative distraction, with negligible bearing on how he conceived masculinity, femininity, and gender relations. This apparent contradiction only serves to illustrate the disparities between an author’s theology and personal interactions— theoretical and philosophical treatises have their limits when it comes to reconstructing actual personal relationships. In moving beyond the misogyny/misandry debate, one way to account for these seemingly contradictory views is to make sense of

Chrysostom’s own understanding of sexual difference and similarity—an undertaking

8 Mayer, “John Chrysostom and Women Revisited,” 216–25. 9 Blake Leyerle, Theatrical Shows and Ascetic Lives: John Chrysostom’s Attack on Spiritual Marriage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Livia Neureiter, “Synoikein. Die beiden Traktate des Johannes Chrysostomus gegen jene Männer und Frauen, die zusammenleben” (Unpublished D. Theol. dissertation, Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz, 2004); “John Chrysostom’s Treatises on the ‘Spiritual Marriage,’” Studia Patristica 41 (2006): 457–62; Chris L. de Wet, “Revisiting the Subintroductae: Slavery, Asceticism, and ‘Syneisaktism’ in the Exegesis of John Chrysostom,” Biblical Interpretation 25.1 (2017): 58–80. 10 Catherine Broc-Schmezer, Les figures féminines du Nouveau Testament dans l’oeuvre de Jean Chrysostome: Exégèse et pastorale, Collection des Études Augustiniennes: Antiquité 185 (Paris: Institut d’Études Augustiniennes, 2010). 11 This tension between theology and interpersonal relationships is also noted by Jo Ann C. Heaney- Hunter, “The Links between Sexuality and Original Sin in the Writings of John Chrysostom and Augustine” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Fordham University, 1988), 229–38.

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that has only been done somewhat generally. Moreover, understanding Chrysostom’s views on women and their behaviour within the context of masculinity may be illustrative as to why Chrysostom said what he said about women.

In this chapter, which continues with Chrysostom’s interpretation of Genesis 1–

3, I will examine his views on masculinity and gender dynamics as based on the creation of Adam and Eve. Most of Chrysostom’s views on maleness and femaleness are based on his understanding of the Eden narrative. In the previous chapter we have noted how

Chrysostom constructs his vision of who God is in terms of the ideal Masculine. In the case of humanity, Adam and Eve find themselves in the middle of God’s cosmic hierarchy, with an element of the divine but also, problematically, a tinge of the bestial.

It will be argued that Chrysostom’s reading of the Eden narrative is actually structured by his own kyriarchal frame of reference, and that he presents the story of Adam, Eve, and the serpent in a strategic way so as to resemble the great masculine struggle—and subsequent failure—between the psychic and the corporeal, between the head and the body, between rationality and the passions.

In order to understand Chrysostom’s impressive mirroring of the psychic and the cosmic, it is necessary to look at the status of humanity and the nature of their domination before the Fall and thereafter. First, I will investigate Chrysostom’s foundational thesis relating to humans’ capacity for dominion, namely the fact that humanity was created in the image of God. Image, to Chrysostom, entails having a rational soul and this enables humans to rule over the cosmos, but also over their own bodies.

Second, the notion of creational succession will be discussed. Humans are seen as being created last, as the crown of succession, just as the body was created first, and thereafter crowned with a soul. By being created in God’s image, and as the crown of

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creation, humans are given a divine right of rule over the world as God’s emissaries.

Third, I will problematise the issue of gender in relation to human cosmic dominion.

What is the status of Adam and Eve before and after the Fall? Are they considered equal? And what does equality even mean and entail? Finally, the role of animality in the human struggle for cosmic dominion, and their failure, will be investigated.

The Image of Dominion

Humanity finds itself in the middle of Chrysostom’s cosmic hierarchy between the divine and the bestial. According to Chrysostom, the fact that Adam was created in

God’s image meant that he had rule (ἀρχή) over the cosmos.12 And because of the fact that Adam was created in God’s image, with a propensity for God’s rule, and in God’s likeness, which enables virtue, he can justly rule as God’s emissary in creation, similar to the way a slave overseer manages his master’s estate. Commenting on Genesis 1:26, which states, “Let us make man in our image and likeness,” Chrysostom explains: “So

‘image’ refers to the matter of control [τῆς ἀρχῆς], not anything else, in other words,

God created man as having control of everything on earth, and nothing on earth is greater than man, under whose authority everything falls.”13 Image (εἰκών) is therefore an indication of control or rule (ἀρχή); εἰκών serves as the initiator of human power and authority. Just as slaves were surrogates for their masters’ power and honour, so too Adam serves under God, ruling his creation.14 The endowment of a rational soul is

12 Serm. Gen. 2.2.124–59 (SC 433.192–95). 13 Hom. Gen. 8.9 (PG 53.72.56–61): Κατὰ τὴν τῆς ἀρχῆς οὖν Εἰκόνα φησὶν, οὐ καθ' ἕτερόν τι· καὶ γὰρ πάντων τῶν ἐπὶ τῆς γῆς ἄρχοντα τὸν ἄνθρωπον ἐδημιούργησεν ὁ Θεὸς, καὶ οὐδὲν τῶν ἐπὶ τῆς γῆς ἐστι τούτου μεῖζον, ἀλλὰ πάντα ὑπὸ τὴν ἐξουσίαν τὴν τούτου τυγχάνει. Translation: Hill, Homilies on Genesis 1–17, 110 (slightly modified). See also Serm. Gen. 2.125–29 (SC 433.192–93). 14 For slaves as surrogate bodies for the slaveholders, see Jennifer A. Glancy, Slavery in Early Christianity (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2006), 15–16. This notion of doulological surrogacy is also found in Chrysostom; De Wet, Preaching Bondage, 214–15.

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what enables humanity, overall, to rule—and there is no difference between the souls of men and women in Chrysostom’s thought.15 Therefore, Eve, too, shares initially in the rule over creation.16 Yet, in his occupation of the cosmic hierarchical median, and despite having an installation of psychic ruling power, Adam is of course not fully divine. He is also body, he is clothed in flesh, made from crude dust. The fact that the text says “dust” (χοῦς), and not “earth” (γῆ), shows the humble and lowly origins of the flesh, according to Chrysostom. 17 This attribute embeds in the identity of Adam a measure of animality. “What is mortal, the soul or the body?” asks Chrysostom,

“Clearly the body: the soul is naturally immortal, the body naturally mortal.” 18

Humanity finds itself between the incorporeal divine and the fleshly bestial, a soul entangled and intertwined in a body:

[R]ealizing the nobility of our soul, let us be guilty of no behaviour

unworthy of it nor defile it with unfitting actions, subjecting it to the thrall

[ὑποταγή] of the flesh and showing so little appreciation and regard for

what is so noble and endowed with such pre-eminence. After all, because

of the soul’s being, we who are intertwined with a body can, if we wish and

under the influence of God’s grace, strive against disembodied powers, can

walk on earth as though coursing across heaven, and pass our lives in this

manner, suffering no inferiority. How can that be, I will tell you. You see,

when people prove, despite entanglement with a mortal body, to live the

15 Hom. Gen. 15.1 (PG 53.120.17–18). 16 Hom. Gen. 10.9 (PG 53.86.5–26). 17 Hom. Gen. 12.12 (PG 53.102.49–53). 18 Serm. Gen. 7.346–48 (SC 433.336–37): «Τὸ θνητὸν», ποῖον; τὴν ψυχὴν, ἢ τὸ σῶμα; Εὔδηλον ὅτι τὸ σῶμα· ἡ γὰρ ψυχὴ φύσει ἀθάνατος, θνητὸν δὲ φύσει τὸ σῶμα. Translation: Robert C. Hill, trans., St. John Chrysostom: Eight Sermons on the Book of Genesis (Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2004), 127.

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same life as those supernatural powers, how will they not be deemed worthy

of grace from God for keeping untarnished the soul’s nobility, though

subject to the body’s necessities.19

The struggle between the flesh and the soul, between rationality and illicit passions, is at the same time the contrast and struggle between that which is divine and that which is bestial. This was seen also in the previous chapter, in which Chrysostom used the Platonic image of the rational soul dominating over its bestial thoughts and appetites. The soul enjoys primacy over the body, and is supposed to control the passions, or “impulses of the flesh [τὰ τῆς σαρκὸς σκιρτήματα]”, as Chrysostom says.20

Chrysostom believes that the soul is supposed to control the body like a slave,21 so when the passions of the flesh overcome the soul, it is akin to what Romans feared most—a slave rebellion.22 Through the nourishment of spiritual exercises, the soul must be

“strengthened [νευρουμένη] and thus able to resist the rebellion [ἐπαναστάσεις] of the flesh and the constant battle waged within us to reduce our soul to servitude if we are disposed to drop our guard even for a short space of time.”23 The use of the term νευρόω,

19 Hom. Gen. 12.17 (PG 53.104.21–38): Ταῦτα δὴ πάντα ἐννοοῦντες, καὶ λογιζόμενοι τὴν εὐγένειαν τῆς ἡμετέρας ψυχῆς, μηδὲν ἀνάξιον αὐτῆς διαπραττώμεθα, μηδὲ καταῤῥυπαίνωμεν αὐτὴν ταῖς ἀτόποις πράξεσι, καθέλκοντες αὐτὴν εἰς τὴν τῆς σαρκὸς ὑποταγὴν, καὶ περὶ τὴν οὕτως εὐγενῆ, καὶ τοσαύτης ἠξιωμένην προεδρίας, οὕτως ἀσυμπαθεῖς γινόμενοι, καὶ ἀγνώμονες. Διὰ γὰρ τὴν ταύτης οὐσίαν ἡμεῖς οἱ σώματι συμπεπλεγμένοι, ἐὰν βουληθῶμεν, δυνησόμεθα, τῆς παρὰ τοῦ Θεοῦ ῥοπῆς ἡμῖν συνεφαπτομένης, ταῖς ἀσωμάτοις ἁμιλλᾶσθαι δυνάμεσι, καὶ ἐν γῇ βαδίζοντες ὡς ἐν οὐρανῷ διάγοντες, οὕτω πολιτεύεσθαι, καὶ μηδὲν ἐκείνων ἔλαττον ἔχειν, ἀλλὰ τάχα κατά τι καὶ πλέον· καὶ πῶς, ἐγὼ λέγω. ῞Οταν γὰρ εὑρεθῇ τις μετὰ τὸ σώματι φθαρτῷ συμπεπλέχθαι, τὰ αὐτὰ ταῖς ἄνω δυνάμεσι πολιτευόμενος, πῶς οὐ πλείονος ἀξιωθήσεται τῆς παρὰ τοῦ Θεοῦ ῥοπῆς, ὅτι καὶ ταῖς ἀνάγκαις τοῦ σώματος ὑποκείμενος ἀκέραιον τῆς ψυχῆς τὴν εὐγένειαν διετήρησε; Translation: Hill, Homilies on Genesis 1–17, 167. 20 Hom. Gen. 10.1–2 (PG 53.82.25–26, 83.15–16), 11.1 (PG 53.91.9), 59.14 (PG 54.518.6). 21 In Hom. Gen. 2.3 (PG 53.27.12–16) Chrysostom describes the flesh, chastened by fasting, as a docile and obedient handmaid, who no longer resists her mistress, the soul. 22 On slave rebellions, see esp. Keith R. Bradley, Slavery and Rebellion in the Roman World, 140 B.C.– 70 B.C. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989); Kyle Harper, Slavery in the Late Roman World, AD 275–425 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 276–79. 23 Hom. Gen. 10.20 (PG 53.90.27–31): ἵνα νευρουμένη ἀντέχειν δύνηται πρὸς τὰς ἐπαναστάσεις τῆς σαρκὸς, καὶ πρὸς τὸν διηνεκῆ πολέμιον τὸν ἐπικείμενον ἡμῖν, καὶ αἰχμάλωτον ἡμῶν ἀπεργαζόμενον τὴν

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above, for the strengthening of the soul points to a muscular and manly soul.24 Spiritual exercises, like fasting and prayer, represent to Chrysostom practically psychic bodybuilding—it is strengthening through straining and nerving—no pain, no gain. But the flesh can overpower a scrawny soul. Essentially, subjecting the soul to the enthrallment or subjugation (ὑποταγή) of the flesh is a mirroring of the events surrounding the temptation and deception of Adam and Eve, when the creature rebelled against the Creator—the first “true” slave rebellion.

But the soul, to Chrysostom, is not divine in itself; it is not a part of God.

Regarding Genesis 2:7, Chrysostom states: “In this regard, some senseless people, moved by their own reasoning, and having no regard for what is proper to God nor any appreciation of the considerateness revealed in the words, try to say that the soul comes from the substance of God. Such madness, such stupidity!”25 Here Chrysostom is most likely refuting the common Manichaean doctrine that the soul is of one substance with

God. The exclamation that such thinking is “madness”, that is, μανία, may be a pun on the Manichaeans. In a different homily, Chrysostom accuses the Manichaeans of introducing the essence of God into apes, dogs, and many other animals, and murderers and sorcerers.26 Such thinking is, once again, not proper to God (θεοπρεπής), and takes no account of God’s adaptability to human reason, or συγκατάβασις. This perspective on Genesis 2:7 was common in anti-Manichaean polemic. “For if the soul is the substance of God, the substance of God errs, the substance of God is corrupted,”

Augustine discloses against the Manichaean presbyter Fortunatus, “the substance of

ψυχὴν, ἐὰν κἂν πρὸς βραχὺ ῥᾳθυμῆσαι βουληθῶμεν. Translation: Hill, Homilies on Genesis 1–17, 141. 24 See also Hom. Matt. 26.7 (PG 57.342.19–21) for a similar use of νευρόω. 25 Hom. Gen. 13.7 (PG 53.106.49–53): ᾿Ενταῦθά τινες τῶν ἀγνωμόνων, ἐξ οἰκείων λογισμῶν κινούμενοι, καὶ οὐδὲν θεοπρεπὲς ἐννοοῦντες, οὔτε τὴν συγκατάβασιν τῶν ῥημάτων λογιζόμενοι, λέγειν ἐπιχειροῦσιν, ὅτι ἐκ τῆς τοῦ Θεοῦ οὐσίας ἐστὶν ἡ ψυχή. ῍Ω τῆς μανίας· ὢ τῆς παραφροσύνης· Translation: Hill, Homilies on Genesis 1–17, 172. 26 Diem nat. (PG 49.359.38–52).

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God is violated, the substance of God is deceived; which is impious to say.”27 Similarly, the soul rests on a higher level than the body, according to Chrysostom, but it is by no means a part of God. The character and masculinity of God remains, substantially, unattainable. But the domination that accompanies image flows through the soul, which must control the impulses of the flesh.

The soul must, in fact, incarcerate and enslave the flesh—a feature of ancient thought on the soul that was eloquently noted by Foucault: “Rather than seeing this soul as the reactivated remnants of an ideology, one would see it as the present correlative of a certain technology of power over the body.”28 It may then be concluded, at least in the thought of Chrysostom, that the carceral power the soul exercises over the body, which it must exercise over the dusty flesh in order to avoid lapse, explains and justifies, even necessitates, the need for the enslavement of real individuals in ancient society.

Masculine self-control is idealised as a full alignment between the interior psychicality of the individual body, and the exterior domination within the social and political body, which is also the realised masculine society.29

We learn here of the fundamental masculine categorical, namely that without total psychic control, social control will never be fully achieved. If a man cannot master his passions, he will not be able to successfully master his wife, children, slaves, or

27 Fort. 11 (CSEL 25.1.89): Nam si anima substantia dei est, substantia dei errat, substantia dei corrumpitur, substantia dei uiolatur, substantia dei decipitur: quod nefas est dicere. See also Gen. Man. 2.8.11 (CSEL 91.130–31); Roland J. Teske, “Soul,” in Augustine Through the Ages: An Encyclopedia, ed. Allan Fitzgerald and John C. Cavadini (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999), 808; Jason D. BeDuhn, Augustine’s Manichaean Dilemma, Volume 1: Conversion and Apostasy, 373–388 C.E., Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 52–53; Johannes van Oort, “Augustine on Sexual Concupiscence and Original Sin,” Studia Patristica 22 (1989): 382–86; “Augustine and Mani on concupiscentia sexualis,” in Augustiniana Traiectina: Communications présentées au Colloque International d’Utrecht, 13–14 novembre 1986, ed. Jan den Boeft and Johannes van Oort (Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1987), 137–52. 28 Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1977), 29. 29 Chris L. de Wet, The Unbound God: Slavery and the Formation of Early Christian Thought, Routledge Studies in the Early Christian World (London: Routledge, 2018), 107–16.

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foreigners and political subjects. The man who can control himself, can control all others. The soul is the nexus for masculinisation—masculinisation takes place, primarily, by means of the psychic. Before the Fall, the souls of Adam and Eve were uncorrupted, and their rule was thus absolute, internally and externally. In this way, the creation narrative serves, in Chrysostom’s thought, as a replication of the struggles of the inner psychic life and the control of the bestial passions, but also on how psychic control is required for cosmic or social control. The creation and Fall narrative is a lesson, fundamentally, in masculinity.

This mirroring of cosmic and psychic struggles for domination assists us in understanding better the postlapsarian human condition. The Fall is sketched as the rebellion of the flesh over the soul, irrationality over rationality, and the body over the head. Speaking to Adam, God (that is, Chrysostom) says:

After all, you are the head of your wife and she has been created for your

sake; but you have inverted the proper order: not only have you failed to

keep her on the straight and narrow but you have been dragged down with

her, and whereas the rest of the body should follow the head, the contrary

has in fact occurred, the head following the rest of the body, turning things

upside down. Hence, since you have reversed the proper order completely,

you now find yourself in that desperate situation after being clad previously

in such wonderful splendour.30

30 Hom. Gen. 17.18 (PG 53.139.35–42): Κεφαλὴ γὰρ εἶ τῆς γυναικὸς, καὶ διὰ σὲ ἐκείνη παρήχθη· σὺ δὲ τὴν τάξιν ἀνέστρεψας, καὶ οὐ μόνον ἐκείνην οὐ διώρθωσας, ἀλλὰ καὶ συγκατεσπάσθης· καὶ δέον τὸ λοιπὸν σῶμα τῇ κεφαλῇ ἕπεσθαι, τὸ ἐναντίον γέγονε, καὶ ἡ κεφαλὴ τῷ λοιπῷ σώματι ἐξηκολούθησε, καὶ τὰ ἄνω κάτω γέγονε. Διὰ τοῦτο, ἐπειδὴ τὴν τάξιν ἅπασαν ἀνέστρεψας, ἐν τούτοις εἶ νῦν, ὁ πρὸ τούτου τοσαύτῃ δόξῃ περιβεβλημένος. Translation: Hill, Homilies on Genesis 1–17, 231.

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In Chrysostomic thought the culpa that is the Fall is understood as a lapse of domination, the great failure of masculinity. The natural order is also the masculine order, but in the case of the Fall, the order was inverted. The inversions of the cosmic hierarchical order are, in fact, numerous. Not only does the woman subdue the man with her trickery, but there is also the inversion of humanity wanting to be like God, thus rebelling against the divinity, and also, as we will see later in this chapter, the bestial asserting itself over and above humanity. “[W]hen she was deceived by this evil creature [the serpent] into thinking that not only would they not come to any harm from this [eating of the tree] but would even be equal to God,” Chrysostom explains, “then evidently hope of gaining the promised reward drove her to taste it.” Eve’s mistake was that she did not have self-control, she “[w]as not content to remain within her proper limits,”31 and her lust for power consumed her. While she formerly shared the same esteem (ὁμοτιμία) as Adam, she actually desired to be equal to God (ἰσόθεος). For

Chrysostom and numerous other patristic authors,32 the lust for divine equality (ἰσοθεΐα) is the great sin of Eden, a wicked and dangerous form of hybris. The term ἰσοθεΐα occurs regularly when Chrysostom refers to the sin of Adam and Eve, and interestingly enough, he usually describes it as an empty human delusion (φαντασία).33 This ἰσοθεΐα is inextricably linked to rebellious and insane arrogance (ἀπόνοια), and an ignorance of human limitations.34 It was also the sin of Pharaoh, and the result is always the same, it

31 Hom. Gen. 16.10 (PG 53.129.43–47): ἠπατήθη παρὰ τοῦ πονηροῦ θηρίου τούτου, ὅτι οὐ μόνον τοῦτο πείσονται, ἀλλὰ καὶ ἰσόθεοι ἔσονται, τότε λοιπὸν ἡ ἐλπὶς τῆς ὑποσχέσεως ἐπὶ τὴν μετάληψιν αὐτὴν παρώρμησε... οὐκ ἀνασχομένη μεῖναι ἐπὶ τῶν οἰκείων ὅρων. Translation: Hill, Homilies on Genesis 1– 17, 213. 32 See Yannis Spiteris, Salvación y pecado en la tradición oriental (Salamanca: Secretariado Trinitario, 2005), 162–64. 33 Hom. Gen. 12.14 (PG 53.103.31–33), 16.10 (PG 53.129.27–29), 26.3 (PG 53.230.40–42); Hom. Goth. 4 (PG 63.506.32–36); Hom. Matt. 15.2 (PG 57.224.49–52), 59.1 (PG 58.575.26–31); Mut. nom. 2.4 (PG 51.130.9); Stag. 1.5 (PG 47.436.24–27). 34 Compare esp. Hom. Goth. 4 (PG 63.506.32–36) and Res. mort. 7.21–27 (SC 561.160–61).

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abases the one who suffers from it.35 If Adam had properly ruled over Eve then the Fall would never have occurred—the Fall was due to Adam’s incapability to rule.

In Chrysostom’s interpretation of the Fall, we have a very intricate and meticulously constructed hamartiological structure. There is the sin of gluttony when

Adam and Eve ate what they should not have eaten.36 The sin of the devil is his envy.37

But there is one violation that stands out above the rest: Chrysostom uses a very specific word to denote the nature of Adam’s failure, namely ῥαθυμία. Robert Hill’s translation of Chrysostom’s homilies on Genesis renders the term as “indifference” (but not exactly like ἀδιαφορία in the Stoic sense), “carelessness,” or “sloth.”38 Sandwell uses the term

“laxity.”39 Hill and Sandwell are also correct that, after all is said and done, ῥαθυμία becomes the original sin of humanity in Chrysostom’s thought.40 Likewise, Gillian

Clark has linked Adam’s ῥαθυμία, which she translates perhaps more accurately as

“slackness,” in Chrysostom’s thought to the inversion of the cosmic order and the failure of masculinity.41 In turn, the opposite, namely προθυμία, which is masculine zeal

35 Hom. Matt. 65.6 (PG 58.625.17–626.17). 36 Hom. Gen. 1.6 (PG 53.23.35–41), 10.2 (PG 53.82.25–35); see also chapter 5. 37 Hom. Gen. 1.6 (PG 53.23.42–51), 16.3 (PG 53.126.47–57); see also Chris L. de Wet, “John Chrysostom on Envy,” Studia Patristica 47 (2010): 255–60. 38 Hill, Homilies on Genesis 1–17, 15, 69, 127, 186. 39 Isabella Sandwell, “John Chrysostom’s Audiences and His Accusations of Laxity,” in Religious Diversity in Late Antiquity, ed. David Morton Gwynn and Susanne Bangert, Late Antique Archaeology 6 (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 523–41. 40 Hill, Homilies on Genesis 1–17, 186; Sandwell, “Accusations of Laxity,” 531–32; see also Raymond J. Laird, Mindset, Moral Choice and Sin in the Anthropology of John Chrysostom, Early Christian Studies 15 (Strathfield: St. Paul’s, 2012), 42; Pak-Wah Lai, “The Monk as Christian Saint and Exemplar in St John Chrysostom’s Writings,” in Saints and Sanctity, Studies in Church History 47 (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2011), 21–22. See also Nils Neumann, Lukas und Menippos: Hoheit und Niedrigkeit in Lk 1,1–2,40 und in der menippeischen Literatur (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008), 229– 30. On ῥαθυμία in non-Christian philosophical thought, see Michael Schramm, Freundschaft im Neuplatonismus: Politisches Denken und Sozialphilosophie von Plotin bis Kaiser Julian (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013), 120–21. 41 Gillian Clark, “The Old Adam: The Fathers and the Unmaking of Masculinity,” in Thinking Men: Masculinity and Its Self-Representation in the Classical Tradition, ed. Lin Foxhall and John Salmon, Leicester-Nottingham Studies in Ancient Society 7 (London: Routledge, 1998), 176. Clark’s view is similar to that of Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley, vol. 2 of The History of Sexuality (New York: Vintage, 1985), 207.

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and agency, becomes an important hallmark of Christian life.42 The term ῥαθυμία, however, requires more examination. Since it signifies the ultimate failure of masculinity, ῥαθυμία therefore implies that Adam failed to be in an active, rational, and dominating position—he was not active, and the result is, at the end, that he was pacified by Eve when she tricked him, when the head was being led by the body.43

Furthermore, ῥαθυμία signifies a failure of surveillance and discipline—Adam neglected to “watch over” the garden and all its inhabitants, as a good overseer should have done.44 ‘Pαθυμία is therefore best understood when examined in the context of rationality/irrationality and the inability to exercise corporeal control.

Raymond Laird has already pointed out the relationship between ῥαθυμία and the mind-set (γνώμη) in Chrysostom; ῥαθυμία is a sign of an unhealthy mind.45 Since

ῥαθυμία signifies the domination of the body over mind, it is therefore also located within the realm of the bestial: “[T]he human being, a creature gentle, and rational, and mild, behaves in a manner contrary to its nature and through indifference casts itself in the mould of wild beasts.” 46 ‘Pαθυμία represents an inability to act rationally and wilfully—it is therefore also an ailment of the will (ἡ προαίρεσις ἡ ῥᾴθυμος). 47

‘Pαθυμία also becomes the intermediary process by which people give their bodies over to the passions—such people, according to Chrysostom, are the ones animalised in the

42 Hill, Homilies on Genesis 1–17, 11. 43 Hom. Gen. 16.13 (PG 53.130.56–131.4). 44 Hom. Gen. 14.8 (PG 53.113.29–46). 45 Laird, Mindset, Moral Choice and Sin, 53–54, 71. 46 Hom. Gen. 12.10 (PG 53.101.61–102.1): ὁ δὲ ἄνθρωπος, τὸ ἥμερον ζῶον, τὸ λογικὸν, τὸ ἐπιεικὲς, τὰ ἐναντία τῇ οἰκείᾳ φύσει διαπράττεται, καὶ διὰ ῥᾳθυμίαν εἰς τὴν τῶν θηρίων ὠμότητα ἑαυτὸν ἐξάγει. Translation: Hill, Homilies on Genesis 1–17, 162. 47 Hom. Gen. 16.20 (PG 53.134.5); a will free of ῥαθυμία, in Chrysostom’s thought, has the ability to render a person blameless and truly free; Elaine Pagels, “The Politics of Paradise: Augustine’s Exegesis of Genesis 1–3 Versus That of John Chrysostom,” Harvard Theological Review 78.1–2 (1985): 67–99.

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Bible as dogs, horses, lions, leopards, and serpents.48 This also means that humanity cannot blame ignorance (ἄγνοια) for the Fall—it is a fault of the ῥαθυμία of the soul; that is, having the gift of rationality, and thus control, but not using it.49

Chrysostom’s deployment of ῥαθυμία in his Genesis commentary has an ascetic impetus. 50 He often uses ῥαθυμία to denote an indifference to ascetic rigour, the unwillingness to subject the body and its passions to ascetic discipline—it must therefore be read in the context of psychic power. “Let the irascible person rid the soul of this passion [that is, lust] that inhibits pious thinking, and turn instead to mildness and reasonableness,” Chrysostom admonishes, “Let the slothful [ῥᾴθυμος] and unmortified [ἀκόλαστος] person, whose fancy is titillated by bodily graces, discipline his thinking and engrave on the texture of his mind the law of the Lord.”51 The links between ῥαθυμία, rational discipline, and ascetic practice are abundantly clear.

‘Pαθυμία is one of the greatest threats to monks 52 and virgins 53 alike. Successful spiritual and ascetic practices require, most of all, zeal (προθυμία).54 We can therefore understand προθυμία as that quality of having a ruling and dominating psychic principle, which is always active. This principle is the amplification of the power that the soul exercises over the flesh. Thus, προθυμία, for Chrysostom, is type of psychic inertia that powers the domination of the body by the soul. It is, at the same time, also

48 Hom. Gen. 12.10 (PG 53.102.1–102.22). 49 Hom. Gen. 5.6 (PG 53.50.30–33), 14.18 (PG 53.116.30–39). 50 Lai, “Monk as Christian Saint,” 22–23. 51 Hom. Gen. 15.17 (PG 53.124.57–63): ῾Ο θυμώδης τὸ μὲν πάθος τὸ ἐνοχλοῦν εὐσεβεῖ λογισμῷ ἐξοριζέτω τῆς ψυχῆς, πραότητα δὲ καὶ ἐπιείκειαν ἀσπαζέσθω. ῾Ο ῥᾴθυμος καὶ ἀκόλαστος, καὶ μετὰ ἀδείας πρὸς τὰ κάλλη τῶν σωμάτων ἐπτοημένος, χαλινώσας αὑτοῦ τὸν λογισμὸν, καὶ τὸν νόμον τοῦ Χριστοῦ εἰς τὸ πλάτος αὑτοῦ τῆς διανοίας ἐγγράψας. Translation: Hill, Homilies on Genesis 1–17, 205. 52 In the tale that introduced this study, of the mother and her son’s secret monastic aspirations, the greatest threat to the boy’s salvation is the life of ῥαθυμία—the opposite of the monastic way of life; Adv. oppug. 3.12 (PG 47.369.7–21); see also Stag. 1.4–5 (PG 47.434.17–435.56). 53 Virg. 32.1.11–16 (SC 125.194–95), 39.3.34–43 (SC 125.230–31). 54 Hom. Gen. 10.3–6 (PG 53.82.53–84.32).

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a power of resistance against the devil.55 The centrality of ῥαθυμία in both the failure of Adam and Eve, and ascetic failure more generally, again confirms that Chrysostom presents the Fall from sin as a prototype for all failures of bodily self-control and ascetic lapses—the great failure of masculinity.

Because Chrysostom contributes the Fall to a lack of cosmic and psychic control, due to ῥαθυμία, there is now, reciprocally, an intensification of domination and control through the multiplication of social hierarchies. Sin therefore introduced the need for more control. According to Chrysostom’s fourth sermon on Genesis,56 from being the one in a position of rulership and control through sharing God’s image, humanity is now in a dominated and subjugated position:

While their receiving government was the result of God’s lovingkindness

alone, then, their forfeiting government was the result of their indifference

[ῥᾳθυμίας]: just as kings discharge from government those who disobey

their commands, so too did God in the case of human beings, discharging

them from government at that time. Now, it is necessary to explain today

the great honor of another kind as well, which sin of its nature removed,

and all the forms of slavery [δουλείας] it introduced, like a kind of usurper

with a variety of shackles shackling our nature in its various roles of

government.57

55 Hom. Gen. 10.6 (PG 53.84.27–32). 56 See SC 433.218–49. 57 Serm. Gen. 4.1.21–31 (SC 433.220–21): Τὸ μὲν οὖν λαβεῖν αὐτὸν τὴν ἀρχὴν, ἀπὸ τῆς τοῦ Θεοῦ φιλανθρωπίας ἐγένετο μόνης· τὸ δὲ ἐκπεσεῖν τῆς ἀρχῆς ἀπὸ τῆς αὐτοῦ ῥᾳθυμίας. ῞Ωσπερ γὰρ οἱ βασιλεῖς τοὺς οὐχ ὑπακούοντας τοῖς αὐτῶν προστάγμασι παραλύουσι τῆς ἀρχῆς, οὕτω καὶ ὁ Θεὸς ἐποίησεν ἐπὶ τοῦ ἀνθρώπου, τότε παρέλύσεν αὐτὸν τῆς ἀρχῆς. ᾿Αναγκαῖον δὲ σήμερον εἰπεῖν πόσην καὶ ἄλλην τιμὴν ἡ τῆς ἁμαρτίας παρείλετο φύσις καὶ ὅσους δουλείας εἰσήγαγε τρόπους, ὥσπερ τις τύραννος ἐν πολυτρόποις δεσμοῖς, ταῖς παντοδαπαῖς ἀρχαῖς τὴν ἡμετέραν δεσμεύουσα φύσιν. Translation: Hill, Sermons on the Book of Genesis, 62–63.

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Postlapsarian politics are here delineated within a very potent doulological framework. Human beings went from being like heralds for the king to lowly slaves.

The sinful human nature was bound, and three forms of “slavery” were introduced as a consequence of the Fall, namely marriage, real institutional slavery, and imperial government. “And from the beginning God made only one form of rule, appointing the man over the woman,” Chrysostom explains, “But after that our kind ran aground in much disorder, so he appointed other forms of rule as well, those of slaveholders, and those of governors.”58 I refer to these “slaveries” as institutions of masculinity, since they are introduced control the consequences of humanity’s failure to be masculine.

The first institution of masculinity, namely marriage, will be discussed in some detail later in this chapter.

For now it should be said that there is some inconsistency in Chrysostom’s works on whether the subjugation of the female is also prelapsarian. This will be examined in detail shortly. But what is very clear is that the institution of marriage is thoroughly postlapsarian. While Chrysostom does not attribute to the wife the same social status as a real slave, her life of domination and anxiety does resemble the enslaved life.59

Married women are often no better than domestic managers. Thus, the only freedom from this form of slavery is virginity: “For marriage truly is a chain, not only because of the multitude of its anxieties and daily worries, but also because it forces spouses to submit to one another [most likely a reference to 1 Cor. 7:460], which is harsher than

58 Hom. 1 Cor. 34.4 (F2.427): Καὶ ἐξ ἀρχῆς μὲν μίαν ἐποίησεν ἀρχὴν, τὸν ἄνδρα ἐπιστήσας τῇ γυναικί· ἐπειδὴ δὲ εἰς πολλὴν ἐξώκειλεν ἀταξίαν τὸ γένος ἡμῶν, καὶ ἑτέρας κατέστησε, τὰς τῶν δεσποτῶν, τὰς τῶν ἀρχόντων. 59 De Wet, Preaching Bondage, 98–99. 60 See Chrysostom’s discussion of spouses owning one another’s bodies in Propt. fornic. 4 (PG 51.214– 15).

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every other kind of servitude.”61 But marriage does serve a purpose, namely to control lust and help people not to fall into sin—this is the essential purpose of all these forms of slavery, to keep people from sinning.62

The second institution of masculinity is that of real institutional slavery. I have already discussed, in detail, Chrysostom’s views on slavery elsewhere,63 although some additional and new remarks are warranted in this context. The majority of early

Christian authors saw a firm link between slavery and sin.64 In Chrysostom’s thought, it is this event, that of Eden, as well as the disobedience of Ham (Gen. 9:18–27), that ushered in institutional slavery. 65 In Chrysostom’s reading, we encounter the construction of the negative stereotype of the slave, and essentially, the slave of passion, by means of the exegetical reconstruction of Ham. As the story goes, Ham, the father of Canaan, saw his father’s, Noah’s, nakedness, and gossiped about this to his brothers, ridiculing his father. When Noah realises what happened, he curses Ham’s son, Canaan, into slavery. Chrysostom’s description of Ham is telling. Chrysostom sketches him as depraved, corrupt in attitude, and intemperate.66

But Ham’s main sin was his disrespect and disobedience shown to his father. In the curse of Ham we find, then, perhaps the manifestation of several anxieties of kyriarchy (or, if you will, patriarchy). It is especially the fear of sons rebelling against

61 Virg. 41.1.11–15 (SC 125.236–37): Δεσμὸς γὰρ ὄντως ὁ γάμος, οὐ διὰ τὸν τῶν φροντίδων ὄχλον μόνον οὐδὲ διὰ τὰς λύπας τὰς καθημερινὰς ἀλλ’ ὅτι παντὸς οἰκέτου χαλεπώτερον ἀλλήλοις ὑποκεῖσθαι τοὺς γεγαμηκότας καταναγκάζει. Translation: Sally R. Shore, trans., John Chrysostom: On Virginity; Against Remarriage (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1983), 61. 62 See also Elizabeth A. Clark, “‘Adam’s Only Companion’: Augustine and the Early Christian Debate on Marriage,” Recherches Augustiniennes 21 (1986): 139–62. 63 De Wet, Preaching Bondage. 64 Chris L. de Wet, “Sin as Slavery and/or Slavery as Sin? On the Relationship between Slavery and Christian Hamartiology in Late Ancient Christianity,” Religion & Theology 17.1–2 (2010): 26–39. 65 De Wet, Preaching Bondage, 103–4; Unbound God, 107–16; see, more generally, David M. Goldenberg, The Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003). 66 Hom. Gen. 29.13 (PG 53.266.9–22).

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their fathers, perhaps a tremor of Freud’s primal patricidal urge.67 Chrysostom, too, warns his audience at length of the dangers of patricide (πατραλοίας) in his interpretation of Genesis.68 Only in the story of Ham, the father lives, and the brothers are not united. Thus, when a son dishonours his father, he loses his honour. What is more, the fact that it was Ham’s depraved gaze at his father’s nakedness irks

Chrysostom even more.69 The slave body is therefore a symbol of both the rule of patriarchy, as well as its anxieties and failures. Whereas Noah’s body was a spectacle of shame and ridicule for Ham, the slave body now takes its place, it being the object of the gaze and contempt. The story, for Chrysostom, had a powerful pedagogical function. Fathers were supposed to instruct their sons from an early age. “Teach him the principles of the natural order, and what is a slave, and what is a free man. Say to him: My child, there were no slaves in the olden days of our forefathers, but sin led to slavery,” Chrysostom teaches, “For when someone gave insult to his father, he suffered this judgement, to become the slave of his brothers [Gen. 9:21–25].”70 It is also because of Ham’s mockery and gossiping, two vices most often associated with slaves, that his punishment is so severe. Although his father Noah sinned by becoming intoxicated,71

Ham publicised his father’s sins and nakedness; and this was an act that Chrysostom deeply reviled.72 Sexual curiosity and promiscuity was a common feature of the ancient

67 Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agreement Between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics, trans. James Strachey, The International Library of Psychology (London: Routledge, 1999), 100–161, esp. 141–43. 68 Serm. Gen. 4.253–83 (SC 433.244–49). 69 Hom. Gen. 29.14 (PG 53.266.22–51). 70 Inan. 61.864–69 (SC 188.172–73): Δίδασκε αὐτὸν καὶ τὰ περὶ τῆς φύσεως, καὶ τί μὲν δοῦλος, τί δὲ ἐλεύθερος. Λέγε αὐτῷ· Παιδίον, οὐκ ἦσαν δοῦλοι τὸ παλαιὸν ἐπὶ τῶν προγόνων τῶν ἡμετέρων, ἀλλ’ ἡ ἁμαρτία τὴν δουλείαν εἰσήγαγεν. ̓Επειδὴ γάρ τις εἰς τὸν πατέρα ἐγένετο ὑβριστής, ταύτην ἔτισε τὴν δίκην, ὥστε δοῦλος γενέσθαι τῶν ἀδελφῶν. 71 Chrysostom is quite critical of Noah’s inebriated lapse, here; Hom. Gen. 29.11 (PG 53.265.22–53). However, overall, he views Noah in a positive light; see Hagit Amirav, Rhetoric and Tradition: John Chrysostom on Noah and the Flood, Traditio Exegetica Graeca 12 (Leuven: Peeters, 2003). 72 Chrysostom’s homily Pecc. (PG 51.353–64) is solely devoted to addressing this practice.

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slave stereotype. 73 Ham and Canaan therefore serve as warnings to sons not to disrespect their fathers, not to publicly flaunt the sins of others, and be very careful of sexual curiosity and facetiousness, for this is how slavery entered into the world:

You [Ham] did not exercise your position properly, he is saying, nor have

you gained any advantage from your parity of esteem; hence, I intend you

to come to your senses through subjection. This happened also in the

beginning in the case of the woman: though of equal status with her

husband, she did not exercise well the position given her, and consequently

she had her authority removed and heard the words: “Your yearning will be

for your husband, and he will be your master” [Gen. 3:16]. Since you did

not know how to exercise control well, learn to be controlled well rather

than controlling badly.74

There is a direct protological link, in Chrysostom’s thought, between female subjection and physical enslavement. Ham’s transgression was then exactly the same as that of Eve. As Eve was equal in esteem (ὁμότιμος) to Adam, so too did Ham have equality (ἰσοτιμία) with his brothers. As Eve attempted to exalt herself above Adam, so too Ham attempted to exalt himself above his brothers and father, and so, came to a fall.

Slaves are first and foremost categorised as having lost their equal status with citizens.

73 Paul Veyne, A History of Private Life: From Pagan Rome to Byzantium, ed. Paul Veyne, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2000), 1:75–81. 74 Hom. Gen. 29.24 (PG 53.270.46–54): Οὐκ ἐχρήσω, φησὶν, εἰς δέον τῇ τιμῇ, οὐδὲ ἤνεγκας τὴν εὐπραγίαν τὴν ἀπὸ τῆς ἰσοτιμίας· διὰ τοῦτο τῇ ὑποταγῇ σωφρονισθῆναί σε βούλομαι. Τοῦτο καὶ ἐξ ἀρχῆς ἐπὶ τῆς γυναικὸς γέγονεν. ᾿Επειδὴ γὰρ ὁμότιμος τῷ ἀνδρὶ γενομένη, οὐ καλῶς ἐχρήσατο τῇ δεδομένῃ τιμῇ, διὰ τοῦτο ἀφῃρέθη τὴν ἐξουσίαν, καὶ ἤκουσε· Πρὸς τὸν ἄνδρα σου ἡ ἀποστροφή σου, καὶ αὐτός σου κυριεύσει. ᾿Επειδὴ οὐκ οἶσθα, φησὶ, καλῶς κεχρῆσθαι τῇ ἀρχῇ, μάθε καλῶς ἄρχεσθαι, ἢ κακῶς ἄρχειν. Translation: Robert C. Hill, trans., St. John Chrysostom: Homilies on Genesis 18–45, The Fathers of the Church 82 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1999), 215.

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As institutions of masculinity, the bondage of marriage and slavery is then introduced to safeguard women and men like Ham from falling into sin again. Slavery is therefore not only a consequence of sin, but also something that assists people against sinning even more. Those who are unable to exercise control must be controlled. Quite disturbingly, slaveholding was considered to be an institution that actually opposed and obstructed sin:

I mean, behold the man sharing the same birth pangs as his brothers, born

of the same womb, yet made their slave by the onset of sin, robbed of his

freedom and brought into subjection—hence the origin of his subsequent

condition of slavery. Before this, you see, there was no such indulgence,

people being pampered in this way and needing others to minister to their

needs; rather, each one looked to his own needs, there being great equality

of esteem and complete absence of discrimination. When sin entered the

scene, on the contrary, it impaired freedom, destroyed the worth inherent in

nature and introduced slavery so as to provide constant instruction and

reminder to the human race to shun the slavery of sin while returning to the

freedom of virtue. You see, for the fact that slave and master both stand to

gain benefit arising from this incident, provided they are willing, let them

give due thought—the slave, on the one hand, to the fact that he entered

slavery for the reason that Ham rushed headlong into such impertinence,

while the master in turn should consider that servitude and command arose

from no other source than Ham’s display of a depraved intention and his

fall from the equal esteem he enjoyed with his brothers.75

75 Hom. Gen. 29.22 (PG 53.269.59–270.20): ᾿Ιδοὺ γὰρ τὸν ἀδελφὸν τὸν τῶν αὐτῶν ὠδίνων κοινωνήσαντα, τὸν ἐκ τῆς αὐτῆς νηδύος ἐξελθόντα, τοῦτον ἐπεισελθοῦσα ἡ ἁμαρτία δοῦλον εἰργάσατο,

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Before sin, there was no slavery. This type of rhetoric, among others, contributed to the persistence of oppressive slaveholding throughout early Christian period.

Chrysostom considers slavery a means of instruction, a teacher (διδάσκαλος) sent by

God and an admonition (νουθεσία) to despise sin and seek virtue. Slavery is therefore both pedagogical and mnemonic for Chrysostom. Slavery in not only a tragic consequence but also an indispensible feature of the postlapsarian life.

The postlapsarian utility of slavery was an ideology that was quite common among patristic writers. Basil notes in a similar vein: “Sometimes, by a wise and inscrutable providence, worthless children are commanded by their father to serve their more intelligent brothers and sisters.” Enslavement is therefore a grace of providence, divine οἰκονομία. “Any upright person investigating the circumstances would realise that such situations bring much benefit, and are not a sentence of condemnation for those involved. It is better for a person who lacks intelligence and self-control to become another’s possession,” Basil continues, “Governed by his master’s intelligence, he will become like a chariot driven by a skilled horseman, or a ship with a seasoned sailor at the tiller.”76 According to Chrysostom and Basil, some people are simply better

καὶ τὴν ἐλευθερίαν ἀφελομένη, εἰς τὴν ὑποταγὴν ἤγαγε· καὶ γὰρ ἐντεῦθεν τὰ τῆς δουλείας ἀρχὴν ἐλάμβανε λοιπόν. Οὐδὲ γὰρ ἦν πρὸ τούτου ἡ βλακεία αὕτη, καὶ τὸ οὕτω διαθρύπτεσθαι, καὶ ἑτέρων δεῖσθαι τῶν διακονουμένων, ἀλλ' ἕκαστος αὐτὸς ἑαυτῷ διηκονεῖτο, καὶ πολλὴ ἦν ἡ ὁμοτιμία, καὶ πᾶσα ἀνωμαλία ἐκποδὼν ἦν. ᾿Επειδὴ δὲ εἰσῆλθεν ἡ ἁμαρτία, ἐλυμήνατο τὴν ἐλευθερίαν, καὶ διέφθειρε τὴν ἀπὸ τῆς φύσεως δεδομένην ἀξίαν, καὶ τὴν δουλείαν ἐπεισήγαγεν, ἵνα διηνεκὴς ᾖ διδάσκαλος καὶ νουθεσία τῷ τῶν ἀνθρώπων γένει, ὥστε φεύγειν μὲν τῆς ἁμαρτίας τὴν δουλείαν, πρὸς δὲ τὴν ἐλευθερίαν τῆς ἀρετῆς ἐπανιέναι. ῞Οτι γὰρ ὁ δοῦλος καὶ ὁ δεσπότης διηνεκῆ ἔχουσι τὴν ἐντεῦθεν ἐγγινομένην ὠφέλειαν, εἰ βούλοιντο, ἐννοείτωσαν, ὁ μὲν δοῦλος, ὅτι διὰ τοῦτο εἴληφε τὴν δουλείαν, ἐπειδὴ ὁ Χὰμ εἰς τοσαύτην προπέτειαν ἐξώκειλε· καὶ ὁ δεσπότης πάλιν λογιζέσθω, ὅτι οὐχ ἑτέρωθεν ἡ ὑποταγὴ γέγονε καὶ ἡ δουλεία, ἀλλ' ἢ ἀπὸ τοῦ μοχθηρὰν ἐκεῖνον ἐπιδείξασθαι γνώμην, καὶ τῆς ἰσοτιμίας τῶν ἀδελφῶν ἐκπεσεῖν. Translation (slightly modified): Hill, Homilies on Genesis 18–45, 213–14. 76 Spir. 20.51.11–20 (SC 17.426–29): ἢ κατά τινα σοφὴν καὶ ἀπόρρητον οἰκονομίαν, οἱ χείρους τῶν παίδων, ἐκ τῆς τῶν πατέρων φωνῆς, τοῖς φρονιμωτέροις καὶ βελτίοσι δουλεύειν κατεδικάσθησαν· ἣν οὐδὲ καταδίκην, ἀλλ' εὐεργεσίαν εἴποι τις ἂν δίκαιος τῶν γινομένων ἐξεταστής. Τὸν γάρ, δι' ἔνδειαν τοῦ φρονεῖν, οὐκ ἔχοντα ἐν ἑαυτῷ τὸ κατὰ φύσιν ἄρχον, τοῦτον ἑτέρου κτῆμα γενέσθαι λυσιτελέστερον, ἵνα τῷ τοῦ κρατοῦντος λογισμῷ διευθυνόμενος, ὅμοιος ᾖ ἅρματι ἡνίοχον ἀναλαβόντι, καὶ πλοίῳ κυβερνήτην ἔχοντι ἐπὶ οἰάκων καθήμενον. Translation: David Anderson, trans., St. Basil the Great: On the Holy

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off enslaved.

Although most of these early Christian authors did not subscribe to Aristotelian natural slavery,77 there does seem to be a view that some people, due to their upbringing and character, are supposed to be enslaved, and are in fact better off when enslaved.

Chrysostom actually believes that, according to nature, no one should be enslaved78— but sin “destroyed the worth inherent in nature” (διέφθειρε τὴν ἀπὸ τῆς φύσεως

δεδομένην ἀξίαν), and so resulted in slavery. The metaphorical and literal lines of slavery are often blurred in Chrysostom’s doulological discourse: “Slavery in turn is thus only a label: the person who commits sin is a slave.”79 Being a real slave was considered only a title, only a matter of terminology. This type of interiorised and metaphorical slavery, unfortunately, removed the focus from the problem of real slavery.80 Yet the conceptual overlap between sinners and slaves also meant that the view of slaves as deserving their lot, not only as a punishment for their own sins, but also as a safeguard for society against such delinquents, meant that slavery was not only accepted and tolerated, but it was actually advanced and propagandised in the church itself. Chrysostom told slaves that the reason for their enslavement was not the sin of

Ham, but their own sin.81 He does not account for the fact that basically everyone is

Spirit (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1980), 80. 77 De Wet, Preaching Bondage, 26–29, 55–57. I have argued extensively that Platonic views of slavery, rather than Aristotelian views, were far more influential in shaping early Christian views on slavery; De Wet, Unbound God, 40–77; for Plato’s views on slavery, see Gregory Vlastos, “Slavery in Plato’s Thought,” Philosophical Review 50 (1941): 289–304; “Does Slavery Exist in the Republic?,” Classical Philology 63 (1968): 291–95; Eckart Schütrumpf, “Slaves in Plato’s Political Dialogues and the Significance of Plato’s Psychology for the Aristotelian Theory of Slavery,” in Ideal and Culture of Knowledge in Plato, ed. Wolfgang Detel, Alexander Becker, and Peter Scholz (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 2003), 245–60. 78 Hom. Tit. 4.1 (F6.298). 79 Hom. Gen. 29.23 (PG 53.270.36–37): Καὶ ἡ δουλεία πάλιν ὁμοίως ὄνομά ἐστιν· ἐκεῖνος γάρ ἐστι δοῦλος ὁ τὴν ἁμαρτίαν ἐργαζόμενος. See also Hom. Eph. 22.1 (F4.330). 80 De Wet, Preaching Bondage, 45–81. 81 Serm. Gen. 5.1.19–29 (SC 433.252–53).

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prone to sin, but not everyone is enslaved—tragically, some were perhaps then simply more sinful and enslaveable than others. But if sinners are slaves, and real slaves are really bad sinners, then the opposite may also be assumed—masters are actually not so bad, and although they still sin and are still under the rule of God, they are not as sinful and despised by God as the iniquitous slaves at the ends of their whips.82 Furthermore, according to Chrysostom, by punishing their wicked slaves, masters are actually busy with the work of God; masters mitigate the effects of sin.83 In the earliest Christian literature, eschatological depictions of sinners included being bound and chained like slaves.84 Enslavement, according to this ideology, is more to the benefit of the slaves than the masters. Being sinful is then effeminate, weak, and resembles the servile nature—mastery is masculine.

The monastic life, once again, represented freedom from slavery. Monasticism radiated liberty from the slavery of marriage, institutional slavery, and the slavery of sin. In Jerome’s Vita Malchi, it is actually because of Malchus’ perceived sin (his cares for his family) and abandoning his monastic community, that he becomes physically enslaved.85 In Jerome’s account, when Malchus resolved to leave the monastery, the abbot said that he was “marked with Satan’s branding iron.”86 Although the branding of slaves was banned in late antiquity, it was still practiced.87 Branding, chaining, and collaring of the neck were common markers of slave ownership and punishment.

82 Hab. eun. spir. 3.7 (PG 51.287.4–8). 83 Hom. Phlm. 3.2 (F6.352); Hom. Tit. 4.1 (F6.298–99). 84 Isabel Moreira, Heavens Purge: Purgatory in Late Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 52–53. 85 Vit. Mal. 3.1–8; see Christa Gray, Jerome: Vita Malchi, Oxford Classical Monographs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 80–83. 86 Vit. Mal. 3.8: Satanae notatum cauterio; in Gray, Vita Malchi, 82–83. 87 Julia Hillner, Prison, Punishment and Penance in Late Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 171.

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Ironically, some Syrian monks walked around wearing slave collars (κλοιοί) and having heavy chains around their bodies—an ascetic act rich with symbolism—indicating the domination of the soul over the flesh of the monk, and at the same time picturing the monk as a slave of Christ (the chains may also be a performative allusion to the shackles

Paul had to endure [Phil. 1:14]).

Jerome, for instance, was rather sceptical about such monks who wear chains

(catenae), and warned Eustochium, the daughter of his close companion Paula, to steer clear of them.88 Yet, in another case, he is quite positive of such performative attire.89

Epiphanius of Salamis also highlights this characteristic of some monks, who wear slave collars against the ordinances of the church.90 Monks in chains are still a common theme in the sixth-century hagiographer John of Ephesus’ Lives of the Eastern Saints.

He writes about a monk, Zacharias, who kept a stone in his mouth and a coil on his wrist, symbols of his slavery to God.91 The coil’s symbolism was complex; a physical symbol of psychic control and divine carcerality—it was tied around his neck, but later around his wrist, to keep anger from moving from his heart to his mouth or hands, or from his surroundings into his heart. The monk Harfat tied such heavy chains around his neck, hands, and feet, that they nearly cost him his life.92 In the coenobitic context, the wearing of chains was reserved for the most worthy of monks.93 Women, too, wore such chains—sometimes so heavy that it affected their posture, as is evident from the

88 Ep. 22.28 (CSEL 54.185). 89 Ep. 17.2 (CSEL 54.71). 90 Fid. 13.8 (Holl 3.514.7–9), 23.6 (Holl 3.524.27–28); for more on slave collars generally, see David L. Thurmond, “Some Roman Slave Collars in CIL,” Athenaeum 82.72 (1994): 459–78. 91 Vit. 19 (Brooks 270–72). 92 Vit. 11 (Brooks 160–66). 93 Susan Ashbrook Harvey, Asceticism and Society in Crisis: John of Ephesus and The Lives of the Eastern Saints, Transformation of the Classical Heritage 18 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 19–20; Chris L. de Wet, “Slavery and Asceticism in John of Ephesus’ Lives of the Eastern Saints,” Scrinium 13 (2017): 84–113.

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testimony of Theodoret.94

The fact that both Jerome and Epiphanius express concern over the wearing of chains may indicate that the practice was somewhat contested. Epiphanius forbade the wearing of collars in public—not that everyone listened to him.95 Wearing chains and collars was also extremely rare among Egyptian ascetics.96 Could it be that the façade of the slave of God was being taken too far, and that some early Christian leaders preferred a more traditionally masculine habit? Was the performance of psycho-somatic control being proliferated at the cost of or in contrast to Christian liberty, where the yoke of Christ is light (Matt. 11:28–30)? This is very difficult to determine directly from the sources (since other extreme ascetic practices are also criticised), and the practice continued nevertheless. Ascetic performances among monks were often highly individualised and personal, as we see with Zacharias, for instance. But overall such multi-layered meanings were deliberate features of monastic performativity. The figure of the monk is then paradoxical in relation to slavery. They are free, but their ascetic regimen and demeanour display several doulological stimuli, as Chrysostom, who seems more irenic about the matter, says:

Do you not see those who are in the mountains? They renounce both houses,

and wives, and children, and all esteem, and shut themselves away from the

world, clothing themselves in sackcloth, strewing ashes beneath them; they

wear collars hung around their necks, and have enclosed themselves in a

94 Hist. rel. 29.4–5 (SC 257.234–37); see also Harvey, Asceticism and Society, 114; Theresa Urbainczyk, Theodoret of Cyrrhus: The Bishop and the Holy Man (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 108. Chaining occurs, overall, as a common practice in Theodoret’s Historia Religiosa. 95 Fid. 23.6 (Holl 3.524.26–28). 96 Daniel F. Caner, “‘Not of This World’: The Invention of Monasticism,” in A Companion to Late Antiquity, ed. Philip Rousseau, Blackwell Companions to the Ancient World (Malden, MA: Wiley- Blackwell, 2012), 588–600.

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small cell. Nor do they stop here, but exert themselves with fasting and

constant hunger.97

Like slaves, monks have no legal bonds to family ties, and cannot marry. Like slaves, they are often locked away, shut up in their cells away from this world. Their clothing is simple, and they wear collars like slaves. Finally, like many slaves, hunger was a daily part of life. The monastic regimen and attire can therefore be understood as a performance of the slave of God image, signifying, too, the mastery of the flesh. This is the paradoxical nature of Christian freedom98—freedom, according to the principle of corporeal heteronomy discussed in the previous chapter, still means being enslaved to Christ. Monks did not need slaves, which also represents their freedom from the curse of labour we find in Genesis 3:17–19, as well as the fact that they have become self-sufficient.99 Another consequence of sin was then the love of indulgence that it wrought, and so the preference for slavery. Using this same reasoning, Chrysostom actually argued that women (and, by implication, effeminate persons more generally) were more in need of slaves due to their “soft” nature.100 The inverse is not also true: a man who has need of many slaves is unmasculine. The monastic life was therefore seen as a safeguard against enslavement, despite the chains that signified enslavement to the heavenly master, and not to mention the threat of being kidnapped and enslaved by

97 Hom. Eph. 13.3 (F4.241): Οὐχ ὁρᾷς τοὺς ἐν τοῖς ὄρεσιν; ἐκεῖνοι καὶ οἰκίας ἀφιᾶσι, καὶ γυναῖκας καὶ παῖδας, καὶ προστασίαν ἅπασαν, καὶ ἐκτὸς ἑαυτοὺς τοῦ κόσμου ποιήσαντες, σάκκον περιθέμενοι, σποδὸν ὑποστρωσάμενοι, κλοιὰ τῶν τραχήλων ἐξαρτήσαντες, ἐν οἰκίσκῳ μικρῷ κατακλείσαντες ἑαυτοὺς, οὐδὲ μέχρι τούτων ἵστανται, ἀλλὰ καὶ νηστείαις καὶ λιμῷ διηνεκεῖ κατατείνουσιν ἑαυτούς. 98 De Wet, Preaching Bondage, 64–81. 99 For an extensive discussion of the role of labour in early Christian monasticism, see Peter R. L. Brown, Treasure in Heaven: The Holy Poor in Early Christianity, Kindle Edition. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016). 100 Subintr. 9 (Dumortier 77); De Wet, “Revisiting the Subintroductae,” 66–67.

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bandits, as in Jerome’s account of Malchus. 101 On this account, the practice of asceticism and the monastic life (whether living in a real monastery or desert, or practising what has been called popular or lay monasticism in the city and household) is actually for Chrysostom the greatest institution of masculinity, surpassing all the rest, since the practice of this masculine institution negates the need for all the others, as we have seen and will see next.

Finally, it is also due to sin that the world now has need for secular governments.

Imperial governance is third form institution of masculinity, for Chrysostom, and it is also the worst. It is in secular governments that the need for controlling the consequences of sin is most clearly seen. Chrysostom states: “For proof that this form of government necessarily followed from sin, listen in turn to Paul himself giving the rationale for it: ‘If you want to have no fear of authority, do the right thing, and you will win its commendation. But if you do the wrong thing, have fear: the sword is not carried to no purpose’ [Rom. 13:3–4].” Chrysostom relies very much on Paul’s words in Romans 13 when it comes to his views on secular governments. The government and its laws are to Chrysostom like a pedagogue (παιδαγωγός) and a teacher, as he continues to say: “He [God] appointed you an armed judge: just as a loving father in his goodness entrusts to fearsome tutors and teachers children who ignore him and scorn his fatherly affection, so too God in His goodness entrusted to rulers, like teachers and tutors, our nature that scorned Him, the purpose being for them to correct their neglect.”102

101 Vit. Mal. 4; Gray, Vita Malchi, 82–83. 102 Serm. Gen. 4.149–154, 159–66 (SC 433.234–37): Καὶ ὅτι καὶ οὗτος τῆς ἀρχῆς ὁ τρόπος ἀναγκαῖος διὰ τὴν ἁμαρτίαν ἐγένετο, ἄκουσον πάλιν αὐτοῦ τοῦ Παύλου περὶ τούτου φιλοσοφοῦντος. «Εἰ δὲ θέλεις μὴ φοβεῖσθαι τὴν ἐξουσίαν, τὸ ἀγαθὸν ποίει, φησὶ, καὶ ἕξεις ἔπαινον ἐξ αὐτῆς. ᾿Εὰν δὲ τὸ κακὸν ποιῇς, φοβοῦ· οὐ γὰρ εἰκῆ τὴν μάχαιραν φορεῖ».... ῾Ωπλισμένον σοι τὸν δικαστὴν ἐπέστησε. Καθάπερ γὰρ φιλόστοργος πατὴρ παῖδας εἰς αὐτὸν ῥᾳθυμοῦντας, καὶ διὰ τὴν πατρικὴν φιλοστοργίαν καταφρονοῦντας αὐτοῦ, παιδαγωγοῖς καὶ διδασκάλοις ἐκδίδωσι φοβεροῖς, οὕτω καὶ ὁ Θεὸς τὴν φύσιν τὴν ἡμετέραν, καταφρονοῦσαν αὐτοῦ, διὰ τὴν ἀγαθότητα, καθάπερ διδασκάλοις καὶ παιδαγωγοῖς, τοῖς ἄρχουσιν ἐξέδωκεν, ὥστε αὐτοὺς ἐπιστρέψαι αὐτῶν τὴν ῥᾳθυμίαν. Translation: Hill, Sermons on the Book of Genesis, 69–70.

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We will remember, as stated above, Chrysostom also called slavery a teacher.103

Although most pedagogues in late antiquity were slaves, pedagogues were still very much feared by the children they supervised—the pedagogue was known for his recourse to punishment.104 As we have noted in the introductory chapter of this study, the pedagogue was seen as a surrogate for the power and authority of the paterfamilias. 105 Thus, in the same way, Chrysostom views the government as a surrogate for God, who may punish on his behalf. The most important function of the pedagogue was to teach the child discipline—in the same way, secular governments discipline humanity because of their sins. Chrysostom explicitly notes that this pedagogue-teacher is there to correct ῥαθυμία. Along with sin, then, comes the puerilisation of humanity—the onset of sin was a regression from maturity back to infantility, hence the need for divine pedagogy.106 As with the pedagogue,107 secular governments are there to instil fear in disobedient citizens. The dynamics of fear in

Chrysostomic thought are laid bare in this case—animals fear humans, humans fear

God (perhaps not exactly like animals, but there is still fear nonetheless), but God has no fear. But with sin, humans lost their fear of God; similarly, animals also lost their fear of humans. Now there is an impetus for more fear, namely the fear wives show to husbands, masters show to slaves, and citizens show to the imperial government—but above all, there is need for the fear of God. Secular government keeps society in good order, according to Chrysostom.

The issue of ὁμοτιμία, equality of honour, plays a role here as well. It was the

103 Hom. Gen. 29.22 (PG 53.269.59–270.20) 104 De Wet, Preaching Bondage, 145–46. 105 De Wet, Preaching Bondage, 143–44. 106 David Rylaarsdam, John Chrysostom on Divine Pedagogy: The Coherence of His Theology and Preaching, Oxford Early Christian Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 106–7. 107 Stat.15.2 (PG 49.154.17–19).

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equality of esteem that caused Eve to rebel against Adam and God, and Ham to disrespect his father. The government is therefore also a testament to the ineffectiveness of ὁμοτιμία, and exists to manage its risks. Chrysostom considers political governance even a phenomenon clear in nature among animals. These governments keep anarchy

(ἀναρχία) at bay.108 In Chrysostom’s reading of Romans 13, he also makes it clear that even priests and monks are to be subject to imperial rule.109 But Christians also govern in a different manner, not based on force, as the imperial government, but through persuasion—this is characteristic of the governance of the priest and the church.110 And although monks and priests are to respect the law, they, and all other pious believers in fact, actually have no need of it—because they are able to live a life free from sin with total self-governance (αὐτεξουσία).111 “For those who live in piety do not require the discipline [παιδαγωγίας] of the magistrates; for ‘the law is not made for a righteous person’ [1 Tim. 1:9], Paul says,” Chrysostom assures the good folks, “But since the majority of people are wicked, if they had no fear of these rulers set over them, they would fill the cities with innumerable evils.”112 Free will and self-governance therefore do not need these forms of slavery to stop it from falling into sin. But government protects the pious individual from the anarchy of the wicked.

With the introduction of these “three-plus-one” institutions of masculinity

(marriage, slavery, and imperial goverance, and/or asceticism and the monastic life),

108 Hom. Rom. 24[23].1 (F1.381–82). 109 Hom. Rom. 24[23].1 (F1.381). 110 Sac. 2.3.57–61 (SC 272.110–13); see also the discussion in Pagels, “Politics of Paradise,” 71–75; for a very extensive study of the topic of imperial governance in Chrysostom, see Konstantinos Bosinis, Johannes Chrysostomus über das Imperium Romanum: Studie zum politischen Denken der Alten Kirche (Mandelbachtal: Cicero, 2005). 111 Pagels, “Politics of Paradise,” 74–75 compares this to Augustine, who saw total self-governance as a myth. 112 Stat. 6.2 (PG 49.82.25–29): οἱ μὲν γὰρ εὐλαβείᾳ συζῶντες οὐδὲν δέονται τῆς τούτων παιδαγωγίας· Δικαίῳ γὰρ νόμος οὐ κεῖται, φησίν. Οἱ δὲ πολλοὶ πρὸς κακίαν βλέποντες, εἰ μὴ τὸν ἀπὸ τούτων φόβον εἶχον αὐτοῖς ἐπικείμενον, μυρίων ἂν κακῶν τὰς πόλεις ἐνέπλησαν.

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we therefore see a major change in the protological politeia of human rule before and after the Fall. The loss of domination required an intensification of domination in order to balance the cosmic scales of order. The function of these institutions of masculinity were both pedagogical or disciplinary and often punitive.

A Palace Prepared for a King: Domination and Creational Succession

In addition to the divine imaging of humanity, there is also a second operation that legitimises humanity’s absolute prelapsarian control of creation in Chrysostom’s thought, namely creational succession. The order of creation was an important motif in patristic commentaries on the creation narrative, or hexaemeron.113 The regality of humanity is confirmed by the fact that it was created last, as the crown of all creation:

If more estimable than the whole world, you ask, how is it that they

[humans] are produced after the world? For the very reason that they are

more estimable than the world: just as when an emperor is due to process

into some city, generals and lieutenants and bodyguards and all the slaves

precede him so as to prepare the palace, have every convenience prepared

and welcome the emperor with great honor, just so too here, with an

emperor about to be brought forth, as it were, the sun preceded, the moon

went ahead, the light entered, everything was made and got ready, and only

113 Yves M. -J. Congar, “Le thème de Dieu-créateur et les explications de l’Hexaméron dans la tradition chrétienne,” in L’homme devant Dieu: mélanges offerts au Père Henri de Lubac, vol. 1 of Théologie Series 56–58 (Paris: Aubier, 1963), 189–222; Peter C. Bouteneff, Beginnings: Ancient Christian Readings of the Biblical Creation Narratives (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2008), 121–83; Paul M. Blowers, Drama of the Divine Economy: Creator and Creation in Early Christian Theology and Piety, Oxford Early Christian Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 101–38; Wynand de Beer, “The Patristic Understanding of the Six Days (Hexaemeron),” Journal of Early Christian History 5.2 (2015): 3–23.

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then the human being is brought forth at a later stage with great honor.114

With his usual impressive rhetorical acuity, Chrysostom likens creation to an imperial procession, and presents humanity as the emperor. Imperial masculinity was a very powerful manifestation of manliness and rulership.115 Not only should humanity dominate creation, but creation was also made to serve and honour humanity. 116

Scholars approaching early Christianity from a socio-scientific perspective call this ascribed honour—a type of honour that is conferred upon someone by birth or from a higher authority.117 Humanity is ascribed a measure of honour through their creation and by God. Interestingly enough, the fact that Eve was actually created after Adam is an inconsistency of creational succession that Chrysostom does not notice. Adam’s creation from the dust of the earth means that he rules the earth; yet, although Eve is created from the rib of Adam, she does not rule over him. The principle of creational succession is also interiorised and applied to the realm of the psychic:

But in the case of the human person, its being is incorporeal and immortal,

114 Serm. Gen. 2.1.67–78 (SC 433.186–87): Καὶ πῶς, φησὶν, εἰ τοῦ κόσμου τιμιώτερός ἐστι παντὸς, ὕστερος τοῦ κόσμου παράγεται; Δι' αὐτὸ τοῦτο, ἐπειδὴ τοῦ κόσμου τιμιώτερός ἐστιν. ῞Ωσπερ γὰρ βασιλέως εἰσελαύνειν μέλλοντος [PG: εἰς τινα πόλιν], στρατηγοὶ καὶ ὕπαρχοι καὶ δορυφόροι καὶ πάντες οἱ δοῦλοι προφθάνουσιν, ἵνα τὰ βασίλεια παρασκευάσαντες, καὶ πᾶσαν τὴν ἄλλην εὐτρεπίσαντες θεραπείαν, μετὰ πολλῆς τῆς τιμῆς ὑποδέξωνται τὸν βασιλέα, οὕτω δὴ καὶ ἐνταῦθα, καθάπερ βασιλέως εἰσάγεσθαι μέλλοντος, προέφθασεν ὁ ἥλιος, προέδραμεν ὁ οὐρανὸς, προεισῆλθε τὸ φῶς, ἅπαντα γέγονε καὶ εὐτρεπίσθη, καὶ τότε ὁ ἄνθρωπος μετὰ πολλῆς ὕστερον εἰσάγεται τῆς τιμῆς. Translation: Hill, Sermons on the Book of Genesis, 44. See also the parallel in Hom. Gen. 8.5 (PG 53.71.19–29). 115 See, generally, Mark Masterson, Man to Man: Desire, Homosociality, and Authority in Late-Roman Manhood (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2014), 138–69; Susanna Elm, “Family Men: Masculinity and Philosophy in Late Antiquity,” in Transformations of Late Antiquity: Essays for Peter Brown, ed. Philip Rousseau and Emmanuel Papoutsakis (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 290–91; Mary R. D’Angelo, “The ANHP Question in Luke-Acts: Imperial Masculinity and the Deployment of Women in the Early Second Century?,” in A Feminist Companion to Luke, ed. Amy-Jill Levine, Feminist Companion to the New Testament and Early Christian Writings 3 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2002), 44–72. 116 Hom. Gen. 15.11 (PG 53.122.12–23). 117 Bruce J. Malina, The New Testament World: Insights from Cultural Anthropology (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001), 31–33.

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and has great superiority over the body, to the same extent as incorporeal

form surpassed the corporeal. Why is it that, if the soul is more important

than the body, the lesser is created first, and then the greater afterwards?

Don’t you see, dearly beloved, that even in the process of creation this very

sequence is followed. That is to say, just as heaven and earth, the sun and

moon, and everything else is created, including the brute beasts, and after

all these the human person, the one destined to enjoy control of all of them,

in the very same way in the actual creation of the human person the body is

produced first and then the soul, greater though its importance is. The

procedure is the same with the brute beasts: though they are destined to be

useful in the service of human beings, they are created before them so that

the ones intended to enjoy the use of these beasts will find them ready for

service. So too, the body is created before the soul, so that when the soul is

produced according to God’s ineffable wisdom, it will be able to display its

own vital forces through the movement of its body.118

Just as creation is ready for humanity when they arrive, so too the body is ready for the arrival of the soul. In the section cited above, the fleshly body is again clearly linked with animality, while the soul is the ruling and animating principle. The

118 Hom. Gen. 13.10–11 (PG 53.107.55–108.13): ᾿Επὶ δὲ τοῦ ἀνθρώπου οὐσία τίς ἐστιν ἀσώματος καὶ ἀθάνατος πολλὴν πρὸς τὸ σῶμα τὴν ὑπεροχὴν κεκτημένη, καὶ τοσαύτην, ὅσην εἰκὸς τὸ ἀσώματον τοῦ σώματος. ᾿Αλλ' ἴσως εἴποι τις ἂν, καὶ τίνος ἕνεκεν, εἰ τιμιώτερον ἡ ψυχὴ τοῦ σώματος, τὸ ἔλαττον πρῶτον δημιουργεῖται, καὶ τότε τὸ μεῖζον καὶ ὑπερέχον; Οὐχ ὁρᾷς, ἀγαπητὲ, ὅτι καὶ ἐπὶ τῆς κτίσεως τὸ αὐτὸ τοῦτο γέγονεν; ῞Ωσπερ γὰρ οὐρανὸς, καὶ γῆ, καὶ ἥλιος καὶ σελήνη, καὶ τὰ ἄλλα πάντα ἐδημιουργήθη, καὶ τὰ ζῶα τὰ ἄλογα, καὶ μετὰ ταῦτα ἅπαντα ὁ ἄνθρωπος, ὁ τούτων ἁπάντων τὴν ἀρχὴν μέλλων ἐγχειρίζεσθαι· τὸν αὐτὸν δὴ τρόπον καὶ ἐν αὐτῇ τῇ διαπλάσει τοῦ ἀνθρώπου πρότερον τὸ σῶμα παράγεται, καὶ τότε ἡ ψυχὴ ἡ τιμιωτέρα. ῝Ον γὰρ τρόπον τὰ ἄλογα τὰ πρὸς ὑπηρεσίαν μέλλοντα τῷ ἀνθρώπῳ εἶναι χρήσιμα, πρὸ τοῦ ἀνθρώπου δημιουργεῖται, ἵνα ἑτοίμην ἔχῃ τὴν ὑπηρεσίαν ὁ μέλλων τῆς τούτων χρείας ἀπολαύειν· οὕτω καὶ πρὸ τῆς ψυχῆς τὸ σῶμα δημιουργεῖται, ἵνα ἐπειδὰν κατὰ τὴν ἀπόῤῥητον αὐτοῦ σοφίαν ἡ ψυχὴ παραχθῇ, ἔχῃ τὰς οἰκείας ἐνεργείας ἐπιδείκνυσθαι διὰ τῆς τοῦ σώματος κινήσεως. Translation: Hill, Homilies on Genesis 1–17, 174.

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incorporeality of the soul affirms its connection, theologically speaking, as we have seen in the previous chapter, with the divine Masculine. The body is described as an instrument that the rational soul must activate.119

The operation of creational succession is also one based on utility. In this sequence, created beings, especially animals, are created before human beings so that they can be ready and useful immediately. The terms “instrument” (ὄργανον) and

“useful” (χρήσιμος) are again ones with doulological connotations. 120 The slave is created for the sake of the master; the master is not created for the sake of the slave.

The same terms are used when describing the possession of the serpent, like an instrument, by the devil.121 Once again, in the principle of creational succession in the hexaemeron, we see the great masculine struggle playing itself out.

Creational succession, finally, also has an aesthetic function in Chrysostom. The order of creation is beautiful, and therefore worth striving for and protecting, since it reveals the creator. 122 The beauty of the created order has both a heuristic and an authorising function. Heuristically, one can discover the divine and its dynamics within the patterns of the cosmic order. But the cosmic order is also the blueprint of divine volition. In this last function, an almost immeasurable authority is afforded to “nature” and naturalness. The ordo naturalis also becomes the ordo Dei. This principle is indispensible for understanding ancient gender dynamics.123

119 Hom. Gen. 13.9 (PG 53.107.33–35). 120 See esp. Jennifer A. Glancy, “The Utility of an Apostle: On Philemon 11,” Journal of Early Christian History 5.1 (2015): 72–86. 121 Hom. Gen. 16.3 (PG 53.127.1–4). 122 Serm. Gen. 1.1.30–34 (SC 433.142–45): Εἰ γὰρ «ἐκ μεγέθους καὶ καλλονῆς κτισμάτων ἀναλόγως ὁ γενεσιουργὸς θεωρεῖται», ὅσῳπερ ἂν τῇ καλλονῇ καὶ τῷ μεγέθει τῶν κτισμάτων ἐνδιατρίψωμεν, τοσούτῳ πρὸς τὸν γενεσιουργὸν χειραγωγούμεθα. Translation: Hill, Sermons on the Book of Genesis, 23. 123 See also, more generally, John J. Winkler, The Constraints of Desire: The Anthropology of Sex and Gender in Ancient Greece (New York: Routledge, 1990), 17–18; Elizabeth A. Clark, “Ideology, History

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Furthermore, because humanity is created last as the crown of the cosmos, they are classified as masters over the animals, and also aid in the classification of the animals. Classification is never innocent—it always seeks to empower some and subjugate others.124 Classification is what enables hierarchy. Chrysostom notes that

Adam names the animals just as a slaveholder names his slaves:

As evidence, after all, that everything was placed under the human being’s

control, listen to Scripture saying, “He brought the wild animals and all the

brute beasts to Adam to see what he would call them” [Gen. 2:19]. And

seeing the animals near him, he didn’t shrink back, but like a master giving

names to slaves in his service, he gave them all names; the text says, “They

each bore the name Adam gave them,” this being a symbol of his dominion.

Hence God was wanting to teach him through this the dignity of his

authority, so he entrusted to him the giving of names.125

Naming and classification here are therefore doulological—it establishes the active namer as the master, and the passively named ones as the slaves. In my previous work I have referred to this process of slaving by naming as kyriophorism.126 For

and the Construction of ‘Woman’ in Late Ancient Christianity,” in A Feminist Companion to Patristic Literature, ed. Amy-Jill Levine and Maria M. Robbins (London: T & T Clark, 2008), 111. 124 For an excellent study on the power dynamics of classification in late ancient Christianity, see Todd S. Berzon, Classifying Christians: Ethnography, Heresiology, and the Limits of Knowledge in Late Antiquity (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016). 125 Hom. Gen. 9.8 (PG 53.79.5–16): ῞Οτι γὰρ ὑποτεταγμένα ἦν ἅπαντα τῷ ἀνθρώπῳ, ἄκουσον τῆς Γραφῆς λεγούσης· ῎Ηγαγε, φησὶ, τὰ θηρία καὶ πάντα τὰ ἄλογα πρὸς τὸν ᾿Αδὰμ, ἰδεῖν τί καλέσει αὐτά. Καὶ ὁρῶν πλησίον αὐτοῦ γινόμενα τὰ θηρία, οὐκ ἀπεπήδησεν, ἀλλὰ καθάπερ τις δεσπότης δούλοις ὑποκειμένοις ὀνόματα ἐπιτιθεὶς, οὕτως ἅπασι τὰς προσηγορίας ἐπέθηκεν· Καὶ πᾶν ὃ ἐκάλεσεν αὐτὸ, φησὶν, ᾿Αδὰμ, τοῦτο ὄνομα αὐτῷ· καὶ τοῦτο γὰρ δεσποτείας σύμβολον. Διὰ τοῦτο καὶ ὁ Θεὸς βουλόμενος καὶ διὰ τούτου διδάξαι αὐτὸν τὸ τῆς ἐξουσίας ἀξίωμα, αὐτῷ τῶν ὀνομάτων τὴν θέσιν ἐπέτρεψεν. Translation: Hill, Homilies on Genesis 1–17, 122. 126 De Wet, Preaching Bondage, 16–17.

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Chrysostom, naming in this case is a “symbol of dominion” (δεσποτείας σύμβολον). It is an important function that Adam has, since he is also seen as the overseer or vilicus of creation—naming is an important subset of surveillance and management. Shortly before discussing Adam’s naming of the animals, Chrysostom states: “That phrase, ‘to watch over it’ [Gen. 2:15], is not added idly: it is an instance of considerateness in expression to the effect that he might be fully aware that he was subject to a master who had regaled him with such enjoyment, and along with that enjoyment entrusted him with its protection.”127 Like sex, naming betrays the most basic dynamics of power, in which one actively imposes knowledge, and the other passively accepts. This type naming, that is kyriophorism, has several important social effects, as is clear from

Chrysostom’s thought. Kyriophorism confirms the knowledge (and rationality, that important marker of manliness), and thus power, of the one who names. Chrysostom makes it clear that Adam did have knowledge of good and evil, discernment that is, even before eating from the tree, otherwise “he would have been more irrational than the irrational animals, the master would have been more foolish than the slave.”128

Knowledge of and over another can enable subjugation, and it also makes surveillance possible and facile. Naming is part of “watching over” and “guarding” (φυλάσσειν).

The knowledge imposed by kyriophorism therefore creates subjects. Naming informs and affirms the subjectivity of the one who subjugates and the subjugated one.

Kyriophorism also creates the “other” and thereby serves to construct similarity and, perhaps more importantly, difference. It partitions the cosmos, and draws boundaries

127 Hom. Gen. 14.9 (PG 53.113.41–46): Καὶ τὸ εἰπεῖν δὲ, ὅτι Φυλάσσειν, οὐχ ἁπλῶς πρόσκειται, ἀλλὰ συγκατάβασίς ἐστι τῶν ῥημάτων, ἵνα ὅλως εἰδέναι ἔχῃ, φησὶν, ὅτι ὑπόκειταί τινι δεσπότῃ τῷ τὴν τοσαύτην ἀπόλαυσιν αὐτῷ χαρισαμένῳ, καὶ μετὰ τῆς ἀπολαύσεως τὴν φυλακὴν ἐπιτρέψαντι. Translation: Hill, Homilies on Genesis 1–17, 185 (my italics). 128 Serm. Gen. 6.1.55–56 (SC 433.286–87): καὶ αὐτῶν τῶν ἀλόγων ἀλογώτερος ἦν, καὶ τοῦ δούλου ὁ δεσπότης ἀνοητότερος. Translation: Hill, Sermons on the Book of Genesis, 100.

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of inclusion and exclusion. Kyriophorism is ἀρχή in action. “[P]assing his [Adam’s] time in that garden like a king he could revel in its enjoyment,” Chrysostom muses,

“and like a master he had no occasion to mix with those ministering to him but had a life all to himself.”129 The doulological classification of animals separates Adam from them. Eve’s mistake was, then, that she mingled with the serpent. Finally, the conceptual linkages between kyriophorism and surveillance or guarding, as seen in

Chrysostom’s rhetoric above, establishes the named one as being the responsibility of the namer, and so under his protection and discipline. In exchange for usefulness, the master gives protection. The interaction between kyriophorism and surveillance thus signifies a paternalism that affirms the dependence of women upon men, slaves upon masters, and the ruled upon the rulers—at the same time, it conceals the dependence of those in power upon their subjects.130

The construction of difference and drawing of cosmic and social boundaries through kyriophorism is nowhere clearer in Chrysostom’s thought than when Adam names Eve.131 Notice that the naming of Eve, or Zoē, only occurs after the Fall (Gen.

3:20), when the subjugation of Eve, due to her disobedience, is explicitly stated. As I will shortly demonstrate, it is only after the Fall that sexual difference becomes a major factor, and the sexual difference between man and woman, Adam and Eve, is ratified upon the naming of Eve. In Chrysostom’s protological imaginaire, sexual difference and subjugation are thus confirmed by means of kyriophorism, and so the social separation and hierarchical classification of the sexes are also established. These

129 Hom. Gen. 14.12 (PG 53.114.57–61): ἔχῃ καθάπερ βασιλεὺς ἐνδιαιτώμενος τῇ τοῦ παραδείσου διαγωγῇ, ἐντρυφᾷν τῇ ἐκεῖθεν ἀπολαύσει, καὶ καθάπερ δεσπότης κεχωρισμένος ᾖ τῶν εἰς ὑπηρεσίαν αὐτῷ παρασχεθέντων, καὶ ἀφωρισμένην ἔχῃ τὴν διαγωγήν. Translation: Hill, Homilies on Genesis 1–17, 187. 130 See Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 337; De Wet, Preaching Bondage, 72, 204. 131 Hom. Gen. 18.3 (PG 53.149.17–19).

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conceptual and theological discourses of power had very real consequences in late ancient society. Such discourses emphasised the difference between men and women, slaves and free, rulers and those ruled, and undergirded the practical implementation of acts of domination and subjugation. Finally, and disturbingly, they also proposed that the subjugated are actually the ones in need of those of dominate.

Equality between Adam and Eve?

If we look closer at human cosmic dominion, the dominium that Adam and Eve had, we see a rather complex and inconsistent picture emerging. Before the Fall, according to Chrysostom, there seems to have been some type of “equality” between Adam and

Eve. This is, however, a disputed and inconsistent point in Chrysostom’s thought, as

Clark explains: “As for ideology’s ‘naturalizing’ function, women’s subjection to men is seen by Chrysostom as a ‘natural’ phenomenon (i.e., instituted from the time of creation, by God’s command), although the alternative construction, that women were subjected to men only after the first sin, as a form of punishment, occurs simultaneously in his writings.” 132 When interpreting the deutero-Pauline Haustafeln, Chrysostom states that female subjection is something that is “natural”, which may imply that

132 Elizabeth A. Clark, “Genesis 1–3 and Gender Dilemmas: The Case of John Chrysostom,” in Körper und Seele: Aspekte spätantiker Anthropologie, ed. Barbara Feichtinger, Stephen Lake, and Helmut Seng, Beiträge zur Altertumskunde 215 (München: K. G. Saur, 2006), 166–67. In Michel Foucault’s latest volume in the History of Sexuality series, he too struggles with making sense of the inconsistencies regarding the equality between Adam and Eve and husband and wife in Chrysostom’s thought; Michel Foucault, Les aveux de la chair, ed. Frédéric Gros, vol. 4 of Histoire de la sexualité (Paris: Gallimard, 2018), 260–61: “Principe de l’inégalité naturelle. Dieu en créant l’homme le premier et en lui donnant la femme « comme aide », selon le texte de la Genèse, a bien marqué que l’homme occupe le premier rang, et qu’il est destiné à commander. Il est la tête : « Représentons-nous le mari comme tenant le rang de chef ; la femme, comme occupant la place du corps […]. Paul assigne à chacun sa place ; à l’un l’autorité et la protection, à l’autre la soumission.” In Foucault’s analysis of marriage and virginity in Chrysostom’s thought, in this latest volume of the History of Sexuality, he highlights five principles that is the foundation of a “good marriage” in Chrysostom’s thought: 1) natural inequality; 2) complementarity; 3) the husband must occupy a teaching duty, especially in relation to teaching his wife modesty; 4) permanence of the link between husband and wife, and the reciprocity of their obligations; and, 5) the emotional bond between spouses is the goal and condition of a good marriage; Les aveux de la chair, 261–65.

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women were created from the beginning to be subject to men.133 This also links up with

Chrysostom’s argument about Adam being created in the image of God, but not Eve.

In Homilia in epistulam ad 1 Corinthios 34, Chrysostom is clearer about this point:

Therefore even before the human race was increased to a multitude, when

there were only the first two, God commanded him to rule [ἄρχειν], and her

to be ruled [ἄρχεσθαι]. And, again, in order that Adam might not despise

her as inferior, and leave her, see how God honoured her, and made them

one, even before her creation. For, “Let us make for man a helpmate” [Gen.

2:18], implying that she was made for his need, and thereby uniting Adam

unto Eve, who was made for his sake.... And from the beginning God made

only one form of rule, appointing the man over the woman.134

In this case, Chrysostom sees the primeval subjection of Eve under Adam in the use of the term “helpmate” (βοηθός); a term that has numerous servile connotations. The idea of image as governance functions in the background here, as is seen in the use of the term ἄρχειν. Because Eve was never created in the image of God, she cannot rule but must be ruled (ἄρχεσθαι). Yet a few homilies earlier, in the very same homiletic series on 1 Corinthians, Chrysostom seems to state the opposite, that the woman was not in subjection from the beginning of creation:

133 Hom. Col. 10.1–2 (F5.274–78); Hom. Eph. 20.1–2 (F4.299–307). 134 Hom. 1 Cor. 34.3–4 (F2.425, 427): Διὰ τοῦτο καὶ πρὶν εἰς πλῆθος ἐξενεχθῆναι τὸ γένος, δύο μόνων ὄντων τῶν πρώτων, τῷ μὲν ἄρχειν, τῇ δὲ ἄρχεσθαι ἐκέλευσε. Καὶ ἵνα μὴ ὡς ἐλάττονος καταφρονῇ πάλιν καὶ ἀποσχίζηται, ὅρα πῶς αὐτὴν ἐτίμησέ τε καὶ ἥνωσε καὶ πρὸ τῆς δημιουργίας. “Ποιήσωμεν γὰρ αὐτῷ βοηθόν·” δεικνὺς ὅτι εἰς χρείαν αὐτοῦ γέγονε, καὶ ταύτῃ συνάγων αὐτὸν πρὸς τὴν δι' αὐτὸν γεγενημένην…. Καὶ ἐξ ἀρχῆς μὲν μίαν ἐποίησεν ἀρχὴν, τὸν ἄνδρα ἐπιστήσας τῇ γυναικί.

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For with us indeed the woman is understandably subjected to the man; for

equality of honour [ἰσοτιμία] causes strife. And not only because of this,

but also because of the deceit [see 1 Tim. 2:14] which happened in the

beginning. Therefore she was not subjected immediately when she was

made; neither when God brought her to the man did she hear anything such

as this from God, nor did the man say anything like this to her. He actually

said that she was bone of his bone, and flesh of his flesh [Gen. 2:23]. But

he never reminded her of rule or subjection. But when she misused her

privilege and she who had been made a helper was found to be a traitor, and

ruined everything, then she rightly hears the following: “Your yearning will

be for your husband” [Gen. 3:16].135

We see here two very different and complicated interpretations of Genesis 2:18 and the implications of Eve being a helpmate. In this quotation above, being a helpmate does not necessarily suggest subjugation for Chrysostom. At least, Adam never

“reminded” (ἐμνημόνευσε) Eve of her subjection—which may imply that she was treated as an equal, even though she was, essentially, not. It is very difficult to account for these differences and inconsistencies.136 Chrysostom seems to use one interpretation whenever it suits his argument. At times the inconsistency about Eve’s status functions within the very same argument. For instance, in the narrative of Eve’s deception by the

135 Hom. 1 Cor. 26.2 (F2.311–12): Παρ' ἡμῖν μὲν γὰρ εἰκότως ὑποτέτακται ἡ γυνὴ τῷ ἀνδρί· ἡ γὰρ ἰσοτιμία μάχην ποιεῖ· καὶ οὐ διὰ τοῦτο μόνον, ἀλλὰ καὶ διὰ τὴν ἀπάτην τὴν παρὰ τὴν ἀρχὴν συμβᾶσαν. Διά τοι τοῦτο γενομένη μὲν εὐθέως οὐχ ὑπετάγη· οὐδὲ ὅτε αὐτὴν ἤγαγε πρὸς τὸν ἄνδρα, οὔτε αὐτὴ ἤκουσέ τι παρὰ τοῦ θεοῦ τοιοῦτον, οὔτε ὁ ἀνὴρ εἶπέ τι πρὸς αὐτὴν τοιοῦτον· ἀλλ' ὅτι μὲν ὀστοῦν ἐκ τῶν ὀστῶν αὐτοῦ, καὶ σὰρξ ἐκ τῶν σαρκῶν αὐτοῦ ἦν, εἶπεν· ἀρχῆς δὲ οὐδαμοῦ οὐδὲ ὑποταγῆς ἐμνημόνευσε πρὸς αὐτήν. ῞Οτε δὲ κακῶς ἐχρήσατο τῇ ἐξουσίᾳ, καὶ ἡ γενομένη βοηθὸς ἐπίβουλος εὑρέθη, καὶ πάντα ἀπώλεσε, τότε ἀκούει δικαίως λοιπόν· “Πρὸς τὸν ἄνδρα σου ἡ ἀποστροφή σου.” See also Serm. Gen. 2.1.144–59 (SC 433.194–95). 136 The dating and provenance of the material do not provide us with a definite solution.

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serpent, Chrysostom must rely, firstly, on the notion that Eve was subordinate and inferior to Adam. Chrysostom describes Eve as an ἄπλαστον καὶ ἀσθενέστερον

σκεῦος.137 Hill translates this as “naive and weaker vessel.”138 Chrysostom’s use of the term ἄπλαστον is curious here. In addition to a sense of naiveté or being unfeigned, it also literally means “not fully shaped” or “not capable of being moulded.”139 Its use with ἀσθενέστερον σκεῦος seems to imply that Eve was both mentally and physically inferior to Adam, literally “not all there,” almost as if femaleness was a mental and physical disability. Her ruling principle, that masculine factor, was yet “unshaped.”

This is why the serpent, which is even lower in the cosmic hierarchy, was able to trick her. Eve must be a weaker and a lesser-formed being than Adam, otherwise she would not have fallen prey to the serpent; the implication being that if the serpent approached

Adam, he would have remained resolute.

However, in the same narrative, Eve must also be equal to Adam, since she was able to deceive him. “But it is not the same thing to be deceived by a fellow human being and one of the same kind [παρὰ τῆς ὁμοφύλου καὶ συγγενοῦς], as by an animal, the slave, who has been subjugated [παρὰ θηρίου, τοῦ δούλου, τοῦ ὑποτεταγμένου].

That is true deception,” Chrysostom reveals, “Compared therefore to the woman, he is spoken of as ‘not deceived.’ For she was misled by a slave and subject [ὑπὸ τοῦ δούλου

καὶ ὑποτεταγμένου], he was beguiled by one who is free [ὑπὸ τῆς ἐλευθέρας].”140

Here Chrysostom says that Eve and Adam are of the same species, homogenous, that is, they are both human; whereas the serpent was an animal, a subjected slave. The

137 Hom. Gen. 16.3 (PG 53.127.2). 138 Hill, Homilies on Genesis 1–17, 208. 139 LSJ. 140 Hom. 1 Tim. 9.1 (F6.71): Οὐκ ἔστι δὲ ἴσον παρὰ τῆς ὁμοφύλου καὶ συγγενοῦς δέξασθαι τὴν ἀπάτην, καὶ παρὰ θηρίου, τοῦ δούλου, τοῦ ὑποτεταγμένου· ὥστε ἐκεῖνο ἀπάτης ἐστί. Πρὸς οὖν τὴν σύγκρισιν τῆς γυναικός φησιν αὐτὸν μὴ ἠπατῆσθαι, ὅτι ἐκείνη μὲν ὑπὸ τοῦ δούλου καὶ ὑποτεταγμένου, οὗτος δὲ ὑπὸ τῆς ἐλευθέρας.

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narrative of the Fall is fully doulologised—the serpent is a slave and a subject, but Eve was free. She was beguiled by a slave, Adam by a free woman. For Chrysostom then,

Adam was truly deceived, while the woman was simply weak, gullible, and foolish. In this sense, Chrysostom’s Adam figure needs to “save face,” so to speak. He could only have been deceived by an equal, by a free person, yet Eve would not, if she had been

Adam’s “real” equal, have been deceived by the serpent; hence, in other words, she is inferior. However, in a different argument, namely the one against the Arians that was noted in the previous chapter, Chrysostom had to affirm the equality of honour of the wife since, according to 1 Corinthians 11:3, the husband is the head of the wife as God is the head of Christ141—her equality of honour (ὁμοτιμία) was based on the fact that she was free (ἐλεύθερα), just as Eve was free. In this case, the stakes were very high, and now the ὁμοτιμία of the wife is convenient to compare with Christ’s ὁμοτιμία to the Father, since ὁμοτιμία and ὁμοουσία were very closely related. Christ’s freedom to act was a crucial element in Nicene Trinitarian doctrine. Chrysostom’s gender discourse is therefore absolutely inseparable from his doulological discourse—despite the inconsistencies—and the intersectionality of this rhetoric was also a central feature of

Chrysostom’s views on Christology and the Trinity. Yet, Chrysostom has no problem in maintaining these inconsistencies and contradictions throughout his exegesis. Human dominion, upon a closer look, is not at all straightforward and clear.

Once again, this inconsistency lucidly exhibits the tension the early Christian readers of Genesis experienced when trying to make sense of sexual difference and the gender order. Chrysostom is no exception to the “failure of coherence” in terms of sexual difference and similarity that Benjamin Dunning has identified.142 I will argue

141 Hom. 1 Cor. 26.2 (F2.311). 142 Benjamin H. Dunning, Specters of Paul: Sexual Difference in Early Christian Thought, Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 5.

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next, however, that the protological equality of Adam and Eve, their “parity of esteem,” 143 notwithstanding the inconsistencies noted above, gained precedence in

Chrysostom’s thought regarding the prelapsarian human condition.144 But a caveat is in order: “equality” in Chrysostom is a very loose and relative term, perhaps never implying full equality, as both Clark and Dunning point out145—Adam was perhaps always “more equal” than Eve for Chrysostom. Foucault attempts to solve the problem of the equality between husband and wife in Chrysostom’s thought by rather using the term complementarity (complémentarité): “L’homme lance le javelot ; la femme manie la quenouille. L’un participe aux délibérations publiques ; l’autre fait triompher ses avis

à la maison. Il gère les deniers publics ; elle élève les enfants qui sont à leur façon un « trésor précieux ».”146 Foucault prefers to emphasise the unity of husband and wife, in which they almost become one unified subjectivity in Chrysostom’s thought—a correct observation. One part of this composite subjectivity occupies a higher and more honourable role than the other part, yet both are useful and necessary in order to maintain the union. Foucault is also correct to observe that the natural hierarchy and complementarity between a man and a woman as Chrysostom envisioned it also necessitates a similar social and economic hierarchy. Because a man is naturally superior to a woman, it can become problematic when a man marries a woman of higher

143 Paul Cartledge, “Comparatively Equal,” in Dēmokratia: A Conversation on Democracies, Ancient and Modern, ed. Josiah Ober and Charles W. Hedrick (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 178. 144 See also Benjamin H. Dunning, “Chrysostom’s Serpent: Animality and Gender in the Homilies on Genesis,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 23.1 (2015): 85. 145 Elizabeth A. Clark, “Sexual Politics in the Writings of John Chrysostom,” Anglican Theological Review 59.1 (1977): 7–8; Dunning, “Chrysostom’s Serpent,” 82–85. 146 Foucault, Les aveux de la chair, 261.

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class or one that is richer, since she then functions as “a sovereign” (un souverain) over him. Such a pairing will only result in conflict.147

Matters of complementarity aside, it is not always clear whether the equality pertains to an equality of essence or substance, or authority, or benefits and privileges.

Being “equal” may have simply meant treating Eve like an equal even though she was not, not reminding her of her weakness. It often simply depends on the nature of the argument that Chrysostom is making. Yet there are certain points of similarity that inform Chrysostom’s view of Eve’s protological parity, which deserve closer attention.

Chrysostom states:

Now it is necessary to explain today the great honor of another kind as well,

which sin of its nature removed, and all the forms of slavery it introductory,

like a kind of usurper with a variety of shackles shackling our nature in its

various roles of government. First, then, is the form of government and of

slavery by which men have power also over women, there being a need of

this after sin. Before the disobedience, you see, she was equal in dignity

[ὁμότιμος] to the man: when God formed her; the words he had used in the

formation of the man he used also in the creation of the woman. As He had

said in his case then, Let us make a human being in our image and likeness

[Gen. 1:26], and did not say, Let there be a human being, likewise in her

case as well He did not say, Let there be a woman, but here too Let us make

him a helpmate, and not simply a helpmate but like him [Gen. 2:18], again

147 Foucault, Les aveux de la chair, 261–62: “Pour que cette complémentarité puisse jouer comme il faut, il ne convient pas d’épouser une femme plus riche que soi. Car celui qui épouse une femme fortunée prend « un souverain », s’il choisit une plus pauvre, au contraire, il trouve en elle « une auxiliaire, une alliée […]. La gêne que cause à l’épouse sa pauvreté lui inspire toutes sortes de soins et d’attentions pour son mari, l’obéissance, une soumission parfaite, et supprime toutes les causes de disputes ».”

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indicating her equality of dignity [ὁμότιμον]. Since, you see, the brute

beasts made a helpful contribution to our needs in life, lest you should think

the woman also is one of the slaves…. Now this was before sin; but after

sin For your husband will be your yearning, and he will be your master

[Gen. 3:16]. I made you equal in dignity [ὁμότιμον], He is saying; you

abused your government, exchange it for submission. You could not bear

freedom: accept slavery. You did not know how to govern.148

Chrysostom uses the terms ἰσοτιμία and ὁμοτιμία, and their variants, to denote the prelapsarian equality between Adam and Eve (Chrysostom seems to use both as synonyms149). Both terms refer to equality in status and privilege before the Fall, before being removed by sin. The focus is on sexual similarity and shared humanity, rather than difference—Eve was a helpmate “like him” (κατ' αὐτὸν). The preposition κατά is understood, here, in the sense of conformity. In addition to their rich theological uses in Trinitarian debates,150 both ἰσοτιμία and ὁμοτιμία are political-military terms, and

148 Serm. Gen. 4.1.28–40, 56–61 (SC 433.220–225): ᾿Αναγκαῖον δὲ σήμερον εἰπεῖν πόσην καὶ ἄλλην τιμὴν ἡ τῆς ἁμαρτίας παρείλετο φύσις καὶ ὅσους δουλείας εἰσήγαγε τρόπους, ὥσπερ τις τύραννος ἐν πολυτρόποις δεσμοῖς ταῖς παντοδαπαῖς ἀρχαῖς τὴν ἡμετέραν δεσμεύουσα φύσιν. ῎Εστι τοίνυν ἀρχὴ καὶ δουλεία πρώτη, καθ' ἣν τῶν γυναικῶν οἱ ἄνδρες κρατοῦσι· μετὰ γὰρ τὴν ἁμαρτίαν ἡ ταύτης ἐγένετο χρεία. Πρὸ γὰρ τῆς παρακοῆς ὁμότιμος ἦν τῷ ἀνδρί· καὶ γὰρ ὅτε ταύτην διέπλαττεν ὁ Θεὸς, οἷς ἐχρήσατο ῥήμασι ἐπὶ τῆς διαπλάσεως τοῦ ἀνδρὸς, τούτοις καὶ ἐπὶ τῆς δημιουργίας τῆς γυναικός. ῞Ωσπερ οὖν εἶπεν ἐπ' ἐκείνῳ, «Ποιήσωμεν ἄνθρωπον κατ' εἰκόνα καὶ καθ' ὁμοίωσιν ἡμετέραν», καὶ οὐκ εἶπε· «Γενηθήτω ἄνθρωπος», οὕτω καὶ ἐπὶ ταύτης οὐκ εἶπε, «Γενηθήτω γυνὴ», ἀλλὰ καὶ ἐνταῦθα, «Ποιήσωμεν αὐτῷ βοηθόν»· καὶ οὐχ ἁπλῶς «βοηθὸν», ἀλλὰ, «κατ' αὐτὸν», πάλιν τὸ ὁμότιμον δηλῶν. ᾿Επειδὴ γὰρ πολλὴν εἰς τὴν τῆς ζωῆς ἡμῶν χρείαν τὰ ἄλογα τὴν τῆς βοηθείας εἰσήγαγε κοινωνίαν, ἵνα μὴ τῶν δούλων νομίσῃς εἶναι καὶ τὴν γυναῖκα.... Ταῦτα πρὸ τῆς ἁμαρτίας, μετὰ δὲ τὴν ἁμαρτίαν, «“Πρὸς τὸν ἄνδρα σου ἡ ἀποστροφή σου, καὶ αὐτός σου κυριεύσει.” ᾿Εποίησά σε, φησὶν, ὁμότιμον. Oὐκ ἐχρήσω καλῶς τῇ ἀρχῇ, μετάβηθι πρὸς τὴν ὑποταγήν. Οὐκ ἤνεγκας τὴν ἐλευθερίαν, κατάδεξαι τὴν δουλείαν. Οὐκ οἶδας ἄρχειν. Translation (and italics): Hill, Sermons on the Book of Genesis, 63–64. See also Hom. Gen. 14.16 (PG 53.116.11–15), 17.36 (PG 53.144.58–65); Hom. 1 Tim. 9.1 (F6.71–72). 149 He does show preference for ὁμοτιμία and its variants. 150 See again Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government, trans. Lorenzo Chiesa and Matteo Mandarini (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), esp. 221.

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their use in Chrysostom is not bereft of this sense.151 In the Classical Greek context, particularly that of honourary civic titles, the use of ἰσοτιμία is rather complex. Some consider ἰσοτιμία as the bestowal of political rights on an individual; the right to ἄρχειν and ἄρχεσθαι.152 This sense is certainly present in Chrysostom’s readings of Genesis

(for both ἰσοτιμία and ὁμοτιμία), and is directly noted in Hom. 1 Cor. 34.3 above—Eve had the right to rule. This equality, ὁμοτιμία, is also what separates Eve from the animals. Sin is seen as a tyrant (τύραννος) that commits one of the worst civic offenses—enslaving citizens who formerly had ἰσοτιμία or ὁμοτιμία and thus ἀρχή. The abuse of ὁμοτιμία leads to slavery (δουλεία). The woman is especially one who is stuck in slavery due to her disobedience. Eve loses her political right to dominion, and later becomes subject to the institution of masculinity that is marriage. As we have seen above, it was exactly the same with regard to Ham. He had equality (ἰσοτιμία) with his brothers, but due to his disrespect to Noah, he became enslaved.153 Because Eve could not govern, she lost her equality. The same political use of the word ὁμοτιμία is present when Chrysostom states that a household, in which the husband must rule over the wife, is a monarchy (βασίλεια) and not a democracy (δημοκρατία)—since ὁμοτιμία always causes strife (μάχη).154 As seen above, secular governments are installed in order to

151 See Cartledge, “Comparatively Equal,” 175–86. 152 Christian Habicht, “Eine Burgerrechtsverleihung von Metropolis,” Klio 52 (1970): 141–42. Others, however, consider ἰσοτιμία to be the same as πολιτεία or ἰσοπολιτεία—the debate in the archaic context can become very technical, and these minute distinctions are not necessarily present in Chrysostom; see esp. the discussion in Maria Mili, Religion and Society in Ancient Thessaly, Oxford Classical Monographs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 73–75. 153 Hom. Gen. 29.24 (PG 53.270.46–54). 154 Hom. 1 Cor. 34.6 (F2.425); Hom. Rom. 24[23].1 (F1.382); see also Clark, “Genesis 1–3 and Gender Dilemmas,” 167–68; De Wet, Preaching Bondage, 97–99.

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manage the risks of ὁμοτιμία.155 Clark has rightly noted that Chrysostom’s arguments in his interpretation of Genesis 1–3 can be labelled as sexual politics.156

But even on the point of the primeval ὁμοτιμία between Adam and Eve there is some inconsistency with Chrysostom. In a different homily, while interpreting 1

Corinthians 7:3–4—where Paul states that the husband does not have authority (οὐκ

ἐξουσιάζει) over his own body, but the wife, and the wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband157—Chrysostom states that there should be ἰσοτιμία between husband and wife.158 It seems plausible to deduce, then, that Eden was at first a democracy—only the animals were the slaves, but humanity shared the right to rule and had equal political status before God. Although Eve was not created directly in the image of God, she still shared rulership with Adam. Chrysostom has God saying to the woman: “In the beginning I created you equal in esteem to your husband, and my intention was that in everything you would share with him as an equal, and as I entrusted control of everything to your husband, so I did to you; but you abused your equality of status.”159 Eve’s sin was the fact that she was dissatisfied with ὁμοτιμία, but wanted to be ἰσόθεος, equal to God.160 Equality of honour is then used specifically as a political

155 Hom. Rom. 24[23].1 (F1.381–82). 156 Clark, “Sexual Politics,” 3–20. 157 NA28: τῇ γυναικὶ ὁ ἀνὴρ τὴν ὀφειλὴν ἀποδιδότω, ὁμοίως δὲ καὶ ἡ γυνὴ τῷ ἀνδρί. ἡ γυνὴ τοῦ ἰδίου σώματος οὐκ ἐξουσιάζει ἀλλ’ ὁ ἀνήρ, ὁμοίως δὲ καὶ ὁ ἀνὴρ τοῦ ἰδίου σώματος οὐκ ἐξουσιάζει ἀλλ’ ἡ γυνή. In Chrysostom’s interpretation of this verse, he states that the husband is not the “master” (δεσπότης) of his own body, but the wife, and the wife is not the “mistress” (δέσποινα) of her own body, but the husband. Note again the doulological overtones; see Propt. fornic. 4 (PG 51.214.39–40, 44–46): “And accordingly the husband is the master of his wife’s body, and the wife is the mistress of her husband’s body [Καὶ καθάπερ ἐκεῖνος δεσπότης ἐστὶ τοῦ σώματος αὐτῆς, οὕτω καὶ αὕτη δέσποινα τοῦ ἐκείνου σώματος] [my italics].” 158 Hom. 1 Cor. 19.1 (F2.216). 159 Hom. Gen. 17.36 (PG 53.144.59–63): ᾿Εγὼ μὲν ἐξ ἀρχῆς ὁμότιμόν σε ἐδημιούργησα, καὶ τῆς αὐτῆς ἀξίας ἐν ἅπασιν αὐτῷ κοινωνεῖν ἠβουλήθην, καὶ ὥσπερ τῷ ἀνδρὶ, οὕτω καὶ σοὶ τὴν κατὰ πάντων ἀρχὴν ἐνεχείρισα· ἀλλ' ἐπειδὴ οὐκ ἐχρήσω εἰς δέον τῇ ὁμοτιμίᾳ. Translation: Hill, Homilies on Genesis 1–17, 240. 160 Hom. Gen. 16.10 (PG 53.129.45).

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right to govern. This is the most significant point of similarity between Adam and Eve before the Fall.

The emphasis on sexual similarity and the (political) equality between Adam and Eve is based on four interrelated isomorphisms. First, both Adam and Eve share in the same form (μορφή).161 Form, as noted in the previous chapter, was one of the main markers of difference between the divinity and humanity. Form separates humans from

God, yet all humans share the same form. Form was an important factor, in

Chrysostom’s thought, to refute anthropomorphism and patripassianism, and he constantly states that God’s form is essentially incorporeal.162 Form therefore seems to relate to embodiment. Adam and Eve share in the same corporeality. It is important to note that the human body, in this case, functions as a site for sexual similarity and not

(yet) difference.

Second, Adam and Eve also share (κοινοῦν) in the same being or substance

(οὐσία), race or kind (ὁμογενής), and nature (φύσις). Adam’s helpmate had to “share with him the same being,” Chrysostom explains.163 In a diatribe against Eve after the

Fall Chrysostom writes: “[You were created] for the purpose of providing him with comfort from your person inasmuch as you are of the same kind as he and share in the same nature.” 164 Being, kind, and nature are complex terms and often used in conjunction with each other in patristic theology. They point to the ontological and homogenous status of humanness, which reaches beyond form and corporeality, and encompasses the intertwining of flesh, soul, and spirit—that which makes the couple

161 Hom. Gen. 8.10 (PG 53.73.1–4). 162 Hom. Gen. 13.9 (PG 53.107.17–25). 163 Hom. Gen. 15.15 (PG 53.124.6): τῆς αὐτῆς αὐτῷ κοινωνοῦντος οὐσίας. Translation: Hill, Homilies on Genesis 1–17, 203. 164 Hom. Gen. 17.20 (PG 53.140.7–9): ἵνα τὴν παρὰ σαυτῆς παραμυθίαν εἰσαγάγῃς αὐτῷ, οἵα δὴ ὁμογενὴς καὶ τῆς αὐτῆς αὐτῷ φύσεως κοινωνοῦσα. Translation: Hill, Homilies on Genesis 1–17, 232 (slightly adapted).

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from Eden communally human.165 The use of these terms points to the constitution of the human person. Although Chrysostom rarely uses the word ὑπόστασις in the Genesis commentaries when referring to Adam and Eve, one may deduce here a type of hypostatisation or reification of humanity over and against divinity and animality.166

Nature here does not refer to biological sex, nor does Chrysostom seem to imply a sense of androgyny in this statement—it has a more general reference to basic human attributes, like the capacity for reason.167 Thus, although their souls link them with the divine, and in their bodies they experience the call of animality, they are essentially, homogenously, and naturally different from the divine and the bestial.

Third, the similarities between Adam and Eve in terms of form, substance, kind, and nature, also point to another important marker of sameness, namely rationality

(λογικός). 168 Having reason is also, mainly, what separates human beings from animals. 169 “I mean, even if many of the brute beasts helped him in his labors,”

Chrysostom says, “there was still nothing equivalent to a woman, possessed as she was of reason.”170 Rationality is a crucial element of masculinity, since it is rationality that

165 See also Laird, Mindset, Moral Choice and Sin, 221–56. 166 See more generally, John A. McGuckin, The SCM Press A–Z of Patristic Theology, The SCM Press A–Z of Christian Theology (London: SCM, 2005), 117. In Chrysostom’s theology; Benjamin Gleede, The Development of the Term Ἐνυπόστατος from Origen to John of Damascus, Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 37–38. 167 David S. Wallace-Hadrill, The Greek Patristic View of Nature (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1968), 40–79; McGuckin, Patristic Theology, 234–35. 168 Or a rational soul (λογική ψυχή); Hom. Gen. 13.9 (PG 53.107.31). Chrysostom also uses the terms intelligence or wisdom (σοφία) and mind/mindset (γνώμη) that relate to human rationality; for σοφία, see esp. Hom. Gen. 10.19 (PG 53.116.44–46); for γνώμη, see the discussion and references in Laird, Mindset, Moral Choice and Sin, 221–56. 169 Andrew Louth, “The Fathers on Genesis,” in The Book of Genesis: Composition, Reception, and Interpretation, ed. Craig A. Evans, Joel N. Lohr, and David L. Petersen, Supplements to Vetus Testamentum 152 (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 573. 170 Hom. Gen. 14.17 (PG 53.116.23–25): Εἰ γὰρ καὶ συνεφάπτεται τῶν καμάτων αὐτῷ πολλὰ τῶν ἀλόγων, ἀλλ' οὐδὲν ἴσον τῆς λογικῆς γυναικός. Translation: Hill, Homilies on Genesis 1–17, 190. See also Hom. Gen. 10.9 (PG 53.86.24).

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endows both Adam and Eve with authority (ἐξουσία) and the ability to rule and dominate.171

Finally, both Adam and Eve share in the primacy of creational succession. Since

Chrysostom does not recognise that Genesis 1–3 has, in fact, two creation accounts,172 he needs to perform some interesting and tricky exegetical calisthenics to make sense of the narrative as a unit. One of the issues he faces is that God speaks to man and woman before the woman is actually created. Chrysostom states: “I mean, though she is yet to be created he gives instruction as though to two people in the words, ‘Do not eat from it,’ and, ‘On that day you eat from it you will truly die’ [Gen. 2:17], showing right from the outset that man and woman are one [Eph. 5:23].”173 Thus, even though man was created before woman, God spoke and acted as if they were both present. This is an affirmation of Foucault’s notion of Adam and Eve’s composite subjectivity in

Chrysostom’s thought.

Three important findings have been made in this section with regard to prelapsarian sexual equality. First, Chrysostom is inconsistent with regard to prelapsarian sexual status. In some cases, Adam and Eve have equal honour from the beginning, but in other cases, Eve’s subordination is wholly prelapsarian—the former point seems to be the more common one in Chrysostom’s thought. Second,

Chrysostom’s prelapsarian discourse on sexuality focuses much more on sexual similarity, with little or no mention of biological difference. Third, the only point of

171 Hom. Gen. 10.9 (PG 53.86.5–26). 172 See Walter Brueggemann, Genesis, Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010), 23–53. 173 Hom. Gen. 14.14 (PG 53.115.25–28): Οὐδέπω γὰρ αὐτῆς παραχθείσης, ὡς πρὸς ἀμφοτέρους τὴν ἐντολὴν ποιεῖται λέγων· Οὐ φάγεσθε ἀπ' αὐτοῦ, καὶ, ᾗ ἂν ἡμέρᾳ φάγητε, θανάτῳ ἀποθανεῖσθε· δηλῶν ἄνωθεν καὶ ἐξ ἀρχῆς, ὅτι ἕν εἰσιν ἀνὴρ καὶ γυνὴ. Translation: Hill, Sermons on Genesis 1–17, 188.

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sexual difference that is mentioned relates to image; however, Eve is seen as one who also rules with Adam before the Fall occurs.

If we move to the postlapsarian human condition, once again, we see some dramatic changes occurring. Most of all, postlapsarian humanity is now characterised in terms of sexual difference and subjugation, an absolute loss of ἰσοτιμία or ὁμοτιμία, and being subject to institutions of masculinity. Hence, as explained above, there is a major proliferation of hierarchies to make up for the loss of control and domination.

Above all else, perhaps, is the subjugation of the female subject. Chrysostom meticulously constructs the beginnings of sexual difference, particularly biological sexual difference, within the context of the Fall. Three central moments mark the birth of biological difference in Chrysostom.

First, there is the human couple’s first realisation of their nakedness and shame, and more specifically, awareness of their genitals. Chrysostom does not see the act of eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil as the introduction point of sexual difference. Adam and Eve did not then suddenly become aware of their nakedness; that is, because they now receive some form of discernment. Rather, because Chrysostom understands the bodies of Adam and Eve, before the Fall, to be angelic, it also implies that they were clothed, not with human garments, but with glory. The act of sin and disobedience stripped Adam and Eve of their vestments of glory, and for the first time, they were naked in the true sense of the word. “Blessed Moses, remember, told us that they were naked without feeling shame,” Chrysostom elaborates, “for they did not know, after all, that they were naked, clad as they were in ineffable glory, which adorned them better than any clothing.”174 Nakedness now portends a loss of glory; it

174 Hom. Gen. 16.3 (PG 53.126.33–37): Εἰπὼν γὰρ ὁ μακάριος Μωϋσῆς, ὅτι γυμνοὶ ἦσαν, καὶ οὐκ ᾐσχύνοντο (οὐδὲ γὰρ ᾔδεισαν ὅτι γυμνοὶ ἦσαν, τῆς δόξης τῆς ἀφάτου περιστελλούσης αὐτοὺς, καὶ παντὸς ἱματίου μᾶλλον αὐτοὺς κοσμούσης). Translation: Hill, Homilies on Genesis 1–17, 208. On early

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signifies a departure from the angelic to the fallen human condition. This is also why nakedness is linked to human weakness. Nakedness should not only be covered for the sake of shame, but also as protection against the heat and the cold.175 Earthly dress is a signifier of humiliation. Chrysostom likens the glory that Adam and Eve wore to the garments of a master, while their earthly clothing symbolises the lordly garments being ripped off and replaced with the shabby rags of a slave. 176 Clothing functions doulologically. It shows that humanity is now enslaved to sin. Nudity and dress is then also mnemonic. It invokes the memory of a time long past when the body was gloriously angelic, without need or shame—the perfect body:

Let the affluent pay heed, those who pamper themselves with cloth from

the silkworm and are clad in silk, and let them learn how at the beginning

from the outset the loving Lord instructed the human race: when the

firstformed man became liable to the punishment of death through the Fall

and the Lord had to clothe him in a garment to hide his shame, he made

them garments of skin, to teach us to shun the soft and dissolute life, and

not to pine for one that is lazy and characterised by inactivity, but rather

strive for an austere life…. Accordingly, let the wearing of clothes be a

constant reminder to us of the loss of advantages and instruction about the

punishment which the race of human beings received on account of

disobedience. Accordingly, let those people who make use of such

paraphernalia that they are no longer familiar with garments of sheep’s

Christian views on dress more generally, see Kristi Upson-Saia, Early Christian Dress: Gender, Virtue, and Authority (New York: Routledge, 2011). 175 Hom. Gen. 16.2 (PG 53.126.20–28). 176 Hom. Gen. 18.3 (PG 53.149.29–51).

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wool, but are clad in silk and have been carried to such extremes that they

even drape gold with covering, the female sex particularly demonstrating

this kind of luxury—let them, I say, tell us: Why do you dress up the body

with these things and delight in clothing of that kind, not understanding that

this covering was devised as severe punishment for the Fall?177

Chrysostom vituperates that humanity has lost sight of the purpose of clothing one’s nudity. Dress was supposed to be a reminder of human disobedience, a form of punishment, in fact, but now the wealthy flaunt their riches especially by means of excessive adornment. But this was never the original purpose of dress. Thus, it is not only the move from nudity to being dressed that is significant to Chrysostom—he also finds meaning in the wardrobe God chose for Adam and Eve. The animal skins teach them not only of the cost of their disobedience, it also becomes a prophetic act safeguarding them against excess and luxury. The uncomfortable animal skins become a precursor to monastic fashion,178 a return to a simpler attire which God initially chose for humanity. The early ecclesiastical historian Socrates Scholasticus, for example,

177 Hom. Gen. 18.5 (PG 53.150.8–18, 30–43): ᾿Ακουέτωσαν οἱ πλουτοῦντες, οἱ ἐντρυφῶντες τοῖς τῶν σκωλήκων νήμασι, καὶ τὰ σηρικὰ περιβαλλόμενοι, καὶ μανθανέτωσαν πῶς ἐξ ἀρχῆς καὶ ἐκ προοιμίων παιδεύων τὴν ἀνθρωπίνην φύσιν ὁ φιλάνθρωπος Δεσπότης, ἐπειδὴ διὰ τὴν παράβασιν τῷ ἐπιτιμίῳ τοῦ θανάτου γέγονεν ὑπεύθυνος ὁ πρωτόπλαστος, ἐχρῆν δὲ ἱμάτιον αὐτῷ περιτεθῆναι τὸ τὴν αἰσχύνην καλύπτον, δερματίνους αὐτοῖς ἐποίησε χιτῶνας, διδάσκων ἡμᾶς φεύγειν τὸν ὑγρὸν καὶ διαλελυμένον βίον, καὶ μὴ τὸν ἀνειμένον καὶ βλακείας γέμοντα μεταδιώκειν, ἀλλὰ τὸν αὐστηρὸν μᾶλλον ἀσπάζεσθαι.... ῾Η τοίνυν τῶν ἱματίων περιβολὴ ὑπόμνησις ἡμῖν γενέσθω διηνεκὴς τῆς τῶν ἀγαθῶν ἐκπτώσεως, καὶ τῆς τιμωρίας διδασκαλία, ἣν διὰ τὴν παρακοὴν τὸ τῶν ἀνθρώπων γένος ἐδέξατο. Λεγέτωσαν τοίνυν ἡμῖν οἱ τοσαύτῃ κεχρημένοι τῇ φαντασίᾳ, ὡς μηδὲ εἰδέναι λοιπὸν τὰ ἀπὸ τοῦ ἐρίου τῶν προβάτων ἐνδύματα, ἀλλὰ τὰ σηρικὰ περιβαλλόμενοι καὶ εἰς τοσοῦτον ἐξοκείλαντες μανίας, ὡς καὶ χρυσίον συνυφαίνειν τοῖς ἐνδύμασι· μάλιστα γὰρ τὸ τῶν γυναικῶν γένος ταύτην ἡμῖν ἐπιδείκνυται τὴν βλακείαν· τίνος γὰρ ἕνεκεν, εἰπέ μοι, τούτοις τὸ σῶμα καλλωπίζεις, καὶ χαίρεις τῇ ἐντεῦθεν περιβολῇ, καὶ οὐκ ἐννοεῖς ὅτι ἀντὶ μεγίστης τιμωρίας διὰ τὴν παράβασιν ἡ σκέπη αὕτη ἐπενοήθη; Translation: Hill, Homilies on Genesis 1–17, 5–6. 178 See especially the important analysis of monastic dress codes and their social significance by Rebecca Krawiec, “‘The Holy Habit and the Teaching of the Elders’: Clothing and Social Memory in Late Antique Monasticism,” in Dressing Judeans and Christians in Antiquity, ed. Alicia J. Batten, Carly Daniel- Hughes, and Kristi Upson-Saia (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), 55–74.

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relates the tale of a certain monk named Ammoun: “It is said that Ammoun never saw himself naked, being accustomed to say that ‘it became not a monk to see even his own person exposed.’ And when once he wanted to pass a river, but was unwilling to undress, he besought God to enable him to cross without his being obliged to break his resolution; and immediately an angel transported him to the other side of the river.”179

Monastic attire had to be very basic, and the animal skins and cloaks of hair clearly point to God’s clothing of Adam and Eve. Nudity was a constant problem to the monk, and their shame reminded them of the Fall and the introduction of sexual intercourse and lust. For Ammoun, it was inappropriate to gaze even at his own nudity—and God agreed, and sent angelic assistance. Some monks rarely undressed.

Excessive “bling”, on the other hand, becomes an ironic symbol of the indifference the rich have for the consequences of sin—the excessive adornment functions, to

Chrysostom, as correlate for the excessive punishment such vain individuals deserve.

In addition, Chrysostom expands the moral-theological dynamics of dress in noting that clothing does not simply function as a marker of sexual difference, in that women dress differently from men, but women also betray their softness and weakness in their love for jewellery and silk robes.180 Finally, it is also with the removal of glory and the introduction of shame that we also have the conscience. The conscience, in Chrysostom, activates the awareness of disobedience and shame.181

A second moment marking the shift to sexual difference and inequality lies in the naming of Eve. Chrysostom states that Adam names the animals to exhibit his

179 Hist. eccl. 4.23.45–49 (SC 505 [TLG]): ᾿Αμμοῦν οὗτος γυμνὸν ἑαυτὸν μὴ ἑωρακέναι ποτέ· λέγων ἀπρεπὲς εἶναι τῷ μοναχῷ καὶ τὸ ἑαυτοῦ σῶμα γυμνὸν θεωρεῖν. Καί ποτε διαβῆναι ποταμὸν βουλόμενος, ὤκνει ἀποδύσασθαι· ηὔξατό τε τῷ Θεῷ, γενέσθαι αὐτῷ τὴν διάβασιν μὴ ἐγκοπτομένῳ τὴν πρόθεσιν· καὶ ἄγγελος μετέθηκεν αὐτὸν εἰς τὸ πέραν τοῦ ποταμοῦ. 180 Upson-Saia, Early Christian Dress, 48–50. 181 For a detailed discussion of the conscience in Chrysostom, see Laird, Mindset, Moral Choice and Sin, 73–79, 130–33.

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domination over them.182 It was a doulological operation in which he showed himself to be the master, and them the slaves. But Eve is only named after the Fall, when her subjugation is definite.183 Chrysostom does not say much about the so-called “first naming” of Eve, when she is called “woman” (γυνή; see Gen. 2:23).184 For Chrysostom, it is a reference to Eve’s future postlapsarian state, when the first couple’s glory is removed and their nakedness exhibited, which Chrysostom probably deduces from the use of the future tense in “she will be called” (κληθήσεται) according to the Septuagint.

Chrysostom reads κληθήσεται as a prophetic future tense.185 Eve’s naming as γυνή and her later naming as Eve are then the same to Chrysostom. The term γυνή usually refers to a married woman who has had children, two characteristics which Eve did have after the Fall, but not before. 186 Before the Fall, Adam and Eve were, according to

Chrysostom, both virgins (παρθένοι). More on these states of Adam and Eve will be said in the next chapter.

Sexual difference and subjugation is then also constructed through naming, or kyriophorism. Just as Adam established himself as master over the animals, and thereby showing that he is not an animal, Adam now affirms his dominion over Eve, showing that, despite his own disobedience, he is not woman. The naming of Eve is also significant in that it establishes Adam as the governing principle, the master—always

182 Serm. Gen. 1.1.30–34 (SC 433.142–45). 183 Hom. Gen. 18.3 (PG 53.149.13–39). 184 For many patristic authors, this was a major exegetical issue. Tertullian, for instance, had to argue that virgins like Eve and Mary, and those in his own fold, belonged to the genus of “women,” despite not being married or having had sexual intercourse; Virg. 7 (SC 424.150–55). In contrast to Tertullian, however, Chrysostom believes that the title “woman” is a reference to her future postlapsarian status. Tertullian did not believe that any of Eve’s appellations referred to her future status; see also Geoffrey D. Dunn, Tertullian, The Early Church Fathers (London: Routledge, 2004), 148; Upson-Saia, Early Christian Dress, 65. 185 Hom. Gen. 15.14 (PG 53.123.10–25). 186 See Abbe L. Walker, “Bride of Hades to Bride of Christ: The Virgin and the Otherworldly Bridegroom in Ancient Greece and Early Christian Rome” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Bryn Mawr College, 2017), esp. 24– 28.

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related to the head and the soul, the divine. Eve, on the other hand, becomes the governed subject, the slave—always related to the body and the flesh, the bestial. Eve is not an animal, but by conversing with the serpent, by mingling with those she had to avoid—masters should not mingle with slaves—as a consequence, she too is named like an animal.187 Eve’s naming is therefore not only subjugation, but also animalisation.

The third moment of sexual differentiation lies in what is called the humiliation of labour.188 The pain that is punishment for disobedience is not distributed among men and women in exactly the same form. Women suffer pain through childbirth, while men experience pain when they must till and harvest the soil in order to eat. The monastic lifestyle represents a departure from both these aspects. As in the case of clothing, working the “cursed earth” (Gen. 3:17–19) serves as a reminder and an instruction.

“You see, since the soil had been produced for the sake of the human being so that he might thus be able to enjoy what sprang from it,” Chrysostom states, “accordingly in turn he places a curse on it on account of the human being’s sin.” The cursing of the soil, however, also has an ascetic impetus, as Chrysostom continues, “because the curse on it impairs in turn the human being’s relaxation and tranquillity, he says, ‘Accursed shall be the soil as you till it’ [Gen. 3:17].”189 As all human offspring will spring forth from agony out of the womb, so too the food that springs from the womb that is the earth will be harvested in pain. And as with the naming of Eve, the tilling of the soil also brings human beings and animals closer together, since animals, by God’s grace,

187 See again Hom. Gen. 14.12 (PG 53.114.57–61) in which Adam distanced himself from the animals like a master from his slaves. 188 See Peter R. L. Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), liii. 189 Hom. Gen. 17.39 (PG 53.146.21–27): ᾿Επειδὴ γὰρ διὰ τὸν ἄνθρωπον παρήχθη, ἵνα οὕτως ἀπολαύειν δύνηται τῶν ἐξ αὐτῆς ἀναδιδομένων, διὰ τοῦτο πάλιν διὰ τὸν ἄνθρωπον ἁμαρτόντα ταύτῃ τὴν κατάραν ἐπιτίθησιν· ἐπειδὴ ἡ εἰς αὐτὴν κατάρα πάλιν τοῦ ἀνθρώπου ἐλυμαίνετο τῇ ἀνέσει καὶ τῇ ἀδείᾳ, ᾿Επικατάρατος, φησὶν, ἡ γῆ ἐν τοῖς ἔργοις σου. Translation: Hill, Homilies on Genesis 1–17, 243.

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assist humanity in the labour.190 As with slavery, hard labour is what now defines the fallen human condition.

In Chrysostomic thought, the realisation of sexual difference through nudity is inseparable from the loss of human perfection and the start of human weakness and mortality. As I will show in the next chapter, once the focus falls on sexual difference, there is also a reproductive shift from androgenerativity (a form of reproduction where the masculine body serves as the subject of reproduction and multiplication) to sexual intercourse; and the latter simply brings death. This finding also has implications for how we are to make sense of biological sexual difference in Chrysostom. Thomas

Laqueur’s one-sex model of the body, for instance, does not then seem to be a good fit for Chrysostom’s thought. 191 To my knowledge, there is no explicit reference in

Chrysostom to what would constitute a one-sex model of the body as Laqueur has it.192

The problem with the model is that it especially focuses on the genitalia—the model proposes that the female genitalia are basically inverted male genitals.

But for Chrysostom, the genitals only start playing a role after the Fall, and very little is said about them (perhaps out of modesty). There is only a genital awareness, a realisation of “shame” (αἰσχύνη), which is a common euphemism for the genitals, when the glory of humanity is removed. But then the focus is not on sameness, as the model proposes, but on difference with the need for sexual reproduction. Chrysostom is not clear on whether Adam and Eve had male and female genitals before the Fall, but the fact that they are indeed “clothed” before the Fall, in glory that is, may imply that they had genitals all along. After the Fall, the focus on sexual difference as related to human

190 Serm. Gen. 3.2.132–58 (SC 433.214–17). 191 Thomas W. Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). 192 For an extensive critique of Laqueur’s model, see Helen King, The One-Sex Body on Trial: The Classical and Early Modern Evidence, The History of Medicine in Context (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013).

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“shame” is one side of the coin. However, in De virginitate 18.1.3–4 Chrysostom does confirm that sexual intercourse is not a prerequisite for reproduction, since God was able to create the angels without reproduction.193 God is not subject to the laws of institutions of masculinity.

Chrysostom does not give us any indication of what he thought about the presence of human genitals before the Fall, and after, and even after the resurrection.

In contrast, Augustine, for instance, had much to say on the topic. In De civitate Dei

14.16194 Augustine bemoaned the fact that during postlapsarian sexual intercourse the genitals were not under the control of the mind and the will, but opposed to it. He seems to imply that male erections are not subject to the mind or will, but dependent on the presence of desire (voluptas). But in De Genesi ad litteram 9.10.18 195 Augustine envisions the prelapsarian genitals as fully under the command of the soul. Because of the absence of voluptas, prelapsarian reproduction is a fully controlled mode of reproduction. The genitals would be controlled as the feet or the hands. However, there is an interesting change between the prelapsarian and eschatological genitals. In

Augustine’s mind, if sin never occurred, the prelapsarian genitals would be functional.

Their purpose would be to procreate without lust and pain, and they would have been fully under the control of reason. In an extremely interesting passage, Augustine explains thus:

Why, therefore, may we not assume that the first couple before they sinned

could have given a command to their genital organs for the purpose of

193 SC 125.156–57. 194 CCSL 48.438–39. 195 CSEL 28.1.279–80.

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procreation as they did to the other members which the soul is accustomed

to move to perform various tasks without any trouble and without any

craving for pleasure [uoluptatis]? For the almighty Creator, worthy of

praise beyond all words, who is great even in the least of his works, has

given to the bees the power of reproducing their young just as they produce

wax and honey. Why, then, should it seem beyond belief that he made the

bodies of the first human beings in such a way that, if they had not sinned

and had not immediately thereupon contracted a disease which would bring

death, they would move the members by which offspring are generated in

the same way that one commands his feet when he walks, so that conception

would take place without passion and birth without pain. But as it is, by

disobeying God’s command they deserved to experience in their members,

where death now reigned, the movement of a law at war with the law of the

mind.196

Using a somewhat different appropriation of the “birds and the bees” than to which we moderns are accustomed, Augustine immediately solves the problem of irrational pleasure and unbridled genital “movements.” He relies on assumptions from ancient apiology, already present as early as Aristotle, that some bees reproduce without

196 Gen. litt. 9.10.18 (CSEL 28.1.279–80): Quae cum ita sint, cur non credamus illos homines ante peccatum ita genitalibus membris ad procreandos filios imperare potuisse sicut ceteris, quae in quolibet opere anima sine ulla molestia et quasi pruritu uoluptatis mouet? si enim creator omnipotens ineffabiliterque laudandus, qui et in minimis suis operibus magnus est, apibus donauit, ut sic operentur generationem filiorum quemadmodum cerae speciem liquoremque mellis, cur incredibile uideatur primis hominibus talia fecisse corpora, ut, si non peccassent et morbum quendam, quo morerentur, continuo concepissent, eo nutu inperarent membris, quibus fetus exoritur, quo pedibus, cum ambulatur. ut neque cum ardore seminaretur neque cum dolore pareretur. nunc uero transgrediendo praeceptum motum legis illius, quae repugnat legi mentis, in membris conceptae mortis habere meruerunt. Translation: John Hammond Taylor, trans., St. Augustine: The Literal Meaning of Genesis, Vol. 2, Ancient Christian Writers 42 (New York: Newman, 1982).

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copulation. 197 Thus, where Chrysostom forwarded the example of God producing angels without sexual intercourse and desire, Augustine directs his audience to the more humble sight of the bees. Augustine assumes that bees reproduce in a controlled manner, as they produce wax and honey. The implication is, however, that prelapsarian sex would have no voluptas and, in fact, no orgasm.

For Augustine, however, the genitals of the resurrected body will be different.

They will not be functional, but will remain for aesthetic purposes. Augustine differentiated between functional parts of the body, like the hands and feet, and decorative body parts, like male nipples.198 In the resurrected body, the genitals will be present, but only for aesthetic purposes. The sight of nudity and the private parts would not excite any lust.199 It may then be that in heaven there will be no phalli, only flaccid penises.200 Augustine also found it hard to imagine heaven without the presence of female genitalia. Margaret Miles rightly notes that Augustine’s sexuality of resurrected bodies “provides a broader palette with which to envision sexuality as more inclusive than that of recognizable sex acts.”201 Similarly with virgins already in the present life the genitals serve an aesthetic rather than a functional purpose.

In their current state, however, Chrysostom believes that the genitals are

“necessary” and “honourable” body parts that also bear the beauty of God’s creation, even though they are covered. In his exegesis of 1 Corinthians 12:22–24, Paul’s

197 See Aristotle, Gen. an. 3.10 (LCL 366.332–47). 198 David G. Hunter, “Augustine on the Body,” in A Companion to Augustine, ed. Mark Vessey, Blackwell Companions to the Ancient World (Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2012), 362–63. 199 Civ. 22.17 (CCSL 48.835). 200 Jeff Nicoll, Augustine’s Problem: Impotence and Grace (Eugene, OR: Resource, 2016), 210. 201 Margaret R. Miles, “Sex and the City (of God): Is Sex Forfeited or Fulfilled in Augustine’s Resurrection of Body?,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 73.2 (2005): 323.On the presence of the genitals in the resurrected body in earlier Christian literature, see especially the study of Petrey Resurrecting Parts: Early Christians on Desire, Reproduction, and Sexual Difference, Routledge Studies in the Early Christian World (London: Routledge, 2015).

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discourse on the honour of certain limbs and organs in the body, Chrysostom says the following about the genitals:

“[The genitals] are necessary [1 Cor. 12:22],” and very fittingly so. For

they are necessary for procreation of children and the succession of our

race. Which is also why the Roman legislators punish those who mutilate

these members and turn men into eunuchs, as individuals who injure our

common stock and insult nature itself. But accursed are the lewd ones who

dishonour the handiworks [δημιουργήματα] of God.202

Similar to Augustine’s view, Chrysostom felt that the genitals are not dishonourable per se, but are made to be shameful though excessive sexual misconduct and lust. The fact that the genitals are referred to as God’s handiworks (δημιουργήματα) may imply that they are a prelapsarian feature of the human creation, but we still do not have any certainty on this matter.203 This sacred status of the genitals is also why any form of genital mutilation is prohibited.

As with many other ancient thinkers, sexual difference for Chrysostom was not only located in the genitals, but also in the very texture of the flesh. Chrysostom often elaborates on human weakness, especially female softness. Women were softer, thus weaker, and more susceptible to luxuries like fine clothing and slaves. Moreover, after the Fall the womb becomes a major issue in relation to female identity in Chrysostom’s

202 Hom. 1 Cor. 31.1 (F2.378): ἀναγκαῖά ἐστι· καὶ μάλα εἰκότως. Καὶ γὰρ πρὸς παιδοποιίαν καὶ τὴν τοῦ γένους ἡμῶν διαδοχὴν χρήσιμα. Διὰ τοῦτο καὶ οἱ νομοθέται Ῥωμαίων τοὺς ταῦτα ἀκρωτηριάζοντας τὰ μέλη καὶ ποιοῦντας εὐνούχους κολάζουσιν, ἅτε τῷ κοινῷ γένει λυμαινομένους, καὶ αὐτῇ ἐπηρεάζοντας τῇ φύσει. Ἀλλ' ἀπόλοιντο οἱ ἀκόλαστοι, οἱ τοῦ Θεοῦ τὰ δημιουργήματα διαβάλλοντες. See also Dale B. Martin, The Corinthian Body (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 95. 203 Josiah B. Trenham, “Marriage and Virginity According to St. John Chrysostom” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Durham University, 2003), 33, 101n168, 142–43.

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thought, an organ for which Laqueur has no male equivalent. Thus, the one-sex model of the body, and all its implications, should not be applied simply to Chrysostom. We also do not find any women turning into men in Chrysostom. Some women are masculinised, and some men effeminised, but this is something different. Aideen

Hartney calls this position between male and female a “third sex” (although

Chrysostom does not use this term explicitly). 204 Clark is again accurate in her observation regarding Chrysostom’s close friend Olympias: “In sum, for all her

‘masculine’ virtue, Olympias remained an appropriately ‘womanly woman.’”205 Thus, a very nuanced reading of sexual difference in Chrysostom must be undertaken within both his medical-cultural and moral-theological frames of reference.

Animal Control: Masculinity and the Bestial

Finally, if we want to fully understand human dominion in Chrysostom’s interpretation of Genesis, and how it relates to the great struggle of masculinity, we must also account for the role of animality. Blake Leyerle rightly notes that Chrysostom was fond of using animals to tell stories with moral lessons. He used animals as images to make spatial distinctions (between the urban and rural spaces, for instance), and also personified animals to describe various character traits.206 Arguably, one of the greatest animal stories Chrysostom tells is that of the serpent in the garden. In support of Leyerle’s

204 Hartney, Transformation of the City, 116 states: “But they [men who act womanish] have not actually become women in Chrysostom’s eyes, and instead occupy an ambiguous space as being less than men, but not entirely female or bestial. This then is a kind of ‘third sex’, even though it is not always explicitly referred to as such.” 205 Clark, “Genesis 1–3 and Gender Dilemmas,” 174. 206 Blake Leyerle, “Locating Animals in John Chrysostom’s Thought,” in (Re)Visioning John Chrysostom: New Theories and Approaches, ed. Chris L. de Wet and Wendy Mayer (London: Routledge, 2018), Forthcoming.

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thesis, this story too has in mind distinctions—but now to discern between the spaces of the soul and the body, the divine and bestial.

In an insightful article analysing Chrysostom’s exegesis of the serpent of

Genesis, Dunning rightly notes that the serpent serves as a narrative device to structure sexual difference, subjugation, and animality more generally. The gender of the serpent is ambiguous, Dunning argues, since it is both masculinised and feminised to different ends.207 Throughout my discussion below, I will add to Dunning’s argument by noting that the serpent is also doulologised, that is, made to be slave-like and to represent slaves (which is, of course, linked to feminisation, but also differs in that it has effects, specifically, on the institutionally enslaved). By being part of the animal kingdom, the serpent is a slave by default. The fact that the devil uses the reptile, despite its cunning, as an instrument (ὄργανον) affirms the discursive doulologisation of the serpent.208 Both

Leyerle and Dunning acknowledge the role of animals and animalities as technologies to fashion expressions of distinction and difference. I will therefore not focus, here, on the gendering of the serpent per se, nor the various personifications of animality we find in Chrysostom. Rather, and relying on Dunning’s findings and developing some of them, I wish to investigate to what extent the animality the serpent represents fits into the larger construction of masculinity Chrysostom purports in his Genesis commentary, especially the construction of masculinity as a struggle between the psychic and the corporeal, between those who dominate and the subjugated.

The main point I aim to demonstrate is this: the problem of animality justifies the need for masculinity. Why is this the case? If we investigate the role of animality in

Chrysostom’s Genesaic imaginaire more closely, we find that he reads it as a narrative

207 Dunning, “Chrysostom’s Serpent.” 208 Hom. Gen. 16.3 (PG 53.127.1–4).

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that betrays how easily bodily passions can overpower the soul, whether by demonic influence—Chrysostom believes that the devil possessed the snake 209 —or by a malevolent will and corrupt mind-set. In Chrysostom’s greater expository framework for Genesis, the bestial functions as a correlate for embodiment. Dunning rightly notes:

“Animal being is thus inseparably attached to embodiment in a way that human being is not. Lacking reason as a wedge between corporeality and incorporeality, animals cannot in any sense be other than their bodies.”210 Animality is represented in the bodily passions. “In other words, just as in this wide and spacious land some animals are more irrational and some more savage, likewise in the reaches of our soul some thoughts are more irrational and beastly, others wilder and more savage,” Chrysostom construes,

“There is therefore need to take charge and get the better of them, and to entrust government of them to reasoned thinking.” 211 Remember too that, while animals represent sole corporeality, God’s status as the ideal Masculine is supported by the fact that he is totally incorporeal, as noted in the previous chapter. Practices of masculinity therefore serve in favour of the psychic domestication of the corporeal animality present in the human being. The role of animality in Chrysostom’s interpretation, furthermore, warns and instructs elite male slaveholders that they should always control and discipline their wives, children, and slaves.

How does the tale of Eve and the serpent, then, signify the great struggle of masculinity, and its eventual failure? The disobedience of Adam and Eve both resulted in the threat of animals and the passions. In the next chapter, when discussing the shift

209 Hom. Gen. 16.4 (PG 53.127.10–43). 210 Dunning, “Chrysostom’s Serpent,” 77 (his italics). 211 Serm. Gen. 3.1.46–52 (SC 433.204–7): Καθάπερ γὰρ ἐν τῇ γῇ τῇ πλατείᾳ καὶ εὐρυχώρῳ ταύτῃ τῶν ζώων τὰ μέν εἰσιν ἀλογώτερα, τὰ δὲ θηριωδέστερα, οὕτω καὶ ἐν τῷ πλάτει τῆς ἡμετέρας ψυχῆς, τῶν λογισμῶν οἱ μὲν εἰσὶν ἀλογώτεροι καὶ κτηνώδεις, οἱ δὲ θηριωδέστεροι καὶ ἀγριώτεροι. Δεῖ τοίνυν αὐτῶν κρατεῖν καὶ περιγίνεσθαι, καὶ τῷ λογισμῷ τὴν τούτων ἀρχὴν παραδιδόναι. Translation: Hill, Sermons on the Book of Genesis, 54. See also Hom. Gen. 9.7 (PG 53.78.20–32).

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from androgenerativity to sexual intercourse, it will be shown how the event of the Fall also exacerbated the problem of the passions. Before the Fall, human beings had complete psychic control, just as they had complete control over the animals, but after the Fall, both their passions and the animals become threats. The devil-possessed serpent’s rationality, then, perhaps represents the cunning relationality of sinful bodily passions. “Notice in this case the extreme subtlety of his malice,” Chrysostom warns,

“in the unfolding of his planning and inquiry he introduces words not spoken by God and acts as though motivated by care for them.”212 Chrysostom further states: “Do you see how he uses the words like a bait to inject his poison? The woman should have been able from his very approach to recognize the extremity of his frenzy and the fact that he deliberately said what was not the case and made a pretence of care for them as part of his plan.”213 The devil pretended to be someone who “cared” for Adam and Eve. The danger of the temptation of the passions is that they assume a false façade of care

(κηδεμονία); this is the serpentine character of the passions. The fact that Eve was “not all there” (ἄπλαστον) meant that she was unable to discern what was safe from what was savage and dangerous. The proper care of the self, then, lies at the heart of the struggle between psychic control and bodily passions. Eve was unable to discern between the devil’s false care, and the true care for the self, which meant obedience to

God, and abstinence from the tree. 214 Because she is the naïve and weaker vessel

212 Hom. Gen. 16.4 (PG 53.127.23–25): Σκοπεῖτε ἐνταῦθα κακουργίας ὑπερβολὴν λεπτοτάτην. Τὸ μὴ ῥηθὲν ὑπὸ τοῦ Θεοῦ ἐν τάξει συμβουλῆς καὶ ἐρωτήσεως εἰσάγει, καὶ ὡσανεὶ τὴν ὑπὲρ αὐτῶν κηδεμονίαν ποιούμενος. Translation: Hill, Homilies on Genesis 1–17, 209. 213 Hom. Gen. 16.5 (PG 53.127.37–41): Εἶδες πῶς, καθάπερ δέλεαρ, διὰ τῶν ῥημάτων ἐνίησιν αὑτοῦ τὸν ἰόν; Δέον τὴν γυναῖκα ἐξ αὐτῆς τῆς ἐπιχειρήσεως κατανοῆσαι τῆς μανίας τὴν ὑπερβολὴν, καὶ ὅτι τὰ μὴ ὄντα ἐπίτηδες λέγει, καὶ ἐν τάξει δῆθεν κηδεμονίας. Translation: Hill, Homilies on Genesis 1–17, 210. 214 For more on the care of the self and ascetic fashioning in Chrysostom, see Chris L. de Wet, “The Practice of Everyday Death: Thanatology and Self-Fashioning in John Chrysostom’s Thirteenth Homily on Romans,” HTS Theological Studies 71.1 (2015): 1–6; see also chapter 5.

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(ἄπλαστον καὶ ἀσθενέστερον σκεῦος),215 Eve was unable to see that the serpent was actually a wild and irrational creature, savage and mad. The problem that masculinity faces, to Chrysostom, is recognising and controlling the “wildness” (θηριώδης) of thought:

How do you get control of the wildness of thought [λογισμοῦ θηριώδους],

you ask? What are you saying, human being that you are? We subdue lions

and tame their spirit, and do you doubt if you are able to transform the

ferocity of your thinking into mildness? Further, ferocity is naturally proper

to wild beasts and mildness unnatural, whereas the opposite is true in your

case: mildness is natural, ferocity and savagery unnatural. Are you, then,

who expel the natural and induce the unnatural in wild animals, unable to

maintain what is natural? What great condemnation this brings against

you!... However, in a person reason is present, and the fear of God, and

many other advantages from other sources—so don’t adduce excuses and

pretexts. It is, after all, quite within your capabilities to be meek and mild

and gentle, if you have the good will [ἐὰν θέλῃς ἥμερος εἶναι]. The text

says, “‘Let us make a human being in our image and likeness.’”216

215 Hom. Gen. 16.3 (PG 53.127.2). 216 Hom. Gen. 9.7 (PG 53.78.33–42, 50–55): Καὶ πῶς ἄν τις περιγένοιτο, φησὶ, λογισμοῦ θηριώδους; Τί λέγεις, ἄνθρωπε; Λεόντων περιγινόμεθα, καὶ τὰς ψυχὰς αὐτῶν ἡμεροῦμεν, καὶ ἀμφιβάλλεις εἰ λογισμοῦ θηριωδίαν πρὸς ἡμερότητα μεταβαλεῖν δυνήσῃ; Καίτοι τῷ θηρίῳ μὲν κατὰ φύσιν πρόσεστι τὸ ἄγριον, παρὰ φύσιν δὲ τὸ ἥμερον· σοὶ δὲ τὸ ἐναντίον, κατὰ φύσιν μὲν τὸ ἥμερον παρὰ φύσιν δὲ τὸ ἄγριον καὶ θηριῶδες. Ὁ τοίνυν τὸ κατὰ φύσιν ἐκβαλὼν, καὶ τὸ παρὰ φύσιν ἐνθεὶς τῇ τοῦ θηρίου ψυχῇ, τὸ κατὰ φύσιν αὐτὸς οὐ δύνασαι διατηρῆσαι; καὶ πόσης οὐκ ἂν εἴη τοῦτο καταγνώσεως;… ἐπὶ δὲ τῆς σῆς ψυχῆς καὶ λογισμός ἐστι, καὶ Θεοῦ φόβος, καὶ πολλὴ πολλαχόθεν ἡ βοήθεια· μὴ τοίνυν σκήψεις λέγε καὶ προφάσεις. Δυνατὸν γὰρ, ἐὰν θέλῃς ἥμερος εἶναι καὶ πρᾷος καὶ ἐπιεικής. Ποιήσωμεν, φησὶν, ἄνθρωπον κατ' εἰκόνα ἡμετέραν, καὶ καθ' ὁμοίωσιν. Translation: Hill, Homilies on Genesis 1–17, 121. See also Serm. Gen. 3.1.52–71 (SC 433.206–9).

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The answer to the domination of corporeal animality lies in the fact that human beings are, essentially, not fully animal—they have reason and a will, and it is then through rationality (λογισμός) and the cultivated (ἥμερος, the opposite of θηριώδης) volition that the animal passions are conquered. The cultivated will, here, must be read as the antidote to ῥαθυμία. Although animals are naturally savage and wild, the human being is by nature gentle, meek, and mild. These are the same attributes Chrysostom affords to Christ,217 and he brings in here, again, the argument of divine likeness. Human beings are created in God’s likeness (gentle, mild, and virtuous), naturally—it is unnatural for them to be like animals, just like it was unnatural for the serpent to act rationally. This, too, is linked to the fear of God. Just as all animals are supposed to fear humans, which is what defines them as animal, according to Chrysostom, so too all human beings are supposed to fear God, since fear of God is what makes a human being truly human. If ferocious lions can be tamed and made to walk through the marketplace, surely men and women are able to tame the lion within. This is then the true care of the self, the true pathway to masculinity, namely not relating and giving in to irrational bestial passions. Most importantly, masculinity and psychic control, or the opposite, is a choice to Chrysostom. If the will and reason are aligned, men and women will not choose sin. “No evidence of force, no evidence of pressure,” Chrysostom points out,

“only choice and decision [προαίρεσις καὶ γνώμη].”218 The devil did not force Eve to eat, just as she did not force Adam—it was their own choice, and hence, they are culpable.219

217 Hom. Gen. 16.7 (PG 53.78.21–26). 218 Hom. Gen. 17.21 (PG 53.140.31–32): Οὐδαμοῦ ἀνάγκη, οὐδαμοῦ βία, ἀλλὰ προαίρεσις καὶ γνώμη. Translation: Hill, Homilies on Genesis 1–17, 232; see also Laird, Mindset, Moral Choice and Sin, 221– 56. 219 Hom. Gen. 17.21 (PG 53.140.24–43).

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Giving in to the savage passions has dire consequences. The whole narrative of the Fall, to Chrysostom, represents a world where the bestial has taken over, where animality rules. If God was the ideal Masculine, then the animal is the ideal slave, the pure corporeal. Just as the deceit of Eve against Adam signified the body leading the head, the narrative of the serpent represents animality guiding humanity—an inverted order, an upside-down world.220 Eve was not supposed to associate with the serpent, just as masters should not associate with slaves—she was guilty of a serious infraction already, especially since she was female, namely the crime of speech, of keeping bad company and talking to strangers, and not first talking to her husband. “After all, there was no need for her to get involved in conversation with him in the first place,”

Chrysostom clarifies, “she should rather have conversed with the person for whose sake she came into being, with whom she shared everything on equal terms, and whose helpmate she had been made.”221 In a different homily, as we saw above, Chrysostom accused Eve of being deceived by an inferior slave, while Adam was deceived by a free equal.222 Women’s speech was something that was intensively controlled and policed in early Christianity, and here we see the original cause of female voicelessness in

Christian antiquity.223 Moreover, when advising fathers on how to raise their sons, he also notes that children should avoid talking to slaves, except if the father has approved of the slave as being virtuous.224 Slaves were equally voiceless. Like serpents, slaves

220 Hom. Gen. 17.18 (PG 53.139.35–42). 221 Hom. Gen. 16.5 (PG 53.127.47–50): Ἔδει μὲν γὰρ μηδὲ ἐξ ἀρχῆς ἀνασχέσθαι τῆς πρὸς αὐτὸν διαλέξεως, ἀλλ' ἐκείνῳ μόνῳ διαλέγεσθαι, δι' ὂν παρήχθη, καὶ κοινωνὸς κατὰ τὴν ἀξίαν γέγονε, καὶ εἰς βοήθειαν ἐδημιουργήθη. Translation: Hill, Homilies on Genesis 1–17, 210. 222 Hom. 1 Tim. 9.1 (F6.71). 223 See esp. 1 Timothy 2:12, stating that women are not allowed to teach. Chrysostom interprets this verse as forbidding women to teach publically and occupying an ecclesiastical office. Chrysostom does believe that women are allowed to teach in private at their homes; see Sal. Prisc. Aq. 1.3 (PG 51.192.23–40); Hom. Rom. 32[31].1 (F1.474–75); Hom. 1 Tim. 9 (F6.69–75); Hom. Tit. 4.1 (F6.293– 95). 224 Anna 1.6 (PG 54.642.25–33); Inan. 37.469–38.476 (SC 188.128–30).

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are not to be trusted. In Eve’s conversation with the serpent we see a great kyriarchal anxiety—that of the subjugated dialoguing; it becomes a situation where the dominant male master is excluded. It betrays the elite male slaveholder’s fear of not being in control, or losing control. Moreover, although the animal is thoroughly doulologised in

Chrysostom’s rhetoric, there is also a process of reversed discursivity in this case—the doulologisation of the animal also leads to the animalisation of the slave, a common feature in the rhetoric of ancient slavery.225 This is firm evidence of how ancient gender and doulological politics shaped Chrysostom’s reading of the serpent narrative.

Thus, Eve did not know her place in the cosmic hierarchy and was “dragged down to a low level” by the serpent, and then tried to exalt herself above God by desiring to be equal to God (ἰσόθεος).226 Eve’s desire to become like God was the result of the devil’s envy (φθόνος). Chrysostom explains:

I mean, just as he [the devil] had ideas above his station, was carried away

to a degree beyond what was granted him, and so fell from heaven to earth,

in just the same way did you have in mind to proceed, and by your

transgression of the command were brought to the punishment of death,

giving free reign to your own envy, as some sage has said: “By the devil’s

envy death entered the world” [Wis. 2:24].227

225 See, more generally, Karl Jacoby, “Slaves by Nature? Domestic Animals and Human Slaves,” Slavery & Abolition 15.1 (1994): 89–99. 226 Hom. Gen. 16.10 (PG 53.129.45). 227 Hom. Gen. 16.12 (PG 53.130.47–54): Καθάπερ γὰρ ἐκεῖνος τὰ ὑπὲρ τὴν ἀξίαν φρονήσας, καὶ τῆς παρασχεθείσης ἀξίας ἐξεβλήθη, καὶ ἐκ τῶν οὐρανῶν εἰς τὴν γῆν κατηνέχθη· τὸ αὐτὸ δὴ καὶ ὑμᾶς ἐργάσασθαι ἐβουλήθη, καὶ διὰ τῆς παραβάσεως τῆς ἐντολῆς εἰς τὸ τοῦ θανάτου ἐπιτίμιον ἀγαγεῖν, καὶ τὸν οἰκεῖον φθόνον πληρῶσαι, καθὼς καὶ σοφός τις ἔλεγε· Φθόνῳ δὲ διαβόλου θάνατος εἰς τὸν κόσμον εἰσῆλθε. Translation: Hill, Homilies on Genesis 1–17, 215. On envy more generally in Chrysostom, see De Wet, “John Chrysostom on Envy.”

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Envy is the chief diabolical sin. The devil becomes the archetypical rebellious slave.

Because of his envy, the devil wanted to destroy the angelic humans. But what happened is that the devil implanted the seed of his own sin, envy, into Eve, so that she would be envious of divine equality. Eve’s fall stands parallel to the fall of the devil.

Just like the devil, Adam and Eve were angelic, but lost it due to that dangerous vice that is envy. It is the full subsumption of ideal angelic humanity by animality, the point where the psychic is eclipsed and conquered by the bestial, where the slave rebels against the master.

Finally, the serpentine body now becomes a sign and symptom of the dangers of rebellion and not respecting the natural (that is, kyriarchal) order. Dunning is correct to point out that the serpent is feminised in order to serve as a symbol of subjugation.228

The instant and violent subjugation of the serpentine body acts as a message and deterrent, discouraging any female or slave against disobedience and rebellion—it is the doulologisation of the serpentine body becoming full circle. In the previous chapter

I have shown that God represents the ideal and unattainable Masculine. In the narrative of the Fall, God acts as a “real man” should act, he acts in the way Adam failed to act.

He sternly speaks to and punishes his children, thereby also instructing them. God also respects the cosmic order he instituted. He first speaks to the man, then to the woman, and then to the serpent/slave. But it is most likely God’s response to the serpent that affirms his divine masculinity. God deals with the serpent in the way that Eve should have, in the way an ideal slaveholder interacts with his slaves:

Notice in this passage [Gen. 3:9–19], I ask you, the order and sequence

illustrating God’s loving kindness. I mean, he began directing his enquiries

228 Dunning, “Chrysostom’s Serpent,” 85.

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to the man, and then he turned his attention to the woman. When she

mentioned who was the cause of her fall, he turned to the serpent: not

deeming him worth a reply, he sentenced him to his punishment and

extended it for all time; in the person of the serpent a lasting instruction was

provided for everyone in future never again to accept that deadly advice nor

be deceived by stratagems devised by him.229

The serpent is a slave, and nothing less, and the physical and violent subjugation of the serpent’s body becomes a pedagogical act calling for imitation. As the serpent is subjugated and dominated (literally being forced to slither on its belly on the ground), so too must a man discipline his wife, children, and slaves, and perhaps most importantly, so too must the bestial passions be controlled. God’s punishment of the serpent serves as justification for the violent punishment of slaves. 230 Although

Chrysostom uses the Roman kyriarchal order of domination to structure his interpretation of Genesis 1–3, the exegetical operation is also autocatalytic—as the kyriarchal order is utilised to fabricate an interpretation, that exegetical invention, in turn, justifies and authorises the same kyriarchal order. The more kyriarchal imagery is used to structure biblical interpretation, the more kyriarchal attitudes and practices are strengthened and proliferated. Scriptural interpretation has real and often serious social effects.231

229 Hom. Gen. 17.23 (PG 53.141.25–34): Σκόπει μοι ἐνταῦθα τάξιν καὶ ἀκολουθίαν φιλανθρωπίας πεπληρωμένην. Τὴν μὲν γὰρ ἐρώτησιν ποιούμενος ἀπὸ τοῦ ἀνδρὸς ἤρξατο, εἶτα μετῆλθεν ἐπὶ τὴν γυναῖκα. Καὶ ἐπειδὴ εἶπεν αὐτὴ τὸν αἴτιον αὐτῇ γεγενημένον, ἐλθὼν ἐπὶ τὸν ὄφιν, καὶ οὐκέτι αὐτὸν ἀποκρίσεως ἀξιώσας, τὴν τιμωρίαν ἐπάγει, καὶ τοιαύτην ὡς παντὶ τῷ χρόνῳ παρεκτείνεσθαι, καὶ διὰ τῆς ὄψεως διηνεκῆ διδάσκαλον γίνεσθαι τοῖς ἑξῆς ἅπασι, μηκέτι δέχεσθαι τὴν ὀλεθρίαν ἐκείνην συμβουλὴν, μηδὲ ἀπατᾶσθαι τοῖς παρ' ἐκείνου μηχανήμασιν. Translation: Hill, Homilies on Genesis 1–17, 234. 230 For Chrysostom’s views on the punishment of slaves, see De Wet, Preaching Bondage, 170–219. 231 I have demonstrated this dynamic with regard to Chrysostom’s use of slavery as discourse and social practice in his scriptural interpretation; see De Wet, Preaching Bondage.

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Conclusion

If God represents idealised masculinity to Chrysostom, then humanity resembles the more realistic crises of what masculinity entails. In the image of God, we see a masculinity that is always in control, always dominating, with no weaknesses.

Chrysostom’s interpretation of the Eden narrative shows humanity in a struggle, torn between its divine and psychic ruling principle, and its raging corporeal animality. It is not a dichotomy between soul and body—rather, it is exactly the “reticulatedness” of the soul and the body that results in the struggle for dominion, both of the inner self and the outer cosmos. Humanity, according to Chrysostom, was created with the purpose of ruling material creation. Adam was created in God’s image, which implied that he had the capacity to rule the world as God’s representative. He was created last as the crown of creation, like a king going to a palace long prepared for him. But the human capacity for rulership is not simple—there was Adam and Eve, and Chrysostom himself seems unsure as to the nature of their power dynamics, individually and together, both before and after the Fall. The arguments about the equality of honour between Adam and Eve, their composite subjectivity, before and after the Fall resembles a twisted ball of yarn nearly impossible to unravel.

Ultimately then, human dominion is not as straightforward as the dominion of

God. Thus, when examining the narrative and rhetorical interplays between divinity, humanity, and animality, we see that Chrysostom’s retelling of the events in Genesis

1–3 is done strategically. He shows what ideal masculinity is supposed to be (as extrapolated in chapter 2), even though it is humanly impossible to attain. And then, in the rise and fall of Adam and Eve, we see a mirroring of the great masculine struggle, the struggle between the domination of the passions by the soul, but also the struggle

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of elite male slaveholders, who are required to dominate their wives, children, and slaves (as shown in the current chapter). The failure that is the Fall became a failure of masculinity to Chrysostom, which resulted in the multiplication of other forms of dominion—institutions of masculinity—in order to manage the consequences of sin.

Men must dominate now more than ever, for Chrysostom, in order to fight the effects of sin. Women and slaves need domination for their own good, so as to avoid another

Eve or Ham event.

Thus, Chrysostom uses the masculine and kyriarchal social conventions of his day to elucidate the narrative of Genesis 1–3, but he then also directs his interpretation in such a way that it justifies and supports those same masculine and kyriarchal structures and institutions. Male domination over women, slaveholders dominating over slaves, and governors and those with political power dominating the disempowered, are all the necessary consequences of the Fall—according to

Chrysostom, these institutions of masculinity are not there in and of themselves, but have been instituted by God. This type of interpretation of Genesis, no doubt, intensified oppressive practices of subjugation and violent corporal punishment. God, after all, set the perfect example of what a man is supposed to be; a real man, like God, dominates and punishes with a firm no-nonsense attitude. Thus, if one opposes these institutions, one opposes God himself.

Yet, if we read against the grain of Chrysostom’s interpretation, it means that the narrative of the Fall actually represents a victory of the subjugated over those in power and who dominate. From Chrysostom’s polemical tone, it may indicate that some did in fact ask such questions and hold such views, especially women and slaves. There were other groups, like the Manichaeans, who proposed a different structure of the cosmic order—which was not necessarily less concerned about giving power to the

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powerful and subjugating social inferiors. Yet Chrysostom’s reading of Genesis 1–3 supports another alternative, the greatest institution of masculinity, namely the monastic life. The only true escape from all these other institutions of masculinity

(which are also called “slaveries”) introduced after the Fall is to embrace the slavery of

God, to adopt an ascetic life. The monk and virgin simply struggle against the flesh— they have neither a spouse to dominate or to be dominated by, nor need of slaves, nor even need of secular government, because they are righteous. One can even embrace the masculine institution of asceticism and monasticism without being in a real monastery, but by practising asceticism where one is socially located.

Now, in the next chapter, we will look in detail at the reproductive shift that takes place after the Fall, the shift from androgenerativity to sexual reproduction, and the creation of a new spiritual natality in Chrysostom’s thought. The shift in reproductive modes serves to illuminate Chrysostom’s views on these social structures necessitated by the Fall, and how masculinity was transformed, especially with the introduction of the life of marriage and having children, and the alternative that is the monastic life, the truly masculine life. If chapter 2 examined Chrysostom’s theological construction of the ideal Masculine, and this chapter how the great masculine struggle was lost, then the following chapter will examine how humanity might be restored to a masculine state, how humanity might be “reborn” unto their long-lost divine masculinity.

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CHAPTER 4

“What Kind of Birth Pains Produced Eve?”: Masculinity, Androgenerativity, and the

New Spiritual Natality

Introduction

There is a distinct point in Chrysostom’s commentary on Genesis where God’s modus operandi of creation changes. Where creation shifts from fabrication to reproduction, where the human body, and no longer the earth or the waters, becomes the primary trajectory of creation, when creation occurs no longer by means of the spoken word of

God, but via the penetration of the human body. We find therefore an anthropogony in flux, its tide determined by the status of humanity towards sin. This critical moment is found in Chrysostom’s fifteenth homily on Genesis,1 when Eve is created from the rib of Adam.

This brings us to one of the most important characteristics of prelapsarian humanity, namely androgenerativity. When I speak of androgenerativity, I refer to an ideal mode of reproduction in which the masculine male body serves as the primary point of origin. Other bodies are therefore produced from the male body. It represents the mode of reproduction from which Eve came and where God occupies a directly active position, while the male body is the passive site of reproduction.

Androgenerativity stands in contrast to sexual reproduction between male and female, the second creative-reproductive shift that takes place in the seventeenth and eighteenth homilies on Genesis, 2 which Chrysostom considers thoroughly postlapsarian.

1 See PG 53.118.21–125.51. 2 See PG 53.134.34–158.40.

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Androgenerativity is then also the ultimate and ideally masculine mode of reproduction.

In Chrysostom’s thought, androgenerativity becomes the solution to the failure of the great masculine struggle.

Androgenerativity is inextricably linked to God’s identity as a benevolent and expert craftsman, a δημιουργός. Androgenerativity is then a “demiurgic” reproduction, a reproduction based on divine creation or fabrication (δημιουργία), thus standing in stark contrast to human sexual reproduction and procreation (παιδοποιία); although, as we will observe, Chrysostom asserts that even with procreation through sexual reproduction, God still has the final say.

I introduce androgenerativity as an Idealtypus, or ideal type, in the Weberian sense. Max Weber developed the notion of ideal types in which attributes of various

“real” phenomena are taken and merged, thereby forming an abstract and imaginary construct that can be used as a basis for comparative work.3 Androgenerativity therefore can assist the historian of early Christianity in identifying and understanding elements of ideal Christian sexual morality, and thus also comparing these elements with non- ideal expressions of Christian (and non-Christian) sexual moralities. As I will illustrate, androgenerativity as an ideal type can be especially helpful in deconstructing virginity, sexual intercourse, procreation, birth, mother- and fatherhood, and even Christian conversion and soteriology insomuch as all these concepts relate to the formation of manliness and, crucially, the final restoration of humanity to a masculine state. Michel

Foucault has noticed a similar link in Chrysostom’s thought between marriage and procreation and human salvation history: “La dissociation entre mariage et procréation,

Chrysostome l’effectue à partir de l’histoire générale de l’homme, de sa chute et de son

3 See esp. Max Weber, Methodology of Social Sciences, trans. Edward Shils and Henry A. Finch (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2011), 98–107.

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salut. Il fait valoir en effet que la procréation est annoncée dans la Genèse au moment même de la création de l’homme.” 4 We can therefore also use the concept of androgenerativity to make sense of an ideal mode of reproduction before the Fall and before sexual reproduction. This shift in human reproductivity, in turn, also aids in accounting for Chrysostom’s understanding of postlapsarian social structures like marriage and the monastic life.

Perfection, Passion, and Wholeness: The Attributes of Androgenerativity

The reproductive shift in early Christian thought is seen as early as in the writings of

Paul the Apostle. In 1 Corinthians 11:12, an important intertext in Chrysostom’s commentaries on Genesis, Paul states: “For as woman was made from man, so man is now born of woman. And all things are from God.”5 Chrysostom’s interpretation of this text is quite telling. “Paul did not say, ‘from the woman’ [ἐκ τῆς γυναικὸς], but again,

‘of the man’ [ἐκ τοῦ ἀνδρός],” Chrysostom explains, “For still this inviolate state

[ἀκέραιον] remains with the man. But these are not the merits of the man, but of God.

Therefore he also adds, ‘but all things of God’ [ἐκ τοῦ θεοῦ].”6

Two important observations will suffice regarding Chrysostom’s short but potent interpretation of this verse. On the one hand, he gives careful attention to Paul’s use of prepositions in the verse. The correct and accurate reading of prepositional phrases was a crucial skill in early Christian dogmatics—Sean McDonough refers to this as

“prepositional theology”, and has traced it back to the Hellenistic period—and it often

4 Michel Foucault, Les aveux de la chair, ed. Frédéric Gros, vol. 4 of Histoire de la sexualité (Paris: Gallimard, 2018), 270. 5 NA28: ὥσπερ γὰρ ἡ γυνὴ ἐκ τοῦ ἀνδρός, οὕτως καὶ ὁ ἀνὴρ διὰ τῆς γυναικός· τὰ δὲ πάντα ἐκ τοῦ θεοῦ. Translation: ESV. 6 Hom. 1 Cor. 26.5 (F2.317–18): Οὐκ εἶπεν, ἐκ τῆς γυναικὸς, ἀλλὰ πάλιν, “ἐκ τοῦ ἀνδρός·” ἔτι γὰρ αὐτὸ τοῦτο ἀκέραιον μένει παρὰ τῷ ἀνδρί. ᾿Αλλ' οὐ τοῦ ἀνδρὸς ταῦτα τὰ κατορθώματα, ἀλλὰ τοῦ θεοῦ· διὸ καὶ ἐπήγαγε, “Τὰ δὲ πάντα ἐκ τοῦ θεοῦ.”

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led to many controversies.7 Chrysostom emphasises that the woman was made “from” or “out of man,” highlighting the preposition ἐκ; but, according to the Pauline text, man is made “through the woman” (διὰ τῆς γυναικός). The use of ἐκ also refers to God’s creative agency (ἐκ τοῦ θεοῦ)—in this sense, reproduction from the man, that is, androgenerative reproduction, is imitative of God’s creative (or demiurgic) agency.

But being created through the woman is seen as an impure deviation from the original. The passive female body is now an intermediary or catalyst for the creation of the human being. But Chrysostom did not follow Aristotle’s view that women were merely passive receptacles for the fetus (Caroline Whitbeck’s famous “flower pot theory”8), serving only an external nutritive function.9 As in the Hippocratic corpus10 and Galen, 11 Chrysostom’s embryology too dictated that the male and female contributed seminally to the formation of a child despite the fact that the female seed was still inferior to that of the male due to a deficiency of natural heat. “[T]he one flesh is the father, and the child, and the mother, mixed from the substance of the two,”

7 The classic example here is Basil’s detailed explanations of doxological prepositional phrases related to the Trinity in his Spir. 1–5, 25–29 (SC 17.250–85, 456–519); Sean M. McDonough, Christ as Creator: Origins of a New Testament Doctrine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 99–101, 147–51. 8 Caroline Whitbeck, “Theories of Sex Difference,” Philosophical Forum 5 (1973): 54–80. 9 Gen. an. 739b34–740a1 (LCL 366.192–93); see also Anthony Preus, “Science and Philosophy in Aristotle’s ‘Generation of Animals,’” Journal of the History of Biology 3.1 (1970): 1–52; Sophia M. Connell, Aristotle on Female Animals: A Study of the Generation of Animals, Cambridge Classical Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 127–32. 10 Hippocratic corpus, Nat. puer. 1 (LCL 520.30–31); see also Iain M. Lonie, The Hippocratic Treatises, “On Generation,” “On the Nature of the Child,” “Diseases IV”: A Commentary (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1981), 6; Michael Boylan, “The Galenic and Hippocratic Challenges to Aristotle’s Conception Theory,” Journal of the History of Biology 17.1 (1984): 83–112; Joan Cadden, The Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science, and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 17– 19; Helen King, Hippocrates’ Woman: Reading the Female Body in Ancient Greece (London: Routledge, 1998), 8–9. 11 See Galen, Sem. 1.7 (K4.535–39), 146.14–20 (K4.595–96), 176.13 (K4.624); Usu part. 14.6 (K4.158– 65); see also Anthony Preus, “Galen’s Criticism of Aristotle’s Conception Theory,” Journal of the History of Biology 10.1 (1977): 65–85; Roberto L. Presti, “Informing Matter and Enmattered Forms: Aristotle and Galen on the ‘Power’ of the Seed,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 22.5 (2014): 929–50; James Wilberding, “Embryology,” in A Companion to Science, Technology, and Medicine in Ancient Greece and Rome, ed. Georgia L. Irby, trans. Todd Black, vol. 2 of Blackwell Companions to the Ancient World (Malden, MA: John Wiley & Sons, 2016), 329–41.

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Chrysostom says, “For by the intermixing of their seeds [μιγέντων τῶν σπερμάτων] the child is again produced, so that the three are one flesh.”12

Augustine, of course, argued that this is also how sin is transmitted from one individual to another, from the time of Adam, via the semen.13 But Chrysostom believed the contrary. He makes it clear that people suffer the effects of sin due to their own sinful behaviour and corrupt volition, and not that of Adam, Eve, and even Ham (in the case of slaves). The individual person, and not the collective Adam, brought about the consequences of the sinful nature.14 The mortal and the fleshly body is not the cause of sin (since Adam sinned in an immortal angelic body), nor is the mortal body a hindrance to virtue—sin comes not through the seed (σπέρμα) but from the wicked will (ἡ πονηρά

προαίρεσίς).15

Its perfect origins and operations establish androgenerative reproduction firmly above sexual reproduction, and also ramify the superior position of the man over that of the woman in the cosmic hierarchy. Androgenerativity therefore has very real social and political effects with regards to the ancient gender order. Furthermore, and in support of the previous point, Chrysostom states that androgenerative reproduction is an inviolate state (ἀκέραιον) reserved for the man16—hence the centrality of the ἀνήρ

12 Hom. Eph. 20.4 (F4.306): ἡ σὰρξ ὁ πατὴρ καὶ ὁ παῖς καὶ ἡ μήτηρ ἐστιν, ἐκ τῆς ἑκατέρου οὐσίας συγχυθείσης· καὶ γὰρ μιγέντων τῶν σπερμάτων πάλιν τίκτεται ὁ παῖς· ὥστε τοὺς τρεῖς εἶναι μίαν σάρκα. See also Hom. Rom. 31[30].4 (F1.469–70) where Chrysostom refers to the seed of Sarah. 13 Civ. 13.14 (CCSL 48.395–96); see also Elaine Pagels, “The Politics of Paradise: Augustine’s Exegesis of Genesis 1–3 Versus That of John Chrysostom,” Harvard Theological Review 78.1–2 (1985): 79–81; Mark I. Wallace, “Early Christian Contempt for the Flesh and the Woman Who Loved Too Much in the Gospel of Luke,” in The Embrace of Eros: Bodies, Desires, and Sexuality in Christianity, ed. Margaret D. Kamitsuka (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2010), 36–38. For a very interesting discussion of the later reception of sin, semen, and paradise (in which these earlier ideas play a pivotal role), see Alastair Minnis, From Eden to Eternity: Creations of Paradise in the Later Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 24–83. 14 Serm. Gen. 5.1.1–47 (SC 433.250–55); Pagels, “Politics of Paradise,” 79. 15 Hom. 1 Cor. 17.4 (F2.203–4). 16 Hom. 1 Cor. 26.5 (F2.317–18).

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in androgenerativity. Chrysostom’s use of the term ἀκέραιον is very interesting in this regard. Somewhat difficult to translate in this particular instance, ἀκέραιος usually refers to a state of purity, innocence, simplicity, and intactness (as with ἀκεραιοσύνη, that is, guilelessness). In patristic literature, the term is used extensively in descriptions of virginity, and also the resurrection. 17 We will see below that Chrysostom is no exception to this use of the concept. He primarily sees androgenerativity as a virginal mode of reproduction. The sense of ἀκέραιος could also be “unmixed”, often referring to undiluted wine or unalloyed metal, but in this case may allude to a pure state of reproduction that does not entail “mixing” (μίξις), that is, sexual intercourse and the impure commingling (σύγχυσις) of seed.

With the postlapsarian shift to sexual reproduction, there is also the creation of the social structure of domination that is the marriage relationship, in which sexual passion and reproduction is (supposed to be) regulated. I have indicated earlier in this study that marriage is one of the institutions of masculinity, or “slaveries”, introduced after the Fall. Androgenerativity is deployed over and against marriage. Adam and Eve, according to Chrysostom, were not “married” per se. “Why did marriage not appear before the treachery? Why was there no intercourse in paradise? Why not the pains of childbirth before the curse?” Chrysostom asks. He is hereby arguing, against some critics in his community, that marriage is a necessity for the continuation of life.

“Because at that time, these things were superfluous. The necessity arose later because of our weakness, as did cities, crafts, the wearing of clothes, and all our other numerous deeds,” is Chrysostom’s answer.18 Thus, the shift to marriage and sexual reproduction

17 Geoffrey W. H. Lampe, ed., A Patristic Greek Lexicon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 61. 18 Virg. 15.2.17–22 (SC 125.146–47): Διὰ τί γὰρ μὴ πρὸ τῆς ἀπάτης ὁ γάμος ἐφάνη; Διὰ τί μὴ ἐν παραδείσῳ ἡ μίξις; Διὰ τί μὴ πρὸ τῆς ἀρᾶς ὠδῖνες; ῞Οτι τότε μὲν ταῦτα περιττά, ὕστερον δὲ γέγονεν ἀναγκαῖα διὰ τὴν ἡμετέραν ἀσθένειαν καὶ ταῦτα καὶ τὰ ἀλλὰ ἅπαντα, αἱ πόλεις, αἱ τέχναι, ἡ τῶν ἱματίων περιβολή, ὁ λοιπὸς τῶν χρειῶν ὄχλος. Translation: Sally R. Shore, trans., John Chrysostom: On

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also resulted in urbanisation and the proliferation of craft and technology. As we have noted, there was also a sudden realisation of nakedness, shame, and biological sexual difference—hence the need for clothing. All these things complicate life. So we also observe that Chrysostom is highly positive of the more rustic and simple country life.19

This underlines Chrysostom’s whole argument in De virginitate about the superiority of virginity over marriage. The virginal condition was initially, to Chrysostom, a highly fertile condition due to androgenerativity: “Virginity does not cause the human race to dry up but sin and unnatural intercourse do.”20

Chrysostom thus believed that sexual reproduction is not the ideal way of procreation. Chrysostom’s argument in Virg. 14–19 21 is central to the notion of androgenerativity (it is necessary to quote Chrysostom’s full argument):

When the whole world had been completed and all had been readied for our

repose and use, God fashioned man for whom he made the world. After

being fashioned, man remained in paradise and there was no reason for

marriage. Man did need a helper, and she came into being; not even then

did marriage seem necessary. It did not yet appear anywhere but they

remained as they were without it. They lived in paradise as in heaven and

they enjoyed God’s company. Desire for sexual intercourse, conception,

labor, childbirth and every form of corruption had been banished from their

souls. As a clear river shooting forth from a pure source, so were they in

Virginity; Against Remarriage (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1983), 23. 19 See, for instance, Stat. 19 (PG 49.187–98); Christine Shepardson, Controlling Contested Places: Late Antique Antioch and the Spatial Politics of Religious Controversy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 137–42. 20 Virg. 18.1.3–4 (SC 125.156–57): ῞Οτι δὲ οὐχ ἡ παρθενία ποιεῖ τὸ τῶν ἀνθρώπων γένος ἐπιλείπειν ἀλλ' ἡ ἁμαρτία καὶ αἱ ἄτοποι μίξεις. Translation: Shore, Chrysostom: On Virginity; Against Remarriage, 27. 21 See SC 125.137–59.

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that place adorned by virginity. And all the earth was without humanity.

This is what is now feared by those who are anxious about the world…. Do you perceive the origin of marriage? Why it seems to be unnecessary? It springs from disobedience, from a curse, from death. For where death is, there is marriage. When one does not exist, the other is not about. But virginity does not have this companion. It is always useful, always beautiful and blessed, both before and after death, before and after marriage. Tell me, what sort of marriage produced Adam? What kind of birth pains produced

Eve? You could not say. Therefore why have groundless fears? Why tremble at the thought of the end of marriage, and thus the end of the human race? An infinite number of angels are at the service of God, thousands upon thousands of archangels are beside him, and none of them have come into being from the succession of generations, none from childbirth, labor pains and conception. Could he not, then, have created many more men without marriage? Just as he created the first two from whom all men descend…. But moreover, virginity did appear at the beginning and was prior to marriage. Marriage was introduced later for the reasons cited [to procreate and to control desire] and was thought necessary. Adam would not have needed it if he had remained obedient. And how then, you ask, were so many scores of people made? But I will tell you again, since this fear very much remained, shaking you down. How did Adam come to exist?

And how Eve, without the mediation of marriage? What then? You will ask if all men were to be created in this manner. Yes, either in this way or in

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another that I cannot say. The point is that God did not need marriage for

the creation of a multitude of men upon the earth.22

Chrysostom, therefore, believes that sexual reproduction is only one (inferior) mode of procreation.23 God could have created more human beings in many ways, such as he created the angels, or from the lowly dust, like Adam, or from the body of Adam, like

Eve—the latter being androgenerative. Moreover, procreation by means of sexual intercourse is an allowance of God. People can only procreate if God is willing, a point that was understandable considering the high mother and infant mortality rates of antiquity.24

22 Virg. 14.3.31–4.45, 17.5.64–75 (SC125.140–42, 154–55): ᾿Επειδὴ γὰρ ὁ σύμπας οὗτος κόσμος ἀπήρτιστο καὶ πάντα ηὐτρέπιστο τὰ πρὸς ἀνάπαυσιν καὶ χρῆσιν τὴν ἡμετέραν, ἔπλασε τὸν ἄνθρωπον ὁ Θεὸς δι' ὃν καὶ τὸν κόσμον ἐποίησε. Πλασθεὶς δὲ ἐκεῖνος ἔμεινεν ἐν παραδείσῳ καὶ γάμου λόγος οὐδεὶς ἦν. ᾿Εδέησεν αὐτῷ γενέσθαι καὶ βοηθόν, καὶ ἐγένετο, καὶ οὐδὲ οὕτως ὁ γάμος ἀναγκαῖος εἶναι ἐδόκει. ᾿Αλλ' οὐδὲ ἐφαίνετό που, ἀλλ' ἔμενον ἐκεῖνοι τούτου χωρὶς καθάπερ ἐν οὐρανῷ τῷ παραδείσῳ διαιτώμενοι καὶ ἐντρυφῶντες τῇ πρὸς Θεὸν ὁμιλίᾳ. Μίξεως δὲ ἐπιθυμία καὶ σύλληψις καὶ ὠδῖνες καὶ τόκοι καὶ πᾶν εἶδος φθορᾶς ἐξώριστο τῆς ἐκείνων ψυχῆς. ῞Ωσπερ δὲ ῥεῖθρον διειδὲς ἐκ καθαρᾶς πηγῆς προϊόν, οὕτως ἦσαν ἐν ἐκείνῳ τῷ χωρίῳ τῇ παρθενίᾳ κοσμούμενοι. Καὶ πᾶσα τότε ἡ γῆ ἔρημος ἦν ἀνθρώπων, τοῦτο ὃ νῦν δεδοίκασιν οὗτοι οἱ τῆς οἰκουμένης μεριμνηταί.... ῾Ορᾷς πόθεν ἔσχε τὴν ἀρχὴν ὁ γάμος; Πόθεν ἀναγκαῖος ἔδοξεν εἶναι; ᾿Απὸ τῆς παρακοῆς, ἀπὸ τῆς ἀρᾶς, ἀπὸ τοῦ θανάτου. ῞Οπου γὰρ θάνατος, ἐκεῖ γάμος· τούτου δὲ οὐκ ὄντος οὐδὲ αὐτὸς ἕπεται. ᾿Αλλ' οὐχ ἡ παρθενία ταύτην ἔχει τὴν ἀκολουθίαν ἀλλ' ἀεὶ χρήσιμον, ἀεὶ καλὸν καὶ μακάριον καὶ πρὸ τοῦ θανάτου καὶ μετὰ τὸν θάνατον καὶ πρὸ τοῦ γάμου καὶ μετὰ τὸν γάμον. Ποῖος γάρ, εἰπέ μοι, γάμος ἀπέτεκε ᾿Αδάμ; Ποῖαι τὴν Εὔαν ὠδῖνες; Οὐκ ἂν ἔχοις εἰπεῖν. Τί οὖν δέδοικας εἰκῇ καὶ τρέμεις μὴ παυσαμένου τοῦ γάμου καὶ τὸ τῶν ἀνθρώπων παύσεται γένος; Μύριαι μυριάδες ἀγγέλων λειτουργοῦσι τῷ Θεῷ, χίλιαι χιλιάδες ἀρχαγγέλων παρεστᾶσιν αὐτῷ, καὶ οὐδεὶς τούτων γέγονεν ἐκ διαδοχῆς, οὐδεὶς ἐκ τόκων καὶ ὠδίνων καὶ συλλήψεως. Οὔκουν πολλῷ μᾶλλον ἀνθρώπους ἐποίησεν ἂν γάμου χωρίς; ῞Ωσπερ οὖν καὶ ἐποίησε τοὺς πρώτους ὅθεν ἅπαντες ἄνθρωποι.... μᾶλλον δὲ ἡ παρθενία μὲν ἐξ ἀρχῆς καὶ τοῦ γάμου προτέρα ἡμῖν ἐφάνη. Διὰ ταῦτα δὲ ἐπεισῆλθεν ὕστερον ὁ γάμος καὶ πρᾶγμα ἀναγκαῖον ἐνομίζετο εἶναι, ὡς εἴ γε ἔμεινεν ὑπακούων ὁ ᾿Αδάμ, οὐκ ἂν ἐδέησε τούτου. Καὶ πῶς ἄν, φησίν, αἱ τοσαῦται μυριάδες ἐγένοντο; ᾿Εγὼ δὲ σὲ πάλιν ἐρωτῶ, ἐπειδή σε σφόδρα παρέμεινε κατασείων οὗτος ὁ φόβος· πῶς ὁ ᾿Αδάμ, πῶς δὲ ἡ Εὔα μὴ μεσιτεύοντος γάμου; Τί οὖν; Οὕτως, φησίν, ἔμελλον ἅπαντες ἄνθρωποι γίνεσθαι; Εἴτε οὕτως εἴτε ἑτέρως οὐκ ἔχω λέγειν. Τὸ γὰρ ζητούμενον νῦν ὅτι γάμου οὐκ ἔδει τῷ Θεῷ πρὸς τὸ πολλοὺς ποιῆσαι τοὺς ἐπὶ τῆς γῆς ἀνθρώπους. Translation (slightly modified): Shore, Chrysostom: On Virginity; Against Remarriage, 21–22, 26–27. 23 See also the observation of Peter R. L. Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 306–8; Foucault, Les aveux de la chair, 268–74. 24 See Brent D. Shaw, “Seasons of Death: Aspects of Mortality in Imperial Rome,” Journal of Roman Studies 86 (1996): 100–138.

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Androgenerativity, in Chrysostom’s thought, has three characteristics. First, androgenerative reproduction assumes total psychic and corporeal perfection.

Androgenerativity presupposes an exact and precise alignment between the psychic, corporeal, and cosmic technologies of domination—in other words, it presupposes the ideal (but currently unattainable) masculine body, unadulterated (ἀκέραιον) by sin or passion. Chrysostom’s construction of the ideal prelapsarian body is at the same time the construction of the perfect masculine body. Androgenerativity represents the reproduction of the idealised utopian body, in which the incorporeal is active and the corporeal passive. In Virg. 14.3.77–7925 Chrysostom links the creation of Adam and

Eve with the creation of the angels, and in his Genesis reading, expounds: “[U]p until that time [of the Fall] they were living like angels in paradise… created incorruptible and immortal, and on that account at any rate they had no need to wear clothes.”26 He further states:

Consider, I ask you, the transcendence of their blessed condition, how they

were superior to all bodily concerns, how they lived on earth as if they were

in heaven, and though in fact possessing a body they did not feel the

limitations of their bodies. After all, they had no need of shelter or

habitation, clothing or anything of that kind…. [T]his carefree condition of

theirs, their trouble-free life and angelic condition.27

25 See SC 125.142–45. 26 Hom. Gen. 15.14 (PG 53.123.30–35): ἐπεὶ μέχρις ἐκείνου καθάπερ ἄγγελοι οὕτω διῃτῶντο ἐν τῷ παραδείσῳ… δι' ὅλου ἄφθαρτοι κτισθέντες καὶ ἀθάνατοι, ὅπου γε οὐδὲ τῆς τῶν ἱματίων περιβολῆς ἐδέοντο. Translation: Hill, Homilies on Genesis 1–17, 202–3. 27 Hom. Gen. 16.2 (PG 53.126.20–28): ᾿Εννόησόν μοι μακαριότητος ὑπερβολὴν, πῶς ἀνώτεροι ἦσαν τῶν σωματικῶν ἁπάντων, πῶς καθάπερ τὸν οὐρανὸν, οὕτω τὴν γῆν ᾤκουν, καὶ ἐν σώματι τυγχάνοντες τὰ τῶν σωμάτων οὐχ ὑπέμενον· οὔτε γὰρ στέγης, οὔτε ὀρόφου, οὔτε ἱματίου, οὔτε ἄλλου οὐδενὸς τῶν τοιούτων ἐδέοντο.... τὴν ἄλυπον αὐτῶν ταύτην διαγωγὴν, καὶ τὸν ἀνώδυνον βίον, καὶ τὴν ἀγγελικὴν. Translation: Hill, Homilies on Genesis 1–17, 207–8.

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Androgenerativity therefore requires a perfect body or an angelic body, so to speak.

Androgenerative reproduction therefore functions as a near correlate of what we might call angelogenerativity—the (re)production of angels.28 The androgenerative body is a body with no physical limits or requirements—there is no need for shelter or a home, and especially no need for clothing for warmth or to cover its shame. The ideal androgenerative body, we must remember, is clothed in glory, according to

Chrysostom.29 This body is without grief (ἄλυπον), since it cannot die (ἀθάνατον), and without pain (ἀνώδυνον), since it cannot experience suffering and passion (ἀπάθεια):

“[F]ar from being in any way inferior to the life of angels, [they] enjoyed in the body their immunity from suffering.”30 In ancient Christian thought, angels were often seen as being male or androgynous, who reproduce differently because of their perfect state.31 However, I do not see any indication in Chrysostom’s thought that Adam and

Eve were androgynous. Sexual difference was less of a factor before the Fall, since they did not reproduce sexually and could not see each other’s nakedness—the only marker of sexual difference, to Chrysostom, was Adam being created in God’s image. All of these weaknesses—grief, pain, and mortality—Chrysostom attributes to the fallen and sinful body that reproduces by means of sexual intercourse.

28 For more on the role of angels in Christian creation discourse, see Gillian Clark, “Deficient Causes: Augustine on Creation and Angels,” in Causation and Creation in Late Antiquity, ed. Anna Marmodoro and Brian D. Prince (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 220–36; for late antique theories of angels, see esp. Ellen Muehlberger, Angels in Late Ancient Christianity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 29–57. 29 Hom. Gen. 16.3 (PG 53.126.33–37). 30 Hom. Gen. 17.1 (PG 53.134.46–47): κατὰ μηδὲν ἐλαττοῦσθαι τῆς τῶν ἀγγέλων διαγωγῆς, ἀλλὰ καὶ ἐν σώματι τὴν ἐκείνων ἀπάθειαν κεκτῆσθαι. Translation: Hill, Homilies on Genesis 1–17, 222. 31 See Dale B. Martin, Sex and the Single Savior: Gender and Sexuality in Biblical Interpretation (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2006), 105.

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The prevalence of utopian corporeal and angelic discourse in the conceptualisation of androgenerativity also informs its second characteristic, namely that androgenerativity assumes a sexuality not stirred by the passions. In this regard

Chrysostom’s thought coincides with that of Augustine. Chrysostom says Adam and

Eve “were not burning with desire, not assaulted by other passions, not subject to the needs of nature.” 32 Desire (ἐπιθυμία) only comes after the Fall. Androgenerativity therefore positions itself against intercourse based on the attraction of the opposite sex

(and even more so, against same-sex passion). This marks an important moment in the history of sexual impulse. After the Fall, Chrysostom believes, there was implanted in every man an “unnaturally” natural desire for a woman, one that gives the body pleasure, but also one that enslaves it.33 Androgenerativity, however, does not require sexual impulse or attraction. This again resembles the angelic life, since angels are not troubled by their passions.34 Chrysostom uses this characteristic of androgenerativity to make sense of various heroes of faith. Paul is described as one who “regarded not only the attractive features of human bodies, but all things, as we do dust and ashes…. So precisely did he lull to sleep the surges of nature, that he never, ever, experience a single human passion.”35 Thus, although still on earth and mortal, Paul was angelic36 and already exhibited features of prelapsarian androgenerativity. We find similar rhetoric

32 Hom. Gen. 15.14 (PG 53.123.31–33): οὐχ ὑπὸ ἐπιθυμίας φλεγόμενοι, οὐχ ὑπὸ ἑτέρων παθῶν πολιορκούμενοι, οὐ ταῖς ἀνάγκαις τῆς φύσεως ὑποκείμενοι. Translation: Hill, Homilies on Genesis 1– 17, 202–3. 33 Chrysostom gives a detailed discussion of the pleasure of sexual impulse and desire (and the masochistic pain of its denial) in his treatise against male subintroductae; Subintr. 1–2 (Dumortier 44– 52). 34 Virg. 10.3.28 (SC 125.124–25). 35 Laud. 1.9 (SC 300.126–27): οὐ τὰ λαμπρὰ ἐν τοῖς σώμασι μόνον, ἀλλὰ πάντα τὰ πράγματα οὕτως ἑώρα, ὡς ἡμεῖς τὴν κόνιν καὶ τὴν τέφραν.... Οὕτω μετὰ ἀκριβείας τῆς φύσεως τὰ σκιρτήματα κατευνάζων, οὐδὲν οὐδέποτε πρὸς οὐδὲν ἀνθρώπινον πάθος ἔπαθεν. Translation: Margaret M. Mitchell, The Heavenly Trumpet: John Chrysostom and the Art of Pauline Interpretation (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2002), 445. 36 Sac. 4.6 (SC 272.266–67).

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with regards to Abraham. The reason why Abraham’s rape of Hagar is not considered adultery is because there was no lust or jealousy involved.37

Lust was introduced alongside sexual intercourse, and hence the fact that marriage was considered to be a bridle for excessive lust. Relying of Paul’s arguments in 1 Corinthians 7, Chrysostom believed that the sole purpose of marriage, in his day, was to control sexual desire. The earth was already overpopulated, he felt, so marriage was not simply there to encourage procreation. “So marriage was granted for the sake of procreation, but an even greater reason was to quench the fiery passion of our nature,” Chrysostom says, and affirms it with reference to 1 Corinthians 7: “Paul attests to this when he says: ‘But to avoid immorality, every man should have his own wife’

[1 Cor. 7:2]. He does not say: for the sake of procreation.”38 The usefulness of marriage lies in the fact that it has the ability to control sexual lust.39 Marriage has what we may call a psycho-doulological impetus—it is there, as a social structure, to assist the soul with the mastery of the flesh. But marriage, according to Chrysostom, is in itself a form of slavery. 40 Before the Fall, Adam had perfect psychic and cosmic control; this changed after the first couple sinned. Marriage is therefore introduced as an aid to

37 Hom. Gen. 38.1–2 (PG 53.351–53); Hom. Eph. 20.6 (F4.313–14); De Wet, Preaching Bondage, 234. 38 Virg. 19.1.1–5 (SC 125.156–57): ᾿Εδόθη μὲν οὖν καὶ παιδοποιΐας ἕνεκεν ὁ γάμος· πολλῷ δὲ πλέον ὑπὲρ τοῦ σβέσαι τὴν τῆς φύσεως πύρωσιν. Καὶ μάρτυς ὁ Παῦλος λέγων· «Διὰ δὲ τὰς πορνείας ἕκαστος τὴν ἑαυτοῦ γυναῖκα ἐχέτω», οὐ διὰ τὰς παιδοποιΐας. Translation: Shore, Chrysostom: On Virginity; Against Remarriage, 27. See also Subintr. 1.4–20 (Dumortier 45). 39 For a general overview of the dynamics between marriage and desire, see Martin, Sex and the Single Savior, 65–76; see also Kathy L. Gaca, The Making of Fornication: Eros, Ethics, and Political Reform in Greek Philosophy and Early Christianity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 264–65. Foucault, Les aveux de la chair, 273, again, summarises the issue quite well: “Cette définition du rôle du mariage est importante. Au lieu de situer le lien matrimonial dans une économie générale, naturelle ou sociale, de la procréation, elle le situe (au moins aujourd’hui, puisque la terre est peuplée et les temps sont venus) dans une économie individuelle de l’epithumia, du désir ou de la concupiscence. En ce sens elle fait communiquer l’éthique du mariage avec la préoccupation de l’ascétisme et le souci de la continence même la plus rigoureuse. Le mariage est une manière, à côté ou plutôt en dessous de la virginité, de régler la question de la concupiscence ; celle-ci se trouve aussi bien au coeur de la morale du mariage que des procédures ascétiques chez ceux qui ont renoncé à tout lien matrimonial. La concupiscence est l’objet commun aux règles de l’état de mariage et à la tekhnê de la profession de virginité.” 40 Hom. Gen. 17.36 (PG 53.144.58–145.15); Virg. 28 (SC 125.182–85).

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retrieve some measure of masculine control over the lusts of the body (just as slavery and imperial government were introduced to curb the effects of sin). Yet, the ideal masculine body—which now also becomes the ascetic body—does not need the assistance of marriage to control lust, just as it does not require slaves or imperial governance.

The third characteristic of androgenerative reproduction is that it does not change or mar the body. It is painless and keeps the flesh of the body intact. Explaining androgenerative mechanics, Chrysostom states:

“God causes drowsiness to come upon Adam,” the text says, “and he slept.”

It wasn’t simply drowsiness that came upon him nor normal sleep; instead,

the wise and skilful Creator of our nature was able to remove one of Adam’s

ribs. Lest the experience cause him pain and afterwards he be badly

disposed towards the creature formed him from his rib, and through

memory of the pain bear a grudge against this being at its formation, God

induced in him this kind of sleep: He caused drowsiness to come upon him

and bid him be weighed down as though by some heavy weight. His

purpose was that, far from allowing man to suffer any sense of what was

happening, he should, like some excellent craftsman, do away with mere

appearances, supply for any deficiencies and in his own loving kindness

create what had thus been taken from man. The text says, remember, “God

caused drowsiness to come upon Adam, and he slept. God took one of

Adam’s ribs and closed up the flesh in its place” so that after release of

sleep he could not feel the loss he was suffering. You see, even if he was

unaware at the time of the removal, nevertheless afterwards he would be

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likely to realize what had happened. So lest he cause him pain in removing

it, or the loss of it cause him any distress later, he thus provided for both

eventualities by making the removal painless and supplying for the loss

without letting him feel anything of what happened. So, the text says, the

Lord God took the rib and fashioned it into a woman. A remarkable

expression, defying our reasoning with its extraordinary boldness. After all,

everything done by the Lord has this character: forming the human being

from dust is no less remarkable than this.41

Chrysostom exhibits his rhetorical skill quite masterfully in this section, supplying details that the Genesis text seems to leave out, and giving the audience a sense of God’s surgical expertise. God is described as an expert craftsman (τεχνίτης

ἄριστος)—his craft (τέχνη; or ars in Latin), here, being surgery and medicine.42 The technical language of surgery also alludes, implicitly, to God’s status as the great

δημιουργός. The attributes of God in the passage above are practically Asclepic. The

41 Hom. Gen. 15.7 (PG 53.120.50–121.12): ᾿Επέβαλε, φησὶν, ἔκστασιν ἐπὶ τὸν ᾿Αδὰμ, καὶ ὕπνωσεν. Οὔτε ἔκστασις μόνον ἦν τὸ συμβὰν, οὔτε ὕπνος ὁ συνήθης, ἀλλ' ἐπειδὴ ὁ σοφὸς καὶ εὐμήχανος τῆς ἡμετέρας φύσεως δημιουργὸς ἔμελλεν ἐκ τῆς πλευρᾶς αὐτοῦ μίαν ἀφαιρεῖσθαι, ἵνα μὴ ἡ αἴσθησις ὀδύνην αὐτῷ ἐργάσηται, καὶ μετὰ ταῦτα πρὸς τὴν ἐξ ἐκείνης τῆς πλευρᾶς διαπλαττομένην ἀπεχθῶς ἔχῃ διακεῖσθαι, καὶ μισήσῃ τὸ πλαττόμενον ζῶον τῆς ὀδύνης μεμνημένος, διὰ τοῦτο τοσοῦτον αὐτῷ ὕπνον ἐπήγαγεν, ἔκστασιν ἐπιβαλὼν, καὶ ὥσπερ κάρῳ τινὶ κατασχεθῆναι προστάξας, ἵνα μηδεμίαν αἴσθησιν δέξηται τοῦ γινομένου, ἀλλὰ καθάπερ τεχνίτης ἄριστος καὶ ἀφέληται τὸ δοκοῦν, καὶ ἀναπληρώσῃ τὸ λεῖπον, καὶ οὕτω τὸ ληφθὲν δημιουργήσῃ κατὰ τὴν οἰκείαν φιλανθρωπίαν. ᾿Επέβαλε γὰρ, φησὶν, ἔκστασιν ἐπὶ τὸν ᾿Αδὰμ, καὶ ὕπνωσε. Καὶ ἔλαβε μίαν τῶν πλευρῶν αὐτοῦ, καὶ ἀνεπλήρωσε σάρκα ἀντ' αὐτῆς· ἵνα μὴ ἔχῃ μετὰ τὴν τοῦ ὕπνου ἀπαλλαγὴν ἐκ τοῦ λείποντος αἰσθάνεσθαι τοῦ γεγενημένου. Εἰ γὰρ καὶ ἐν τῷ τῆς ἀφαιρέσεως καιρῷ ἠγνόησεν, ἀλλ' ὅμως ἔμελλε μετὰ ταῦτα ἐπιγινώσκειν τὸ γεγονός. ῞Ιν' οὖν μήτε ἐν τῷ ἀφαιρεῖσθαι ὀδύνην αὐτῷ ἐμποιήσῃ, μήτε μετὰ ταῦτα ἡ ἔλλειψις ἀθυμίαν ἐργάσηται, ἀμφότερα οὕτως ᾠκονόμησε, καὶ ἀφελόμενος ἀνωδύνως, καὶ πληρώσας τὸ λεῖπον, καὶ μὴ συγχωρήσας μηδενὸς αὐτὸν τῶν γεγενημένων αἴσθησιν δέξασθαι. Λαβὼν οὖν, φησὶ, ταύτην τὴν πλευρὰν, ᾠκοδόμησε Κύριος ὁ Θεὸς εἰς γυναῖκα. Παράδοξον τὸ εἰρημένον, καὶ νικῶν μετὰ πολλῆς τῆς ὑπερβολῆς τὸν ἡμέτερον λογισμόν. Τοιαῦτα γὰρ ἅπαντα τὰ παρὰ τοῦ Δεσπότου. Τοῦ γὰρ ἀπὸ τοῦ χοὸς πλασθῆναι τὸν ἄνθρωπον οὐκ ἔλαττον τοῦτο. Translation: Hill, Homilies on Genesis 1–17, 198. 42 Chrysostom invokes here the longstanding Greek tradition of medicine as a τέχνη; see Heinrich von Staden, “Celsus as Historian?,” in Ancient Histories of Medicine: Essays in Medical Doxography and Historiography in Classical Antiquity, ed. Philip J. van der Eijk (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 266–67; Thomas M. Walshe, Neurological Concepts in Ancient Greek Medicine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 181.

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Greek god of healing and medicine, Asclepius, was also famous for being able to conduct miraculously painless surgeries, mostly while the patient was asleep.43 Adam’s sleep in Genesis during the generation of Eve shows remarkable similarities with the incubation (ἐγκοίμησις; or incubatio) associated with the painless surgery and healing of Asclepius.44

Let us first examine the role of pain in Chrysostom’s interpretation. We should first just note that, as Stephanie Cobb so eloquently reminds us: “Modern breakthroughs in safe, reliable, and effective pain management have constructed certain relationships between the body and pain that are antithetical to ancient experience.” 45 Without modern-day analgesics, pain was a far more common, unavoidable, and “natural” bodily experience in antiquity. 46 Yet Chrysostom almost pre-empts modern-day anaesthetics in this passage. He notes that the sleep that overcame Adam was not normal; this incubatio totally shielded him from all sensation.47 Although one human being is being fashioned or “born” from another, Chrysostom does not use the traditional language of childbirth to describe the androgenerative moment. Rather, he uses the language of surgery and craftsmanship. The painlessness of God’s quasi- obstetric surgery attests to the effectiveness and wonder of the divine anaesthetic. In

43 Florian Steger, Asklepiosmedizin: medizinischer Alltag in der römischen Kaiserzeit, Medizin, Gesellschaft und Geschichte Beihefte 22 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2004), 77–166; on Asclepius more generally Thomas A. Cavanaugh, Hippocrates’ Oath and Asclepius’ Snake: The Birth of a Medical Profession (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); Pierre Mbid Hamoudi Diouf, Asclépios ou Esculape, le Dieu par excellence de la médecine gréco-romaine: Mythe, cultes et survivances, Sciences humaines et sociales: Histoire (Saint-Denis: Connaissances et Savoirs, 2016). 44 Daniela Rigato, “Medicines, Doctors, and Patients in Greek and Roman Society,” in Doctors and Patients: History, Representation, Communication from Antiquity to the Present, ed. Maria Malatesta (San Francisco: University of California Medical Humanities Press, 2015), 25–26. 45 L. Stephanie Cobb, Divine Deliverance: Pain and Painlessness in Early Christian Martyr Texts (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017), 63. 46 Susanna Elm, “Roman Pain and the Rise of Christianity,” in Quo Vadis Medical Healing: Past Concepts and New Approaches, ed. Susanna Elm and Stefan N. Willich, International Library of Ethics, Law, and the New Medicine 44 (Dordrecht: Springer, 2009), 42–43. 47 On incubation, see Gil Renberg, Where Dreams May Come: Incubation Sanctuaries in the Greco- Roman World, Religions in the Graeco-Roman World 184 (Leiden: Brill, 2017).

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ancient drug lore, the combination of opium poppy, mandrake, and henbane was considered the closest to an “anaesthetic triad of ancient times”—yet its potency and availability has been questioned. 48 Pain during surgery would have been a major obstacle for ancient doctors and patients to overcome due to the absence of an effective anaesthetic.49

Pain had numerous functions in antiquity. It is not simply, as Western biomedicine has dictated, a problem that needs to be managed. It can construct or destroy one’s world, but also serves a narrative and mnemonic purpose. The term used for pain, here, is ὀδύνη. Although some Greek medical authors often used different terms for pain interchangeably, ὀδύνη usually refers to a sharp, sudden, and piercing pain—usually of the type that requires medical attention. The word often used for the pain of labour is πόνος, although Chrysostom uses λύπη in the same sense, following the text of the Septuagint. According to Nicole Loraux, labour pain was considered a necessary pain for women, a pain that resulted in honour, and one that should be borne, just like the pain of war for men.50 The word πόνος was also used for the pain of agricultural labour.51 Hesiod employed this term to describe the evils that entered the

48 See Valérie Bonet, “On Analgesic and Narcotic Plants: Pliny and His Greek Sources, the History of a Complex Graft,” in “Greek” and “Roman” in Latin Medical Texts: Studies in Cultural Change and Exchange in Ancient Medicine, ed. Brigitte Maire, Studies in Ancient Medicine 42 (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 236–37. 49 See Antigone Samellas, “Public Aspects of Pain in Late Antiquity: The Testimony of Chrysostom and the Cappadocians in Their Graeco-Roman Context,” Zeitschrift Für Antikes Christentum 19.2 (2015): 287–89; and more generally Frédéric Le Blay, “Surgery,” in A Companion to Science, Technology, and Medicine in Ancient Greece and Rome, ed. Georgia L. Irby, trans. Todd Black, vol. 2 of Blackwell Companions to the Ancient World (Malden, MA: John Wiley & Sons, 2016), 371–85. 50 Nicole Loraux, “Ponos. Sur quelques difficultés de la peine comme nom du travail,” Annali dell’Instituto Orientale di Napoli 4 (1982): 171–92; see also Nancy Demand, Birth, Death, and Motherhood in Classical Greece (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 19–20. This view has, however, been challenged; Michael A. Rinella, Pharmakon: Plato, Drug Culture, and Identity in Ancient Athens (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2010), 168n60. 51 Chrysostom uses λύπη in exactly the same agricultural sense; Hom. Gen. 17.33 (PG 53.144.23–32). On the pain (πόνος) of labour in monastic contexts, see Peter R. L. Brown, Treasure in Heaven: The Holy Poor in Early Christianity, Kindle Edition. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016), loc. 487, 1417, 1887.

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word after the opening of Pandora’s jar. The Septuagint and consequently Chrysostom employ λύπη in the same sense as Hesiod does πόνος.52 Elaine Scarry has argued that pain can have two functions; it can either make or unmake one’s world.53 The pain that is ὀδύνη, in this case, is destructive and unmakes one’s reality and one’s body. God spares Adam from this pain—his body and hence, his reality, remains intact and unchanged. Not only is there no pain or scarring, according to Chrysostom, but God also replaced the rib that he removed. Adam’s body is for all practical purposes,

“virginally” whole and unblemished. Chrysostom emphatically highlights the virginal state of Adam and Eve before the Fall.54

But pain also has a narrative and a mnemonic function. Pain tells a story, and shapes identity. Pain is the great archivist of corporeal change.55 Adam is yet without a pain story. Chrysostom is acutely aware of the mnemonic dimension of pain. He states that “through the memory of pain” (τῆς ὀδύνης μεμνημένος), Adam may resent Eve and perhaps even God. But what could be the discursive function of mnemonic painlessness? As we will see shortly, pain writes on the body the story of punishment; it is a somatography of disobedience. The English word “pain” is derived from the Latin poena, which relates to punishment.56 After the Fall, God no longer spares Eve and all her daughters from the pain of childbirth. The fact that androgenerative reproduction is painless signifies, along with its exclusivity and purity, a state of being that is free from divine punishment.

52 King, Hippocrates’ Woman, 124–25. 53 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). 54 Hom. Gen. 18.12 (PG 53.153.9–11). 55 See Elm, “Roman Pain and the Rise of Christianity”; King, Hippocrates’ Woman, 126–31. 56 King, Hippocrates’ Woman, 123.

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In contrast to the perfect body assumed by androgenerativity, sexual intercourse implies the painful rupture of the body and, most importantly, a loss of virginity. “So, at the outset and from the beginning the practice of virginity was in force; but when through their indifference disobedience came on the scene and the ways of sin were opened, virginity took its leave for the reason that they had proved unworthy of such a degree of good things,” Chrysostom laments, “and in its place the practice of intercourse took over for the future.”57 Chrysostom’s poignant pun on the rupture of virginity in which disobedience “opened the ways of sin” (εἴσοδον ἔσχε τὰ τῆς

ἁμαρτίας) signifies the ultimate departure of the angelic corporeal state. The body now has a pain narrative, and pain is awarded its sense of memory, one of punishment and disobedience: “I will ensure, he [God] is saying, that the generation of children, a reason for satisfaction, for you will begin with a pain so that each time without fail you will personally have a reminder, through the distress and the pain of each birth, of the magnitude of this sin of disobedience…” 58 But through God’s grace, according to

Chrysostom, procreation through intercourse will have a consolation, namely the love for one’s children. Just as Eve was given as a consolation for Adam, so too children will be a consolation for the pain and discomfort of pregnancy and childbirth.59 But it must also be noted that maternal love was something that should be conquered for the sake of virtue.

57 Hom. Gen. 18.12 (PG 53.153.9–15): ῞Ωστε ἐξ ἀρχῆς καὶ ἐκ προοιμίων τὰ τῆς παρθενίας ἀρχὴν ἐλάμβανεν· ἀλλ' ἐπειδὴ ἐπεισῆλθε διὰ ῥᾳθυμίαν ἡ παρακοὴ, καὶ εἴσοδον ἔσχε τὰ τῆς ἁμαρτίας, ἐκείνη μὲν ἀπέπτη, ἅτε δὴ ἀναξίων αὐτῶν γενομένων τοῦ τοσούτου μεγέθους τῶν ἀγαθῶν· ἐπεισῆλθε δὲ λοιπὸν ὁ τῆς συνουσίας νόμος. Translation: Hill, Homilies on Genesis 1–17, 10–11. 58 Hom. Gen. 17.31 (PG 53.143.52–57): Τὴν ὑπόθεσιν, φησὶ, τῆς πολλῆς εὐφροσύνης, καὶ τῶν τέκνων τὴν διαδοχὴν ἀπὸ λύπης ἄρχεσθαί σοι παρασκευάσω, ἵνα διηνεκῆ ἔχῃς καὶ αὐτὴ τὴν ὑπόμνησιν διὰ τῶν καθ' ἕκαστον καιρὸν ὠδίνων, καὶ τῶν λυπηρῶν τῶν καθ' ἑκάστην τικτομένων, πόσον τῆς ἁμαρτίας ταύτης καὶ τῆς παρακοῆς τὸ μέγεθος... Translation: Hill, Homilies on Genesis 1–17, 238. 59 Hom. Gen. 17.32 (PG 53.144.6–18).

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The martyr-mother of the Maccabees, according to Chrysostom, experienced the pain of childbirth seven fold, once for each of her sons, but with their martyrdom, she experienced a type of birth pain for each of them once more, when they were born as martyrs. She conquered her maternal instinct, and through intense pain, gave birth to them again.60 If the pain of childbirth was introduced as a punishment to women, then the humiliation and hardship of labour were allotted to man. Because of his mortality, man must now eat to live, and in order to eat, he must work and till the soil.61 Pain, however, is a complex phenomenon in early Christianity. Although pain served as a marker of punishment, it should also not be forgotten that pain (especially suffering or being tortured for one’s faith or even the pain of the ascetic life) was also a very important marker of Christian identity in early Christian culture more generally, but also in Chrysostom’s own thought62—in this sense, pain functions, in Scarry’s terms, constructively. As Antigone Samellas has shown, Chrysostom also believed that pain could function constructively to bring people together communally and ideologically.63

Chrysostom also affirms that marriage, sexual intercourse, and procreation introduced old age and death to the world.64 “For where death is, there is marriage.

When one does not exist, the other is not about,” Chrysostom tells his audience, “But virginity does not have this companion.” 65 Dale Martin rightly notes: “Marriage,

60 Macc. 1 (PG 50.617.18–624.3); see also Chris L. de Wet, “Claiming Corporeal Capital: John Chrysostom’s Homilies on the Maccabean Martyrs,” Journal of Early Christian History 2.1 (2012): 3– 21. 61 Hom. Gen. 17.39–40 (PG 53.146.18–64). 62 Judith Perkins, The Suffering Self: Pain and Narrative Representation in the Early Christian Era (London: Routledge, 1995); Elm, “Roman Pain and the Rise of Christianity.” 63 Paenit. 4 (PG 49.301.16–20); Samellas, “Public Aspects of Pain,” 292–94. 64 Hom. Gen. 17.40–42 (PG 53.146.27–147.40). 65 Virg. 14.6.70–72 (SC 125.142–43): ῞Οπου γὰρ θάνατος, ἐκεῖ γάμος· τούτου δὲ οὐκ ὄντος οὐδὲ αὐτὸς ἕπεται. ᾿Αλλ' οὐχ ἡ παρθενία ταύτην ἔχει τὴν ἀκολουθίαν. Translation: Shore, Chrysostom: On Virginity; Against Remarriage, 22.

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therefore, was completely implicated in the dreaded cycle of sex, birth, death, and decay, followed by more sex, birth, death, and decay.”66 Early Christianity, from the time of Jesus and Paul, and Chrysostom as well, positioned themselves against the primacy of marriage, procreation, and the household—they expected humanity to end so that the eschaton may commence.67 This forms part of Chrysostom’s critique of the

Levirate marriage. “The wife of the man that died childless was to be given to his brother [Deut. 25:5]. For since death was an inconsolable evil, and everything was done to promote life,” Chrysostom says, “he makes a law that the living brother should marry the widow, and should give the child that is born the name of the deceased, so that his house should not disappear.”68 Since there was no resurrection, eternal life was to be acquired by means of procreation. If death is the symbol of marriage, then the resurrection and eternal life are the symbols of androgenerativity.69 Androgenerativity then also serves to define Christian identity over and against Jewish identity—marriage, sexual intercourse, and death are all indicative of the old covenant, while the attributes of androgenerativity define the new.

Sterility (ἀπαιδία), therefore, also plays an important part in the androgenerative framework and is, then, not a sign of God’s punishment. Chrysostom states:

They [Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob] were in all respects bright and esteemed,

but all of them had barren wives, and lived without children until an

66 Martin, Sex and the Single Savior, 105. 67 Martin, Sex and the Single Savior, 103–24. 68 Hom. Matt. 48.3 (PG 58.489.54–490.5): Τοῦ τελευτήσαντος ἄπαιδος τὴν γυναῖκα τῷ ἀδελφῷ δίδοσθαι ἔδει. ᾿Επειδὴ γὰρ ἀπαραμύθητον κακὸν ὁ θάνατος ἦν, καὶ πάντα ὑπὲρ ζωῆς ἐπραγματεύετο, νομοθετεῖ γαμεῖν τὸν ζῶντα ἀδελφὸν, καὶ ἐπ' ὀνόματι τοῦ τετελευτηκότος τὸ τικτόμενον καλεῖν παιδίον, ὥστε μὴ διαπεσεῖν τὴν οἰκίαν τὴν ἐκείνου. See also Hom. 2 Cor. 2.7 (F3.30). 69 Taylor Petrey, Resurrecting Parts: Early Christians on Desire, Reproduction, and Sexual Difference, Routledge Studies in the Early Christian World (London: Routledge, 2015), 24–26.

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advanced age. Thus, when you see a husband and wife yoked together in

virtue, when you see them favoured by God, […] giving heed to piety, but

unable to have children, do not assume that the childlessness is in any way

a retribution for sins.70

Other Syrian authors, like Ephrem, linked sterility with sin, with faith ()+wNMYh; haymānūtā) and penitence being symbols of fertility ()+wNYrPM; mapryānūtā). In

Ephrem’s reading of Genesis, Sarah went from disbelief to faith, from sterility to fertility.71 The sense in Chrysostom is different, since sterility in itself serves as a positive androgenerative symbol in the Sarah narrative. The sterile wives of Abraham,

Isaac, and Jacob, in fact, serve an important, almost prophetic function: they all foreshadow the birth of Christ through the virgin, they all bear a mark of androgenerativity. Glenn Olsen is therefore also correct that due to the links between marriage, procreation, and death, the ascetic male, physically sterile but spiritually fertile, becomes the model of masculinity instead of the paterfamilias.72 Marriage and procreation are no longer the defining values of masculinity.

70 Pecc. 6 (Masi 364): Πανταχόθεν λαμπροὶ καὶ εὐδόκιμοι, καὶ πάντες στείρας ἔσχον γυναῖκας, καὶ ἐν ἀπαιδίᾳ μέχρι πολλοῦ διετέλεσαν χρόνου. ῞Οταν οὖν ἴδῃς ἄνδρα καὶ γυναῖκα ἐν ἀρετῇ ζῶντας, ὅταν ἴδῃς θεοφιλεῖς, [...] εὐσεβείας ἐπιμελουμένους, εἶτα παιδία μὴ κεκτημένους, μὴ νομίσῃς ἁμαρτιῶν εἶναι πάντως τὴν ἀπαιδίαν ἀνταπόδοσιν. It is interesting to note that a variant reading of line 29 of the text in PG 51.359 does not read “εἶτα παιδία μὴ κεκτημένους” but “καὶ ἀπαιδίαν νοσοῦντας”, that is, “diseased with sterility”, which shows how the common notion of sterility as a disease influenced the reception of the text. For some background on sterility as disease in late antiquity, see Susanna Niiranen, “Sexual Incapacity in Medieval Materia Medica,” in Infirmity in Antiquity and the Middle Ages: Social and Cultural Approaches to Health, Weakness and Care, ed. Christian Krötzl, Katariina Mustakallio, and Jenni Kuuliala (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016), 223–40. 71 Comm. Gen. 14 (Assad S. Assad, The Commentary of Saint Ephrem on Genesis with an Arabic Translation, Dar Mardin: Christian Arabic and Syriac Studies from the Middle East 39 (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias, 2010), 155–50); see also Hannah Hunt, “The Tears of the Sinful Woman: A Theology of Redemption in the Homilies of Saint Ephraim and His Followers,” Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies 1.2 (1998); Judith Frishman, “‘And Abraham Had Faith’: But in What? Ephrem and the Rabbis on Abraham and God’s Blessings,” in The Exegetical Encounter Between Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity, ed. Emmanouela Grypeou and Helen Spurling, Jewish and Christian Perspectives Series 18 (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 169–72. 72 Glenn W. Olsen, Of Sodomites, Effeminates, Hermaphrodites, and Androgynes: Sodomy in the Age of Peter Damian (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2011), 82–83. This is also the

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Chrysostom makes an interesting link between marriage and the desire for procreation, and wealth renunciation. “If you follow this reasoning, you will say it is better to have two wives instead of being content with only one since this had been allowed under Moses,” Chrysostom elaborates, “In the same way, you will also prefer wealth to voluntary poverty, luxury to a moderate way of life, and revenge to a noble endurance of injustice.”73 We see here how the ascetic life, in Chrysostom, is considered a cohesive and integrated network of social and cultural preferences that are all in some way or another related and connected to one another. If procreation is to be sought as the ultimate value of life, then one could argue that polygamy is even better, just as wealth would be better than voluntary poverty. The preference for procreation becomes the preference for excess and increase, which are not ascetic values. Ironically,

Chrysostom does not develop the argument in the other direction. If procreation is not to be desired, but lust must still be controlled, then one could argue that same-sex sexual intercourse or even prostitution would be the ideal (as some Romans did).74

Some earlier Christian works do indeed make use, positively, of the trope of reproductive homoeroticism.75 Of course, Chrysostom does not entertain this thought for a moment. In his polemic against homoeroticism, Chrysostom actually uses

argument of Mathew Kuefler, The Manly Eunuch: Masculinity, Gender Ambiguity, and Christian Ideology in Late Antiquity, The Chicago Series on Sexuality, History, and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 161–205. 73 Virg. 15.2.25–30 (SC 125.146–47): ἐπεὶ κατὰ τοῦτον προϊὼν τὸν λόγον καὶ τὸ δύο γυναῖκας ἔχειν τοῦ μιᾷ ἀρκεῖσθαι μόνον ἄμεινον εἶναι φήσεις, ἐπειδὴ καὶ τοῦτο συγκεχώρητο ἐν τῷ νόμῳ Μωϋσέως, καὶ τὸν πλοῦτον δὲ οὕτως τῆς ἑκουσίου προτιμήσεις πενίας καὶ τὴν τρυφὴν τῆς σώφρονος διαίτης καὶ τὸ ἀμύνεσθαι τοῦ φέρειν τὸν ἀδικοῦντα γενναίως. Translation: Shore, Chrysostom: On Virginity; Against Remarriage, 23. 74 Many Romans actually reasoned in this way in support of prostitution; see Thomas A. J. McGinn, Prostitution, Sexuality, and the Law in Ancient Rome (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), esp. 21– 68, 140–336; The Economy of Prostitution in the Roman World: A Study of Social History and the Brothel (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004); for Chrysostom’s rebuttals, see De Wet, Preaching Bondage, 239–56. 75 As in the Acta Andreae, for instance; see A. Rebecca Solevåg, Birthing Salvation: Gender and Class in Early Christian Childbearing Discourse, Biblical Interpretation 121 (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 173–77.

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procreation positively as a way to abnormalise same-sex passion. The male body is like the accursed, infertile, and useless soil of Sodom, destroyed by God’s judgement.76 The same goes for prostitution. Chrysostom bemoans the prostitutes of his day, the custodians of abortive knowledge, and their clients, since they “sow where the soil purposefully destroys the fruit.” 77 Chrysostom therefore positions himself against procreation on his own terms, only when it is opposed by means of virginity or abstinence. But procreation was good enough an argument to use against those engaged in same-sex passion and prostitution, and against those guilty of contraception and abortion.78

Towards a New Spiritual Natality: Androgenerativity and Salvation History

To proceed, if we understand androgenerativity as a set of ideal-typical attributes which all constellate in the production of Eve from Adam, we can trace the occurrence and transformation of these attributes in Chrysostom’s discourse of sexual morality, and thereby indicate what sexual attitudes and practices signify a development towards ideal sexual identity, or a move away from it.79 What emerges, furthermore, is a new type of natality that relegates physical (and thus postlapsarian) natality, that is, being born of a woman, to an inferior position, and elevates spiritual natality to the highest plain of one’s human identity. This new spiritual natality is at the same time also a masculine

76 Hom. Rom. 5[4].3 (F1.50–51); Chris L. de Wet, “John Chrysostom on Homoeroticism,” Neotestamentica 48.1 (2014): 187–218. 77 Chrysostom asks (Hom. Rom. 25[24].4 [F1.401]): Τί σπείρεις ἔνθα ἡ ἄρουρα σπουδάζει διαφθεῖραι τὸν καρπόν; 78 For a discussion of Chrysostom’s ideological links between contraception, abortion, prostitution, and witchcraft, see De Wet, Preaching Bondage, 247–53. 79 I have explored some of the issues to be discussed in this section also elsewhere, but more preliminary and without reference to androgenerativity or natality; Chris L. de Wet, “Human Birth and Spiritual Rebirth in the Theological Thought of John Chrysostom,” In Die Skriflig/In Luce Verbi 51.3 (2017): 1– 9.

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natality, as I will show. I use the concept of natality here as Hannah Arendt initially developed it. In short, natality refers to the fundamental human experience of being born, which Arendt calls an action of beginning. The notion of natality is the foundation for Arendt’s conceptualisation of human freedom, especially in contrast to mortality, suffering, and death.80 One might say that natality represents biopolitics in its most basic form, which is then also positioned against necropolitics.81

Arendt especially used Augustine to make demonstrate some of the dynamics of natality:

To act, in its most general sense, means to take an initiative, to begin (as

the Greek word archein, “to begin,” “to lead,” and eventually “to rule,”

indicates), to set something into motion (which is the original meaning of

the Latin agere). Because they are initium, newcomers and beginners by

virtue of birth, men take initiative, are prompted into action. [Initium] ergo

ut esset, creatus est homo, ante quern nullus fuit (“that there be a beginning,

man was created before whom there was nobody”), said Augustine in his

political philosophy [see Civ. 12.20]. This beginning is not the same as the

beginning of the world; it is not the beginning of something but of

somebody, who is a beginner himself. With the creation of man, the

principle of beginning came into the world itself, which, of course, is only

80 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 196, 209, 264– 65. 81 Miguel Vatter, “Natality and Biopolitics in Hannah Arendt,” Revista de ciencia política 26.2 (2006): 137–59.

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another way of saying that the principle of freedom was created when man

was created but not before.82

Natality is a very helpful concept in making sense of the dynamics between androgenerativity and birthing discourses. The strong links with new beginnings, “true” freedom, and life everlasting will further colour our understanding of how androgenerativity and soteriology interact in Chrysostom’s thought.

To start, androgenerativity is particularly useful for highlighting the nature and purpose of virginity in Chrysostomic thought. Perhaps ironically, virginity and natality are two closely related concepts in Chrysostom. It is necessary, here, to remember that androgenerativity is an ideal type, an abstract and imaginary construct (insofar as it is only truly and fully realised in Chrysostom’s Genesaic imaginaire)—Chrysostom uses those sexual attributes that he admires, for instance virginity and the control of desire, to inform his exposition of Eve’s creation and the rise of sexual intercourse. We can therefore compare the creation of Eve with other instances in which ideal-typical androgenerative attributes function, perhaps only not as completely as in the Eden event.

For Chrysostom, after the creation of Adam and Eve, there are some distinct androgenerative moments in the history of salvation. These moments may bear some of the characteristics of the making of Adam and Eve, and all point to the coming of a new natality in God’s Spirit. In the first instance, we have the miraculous conception and birth of Isaac by Sarah. It is Sarah’s manliness and physical sterility that qualify

82 Arendt, Human Condition, 177, see also 335–36; on the concept of natality, especially as related to Augustine, see Patricia Bowen-Moore, Hannah Arendt’s Philosophy of Natality (London: Macmillan, 1989), 86–88; Elisabeth Moltmann-Wendel, “Natalität und die Liebe zur Welt: Hannah Arendts Beitrag zu einer immanenten Transzendenz,” Evangelische Theologie 58.4 (1998): 283–95; Karin Ulrich- Eschemann, Vom Geborenwerden des Menschen: theologische und philosophische Erkundungen, Studien zur systematischen Theologie und Ethik 27 (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2000), 60–62.

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her androgenerative position. Although Sarah is not a male, Chrysostom describes her in highly masculine terms. Remember too that in Chrysostom’s discussion of Eve’s androgenerative reproduction, biological sexual difference was not a factor. Adam was a male, but he was especially masculine. Chrysostom marks the birth of Isaac by Sarah

(Gen. 21:1–8) and, to a lesser extent, the birth of Joseph by Rachel83 (Gen. 30:22–24)— both mothers being infertile, with their husbands Abraham and Jacob impregnating the slave girls Hagar and Bilhah respectively—as some of the major typological events in

Christian soteriology. He describes Sarah, for instance, in terms related to prelapsarian human generation. Sarah was also not stirred by the passions. “Do you see how independent they [Sarah and Rachel] were of any emotional influence?” Chrysostom asks.84 Sarah’s “philosophical mind-set (τὴν φιλόσοφον γνώμην) and the extraordinary degree of her self-control (τῆς σωφροσύνης τὴν ὑπερβολὴν)”—all highly masculine attributes—are accentuated. 85 Chrysostom’s constant emphases on Sarah and

Abraham’s old age may further imply that lust was also not a factor in this conception.86

Abraham’s rape of Hagar is seen in the same passionless light.87 Sarah and Abraham exhibit almost perfect psychic control almost akin to Adam before the Fall, and similar to the angels.

Furthermore, although Sarah does conceive by means of sexual intercourse with

Abraham, the conception remains miraculous. We find a similar rhetoric in

Chrysostom’s telling of Sarah’s story to that seen in Virg. 14–19 cited above.

83 On patristic interpretations of the Rachel narrative, see Christine Ritter, Rachels Klage im Antiken Judentum und frühen Christentum: eine auslegungsgeschichtliche Studie, Arbeiten zur Geschichte des antiken Judentums und Urchristentums 52 (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 250–69. 84 Hom. Gen. 38.4 (PG 53.352.1): Εἶδες πῶς παντὸς πάθους ἐκτὸς ἦσαν; Translation: Robert C. Hill, trans., St. John Chrysostom: Homilies on Genesis 18–45, The Fathers of the Church 82 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1999), 357. 85 Hom. Gen. 38.3 (PG 53.351.45–46): τὴν φιλόσοφον γνώμην, καὶ τῆς σωφροσύνης τὴν ὑπερβολὴν. 86 On the discourse of old age in Chrysostom’s depictions of Abraham, see chapter 6. 87 Hom. Gen. 38.1–2 (PG 53.351–53); Hom. Eph. 20.6 (F4.313–14).

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Procreation is, essentially, still God’s allowance. Chrysostom says that some men attribute “sterility and fecundity to their wives without acknowledging that everything comes from nature’s Creator and that neither intercourse nor anything else is capable of ensuring succession unless the hand from above intervenes and prompts nature to birth.”88

The impregnation of Sarah and Rachel plays an important part in Chrysostom’s broader androgenerative framework, since it serves as forerunner for the virgin birth of

Jesus, another reproductive event bearing the mark of androgenerativity. The same is of course true in the case of Elizabeth, the mother of John the Baptist (Luke 1:36), who is also an example of the typology of the barren woman preparing the way for the birth of Christ.89 We see this in Chrysostom’s interpretation of the virgin birth of Jesus, specifically as he explains it in Peccata fratrum non evulganda and Hom. Gen. 49. The tale of Sarah is supposed to prepare the Christian believer to accept Jesus’ virgin birth.

“There were then two impediments [for Sarah], both the untimeliness of her age and the obsoleteness of nature,” Chrysostom says, “but in the case of the Virgin there was only one hindrance, namely not having participated in marriage. The barren one therefore prepares the way for the virgin.”90 Being physically sterile and unmarried are all androgenerative attributes.

Hence it is also not a problem that Mary conceives and gives birth premaritally, since the birth is not subject to postlapsarian conditions of sexual morality. Chrysostom

88 Hom. Gen. 38.4 (PG 53.352.13–18): ταῖς γυναιξὶ λογιζόμενοι καὶ τὴν ἀπαιδίαν καὶ τὴν εὐπαιδίαν, οὐκ εἰδότες ὅτι τοῦ τῆς φύσεώς ἐστι δημιουργοῦ τὸ πᾶν, καὶ οὔτε ἡ συνουσία, οὔτε ἕτερόν τί ἐστι τὸ δυνάμενον συντελέσαι πρὸς τὴν τῶν παίδων διαδοχὴν, μὴ τῆς ἄνωθεν χειρὸς συνεφαπτομένης, καὶ τὴν φύσιν διεγειρούσης πρὸς τὸν τόκον. Translation: Hill, Homilies on Genesis 18–45, 358. 89 Hom. Gen. 49.10 (PG 54.446.36–56); see Robert C. Hill, trans., St. John Chrysostom: Homilies on Genesis 46–67, The Fathers of the Church 87 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1992), 47. 90 Pecc. 7 (Masi 366): Δύο κωλύματα τότε ἦν, τό ἄωρον τῆς ἡλικίας, τὸ ἄχρηστον τῆς φύσεως· ἐπὶ δὲ τῆς Παρθένου ἓν κώλυμα μόνον ἦν, τὸ μὴ μετασχεῖν γάμου. Προοδοποιεῖ τῇ παρθένῳ ἡ στεῖρα. See also Hom. Gen. 49.7–8 (PG 54.445.47–446.21).

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thoroughly disassociates Mary from marriage. The fact that Mary is pregnant but not married is an accolade, and not a mark of shame. She is a virgin, just like Adam and

Eve before the Fall, and the virgin body was in itself a highly masculine body in

Christian thought.91 What counts against Sarah, namely the fact that she is married and not a virgin, does not disqualify Mary. Chrysostom continues:

Do not seek the sequence of nature, Gabriel says to Mary, when that which

is transpiring is above nature; do not look around for marriage and pangs of

childbirth, when the manner of the birth is greater than marriage. “And how

will this be,” she says, “since I do not know a husband” [Luke 1:34]. But

exactly because of the fact that you know no husband, this will come to

pass. For if you did know a husband, you would not have been deemed

worthy to aid in this service. Thus, believe for the same reason that you

disbelieve. And you would not have been deemed worthy to serve this duty,

not because marriage is an evil, but because virginity is superior, and it was

fitting that the entry of the Master should be more dignified than ours. For

it was royal, and the king enters through one more august. It was also

necessary that he should share in human birth, yet be different from ours.

In this way both these aspects are managed. For being born from the womb

is common among us, but the being born without marriage [i.e. sexual

intercourse] is greater than what happens among us. And the gestation and

conception in the womb belongs to human nature, but that the pregnancy

should occur without sexual intercourse is too dignified for human nature.

And for this purpose both these things happened, in order that you may

91 Kuefler, Manly Eunuch, 178–86.

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learn both the superiority and the communal fellowship of him who was

born.92

The birth of Christ and Christ’s natality is illustrated in bright androgenerative tinctures. While Isaac’s miraculous birth is seen as preparation for the virgin birth of

Christ, the body of Mary, and its reproductivity, is seen as a transitional body. The fact that it is not fully androgenerative, as with Eve, is suggestive of Christ’s human nature.

Yet most of the other androgenerative attributes are present, namely Mary’s virginity, the sexless and passionless conception of Christ, and the active role of God through the

Holy Spirit. In Mary’s body we have the salvific agglutination of all the necessary androgenerative elements. In Chrysostom’s Mariology, the virgin is neither fully perfect, nor does she merit a superior position in terms of salvation. “Now if, setting aside the eminence of her soul, it benefitted Mary nothing that the Christ was born of her,” Chrysostom affirms, “much less will it be able to profit us to have a father or a brother, or a child of virtuous and noble character, if we ourselves fall short of his virtue.”93 In his “low” Mariology, Chrysostom even accused Mary of vanity and being

92 Pecc. 7–8 (Masi 366–67): Πνεῦμα ἅγιον ἐπελεύσεται ἐπὶ σέ. Μὴ ζήτει φύσεως ἀκολουθίαν, φησὶν, ὅταν ὑπὲρ φύσιν ᾖ τὸ γινόμενον· μὴ περιβλέπου γάμον καὶ ὠδίνας, ὅταν μείζων γάμου τῆς γενέσεως ὁ τρόπος ᾖ. Καὶ· Πῶς ἔσται τοῦτο, φησὶν, ἐπεὶ ἄνδρα οὐ γινώσκω; Καὶ μὴν διὰ τοῦτο ἔσται τοῦτο, ἐπειδὴ ἄνδρα οὐ γινώσκεις. Εἰ γὰρ ἐγίνωσκες ἄνδρα, οὐκ ἂν κατηξιώθης ὑπηρετήσασθαι τῇ διακονίᾳ ταύτῃ. ὥστε δι' ὃ ἀπιστεῖς, διὰ τοῦτο πίστευε. Οὐκ ἂν δὲ κατηξιώθης τοιαύτῃ διακονίᾳ ὑπηρετήσασθαι, οὐκ ἐπειδὴ κακὸν ὁ γάμος, ἀλλ' ἐπειδὴ κρείσσων ἡ παρθενία· τὴν δὲ τοῦ Δεσπότου εἴσοδον σεμνοτέραν ἐχρῆν εἶναι τῆς ἡμετέρας· βασιλικὴ γὰρ ἦν· ὁ δὲ βασιλεὺς διὰ σεμνοτέρας εἰσέρχεται. ῎Εδει καὶ κοινωνεῖν τὴν γέννησιν ἐκείνην, καὶ ἐξηλλάχθαι τῆς ἡμετέρας. Καὶ ἀμφότερα ταῦτα γέγονε· τὸ μὲν γὰρ ἀπὸ μήτρας γενέσθαι, κοινὸν πρὸς ἡμᾶς· τὸ δὲ χωρὶς γάμων γενέσθαι, μεῖζον ἢ καθ' ἡμᾶς. Καὶ τὸ μὲν γαστρὶ κυηθῆναι καὶ συλληφθῆναι, τῆς φύσεως τῆς ἀνθρωπίνης· τὸ δὲ χωρὶς μίξεως γενέσθαι τὴν κύησιν, σεμνότερον τῆς φύσεως τῆς ἀνθρωπίνης. ῞Iνα καὶ τὴν ὑπεροχὴν καὶ τὴν κοινωνίαν τὴν πρὸς σὲ μάθῃς τοῦ τικτομένου. 93 Hom. Jo. 44.3 (PG 59.132.1–6): Εἰ δὲ τὴν Μαρίαν οὐδὲν ὠφελεῖ χωρὶς τῆς κατὰ ψυχὴν ἀρετῆς, τὸ γεννηθῆναι παρ' αὐτῆς τὸν Χριστόν· πολλῷ μᾶλλον ἡμᾶς κἂν πατέρα, κἂν ἀδελφὸν, κἂν παῖδα ἔχωμεν ἐνάρετον καὶ γενναῖον, αὐτοὶ δὲ πόῤῥω ὦμεν τῆς ἀρετῆς τῆς ἐκείνου, οὐδὲν τοῦτο ὠφελῆσαι δυνήσεται.

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a stirrer of trouble.94 This transitional body of Mary therefore births what is perfect and sinless, but she is not perfect in herself.

Moreover, Chrysostom also falls within the early Christian tradition of the painless birth of Jesus, and he defends the perpetual virginity of Mary. He states that she should not expect “the pangs of childbirth” (ὠδῖνα). The expectation is that Mary’s body remains intact, her virginity not pierced by sexual intercourse or normal childbirth. Like Adam, she remains a virgin before and after the birth. But

Chrysostom’s Mariology is very mystical—he constantly warns his readers against attempting to understand the virgin birth. The implication is that androgenerativity, in its very nature, and as is clear also from the Virg. 14, is also mystical. Chrysostom states that we are ignorant of “how the infinite is in a mother, how he that encapsulates everything is carried, not yet born, by a woman; how the virgin bears, and remains a virgin.”95 But Chrysostom continues:

[N]ot even after the birth, she having become a mother in such a way, and

having been deemed worthy of a new kind of travail, and a parturition so

strange, could that righteous man [i.e. Joseph] ever have endured to know

her. For if he had known her, and had kept her in the place of a wife, how

is it that our Lord commits her, as an unprotected woman, and having no

one, to his disciple, and commands him to take her to his own home [John

19:27]?96

94 John Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology: Historical Trends and Doctrinal Themes (New York: Fordham University Press, 1979), 148; Tim Perry and Daniel Kendall, The Blessed Virgin Mary (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2013), 32, 56. 95 Hom. Matt. 4.3 (PG 57.43.15–17): πῶς ὁ ἄπειρος ἐν μήτρᾳ ἐστί· πῶς ὁ πάντα συνέχων κυοφορεῖται ὑπὸ γυναικός· πῶς τίκτει ἡ Παρθένος, καὶ μένει παρθένος. 96 Hom. Matt. 5.3 (PG 57.58.33–39): οὐδὲ μετὰ ταῦτα τὴν οὕτω γενομένην μητέρα, καὶ καινῶν ὠδίνων καὶ ξένων καταξιωθεῖσαν λοχευμάτων, οὐκ ἂν δίκαιος ὢν ἐκεῖνος ὑπέμεινε γνῶναι λοιπόν. Εἰ γὰρ ἔγνω αὐτὴν, καὶ ἐν τάξει γυναικὸς εἶχε, πῶς ὡς ἀπροστάτευτον αὐτὴν καὶ οὐδένα ἔχουσαν τῷ μαθητῇ

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Thus, Joseph could not bear to have intercourse with Mary after the birth, and the fact that Jesus has brothers is equally mystical, all “veils” that hide the mystery of the virgin birth.97 The birth is a “new kind of travail” (καινῶν ὠδίνων) and a “strange parturition” (ξένων λοχευμάτων)—Chrysostom’s rhetoric all points to his vision of a new spiritual natality. Just as Adam and Eve, and all humankind, were sentenced to perpetual reproduction through sexual intercourse, now Mary’s transitional body represents a major shift back to perpetual virginity and ideal androgenerativity. The doctrines of virginitas in partu and virginitas post partem are pregnant with androgenerative nuances.

In her reading of the Protevangelium Jacobi, in which Salome tempts God by probing Mary’s puerperal virginity, Jennifer Glancy argues that Mary’s body becomes untouchable, and the act of the virgin birth thereby signifies a return to a pure and unadulterated mode of reproduction. 98 The same could be true of Joseph in

Chrysostom’s interpretation. Unlike Salome, however, Joseph is fully aware of Mary’s sanctified state, and he does not dare to touch her. As the birth of Eve was painless for

Adam, so too was the birth of Jesus for Mary. As God replaced Adam’s rib and mended

παρατίθεται, καὶ κελεύει αὐτῷ εἰς τὰ ἴδια αὐτὴν λαβεῖν; This interpretation of Mary’s virginity by Chrysostom is probably influenced by the earlier readings of Origen; for a very detailed exposition of this passage from Chrysostom, focusing on his views on Marian perpetual virginity, see Margaret A. Schatkin, “The Perpetual Virginity of Mary and New Testament Textual Criticism,” in De Maria Numquam Satis: The Significance of the Catholic Doctrines on the Blessed Virgin Mary for All People, ed. Judith Marie Gentle and Robert L. Fastiggi (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2009), 55– 58; see also Tim Perry, Mary for Evangelicals: Toward an Understanding of the Mother of Our Lord (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2006), 154–55. 97 Hom. Matt. 5.3 (PG 57.58.39–43). 98 See Prot. Jac. 20 (Ronald F. Hock, The Infancy Gospels of James and Thomas (Santa Rosa, CA: Polebridge, 1995), 68–69.); Jennifer A. Glancy, Corporal Knowledge: Early Christian Bodies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 115–17; see also the important article of Julia Kelto Lillis, “Paradox in Partu: Verifying Virginity in the Protevangelium of James,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 24.1 (2016): 1–28.

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his side, so too is Mary’s virginity mended.99 Mary, and the virgins of the church that will come later, are therefore freed from the curse of Eve, and receive a great measure of masculinity. Jerome, too, notes this in his discussion of the perpetual virginity of

Mary. “She who is not subject to the anxiety and pain of childbearing and having been withdrawn from menstruation, has ceased to be a woman, is freed from the curse of

God,” Jerome states, “nor is her attraction to her husband, but on the contrary, her husband becomes subject to her.”100 The virgin is no longer a slave, but free, and even her “husband” becomes subject to her—in theory, at least. Virginity positions the body in a mode of domination and freedom, just as the prelapsarian Adam and Eve.

Androgenerativity therefore develops climactically and in parallel to Christian salvation history, thereby showing how discourses of sexual morality intersect with early Christian views of history and historical development. Typological progression with regard to birth types was a common pedagogical technique in Chrysostom.101

There is the fully androgenerative birth of Eve, and shortly thereafter the loss of androgenerativity, and then its slow and progressive return in the conception of numerous women from the Old Testament, like Sarah, and the virgin birth of Jesus through Mary. But there is still another manifestation of androgenerative reproduction

99 We should not simply assume that ancients considered virginity as the presence of a hymen—there were many other indicators that marked virginity; see Kathleen Coyne Kelly, Performing Virginity and Testing Chastity in the Middle Ages, Routledge Research in Medieval Studies (London: Routledge, 2000), 1–39; Lillis, “Paradox in Partu,” 8–16. Chrysostom was very much against virginity testing. He believed that one’s character was especially a sign of the virginal state; see Fem. reg. 2.36–38 (Dumortier 100); Sac. 4.2.16–24 (SC 272.240–43); Virg. 60.1.7–9 (SC 125.320–21); see also De Wet, Preaching Bondage, 225–27. 100 Adv. Helv. 22 (PL 23.214.38–42): Quae non est in partus anxietatibus et dolore, quae deficientibus menstrui cruoris officiis, mulier esse desiit, a Dei maledictione fit libera: nec est ad virum conversio ejus, sed e contrario vir subjicitur ei. 101 David Rylaarsdam, John Chrysostom on Divine Pedagogy: The Coherence of His Theology and Preaching, Oxford Early Christian Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 91n239; see also Brown, Body and Society, 350–52.

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in Chrysostom’s thought, namely the spiritual (re)birth of all believers.102 Chrysostom summarises androgenerative progression thus:

Because He begets without passion, for this reason did she that was barren

first bear. But there is an even higher meaning—it was necessary to be

believed that he begot of himself. What then? This happens, but obscurely,

as in a type and a shadow, but it still does happen, and as it progresses it

becomes somehow clearer. A woman is formed solely out of man, and he

remains whole. Again, it was necessary there should be some proof of the

conception of a virgin. So the barren bears, not only once, but a second and

a third time, and many times. The barren is then a type of his birth from a

virgin, and she sends the mind forward to faith. Again, this was a type of

God being able to beget alone. For if man is the active agent, and birth takes

place without him, much more is the one who is begotten from the divine

active Agent. And there is another generation, which is a type of the truth—

that is, ours which is from Spirit. The barren one is of this, again, a type,

that it is a birth not from blood [John 1:13]. This refers to being born from

above [John 3:3]. One the one hand, it shows that the generation is without

passion; on the other, that it could be generated from one alone. It is who is

Christ above, ruling over all things: it was necessary that this should be

believed.103

102 For an overview of the image of spiritual birth in biblical and earlier Christian literature, see Solevåg, Birthing Salvation; Beth M. Stovell, “The Birthing Spirit, the Childbearing God: Metaphors of Motherhood and Their Place in Christian Discipleship,” in Making Sense of Motherhood: Biblical and Theological Perspectives, ed. Beth M. Stovell (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2016), 27–44. 103 Hom. Col. 5.4 (F5.230–31): ὅτι ἀπαθῶς γεννᾷ· διὰ τοῦτο ἐγέννησε πρῶτον στεῖρα. Μᾶλλον δὲ ἀνωτέρω, ἔδει πιστευθῆναι, ὅτι ἐξ αὐτοῦ. Tί οὖν; Tοῦτο γίνεται, ἀμυδρῶς μὲν, ἅτε ἐν τύπῳ καὶ σκιᾷ, πλὴν γίνεται· καὶ προϊὸν σαφέστερόν πως γίνεται. ᾿Εξ ἀνθρώπου μόνου γυνὴ, καὶ μένει ἐκεῖνος ὁλόκληρος. Πάλιν τῆς ἐκ παρθένου κυήσεως ἔδει γενέσθαι τι τεκμήριον. Τίκτει στεῖρα οὐχ ἅπαξ, ἀλλὰ

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Chrysostom rounds off this passage chiastically, with the repetition of ἔδει

πιστευθῆναι, noting that the entire androgenerative eclipse exists for the sake of bringing people to faith. We should remember that faith was, as Mathew Kuefler has demonstrated, a very masculine discourse.104 The great mystery concerns how God could, technically, beget from himself—note again the use of the preposition ἐξ, as also noted in Hom. 1 Cor. 26.5105—the same preposition is used to refer to Christ’s birth from, not through, Mary in the passage above. In order to assist human beings to understand this mystery, God slowly reveals it by means of androgenerative progression. We see here all three attributes of androgenerativity clearly mentioned— the perfect virginal (or at least, sterile) body, upon which God is the active agent

(κυριώτερος), the passionless (ἀπαθής) conception, and corporeal wholeness

(ὁλόκληρος). The final manifestation of androgenerativity, at the advent of the eschaton, is seen in the rebirth of Christians from the Holy Spirit (ἐκ πνεύματος). The spiritual birth of Christians, to Chrysostom, represents the full circle of androgenerativity. The birth is spiritual, without physical birth pains, without passion, and it comes from Christ, who is the ideal Masculine, the perfect one, even greater than

Adam. All these narratives therefore, in their utilisation of ideal-typical androgenerative attributes, intersect in one way or another with the Eden event and all signify, to

Chrysostom, a movement towards an ideal mode of reproduction. Taylor Petrey’s

καὶ δεύτερον καὶ τρίτον καὶ πολλάκις. Τῆς μὲν οὖν ἐκ παρθένου γεννήσεως τύπος ἡ στεῖρα· καὶ αὕτη παραπέμπει τῇ πίστει τὴν διάνοιαν. Πάλιν τοῦτο τύπος ἐγένετο τοῦ μόνον δύνασθαι γεννῆσαι τὸν θεόν. Εἰ γὰρ κυριώτερον ἄνθρωπος, καὶ χωρὶς τούτου τίκτεται, πολλῷ μᾶλλον ἐκ τοῦ κυριωτέρου γεννᾶται. ῎Εστι καὶ ἄλλη γέννησις τῆς ἀληθείας τύπος, ἡ ἡμετέρα ἡ ἐκ πνεύματος. Ταύτης πάλιν ἡ στεῖρα τύπος, τὸ οὐκ ἐξ αἱμάτων· αὕτη τῆς ἄνω γεννήσεως. ῾Η μὲν οὖν αὐτῆς τὸ ἀπαθὲς δείκνυσιν, ἡ δὲ τὸ ἐκ μόνου δύνασθαι γεννᾶσθαι. ῎Εστι Χριστὸς ἄνω πάντων κρατῶν· ἔδει πιστευθῆναι τοῦτο. 104 Kuefler, Manly Eunuch, 206–44. 105 F2.317–18.

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important observation, albeit for a slightly earlier period, is important to note in this instance: “This rhetoric [of physical and spiritual birth] takes part in the traditional cultural divisions that associated fleshiness with the feminine and the higher spiritual substance with the masculine. The division reinforces the hierarchy between spirit and flesh in explicitly gendered terms.”106 Sexual reproduction is feminine and fleshy, and in that sense, it represents the bestial side of humanity—androgenerative spiritual birth is the final departure away from the animality of the corporeal dimension of human existence.

What we need to realise, then, is that spiritual rebirth is a highly masculine discourse, despite its deployment of a metaphor, namely birthing, that appears at face value to be quite feminine and maternal.107 Chrysostom states that God travails so that believers may realise the mystery of the divine economy.108 Within this new spiritual natality there is also a devaluation of the flesh, and thus the slavishly bestial, in favour of the spiritual. In applying the Sarah narrative to the spiritual birth, Chrysostom states:

For Isaac, born not according to the order of nature, nor the law of marriage,

nor the power of the flesh, was still Abraham’s own son. He was the son of

bodies that were dead, and of a maternal womb that was dead. His

conception was not by the flesh, nor his birth by the seed, for the womb was

dead both through age and barrenness, but the word of God fashioned him.

Unlike the case of the slave. He came by the ordinances of nature, and

106 Petrey, Resurrecting Parts, 98. 107 For more on the image of motherhood in biblical and early Christian discourse, see several essays in Beth M. Stovell, ed., Making Sense of Motherhood: Biblical and Theological Perspectives (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2016). 108 Hom. Eph. 1.4 (F4.113); Paul M. Blowers, Drama of the Divine Economy: Creator and Creation in Early Christian Theology and Piety, Oxford Early Christian Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 230–31.

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conceived by the intercourse following marriage. Nevertheless, he who was

born not according to the flesh was more honourable than he who was born

according to the flesh. Now then, let it not upset you if you are not born

after the flesh. For because you are not born in this manner, are you most

of all Abraham’s generation. Being born according to the flesh does not

render one more honourable, but less so. For a birth not according to the

flesh is more wondrous and more spiritual. And this is clear from those who

were born from above. For Ishmael, who was born according to the flesh,

was not only a slave, but was cast out of his father’s house. But Isaac, who

was born according to the promise, being a true son and free, was a master

of all.109

In this section we see how the discourse of slavery again intersects with the discourse of rebirth. Being born of the flesh, by the laws of nature and marriage, through sperm and womb, enslaves one just like Ishmael—yet Isaac is awarded with a sense of mastery and domination, the same that was given to Adam. But spiritual birth is freedom.110

“There is no longer a mother, or birth pains, or sleep, and intercourse and embraces of bodies. From this point on, all the fabric of our nature is woven above, of the Holy

109 Comm. Gal. 4.23 (F4.73): ῾Ο γὰρ ᾿Ισαὰκ οὐ κατὰ φύσεως ἀκολουθίαν, οὐδὲ κατὰ γάμων νόμον, οὐδὲ κατὰ σαρκὸς δύναμιν γενόμενος, καὶ υἱὸς καὶ γνήσιος ἦν, ἀπὸ νεκρῶν σωμάτων φὺς, καὶ ἀπὸ τῆς μήτρας ἐκείνης. Οὐ γὰρ ἡ σὰρξ τὴν κύησιν, οὐδὲ τὸ σπέρμα τὸν τόκον εἰργάσαντο· νεκρὰ γὰρ ἡ μήτρα, καὶ διὰ τὴν ἡλικίαν καὶ διὰ τὴν πήρωσιν· ἀλλ' ὁ τοῦ θεοῦ λόγος αὐτὸν ἔπλασεν. ᾿Επὶ δὲ τοῦ δούλου οὐχ οὕτως, ἀλλ' ἐκεῖνος τοῖς τῆς φύσεως θεσμοῖς καὶ τῇ τοῦ γάμου συνηθείᾳ τίκτεται. ᾿Αλλ' ὅμως ὁ μὴ κατὰ σάρκα τοῦ κατὰ σάρκα γεννηθέντος τιμιώτερος ἦν. Μὴ θορυβείτω τοίνυν ὑμᾶς τὸ μὴ κατὰ σάρκα γεγεννῆσθαι· διὰ γὰρ τοῦτο μάλιστα αὐτοῦ συγγενεῖς ὑμεῖς, ὅτι οὐ κατὰ σάρκα ἐγεννήθητε. Οὐ γὰρ τιμιωτέρους τοῦτο τὸ κατὰ σάρκα, ἀλλὰ καὶ ἀτιμοτέρους ἐργάζεται· Θαυμαστότερος γὰρ ὁ τόκος ὁ μὴ κατὰ σάρκα καὶ πνευματικώτερος· καὶ δῆλον ἐκ τῶν ἄνωθεν τεχθέντων. ᾿Ετέχθη γὰρ κατὰ σάρκα ὁ ᾿Ισμαὴλ, ἀλλὰ δοῦλος ἦν, καὶ οὐ τοῦτο μόνον, ἀλλὰ καὶ ἐξεβάλλετο τῆς πατρῴας οἰκίας· ὁ δὲ κατ' ἐπαγγελίαν τεχθεὶς ὁ ᾿Ισαὰκ, ἅτε υἱὸς ὢν καὶ ἐλεύθερος, κύριος ἦν πάντων. 110 See esp. Hom. Jo. 26.1 (PG 59.153.5–154.58); see, more generally, Ashish J. Naidu, Transformed in Christ: Christology and the Christian Life in John Chrysostom, Princeton Theological Monograph Series 188 (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2012), 83–167.

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Spirit and water,” Chrysostom further explains in his interpretation of John 3:6, “The water is employed, being made the birth to the one who is born. What the womb is to the embryo, the water is to the believer; for in the water the believer is fashioned and formed.”111 The imagery of the womb plays an important role here. Chrysostom uses the term “mother,” μήτηρ, in the sense of a womb in these passages—the mother being the personification of the womb; strikingly, the end of the womb is then also the end of motherhood. Motherhood only serves a purpose if mothers raise virtuous “soldiers of

Christ.”112

In fact, as we will see at the end of this chapter, Chrysostom believed that parenthood did not simply imply having children—true parenthood meant raising children with philosophical, that is, self-controlled and manly, souls.113 For it is the cold womb, chilled through the process of aging,114 the dead womb, which becomes the symbol of new life. It is the death of that one symbol that is perhaps most feminine, the womb, that is paradoxically the bell that tolls for new life. The baptismal font is the new symbol of the womb, the baptismal water the new amniotic fluid of spiritual and androgenerative birth. As with Hesiod’s Pandora, the womb of Eve, for Chrysostom, became the entry point of all that is fleshly and opposed to the Spirit. Helen King has argued that Pandora’s jar, in the Hesiodic sense, actually alludes to the womb, which

111 Hom. Jo. 26.1 (PG 59.153.25–32): Οὐκ ἔτι μήτηρ, οὐκ ἔτι ὠδῖνες, οὔτε ὕπνοι, καὶ συνουσίαι καὶ περιπλοκαὶ σωμάτων· ἄνω λοιπὸν ὑφαίνεται τῆς ὑμετέρας φύσεως ἡ κατασκευὴ, ἀπὸ Πνεύματος ἁγίου καὶ ὕδατος. Τὸ δὲ ὕδωρ παρείληπται, τόκος τῷ τικτομένῳ γινόμενον. ῞Οπερ γάρ ἐστιν ἡ μήτρα τῷ ἐμβρύῳ, τοῦτο τῷ πιστῷ τὸ ὕδωρ· ἐν γὰρ τῷ ὕδατι διαπλάττεται καὶ μορφοῦται. 112 This is how Chrysostom interprets the point that women will be saved through childbearing in 1 Timothy 2:15; see Hom. 1 Tim. 9.1 (F4.70–72); more generally, Solevåg, Birthing Salvation, 112–35. 113 Adv. oppug. 3.16 (PG 47.376.28–52). 114 Old age was considered, in antiquity and by Chrysostom, a process of cooling and drying; Tim G. Parkin, Old Age in the Roman World: A Cultural and Social History, Ancient Society and History (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 250–52; Chris L. de Wet, “Grumpy Old Men? Gender, Gerontology, and the Geriatrics of Soul in John Chrysostom,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 24.4 (2016): 491–521; see also chapter 6.

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was seen by ancient physicians as being jar-shaped. 115 Like marriage, the womb enslaves, and the womb only brings death. Thus, the naming of Eve is then also ironic— she is named, in Greek, Zωή, which means “Life,” yet, in the shift away from androgenerativity, it is only death and decay that she brings.116 It also signifies the passing of seed, both male and female seed, and the entrance of spiritual seed. As we have indicated, although Chrysostom did not, like Augustine, consider the semen a vehicle for transmitting sin, there is still a potent link, of course, between seed, lust, sexual intercourse, and death. Spiritual rebirth is androgenerative birth.

While Arendt pointed to natality as a common attribute of all human beings that validates the notion of individual freedom and intrinsic worth in the human subject,

Chrysostom, on the other hand, considers this earthly natality one that is passing. Rather than bringing freedom, being born through a woman actually leads to slavery (to sin and the passions) and death. When the believer is born of the Spirit, the believer enters a new mode of natality. The event of baptism signifies the end of one’s previous sin- ridden natality and ushers in a new spiritual and masculine natality. Previously all were born through a woman unto slavery, but now all are born from Christ unto freedom.

Virgins and Monks: Symbols and Symptoms of Androgenerativity

The observations in the previous section, pertaining to androgenerativity, natality, and salvation history, betray something very important about the symbolism of virginity in late ancient Christianity. The virgin and the monk are symbols of androgenerativity, and perhaps symptoms of the new Christian empire. Focusing on an earlier period, Willi

Braun has argued that the vestal virgin and the eunuch were even then signs and

115 King, Hippocrates’ Woman, 25–26. 116 Hom. Gen. 18.3 (PG 53.149.13–60).

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symptoms of an empire in which the perceived stability of the Roman “family” and the security of hegemony were fissured at best.117 If Braun is correct, then there is an important continuity within the first four centuries of the Roman Empire, in which virgins and eunuchs served, politically, as a challenge to marital and familial stability

(which is clearly seen in Chrysostom).

In the case of Chrysostom, the virgin and the eunuch are presented not simply as alternatives, but as progress. They are indicative of an empyreal realm that is slowly impeding on the mundane earthly existence. They are symbols and symptoms of a passing world, and a return to something better. They have shunned earthy marriage, but are brides of Christ. 118 They have dampened their sexual desire, but are in themselves highly desirable to Christ. There is a very potent divine erotics of virginity present in Chrysostom. 119 Despite some unfavourable views of sexual lust and attraction, the hagiographical literature of the fourth and fifth centuries still gave highly erotic portrayals of the ascetic life, with some of it also penetrating the homilies of urban preachers like Chrysostom.120 The virgin is one who is released from the curse of

Eve. But instead of belonging to a man, she now belonged to Christ, which only meant that she would be subject to similar technologies of subjugation, now only administered by the church and the clergy. Elizabeth Castelli, in her classic and thought-provoking study of late ancient virginity, makes a very important observation:

117 Willi Braun, “Virgins, Eunuchs, Empire,” Acta Patristica et Byzantina 21.2 (2010): 19–38; see also Sissel Undheim, Borderline Virginities: Sacred and Secular Virgins in Late Antiquity (London: Routledge, 2017). 118 Brown, Body and Society, 275–76. 119 Hom. Heb. 28 (F7.310–28). 120 Virginia Burrus, especially, identified the erotics of early Christian hagiography; The Sex Lives of Saints: An Erotics of Ancient Hagiography, Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007); see also Derek Krueger, “Between Monks: Tales of Monastic Companionship in Early Byzantium,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 20.1 (2011): 28–61.

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In the realm of religious virginity, women’s sexuality functioned in a

similar way as a token offered to God as a sign of renunciation; the virgin’s

body belonged to the celestial Bridegroom, conceptually, in the same way

that it would have to his earthly counterpart. I am not suggesting that the

experience of marriage and virginity was identical; rather, I am arguing that

women’s sexuality was being used structurally in the same way, that the

underlying idea of women’s sexuality was the same in the social world and

the religious realm. The religious system adopted the reigning idea of

women’s sexuality as token of exchange and reinforced it by investing it

with theological significance. This fact would not be especially significant,

except for the way in which sexuality becomes the hingepin for the whole

system of asceticism.121

Virgins and monks are the personification of androgenerativity; their bodies come closest to idealised masculinity.122 I will show in the next chapter that ascetic exercises and regimen served the purpose of cooling and drying out the body, similar to aging.

The ascetic therefore ages his or her body prematurely. The cool and dry bodies of the virgins and monks signify the victory over sexual desire, intercourse, childbirth, and essentially, death. By mortifying their own bodies, according to Chrysostom, they have overcome death.123 The cold and dead womb of the virgin hearkens back to Sarah. In

121 Elizabeth Castelli, “Virginity and Its Meaning for Women’s Sexuality in Early Christianity,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 2.1 (1986): 86. 122 See esp. the seminal study of Gillian Clark, “The Old Adam: The Fathers and the Unmaking of Masculinity,” in Thinking Men: Masculinity and Its Self-Representation in the Classical Tradition, ed. Lin Foxhall and John Salmon, Leicester-Nottingham Studies in Ancient Society 7 (London: Routledge, 1998), 176–80. 123 Chris L. de Wet, “The Practice of Everyday Death: Thanatology and Self-Fashioning in John Chrysostom’s Thirteenth Homily on Romans,” HTS Theological Studies 71.1 (2015): 1–6.

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the case of monks, they are the spiritual (but not physical) eunuchs who have castrated their passions.124 The wandering monk was, according to Peter Brown, a man who was free from the curse of the humiliation of labour (Gen. 3:19).125 But despite the fact that they have practically freeze-dried their sexual passions to death, monks were still described as being highly fertile, spiritually at least. Childlessness was not all a sign that a man was not virile; regarding his own childlessness, Jerome said: “My seed produces fruit one hundred fold!”126 Monastic fertility discourse is also very present in

Chrysostom. In a perfervid plea to Christian fathers of would-be monks, Chrysostom maintains that they should not be worried that their sons will not have earthy progeny:

But perhaps you long to see your children’s children? How is this, when

you are not yet parents yourselves? For the act of begetting does not a parent

make…. Therefore, those who are far inferior to their children with respect

to philosophy should no longer be considered parents; only when they also

have given birth to them this way should they desire grandchildren; only

then will they be able to see them. For the monks also have children; they

are born not of flesh and blood nor of the will of a man, but they have been

begotten of God [John 1:13]. Such children as these have no need to torment

their parents over money, or marriage, or any such thing; on the contrary,

they allow them to be free of all care and provide them with a greater

pleasure than their natural parents enjoy. They are not born and raised for

124 Hom. Matt. 62.3 (PG 58.599.42–600.7); De Wet, Preaching Bondage, 256–67. Kuefler has convincingly argued that the eunuch-monk became the definitive symbol of Christian masculinity in late antiquity; Kuefler, Manly Eunuch, 245–82. 125 Brown, Body and Society, liii. 126 Ep. 22.19 (CSEL 54.168): meum semen centena fruge fecundum est; see esp. Kuefler, Manly Eunuch, 161–205.

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the same purposes as natural children, but for a much greater and more

splendid destiny. They thus delight in their parents even more. Besides

these considerations, I will also add one more: it is not unseasonable that

those who disbelieve in the resurrection should grieve about having

descendants, since this is the only consolation left to them.127

We see here how natural and spiritual birth intersect quite clearly and neatly in

Chrysostom’s fertility discourse. Physical parenthood is now qualified by spiritual birth—parents are only truly parents if their children are born from above—Chrysostom quotes, once again, John 1:13 in support of his argument. This is also the nature of the monk’s progeny. A woman is also only “saved through childbearing” (1 Tim. 2:15) if her children are also spiritually born. 128 Although Chrysostom was perhaps more accommodating, his rhetoric does sound similar to that of Jerome: “I praise marriage, I praise the union, but it is because they produce virgins for me.”129 This new definition of father- and motherhood, too, forms the crux of Chrysostom’s reading of the martyr- mother of the Maccabees. “For while her children were just seven martyrs, their mother’s body, though it was just a single body when added, filled the space of fourteen

127 Adv. oppug. 3.16 (PG 47.376.28–30, 35–52):᾿Αλλὰ παῖδας ἴσως ἐπιθυμεῖτε παίδων ἰδεῖν. Καὶ πῶς, οὔπω γενόμενοι πατέρες αὐτοί; Οὐ γὰρ δὴ τὸ γεννῆσαι πατέρα ποιεῖ.... Μὴ τοίνυν μηδὲ πατέρες ἀξιούσθωσαν εἶναι οἱ τοιοῦτοι, ὧν πολὺ κατὰ τὸν τῆς φιλοσοφίας λείπονται λόγον· ἀλλ' ἐπειδὰν αὐτοὺς τοῦτον τὸν τρόπον γεννήσωσι, τότε καὶ τοὺς ἐκγόνους ζητείτωσαν· τότε γὰρ αὐτοὺς καὶ ἰδεῖν δυνήσονται μόνον. Εἰσὶ γὰρ αὐτοῖς παῖδες, εἰσὶν, οὐκ ἐξ αἱμάτων, οὐδὲ ἐκ θελήματος σαρκὸς, οὐδὲ ἐκ θελήματος ἀνδρὸς, ἀλλ' ἐξ αὐτοῦ γεννηθέντες τοῦ Θεοῦ. Οὗτοι οἱ παῖδες οὐχ ὑπὲρ χρημάτων ἀναγκάζουσι κόπτεσθαι τοὺς πατέρας, οὐχ ὑπὲρ γάμου, οὐχ ὑπὲρ ἄλλου τινὸς τοιούτου, ἀλλὰ πάσης αὐτοὺς τῆς φροντίδος ἀτελεῖς ἀφέντες, τῶν φυσικῶν πατέρων μείζονι παρέχουσιν ἐντρυφᾷν ἡδονῇ. Οὐ γὰρ ἐπὶ τοῖς αὐτοῖς τίκτονταί τε καὶ τρέφονται, οἷσπερ κἀκεῖνοι, ἀλλ' ἐπὶ πολλῷ μείζοσι καὶ λαμπροτέροις· διὸ καὶ μᾶλλον τοὺς γεγεννηκότας εὐφραίνουσι. Χωρὶς δὲ τούτων κἀκεῖνο εἴποιμι ἂν, ὅτι τοὺς μὲν διαπιστοῦντας τῇ ἀναστάσει οὐδὲν ἀπεικὸς ὑπὲρ τούτων θρηνεῖν, ἅτε δὴ ταύτης μόνης καταλειπομένης τῆς παραμυθίας αὐτοῖς. Translation (and italics): David G. Hunter, trans., A Comparison between a King and a Monk; Against the Opponents of the Monastic Life: Two Treatises by John Chrysostom (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 1988), 162. 128 Hom. 1 Tim. 9.1 (F4.70–72). 129 Ep. 22.20 (CSEL 54.170): Laudo nuptias, laudo coniugium, sed quia mihi uirgines generant.

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martyrs,” Chrysostom explains, “both because she was a witness for each of them, and because she fashioned them into such [witnesses], and so bore for us an entire Church of martyrs.” The martyr-mother is then most fertile, since she gave birth to seven sons who were also spiritually born as martyrs. Their martyrdoms are duplicated and reproduced in the mother’s own body since they are one flesh. Chrysostom finally concludes: “She gave birth to seven children and gave birth to none for the earth, but all for heaven; rather, for the King of Heaven, having born them all for the life to come.”130

Fertility becomes a spiritual discourse; true motherhood is characterised by masculinity. The monks, as ideal males, procreate without intercourse, without lust, and without the need of a female body.131 This is then the nature of monastic fertility and childbirth—it is totally androgenerative, and eternal. This mode of reproduction does not simply feed the machinery of death and decay; it is a mode of reproduction that will be culminated in the resurrection. Eternal life now flows from the expectation of resurrection, and not the propagation of earthly heirs. The resurrected body is then the ultimate masculine body.132 Androgenerative discourse therefore propagated virginity and monasticism—androgenerativity has an interest in the construction of the ascetic body and the promotion of sexual renunciation. The virgin and the monk are each, in their own way, both symbols and symptoms of a sexual morality founded on androgenerative ideals and principles.

130 Macc. 1.9 (PG 50.622.4–12): Οἱ μὲν γὰρ παῖδες ἑπτὰ μάρτυρες ἦσαν μόνον· τὸ δὲ σῶμα τῆς μητρὸς αὐτῶν προστεθὲν σῶμα μὲν ἦν ἓν, μαρτύρων δὲ δὶς ἑπτὰ χώραν ἐπλήρου, ὅτι τε καθ' ἕκαστον αὐτῶν ἐμαρτύρησε, καὶ ὅτι κἀκείνους τοιούτους εἰργάσατο, ᾿Εκκλησίαν ὁλόκληρον μαρτύρων ἡμῖν ἀποκυήσασα. ῾Επτὰ παῖδας ὤδινε, καὶ οὐδένα ὤδινε τῇ γῇ, ἀλλὰ πάντας τῷ οὐρανῷ, μᾶλλον δὲ τῷ βασιλεῖ τῶν οὐρανῶν, εἰς τὴν μέλλουσαν αὐτοὺς ἅπαντας ἀποκυήσασα ζωήν. Translation: Wendy Mayer, trans., The Cult of the Saints, Popular Patristics Series (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2006), 143–44. 131 This is a concept that can be traced back to earliest Christianity; Petrey, Resurrecting Parts, 96–99. 132 See esp. Hom. 1 Cor. 41–42 (F2.517–34); Res. mort. 1 (SC 561.108–17); Chris L. de Wet, “John Chrysostom’s Exegesis on the Resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15,” Neotestamentica 45.1 (2011): 92–114.

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One last curious question remains: did the proliferation of androgenerativity as an ideal mode of reproduction have an actual effect in the bedrooms of Chrysostom’s urban Christian audience? Probably not. The prevalence of angelic discourse may be the key in this regard. Since androgenerativity assumes corporeal perfection, androgenerativity is also presented as the norm and the normal means of reproduction in Chrysostom’s sexual discourse—sexual reproduction is then in fact an abnormal aberration of primeval reproduction. Androgenerativity is therefore a masculinising, idealising, and normalising reproductive discourse. Ironically, however, androgenerativity may not have abnormalised regular sexual discourse in the way

Chrysostom intended. By imbuing androgenerativity with angelic discourse and linking it with monasticism and virginity, sexual reproduction may have been seen by most people as an acceptable normal routine of everyday life. Ellen Muehlberger, in her important study of angels in late ancient Christianity, notes that early Christian descriptions of the ascetic life as angelic

both justified and normalized the existence of these alternate ways of being

Christian; doing so also removed the implicit challenge of the ascetic life

to the urban one, by placing the feats of the ascetics in the realm of the

supernatural, something to be admired from afar, rather than adopted by all.

In this sense, one effect of describing ascetics as angels was most deeply

felt in the city: it preserved urban Christian life as a viable mode of piety

for “normal” humanity, even as it valued those extraordinary Christians

who did not choose it.133

133 Muehlberger, Angels, 174.

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Although negative Christian attitudes to procreation may have had some impact, good old sex was probably still good enough for the average Joe who may have admired ascetics in the city, but still attached value to the pleasure of coitus and the value of having suitable heirs to carry on the family name.

Conclusion

In this chapter, I have attempted to account for the discursive shift in reproductive modes we find in Chrysostom’s reading of Genesis 1–3. This shift has been characterised as a shift from androgenerativity, to sexual reproduction, and back to androgenerativity via the impregnation of Sarah, Mary, and the spiritual rebirth of all

Christians. Androgenerativity unfolded consecutively and progressively with Christian salvation history. We also see that the human subject’s first earthly natality is replaced by a new spiritual and highly masculine natality. In the current earthly dispensation, although all reborn and baptised Christians are androgenerative symbols, it is especially the spiritually fertile monk and virgin who personify androgenerativity. Although androgenerativity presents itself as a mode of reproduction that is not focused on sexual difference, since it does not entail sexual intercourse between male and female, its discursive dynamics, and the practical implications of the discourses that make up androgenerativity, actually ramifies male superiority, female subordination, and sexual difference. The masculine ideals of late antique Christian sexual morality and reproductive corporeality, in Chrysostom particularly, were most decisively established and proliferated by the notion of androgenerativity. Relying on these findings, in the next chapter we will examine more closely how the masculinisation of the male body influenced it physiologically, and how the male anatomy was politicised.

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CHAPTER 5

Volatile Anatomies: Regimen, Physiology, and the Psychic Politeia of the Masculine

Body

Introduction

The following chapters in this study examine more closely the dynamics of masculine domination. In the previous three chapters, it has been shown that Chrysostom reads the narrative of Genesis 1–3 as a parallel to the great struggle of masculinity, and the dangers of failing to be masculine. The deception of Adam and Eve represented the victory of the bestial over the divine, of the corporeal over the psychic. The lesson, for

Chrysostom, was this: domination is imprinted in the cosmic order ordained by God.

Man is required to rule over the cosmos. Because Adam failed to properly rule over

Eve, sin was brought into human existence. But Adam’s external lapse is also mirrored internally. The Fall was also a psychic failure of corporeal control. Masculine domination, for Chrysostom, must therefore be fully synchronised between interior psychic control and exterior cosmic control. A man who cannot control his passions will never effectively control his wife, children, and slaves.

However, what does masculine domination entail, practically? How do practices of masculinity manifest themselves physically, socially, and politically?

These will be the questions that I will address in the following chapters. If the interior psychic operations of masculine domination must be aligned with their exterior counterparts, it is necessary to ask, more specifically, what these interior dynamics of psychic control entail—which is the topic of the current chapter. What does self- mastery mean? And what are the significations and implications of the psychic control

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of the body in Chrysostom’s thought? If sin results in the multiplication of networks of power and dominion (postlapsarian institutions of masculinity), an intensification of cosmic politeia, then by the principle of interior and exterior congruency of dominion, there will also be an intensive politicisation of the physical body and corresponding spheres of psychic mastery. If sin made society more hierarchised, should the same effect not also be present within the physical body and soul? A multiplication and intensification of cosmic politeia should therefore be matched by an equal or similar psycho-somatic politeia. But is this the case in Chrysostom’s thought? Does he balance the books of dominion, so to speak, internally and externally, psychically and cosmically? There does indeed appear to be such a balancing act present in Chrysostom.

We have already seen that Chrysostom presents the practice of asceticism and the monastic life as an alternative and superior institution of masculinity. This chapter will explain in more detail exactly why he makes this alternative proposal. The psychic politeia of the body is notably evident when one examines more closely Chrysostom’s medical framework, particularly as it relates to the so-called therapy of the soul and overall psycho-somatic health.

In the sections that follow, I aim to account for the dynamics of psychic domination in Chrysostom’s discourse of masculinity, and how the intensification and multiplication of cosmic systems of dominion are also replicated physically in terms of the soul’s mastery over the body.1 Having delineated, in this chapter, the dynamics of psychic control over the body, particularly with regard to physiology and regimen, the

1 I have already explored some of the issues noted in this chapter in a different study: Chris L. de Wet, “Gluttony and the Preacher’s Diet: Regimen, Obesity, and Psycho-Somatic Health in the Homilies of John Chrysostom,” in (Re)Visioning John Chrysostom: New Theories and Approaches, ed. Chris L. de Wet and Wendy Mayer (London: Routledge, 2018), Forthcoming.

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next chapter will ask what the corporeal effects of these dynamics were and to what end the body was moulded by means of masculinising practices.

In the current chapter, while determining the dynamics of psychic control, firstly, I will investigate the issue of the regimen (δίαιτα; this relates especially to diet but also exercise, that is, γυμνασία, and other disciplines) that Chrysostom’s prescribes for men will be addressed. I will ask what types of food he wants people to eat, as well as their quantities, in order to maintain psycho-somatic health and attain a masculine social disposition. Secondly, what other elements of regimen, like sleep and bathing, are regulated in the formation of masculinity? It will be demonstrated that the regimen

Chrysostom prescribes in favour of masculinisation, which is also the foundation of what he understands as psychic control, is a moderate one that serves to cool and dry the body. In the discipline and regimen that Chrysostom forwards to his audience, he brings the pertinent issue of masculinity straight into the food plates of his audience.

Let us now start by looking more closely at Chrysostom’s views on the relationship between regimen, masculinity and the psychic control of the body. The bulk of the discussion following will be on Chrysostom’s dietary advice, especially how he highlights gluttony (λαιμαργία) as a major, even primordial, threat to masculinity.

Regimen, Gluttony, and Masculinity

My aim in this section is to examine Chrysostom’s views on dietary regimen and gluttony,2 and to ask how this features in his broader understanding of psycho-somatic

2 Three previous studies covering gluttony in Chrysostom are those of Shaw, Burden of the Flesh, 129- 131, and; Karl O. Sandnes, Belly and Body in the Pauline Epistles, Society for New Testament Studies Monograph Series 120 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 244–52; Susan E. Hill, Eating to Excess: The Meaning of Gluttony and the Fat Body in the Ancient World, Praeger Series on the Ancient World (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2011), 115–21. For a related study, see Blake Leyerle, “Refuse, Filth, and Excrement in the Homilies of John Chrysostom,” Journal of Late Antiquity 2.2 (2009): 337– 56.

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health and masculine self-mastery. If masculinity is fashioned by one’s diet, then three important questions arise. What should one eat? How much should one eat? Why is such a dietary regimen considered an effective strategy for masculinisation? The link between dietetics and the formation of masculinity also means that the role of the stomach, as well as the problem of gluttony and obesity, cannot be neglected.3 The stomach, perhaps more than all the other organs, posed numerous challenges and problems for the soul. One’s diet influenced one’s psychic state, and thus one’s masculinity. The stomach had an impact on the brain, and thus the soul.

Like us today, ancient persons were very concerned about their diet, weight loss, and the problem of obesity.4 Caelius Aurelianus writes: “Bodies may keep acquiring additional flesh beyond what is needed; and it is because of the superfluous nature of these accessions that the Greeks call the condition ‘obesity [πολυσαρκίαν].’”5 Both

Galen and Caelius gave detailed advice on how to lose weight, including limiting food intake, steam baths, passive exercise, like riding in a carriage, not sleeping directly after a meal, and even vomitive treatment.6 In fourth-century physiognomy, a flat hollow

3 The study of obesity and bariatrics in antiquity is somewhat neglected, unfortunately; see the overview of Niki Papavramidou and Helen Christopoulou-Aletra, “Greco-Roman and Byzantine Views on Obesity,” Obesity Surgery 17.1 (2007): 112–16. See also Hill, Eating to Excess; Claudio Bevegni and Gian Franco Adami, “Obesity and Obesity Surgery in Ancient Greece,” Obesity Surgery 13.5 (2003): 808–9. For a more general cultural history of obesity, see Georges Vigarello, The Metamorphoses of Fat: A History of Obesity, trans. C. Jon Delogu, European Perspectives: A Series in Social Thought and Cultural Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013); Sander L. Gilman, Fat: A Cultural History of Obesity (Cambridge: Polity, 2008); George A. Bray, “Obesity: Historical Development of Scientific and Cultural Ideas,” International Journal of Obesity 14.11 (1990): 909–26. 4 Oribasius, the physician of Julian, went into great detail describing the appropriate diet for the emperor; see Grant, Dieting for an Emperor. 5 Morb. acut. chron. 5.11.129 (Amman 596): Accidunt corporis superflua carnis incrementa, quae Graeci ob nimietatem πολυσαρκίαν vocaverunt. Translation: Israel E. Drabkin, trans., Caelius Aurelianus: On Acute Diseases and on Chronic Diseases (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1950), 993. This collective work of Caelius, it must be remembered, is a Latin translation of Soranus’ versions; see Anna Dysert, “Capturing Medical Tradition: Caelius Aurelianus and On Acute Diseases,” Hirundo 5 (2006): 161–73. 6 Galen, San. tuend. 6.8 (K6.415–19); Caelius Aurelianus, Morb. acut. chron. 5.11.132–38 (Amman 597–99). For Oribasius’ similar recommendations, see Grant, Dieting for an Emperor, 9; Niki S. Papavramidou, Spiros T. Papavramidis, and Helen Christopoulou-Aletra, “Galen on Obesity: Etiology, Effects, and Treatment,” World Journal of Surgery 28.6 (2004): 631–35; Niki Papavramidou and Helen

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stomach (not too fat or thin) was seen as a sign of balance.7 Both Soranus, and his Latin translator, Caelius, called obesity (obesitas; Soranus and Rufus of Ephesus: πιμελώδης,

[δια-]πίμελος; Hesychius: φορμοσίκων; 8 Chrysostom mostly uses πολυσαρκία) a disease. 9 Most importantly, diet was a philosophical matter, and central to the philosopher’s self-fashioning. Iamblichus, for example, goes into detail regarding

Pythagoras’ dietary advice, which greatly favoured vegetarianism. “A well-ordered diet makes a great contribution to the best education, so let us consider his rules about this,”

Iamblichus begins. “He banned all foods which are windy and cause disturbance, and recommended and advised the use of those which settle and sustain the state of the body.” An important rule of Pythagoras: “Abstain from beans!” According to

Iamblichus, this “has many reasons, sacred, natural, and concerned with the soul.” The purpose of Pythagoras’ dietary instructions was to “lead people on the path of virtue by starting with their diet.”10 According to late-antique philosophers, you could tell a lot about a person judging from what is on their plate—for many people, masculinity began by simply eat like a real man should eat.

Interestingly, Chrysostom distinguishes between the person who is “naturally” obese, and someone who is obese due to gluttony, called a λαίμαργος or γαστρίμαργος.

Christopoulou-Aletra, “Management of Obesity in the Writings of Soranus of Ephesus and Caelius Aurelianus,” Obesity Surgery 18.6 (2008): 763–65. 7 Adamantius, Physiogn. 2.14.1–7 (Foerster 1.361–62); see also Maud W. Gleason, Making Men: Sophists and Self-Presentation in Ancient Rome (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 31; Sandnes, Belly and Body, 30. 8 LSJ. 9 Caelius Aurelianus, Morb. acut. 11.132 (Amman 597). 10 Vit. Pyth. 24.106, 109 (Klein [TLG]): Ἐπεὶ δὲ καὶ ἡ τροφὴ μεγάλα συμβάλλεται πρὸς τὴν ἀρίστην παιδείαν, ὅταν καλῶς καὶ τεταγμένως γίγνηται, σκεψώμεθα τίνα καὶ περὶ ταύτην ἐνομοθέτησε. τῶν δὴ βρωμάτων καθόλου τὰ τοιαῦτα ἀπεδοκίμαζεν, ὅσα πνευματώδη καὶ ταραχῆς αἴτια, τὰ δ' ἐναντία ἐδοκίμαζέ τε καὶ χρῆσθαι ἐκέλευεν, ὅσα τὴν τοῦ σώματος ἕξιν καθίστησί τε καὶ συστέλλει…. καὶ ‘κυάμων ἀπέχου’ διὰ πολλὰς ἱεράς τε καὶ φυσικὰς καὶ εἰς τὴν ψυχὴν ἀνηκούσας αἰτίας…. διὰ τῆς τροφῆς ἀρχόμενος εἰς ἀρετὴν ὁδηγεῖν τοὺς ἀνθρώπους. Translation: Gillian Clark, trans., Iamblichus: On the Pythagorean Life, Translated Texts for Historians 8 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1998), 47– 48.

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“And then to whom can such a person cultivating obesity be other than a disgusting spectacle, dragging himself along like a seal?,” Chrysostom maligns, but “I do not say this about those who are naturally overweight [πολυσαρκίαν… περὶ τῶν φύσει ὄντων], but of those who, by luxurious living, have turned their bodies into such a condition.”11

We find perhaps a similar distinction between natural and unnatural weight types, more than a century later, by Philoxenus of Mabbug, in his tenth discourse on gluttony, who speaks of the “naturally heavy” body.12 There is also a third bariatric category that

Chrysostom distinguishes, namely persons suffering from bulimia (βουλιμία13): “Of physical diseases this one is thought a most agonising one, and it is called by physicians bulimia, when a person being filled, remains always hungry.”14 Bulimia in the ancient sense should not be confused with its modern version, bulimia nervosa, which is an emotional eating disorder.15 In antiquity, many understood bulimia as a disease in which there is an excess of heat in the body, and the more food or drink is consumed, like a furnace, the hotter the body becomes (and thus, the hungrier it gets).16 Bulimia is a useful example, for Chrysostom, to illustrate that pathic excess, and especially greed and covetousness, is in fact a disease. In two instances, he speaks of greed as the bulimia

11 Hom. Act. 35.3 (PG 60.256.27–29): Τίνι δὲ οὐκ ἔστιν ἀηδὴς ἄνθρωπος πολυσαρκίαν ἀσκῶν, φώκης δίκην συρόμενος; Οὐ περὶ τῶν φύσει ὄντων τοῦτο λέγω, ἀλλὰ περὶ τῶν ἐκ τῆς τρυφῆς τοιαῦτα κατασκευασάντων τὰ σώματα. 12 Mēmrā 10.7 (Budge 358–59); see more generally, Robert A. Kitchen, “The Lust of the Belly is the Beginning of All Sin: A Practical Theology of Asceticism in the Discourses of Philoxenos of Mabbug,” Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies 13.1 (2010): 49–63. 13 Cf. also φαγέδαινα; and the opposite, ἀνορεξία. 14 Hom. 2 Tim. 7.2 (F6.225–26): ἀλλ’ ἐν μὲν τοῖς σώμασι τὸ τοιοῦτον κόλασίς ἐστιν χαλεπωτάτη, βουλιμία λεγομένη παρὰ τῶν ἰατρῶν, ὅταν τις πολλῶν ἐμφορούμενος, τοῦ λιμώττειν μὴ ἀπαλλάττηται. See also Hom. 2 Thess. 1.2 (F5.447). 15 Those suffering from the modern version of this disorder, bulimia nervosa, usually have a distorted view of their bodies and an obsession to avoid weight gain. Bulimia nervosa is characterised by patterns of binge eating followed by extreme measures to avoid gaining weight, such as self-induced vomiting and fasting. 16 Plutarch provides a useful summary of the debate about the nature of bulimia in antiquity; Quaest. conv. 6.8.1–6 (LCL 424.492–505).

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of the soul.17 Although somewhat unclear, it does seem that Chrysostom differentiates between the physical disease that is ancient bulimia (he shows some sympathy for those who suffer from it), and gluttony, which is the wilful act of over-eating (for which the perpetrators receive no sympathy). Unlike Soranus and Caelius, Chrysostom does not believe that πολυσαρκία, in general, is a disease—but βουλιμία is indeed a physical disease and, as we will see, gluttony is a psycho-somatic disease in the worst sense.

It is Chrysostom’s comments on this latter individual, the glutton, that merit attention in this analysis of regimen, masculinity, and psycho-somatic health—in fact,

Chrysostom says nothing else of those persons who are naturally overweight or bulimic in the ancient sense. Gluttony poses several major threats to an individual’s masculinity and psycho-somatic health more generally: it mars the beauty and symmetry of the body, it can damage the brain, resulting in irrational behaviour and even madness, and gluttonous behaviour can attract evil demons.

The first threat of gluttony, for Chrysostom, is its affect on one’s appearance— gluttony disrupts the bodily aesthetic. Of the glutton, Chrysostom laments:

But this man, having risen from his bed, when sunlight has filled the

marketplace, and people are tired of their domestic work, then this man gets

up, stretching himself out just as if he were indeed a fat pig, having wasted

the most beautiful part of the day in darkness. Then he sits there for a long

17 Hom. Phil. 11[12].4 (F5.130–31); Hom. 2 Tim. 7.2 (F6.225–26). This reference may be ironic, since a more general meaning of βουλιμία could simply be “extreme hunger” or even, symbolically, “poverty.” Plutarch refers to a scapegoat ceremony performed in Chaeronea in which a slave, who personified βουλιμία (hunger, that is, poverty) is symbolically driven out of the house while the owner would shout: “Get out of the doors, bulimia/hunger; and enter riches and health” (Quaest. conv. 6.8.1 [LCL 424.492– 93]); see also Jan Bremmer, “Scapegoat Rituals in Ancient Greece,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 87 (1983): 302. Chrysostom may not have been aware of the ceremony, but the close semantic range between bulimia, as hunger, and poverty, is apparent in his works. Ironically, greed is poverty of the soul and also an excessive hunger that is never satisfied—a proper psychic disease.

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time on his bed, often unable even to lift himself up from the previous

evening’s feasting, and having wasted even more time in listlessness,

proceeds to embellish himself, and spews forth a show of unseemliness,

with nothing human about him, but with all the appearance of a wild animal

in human form: his eyes are rheumy from the effect of wine, while the

wretched soul, just like the lame, is unable to get up, lumbering about with

its excessive flesh, just like an elephant.18

Although Chrysostom is known for his rhetoric against physical beauty, he finds it useful in his invective against gluttony, which mars even the simplest bodily aesthetic.19

This meticulous rhetorical ekphrasis of the glutton cited above is disparaging. He gets up at noon, but is constantly tired, slow, and lazy, with a bad hangover—a disgusting sight. This person is totally dehumanised, animalised, and teratogenised to the extreme, being compared to a pig, a seal, and an elephant. “For to gorge too much food is fitting for a panther, and a lion, and a bear,” Chrysostom says, “[n]o wonder, for those creatures do not have a rational soul.”20 The glutton is someone who has been totally overtaken by the bestial, and the dominance of their corporeal animality is so extensive that their physical bodies start to resemble various animals. 21 Yet, Chrysostom

18 Hom. Act. 35.3 (PG 60.256.41–53): Οὗτος δὲ ἀπὸ τῆς εὐνῆς ἀναστὰς, τοῦ ἡλίου τὴν ἀγορὰν ἐμπλήσαντος, καὶ πάντων κορεσθέντων τῆς οἰκείας ἐργασίας, ἀνίσταται διατεινόμενος, καθάπερ ὄντως ὗς πιαινόμενος, τὸ κάλλιστον τῆς ἡμέρας ἐν σκότει καταναλώσας. Εἶτα κάθηται πολὺν ἐπὶ τῆς εὐνῆς καιρὸν, πολλάκις οὐδὲ ἀνενεγκεῖν δυνάμενος ἀπὸ τῆς ἑσπερινῆς μέθης, καταναλώσας τὸν πλείονα καιρὸν ἐν τούτοις. Εἶτα καλλωπίζει ἑαυτὸν, καὶ πρόεισιν ἀσχημοσύνης θέατρον, οὐδὲν ἔχων ἀνθρώπου, ἀλλὰ πάντα θηρίου ἀνθρωπομόρφου· οἱ ὀφθαλμοὶ δίυγροι, οἴνου τὸ στόμα ἀπόζον, ἡ ταλαίπωρος ψυχὴ καθάπερ ἐπὶ κλίνης βεβλημένη ὑπὸ τῆς ἀμέτρως ἐγχεομένης ἑωλοκρασίας, τὸ μέγεθος τῶν σαρκῶν περιφέρουσα καθάπερ ἐλέφας. 19 E.g., Hom. Heb. 28.6–7 (F7.325–28). 20 Hom. Act. 27.2 (PG 60.207.40–42): τὸ γὰρ πολλὰ σιτεῖσθαι, παρδάλεως, καὶ λέοντος, καὶ ἄρκτου ἐστίν. Εἰκότως· οὐ γὰρ ἔχουσιν ἐκεῖνα ψυχὴν λογικήν. See also Hill, Eating to Excess, 117. 21 For more on the semantic functions of animal imagery in Chrysostom, see Blake Leyerle, “Locating Animals in John Chrysostom’s Thought,” in (Re)Visioning John Chrysostom: New Theories and Approaches, ed. Chris L. de Wet and Wendy Mayer (London: Routledge, 2018), Forthcoming. Leyerle’s

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continues, gluttony even destroys the hard bodies of animals. Here gluttony is linked to animalistic irrationality, a link that will be expounded upon in detail below. The animalisation of the glutton is a direct attack on such a person’s masculinity. Curiously, in this regard, Chrysostom betrays something curious about his own taste in women:

Therefore luxury not only makes the beautiful woman sickly, but also

unappealing to look upon. For when she is constantly belching nauseating

odours, breathing the fumes of stale wine, and is more flushed than she

ought to be, and she spoils the symmetry that is becoming of a woman, and

loses all her decency, and her body becomes flabby, her eyelids bloodshot

and distended, and her bulk extraordinarily great, and her obesity excessive,

just think how nauseating it is…. For nothing is so disgusting as a woman

engorging herself. Therefore among the poorer women one may see more

beauty, the excesses being consumed and not clinging to them, like some

disproportionate clay, useless and redundant.22

On the surface, Chrysostom’s standards of female beauty—based on leanness—sound much like the “skinny” beauty of the modern era. Poor women are more attractive to

Chrysostom because they are lean. Beauty to Chrysostom means symmetry (συμμετρία

important observation also applies here: “Chrysostom invokes animals semiotically. Because these images have a formal rather than a referential function, they cannot be understood apart from their literary quality: their meaning derives from a system of signification. They draw attention not to the ways in which beasts differ from humans but rather to the ways in which people resemble animals.” 22 Hom. 1 Cor. 39.9 (F2.505): καὶ γὰρ οὐκ ἐπίνοσον μόνον, ἀλλὰ καὶ αἰσχρὰν ποιεῖ ἡ τρυφὴ τὴν καλήν. Ὅταν γὰρ ἐρεύγηται συνεχῶς ἀηδῆ, καὶ σεσηπότος οἴνου πνέῃ, καὶ πλέον τοῦ δέοντος ἐρυθαίνηται, καὶ τὸν προσήκοντα γυναικὶ ῥυθμὸν διαφθείρῃ, καὶ τὴν εὐκοσμίαν ἀπολέσῃ πᾶσαν, καὶ πλαδαρὰ μὲν ἡ σὰρξ γίνηται, ὕφαιμοι δὲ καὶ διατεταμέναι αἱ βλεφαρίδες, καὶ πάχος πλέον τοῦ δέοντος, καὶ πολυσαρκία περιττή· ἐννόησον πόση γίνεται ἐντεῦθεν ἀηδία…. Οὐδὲν γὰρ οὕτως ἀηδὲς, ὡς γυνὴ πολλὰ σιτουμένη. Διὰ τοῦτο ἐν ταῖς πενεστέραις πλείονα τὴν εὐμορφίαν ἴδοι τις ἂν, τῶν περιττωμάτων ἀναλισκομένων καὶ οὐχὶ προσπεπλασμένων αὐταῖς, πηλοῦ τινος περιττοῦ δίκην, εἰκῆ καὶ μάτην.

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or ῥυθμός), and obesity resulting from gluttony disrupts this aesthetic. The excess heat from all the gormandising makes her abnormally flushed and gassy, and the corpulence affects her gait. Although Chrysostom does differentiate between people who are

“naturally” obese and those obese from gluttony, his invective against fat probably had an impact on all avoirdupois persons. Gluttony and obesity are stereotypically linked to wealth and luxury, but practically it would have been difficult to distinguish who was overweight due to gluttony and who was simply naturally portly. Imposing such standards of beauty and acceptability on both women and men often has very pernicious consequences.23

Related to this is the second, and perhaps most significant, threat gluttony poses to one’s masculinity: it made a person irrational and could even result in madness.

One’s diet influenced one’s mental state; the stomach had an impact on the brain, and thus the soul. The effects of gluttony on the brain, which represents the rational seat of the soul, may even cause brain damage or mental illness: “So too the stomach, when it is over-strained [βιασθεῖσα], along with these members [the mouth, throat, and tongue], often devastates and destroys the brain itself.”24 The edacious stomach’s threat to rationality is then a direct threat to one’s masculinity, and thus, social honour, since it inhibits psychic control. It is at this point that we need to highlight the importance of the relationship between the stomach and the brain, the anatomical representation of how diet affects the soul and, in the end, one’s psycho-somatic health. Chrysostom explains:

23 For an analysis of the impact of standards of female beauty in the modern period, see Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women (New York: Harper Perennial, 2002). 24 Hom. Matt. 44.5 (PG 57.472.15–17): οὕτω καὶ αὕτη μετὰ τῶν μελῶν τούτων καὶ τὸν ἐγκέφαλον πολλάκις αὐτὸν βιασθεῖσα ἀπόλλυσι καὶ διαφθείρει.

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Because of the heat of fermentation [in the stomach], noxious vapours are

sent forth all over the body, as if from an oven. And if people outside are

disgusted [by the belching], what do you think the brain suffers inside,

overpowered by these fumes? And what about the channels of the heated

and obstructed blood? And what about those reservoirs, the liver and the

spleen, and of the canals by which the excrement is discharged?25

The idea that gastric vapours rise and influence the brain was extremely popular, from the time of the late first-century doctor Rufus of Ephesus up to the tenth-century Arabic physician Isḥāq ibn ‘Imrān, continuing even into the modern era.26 Galen, from his De locis affectis, thought that the stomach could influence the brain, as well as the heart— this is because the stomach is connected to the brain via the vagus nerve, while the heart and stomach are connected via the so-called “great artery.”27 The identification of this arterial link between brain and stomach was quite significant and up to the nineteenth century it was referred to, alternatively, as the pneumogastric nerve.28

25 Hom. 1 Tim. 13.4 (F6.112): ἀτμοὶ πάντοθεν ἀπὸ τοῦ σώματος ζοφώδεις, καθάπερ ἀπὸ καμίνου τῆς θερμότητος σαπείσης ἔνδον. Εἰ δὲ οἱ ἔξωθεν οὕτω δυσχεραίνουσι, τί οἴει παθεῖν τὸν ἐγκέφαλον ἔνδον, πληττόμενον συνεχῶς ὑπὸ τῶν ἀτμῶν; τί δὲ τοὺς ὀχετοὺς τοῦ αἵματος ζέοντος καὶ ἐμφραττομένου; τί δὲ τὰς δεξαμενὰς ἐκείνας, τὸ ἧπαρ, τὸν σπλῆνα; τί δὲ αὐτὰς τὰς ἀμάρας τῆς κόπρου; See also Jessica Wright, “Brain, Nerves, and Ecclesial Membership,” in (Re)Visioning John Chrysostom: New Theories and Approaches, ed. Chris L. de Wet and Wendy Mayer (London: Routledge, 2018), Forthcoming. Hom. Act. 31.4 (PG 60.232–234.39) provides an interesting discussion of the similarities between the heating effects of alcoholic fumes on the stomach (with a vivid description of someone who vomits) and the heat of anger on the soul. 26 Peter E. Pormann, “Medical Epistemology and Melancholy: Rufus of Ephesus and Miskawayh,” in Mental Disorders in the Classical World, ed. William Harris, Columbia Studies on the Classical Tradition 38 (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 240. 27 Loc. aff. 3.9 (K8.178–79), 5.6 (K8.338), 6.2 (K8.382); Rudolf E. Siegel, Galen’s System of Physiology and Medicine: An Analysis of His Doctrines and Observations on Blood Flow, Respiration, Humors and Internal Diseases (Basel: Karger, 1968), 362–65; Brooke Holmes, “Disturbing Connections: Sympathetic Affections, Mental Disorder, and the Elusive Soul in Galen,” in Mental Disorders in the Classical World, ed. William Harris, Columbia Studies on the Classical Tradition 38 (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 168–69. 28 Richard C. Rogers, Gerlinda E. Hermann, and R. Alberto Travagli, “Brainstem Control of Gastric Function,” in Physiology of the Gastrointestinal Tract, ed. Leonard R. Johnson et al., vol. 1 of (Amsterdam: Academic Press, 2006), 851–52.

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Fig. Course and distribution of the glossopharyngeal, vagus, and accessory nerves; from Gray’s Anatomy

(1918), plate 793 (Public Domain).29

The traffic between the stomach and the brain through the vagal nerve is multi- directional, so a headache could also cause gastric distress; however, Galen believed the vagal nerve was more sensitive to the traffic from the stomach to the brain. Galen warned that noxious vapours or humours could rise up from the stomach to the brain.30

It is also the stomach, and not the liver, that transmits hunger and thirst to the brain.31

29 Online: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gray793.png. n.d. [Accessed 18 April 2018]. 30 Loc. aff. 1.6 (K8.48); Grant, Dieting for an Emperor, 11; Holmes, “Disturbing Connections,” 168. 31 Hipp. 3 epid. 3.15 (K17a.2.664); Usu part. 4.7 (K3.275).

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The stomach thus had the ability to cause mental disorders, or mental stability. Diet and mental illness are very much related, both in Galen and Chrysostom. As Holmes notes, the sympathetic arterial lines form a triangle between the stomach, brain, and heart—a second noteworthy anatomical trinity. Holmes refers to this as the “rival triangle” to that of the brain, heart, and liver.32

The same threat of rising noxious vapours is found with the excessive consumption of wine. In De statuis 11,33 Chrysostom highlights the natural ventilation of the brain, important both for smell and to avoid encephalic suffocation. It is also the ventilative nature of the brain that makes it susceptible to the vapours of wine, resulting in drunkenness 34—alcohol abuse, to Chrysostom, is another form of gluttony. To

Chrysostom, wine was especially a sin of women and old persons, due to the natural coldness and dryness of their bodies—Galen, too, believed that old age is the result of the cooling and drying of the body,35 which is why older people may bathe more frequently and have more wine. Chrysostom gives careful advice regarding wine:

For this [the excessive drinking of wine] was especially the vice of women

and of old age. The desire for wine arises because of the natural coldness at

that period of life, therefore he [Paul in Tit 2:3] focuses his exhortation on

that point, to remove all opportunities for drunkenness, wishing them to be

far removed from that vice, and to escape the ridicule that accompanies it.

For the fumes build up more easily from below [in the stomach], and the

32 Holmes, “Disturbing Connections,” 169–70. 33 Stat. 11.3 (PG 49.123.37–38). 34 See Wright, “Brain, Nerves, and Ecclesial Membership,” for an extensive discussion of Chrysostom’s understanding of the brain and how he uses the image of the brain rhetorically and politically. 35 Tim G. Parkin, Old Age in the Roman World: A Cultural and Social History, Ancient Society and History (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 239–72; see also chapter 6 of this study.

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membranes of the brain are harmed from being impaired by age, and this

especially results in intoxication. Yet wine is necessary at this age, because

of its weakness, but not much is needed. Nor do young women require

much, although for a different reason, because it kindles the flame of lust.36

Just like a physician, Chrysostom prescribes a certain amount of wine for older persons and women, but he interweaves his medical advice with ethical exhortation. According to Chrysostom, as with the medical knowledge of his day, with old age comes the erosion of the brain’s membranes, which is also used to explain the occurrence of dementia in old persons. The moisture of wine helps with the dryness of the body, as

Chrysostom knows that the body concocts wine into water,37 while the heat of wine assists with the cooling effects of old age. His advice for younger women is the same, but the reasons are different—women can have wine because their bodies are naturally colder than those of men, but also not too much, not because of the erosion of the brain necessarily, but because of the danger of enkindling lust. The heating properties of wine explained its widespread use in antiquity as a prime aphrodisiac. Wine caused an increase of heat and moisture, allowing the blood in the body to concoct male and female semen more rapidly, and thus resulting in an increased sexual appetite, which

36 Hom. Tit. 4.1 (F6.294): Μάλιστα γὰρ τοῦτο γυναικῶν τὸ ἐλάττωμα καὶ τοῦ γήρως· τῷ γὰρ κατεψῦχθαι τὰς ἡλικίας πολλὴ καὶ τούτου γίνεται ἡ ἐπιθυμία. ῞Οθεν καὶ περὶ τούτου μάλιστα τὴν παραίνεσιν πρὸς αὐτὰς ποιεῖται, πανταχόθεν τὴν μέθην ἐκκόπτων, καὶ τοῦ νοσήματος τούτου ἐκτὸς αὐτὰς εἶναι βουλόμενος, καὶ διαφυγεῖν τὸν ἐντεῦθεν γέλωτα. Καὶ γὰρ εὐκολώτερον καὶ οἱ κάτωθεν ἀτμοὶ ἀναφέρονται, καὶ αἱ μήνιγγες τὴν βλάβην δέχονται τῷ πεπαλαιῶσθαι αὐτὰς τῷ χρόνῳ· καὶ ἐντεῦθεν ἡ μέθη μάλιστα γίνεται. Δεῖ μὲν οὖν οἴνου τῇ ἡλικίᾳ ταύτῃ μάλιστα, ἀσθενὴς γάρ· δεῖ δὲ οὐ πολλοῦ, ὥσπερ οὐδὲ ταῖς νέαις, οὐ διὰ τὴν αὐτὴν αἰτίαν, ἀλλὰ διὰ τὸ σφόδρα τὴν φλόγα τῆς ἐπιθυμίας ἀνάπτεσθαι. Galen also prescribed wine with great moderation; San. tuend. 1.11 (K6.54); Kyle Harper, From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 57–58. 37 Hom Jo. 25.1 (PG 59.149.48–49).

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was a serious problem for Chrysostom.38 But as the noxious vapours of excess food rise to the brain, so too do the fumes of wine rise, and thus strain the brain.39

Chrysostom (and Galen) knew that the stomach posed a great danger to the brain and, hence, the soul. Chrysostom states: “The stomach has its determined limit

[μέτρον], and anything given beyond this limit, will necessarily destroy the whole life of the body.”40 The person that follows a moderate diet eats “not so as to distend the stomach, or to cloud the reason, but so as to recover the strength of the body when it has become weak.”41 Here we see how Chrysostom links gluttony to the clouding or darkening of the reason (σκοτῶσαι τὸν λογισμὸν)—the idea is that gastric vapours, like clouds, irritate and darken the brain and, essentially, the soul. Fasting was therefore quite beneficial to the health of the brain and soul. Chrysostom does refer to what we may call psychic fasting (for instance, in De statuis 342 he speaks of the fasting of the ears, eyes, voice, and so on), but fasting from food is also directly healthy to the soul:

To obstruct the sewers is to breed a plague. Yet if a stench from the outside

is pestilential, that which is built up on the inside of the body [in the

38 As in the Hippocratic corpus and Galen, Chrysostom’s embryology dictated, as we have noted, that the male and female contributed, seminally, to the formation of a child despite the fact that the female seed was still inferior to that of the male due to a deficiency of natural heat; on the two-seed theory in the Hippocratic corpus: Nat. puer. 1 (LCL 520.30–31); see also Iain M. Lonie, The Hippocratic Treatises, “On Generation,” “On the Nature of the Child,” “Diseases IV”: A Commentary (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1981), 6; Michael Boylan, “The Galenic and Hippocratic Challenges to Aristotle’s Conception Theory,” Journal of the History of Biology 17.1 (1984): 83–112.; in Galen: Sem. 1.7 (K4.535–39), 146.14–20 (K4.595–96), 176.13 (K4.624); Usu part. 14.6 (K4.158–65); see also Anthony Preus, “Galen’s Criticism of Aristotle’s Conception Theory,” Journal of the History of Biology 10.1 (1977): 65–85; Roberto L. Presti, “Informing Matter and Enmattered Forms: Aristotle and Galen on the ‘Power’ of the Seed,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 22.5 (2014): 929–50.; in Chrysostom: Hom. Eph. 20.4 (F4.306); Hom. Rom. 30[31].4 (F1.469–70), where Chrysostom refers to the seed of Sarah. 39 For Galen’s views of the rising of wine vapours to the brain, causing drunkenness, see Hipp. fract. 3.21 (K18b.568); Hipp. vict. acut. 3 (K15.672). 40 Hom. Eph. 2.4 (F4.123): Μέτρον ὡρισμένον ἐστὶ τῆς γαστρὸς, καὶ πέρα τούτου δοθὲν ἐξ ἀνάγκης διέφθειρε τὸ πᾶν ζῶον. 41 Stat. 9.1 (PG 49.104.43–46). 42 Stat. 3.9 (PG 49.53.9–47).

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bowels], which is not able to find an outlet, what sicknesses must it not

cause both to body and soul?”43

For Chrysostom, the stomach was designed to carry only a certain load: “For, in fact, God has set the stomach in our bodies as a kind of mill [μύλην], giving it a proportionate power, and appointing a set measure which it ought to grind every day.”44

This is almost identical to Galen’s own view of the stomach as an active agent (unlike the more passive intestines), almost a second brain, which is a storehouse (ταμιεῖον or aerarium), “a work of divine, not human art (θεῖόν τι καὶ οὐκ ἀνθρώπειον ὑπάρχον

δημιούργημα).”45 The stomach, in a sense, determined the well-being of a creature because it was responsible for humoural balance. From Chrysostom’s and Galen’s comments, it is this active nature of the stomach that is the reason why it requires such control, and why it can be a threat to one’s psycho-somatic health and, essentially,

43 Hom. 1 Tim. 13.4 (F6.112–13) (my italics): Ἀπόφραξον τοὺς ὀχετοὺς τῶν ἀμαρῶν, καὶ ὄψει λοιμὸν εὐθέως τικτόμενον. Εἶτα ἡ μὲν ἔξωθεν προσπεσοῦσα δυσωδία λοιμὸν τίκτει, ἡ δὲ ἔνδον οὖσα, καὶ πάντοθεν ἐμπεφραγμένη τῷ στεγανῷ τοῦ σώματος, καὶ μὴ ἔχουσα πόθεν διαφορηθῇ, μυρίας οὐκ ἐργάζεται νόσους καὶ τῷ σώματι καὶ τῇ ψυχῇ; See also Leyerle, “Refuse, Filth, and Excrement.” 44 Hom. 1 Cor. 39.9 (F2.505): Καὶ γὰρ καθάπερ μύλην τινὰ τὴν γαστέρα ἡμῖν ἐνέθηκεν ὁ θεὸς, σύμμετρον αὐτῇ δύναμιν δοὺς, καὶ τάξας μέτρον ῥητὸν, ὅπερ αὐτὴνἀλεῖν δεῖ καθ' ἑκάστην ἡμέραν. In a different homily, Chrysostom compares the stomach to the ocean—as God has set limits for the ocean not to flood the earth, so too limits must be set on the stomach that it does not destroy the body; see Hom. Phil. 13[14].2 (F5.144); see also Pauline Allen, trans., John Chrysostom, Homilies on Philippians, Writings from the Greco-Roman World 16 (Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature, 2013), 271; Hill, Eating to Excess, 116. 45 Usu part. 4.3 (K3.267). Galen, in the same section, writes: Αἱ δ' ὥσπερ οἱ ἐν ταῖς πόλεσιν ἀχθοφόροι τὸν ἐκκεκαθαρμένον ἐν τῷ ταμιείῳ σῖτον εἴς τι κοινὸν τῆς πόλεως φέρουσιν ἐργαστήριον πεφθησόμενόν τε καὶ χρήσιμον εἰς τὸ τρέφειν ἤδη γενησόμενον, οὕτω καὶ αὗται τὴν ἐν τῇ γαστρὶ προκατειργασμένην τροφὴν ἀναφέρουσιν εἴς τι κοινὸν ὅλου τοῦ ζῴου πέψεως χωρίον, ὃ καλοῦμεν ἧπαρ. “Just as city porters carry the wheat cleaned in the storehouse to some public bakery of the city where is will be baked and made fit for nourishment, so these veins carry the nutriment already elaborated in the stomach up to a place for concoction common to the whole animal, a place which we call the liver.” Translation: Margaret T. May, trans., Galen on the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body: Translated from the Greek with an Introduction and Commentary (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1968), 1:204. See also Galen, Sympt. caus. 7.3 (K7.129): ἡ φύσις ἐδημιούργησε μὲν καὶ τὴν γαστέρα ταμεῖον τροφῆς, οἷόν περ τὴν γῆν τοῖς φυτοῖς. “Nature has fashioned the stomach as a storehouse of nutriment, like the earth for plants.” Translation: Ian Johnston, trans., Galen: On Diseases and Symptoms (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 227.

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masculinity—it is like a rebellious slave. Here Chrysostom links the activity of the stomach to mental illness:

[I]t is they who lie the whole day on couches, and join breakfast and supper

together, and distend their stomach, and deaden their senses, and sink the

ship with an overloaded cargo of food, and waterlog the ship, and drown it

like some shipwreck of the body, and create fetters, and manacles, and gags,

and bind their whole body with the constraint of drunkenness and surfeit

that is more grievous than an iron chain, and enjoy no healthy pure sleep

undisturbed by nightmares, and are more wretched than maniacs,

introducing a self-imposed demon to the soul.46

As in the case of brain damage, 47 gluttony “deadens the senses (τὰς αἰσθήσεις

πηροῦντες)” and makes such a person’s state of mind worse than that of an insane person. It also attracts demons to the person’s soul, an issue we will address shortly.

This “rival triangle” is the problem that Galen and Chrysostom faced. In Platonic thought, the liver, the seat of the appetitive desires, can be controlled by the rational part, the brain, but this is not the case with the stomach, which “lies beyond the control of the nerves that convey messages from the brain to the rest of the body.”48 The

46 Laed. 7.37–49 (SC 103.96–99): οἱ πρὸς διαμεμετρημένην τὴν ἡμέραν ἐπὶ τῶν στιβάδων κατακείμενοι καὶ τὰ δεῖπνα τοῖς ἀρίστοις συνάπτοντες καὶ τὴν γαστέρα διαρρηγνύντες καὶ τὰς αἰσθήσεις πηροῦντες καὶ τῷ ὑπερόγκῳ τῶν ἐδεσμάτων φορτίῳ τὸ πλοῖον καταποντίζοντες καὶ ὑπέραντλον ποιοῦντες τὴν ναῦν καὶ, καθάπερ ἐν ναυαγίῳ τῷ τοῦ σώματος, κατακλύζοντες αὐτὴν καὶ πέδας καὶ χειροπέδας καὶ γλωσσοπέδας ἐπινοοῦντες καὶ ἅπαν αὐτῶν καταδεσμοῦντες τὸ σῶμα, ἁλύσεως σιδηρᾶς χαλεπωτέρῳ δεσμῷ τῷ τῆς μέθης καὶ τῆς τρυφῆς καὶ μήτε ὕπνον αἱρούμενοι γνήσιον καὶ εἰλικρινῆ, μήτε ὀνειράτων ἀπηλλαγμένοι φοβερῶν, τῶν τε μαινομένων ὄντες ἀθλιώτεροι καὶ αὐθαίρετον τὸν δαίμονα ἐπεισάγοντες τῇ ψυχῇ. This is a common image in Chrysostom’s discussions of gluttony; see also Hom. Gen. 10.5 (PG 53.84.15–22). The image of the gluttonous body as an overloaded ship is also present in Plutarch’s Tuend. san. 4.10–13 (Moralia 123e–f, 128b–f; LCL 224.242–50); see also Shaw, Burden of the Flesh, 43–44. 47 See Hom. Act. 2.3 (PG 60.32.34–40) above for the same terminology. 48 Holmes, “Disturbing Connections,” 172.

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stomach has the capacity to become a master of the body, hence Chrysostom’s numerous references to “slaves of the stomach (γαστρίδουλοι).”49 The stomach should be a slave to the other organs of the body, and not the body a slave to the stomach. “You have received a stomach, that you may feed, not distend it, that you may have mastery

[κρατῇς] over it, not have it as a mistress [δέσποιναν] over you,” Chrysostom warns,

“that it may serve [ὑπηρετῇ] you for the nourishment of the other members, not that you may minister to it, not that you should exceed its limits.”50 Carefully avoiding any

Manichaeanesque view of the body and its members, Chrysostom clearly states that the stomach is not evil in itself, but gluttony is the main enemy.51 The stomach then becomes the anatomical representation of animality, and when the stomach gains mastery over someone, it is similar to the serpent gaining mastery over Eve—it is thus a moral failure, a failure of self-control.

So by assuming the role of dietary advisors, both the physician and, especially in the case of Chrysostom, the Christian medical philosopher, fulfil the role of the external controlling principle between the brain and the stomach, making them crucial not only for the health of the stomach, but for the health of the entire body and mind.

The preacher assumes the role of the brain. Such a move is understandable in

Chrysostom, since he also states that the apostles represent the brain of the ecclesiastical body.52 In this sense, Chrysostom also fashions his own authority and manliness by occupying a dominating position, medically speaking, over the slave of the stomach.

Moreover, by deploying the discourse of slavery into the realm of anatomy, a new

49 See, for instance, Hom. Matt. 13.1 (PG 57.209.52, 212.45), 49.3 (PG 58.500.23); and the use of the term γαστρίδουλοι in Hom. Jo. 44.1 (PG 59.247.64–65); see also Sandnes, Belly and Body, 244–52. 50 Hom. Phil. 13[14].2 (F5.144): Κοιλίαν ἔλαβες, ἵνα τρέφῃς, οὐχ ἵνα διασπᾷς· ἵνα κρατῇς αὐτῆς, οὐχ ἵνα δέσποιναν ἔχῃς· ἵνα σοι ὑπηρετῇ πρὸς τὴν τῶν λοιπῶν μορίων διατροφὴν, οὐχ ἵνα σὺ αὐτῇ ὑπηρετῇς, οὐχ ἵνα τοὺς ὅρους ἐκβαίνῃς. See also Hom. 1 Cor. 17.1 (F2.196–98). 51 Hom. 1 Cor. 17.1 (F2.196). 52 Hom. Eph. 11.4 (F4.221).

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medical-kyriarchal field is created, in which physicians and preachers receive a potent measure of power and masculinity. The homilist assumes the position of the rational soul that is actually able to control the stomach like a slaveholder, thus assisting people not to become gastric slaves. The stomach’s ability to override the rational soul also explains the animalisation of the glutton—animals and gluttons, for Chrysostom, are incapable of rational self-control. “For nothing is so conducive to pleasure and health as to be hungry and thirsty when one reclines for a meal,” Chrysostom says, “and to experience satiety with the simple necessity of food, never overstepping these limits, nor imposing a load on the body that is too great for its own strength.”53

A third threat that gluttony poses is related to general ill physical health and even stunted physical development. The result of gluttony is the universal destruction of the body, since, as Galen also noted, the stomach will damage the heart, liver, and the brain. “If, then, one puts in more food, it becomes indigestible and it does harm to the whole body,” Chrysostom states, “and this results in diseases and weaknesses and deformities.” 54 He believes that gluttony causes migraines, gout, numerous other diseases, and general humoural imbalance.55 “For they are quickly overcome with gout, and untimely palsy, and premature old age, and headaches, and flatulence, and indigestion, and loss of appetite,” Chrysostom adds, “and they require constant attendance of doctors, and perpetual dosing with drugs, and daily care.” 56 Thus,

53 Laed. 7.57–61 (SC 103.98–99): Οὐδὲν γὰρ οὕτω καὶ ἡδονὴν καὶ ὑγίειαν ἐργάζεται, ὡς τὸπεινῶντα καὶ διψῶντα τῶν προκειμένων ἅπτεσθαι καὶ κόρον εἰδέναι τὴν χρείαν μόνην καὶ μὴ ὑπερβαίνειν ταύτης τὰ σκάμματα, μηδὲ μεῖζον τῆς δυνάμεως ἐπιτιθέναι τὸ ἄχθος τῷ σώματι. 54 Hom. 1 Cor. 39.9 (F2.505): ῍Αν οὖν τις ἐπιβάλῃ πλείονα, ἀκατέργαστα γενόμενα τῷ παντὶ λυμαίνεται. ᾿Εντεῦθεν νόσοι καὶ ἀσθένειαι καὶ ἀμορφίαι. 55 Hom. Gen. 10.5 (PG 53.84.11–15). 56 Laed. 8.10–15 (SC 103.100–1): Καὶ γὰρ καὶ ποδάγραι ταχέως αὐτοῖς ἐφίπτανται καὶ τρόμος ἄκαιρος καὶ γῆρας ἄωρον καὶ κεφαλαλγίαι καὶ διατάσεις καὶ στομάχων πηρώσεις καὶ ὀρέξεως ἀναίρεσις καὶ διηνεκῶν δέονται ἰατρῶν καὶ συνεχῶν τῶν φαρμάκων καὶ καθημερινῆς τῆς θεραπείας.

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Chrysostom’s jeremiad about gluttonous passion was not only ascetic moralisation, it was vital health advice for physical, sexual, and mental wellness.

Chrysostom also highlights the lethargy and cardiovascular problems such gluttonous individuals had.57 In his discussion of the physical dangers of gluttony,

Chrysostom makes an interesting statement that may refer to an adapted version of

Galenic natural πνεῦμα. “Furthermore, I have heard a physician say that many have been bound from reaching their proper height by nothing so much as luxurious living,”

Chrysostom explains, “since the breath [πνεύματος] is obstructed by the multitude of things which are swallowed and being used in the digestion of such things, that which should assist with growth is spent on this digestion of excess foodstuffs.”58 In terms of early concepts of cardiovascular disease, 59 Chrysostom knew that the breathing difficulties associated with obesity caused numerous problems. Because the body had trouble drawing breath, it caused physical problems related to the πνεῦμα of the body.

In another instance, which will be discussed below, Chrysostom also refers to the breathing problems the glutton faces during sleep, which is probably a reference to sleep apnoea.60

Now from his comments in his eleventh homily on Ephesians,61 it does seem that Chrysostom differentiates between psychic and vital πνεῦμα. Although he speaks

57 Hom. 1 Cor. 39.9 (F2.505); for a general overview of coronary heart disease in late antiquity and the mediaeval period, see Joshua O. Leibowitz, The History of Coronary Heart Disease, Publications of the Wellcome Institute of the History of Medicine: New Series 18 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), 41–48. 58 Hom. 1 Cor. 39.9 (F2.505): Ἐγὼ δὲ καὶ ἰατρῶν ἤκουσα λεγόντων, ὅτι πολλοὺς καὶ πρὸς ὕψος ἀναδραμεῖν ἡ τρυφὴ μάλιστα ἐκώλυσε. Τοῦ γὰρ πνεύματος ἐγκοπτομένου τῷ πλήθει τῶν καταβαλλομένων καὶ περὶ τὴν τούτων ἐργασίαν ἀσχολουμένου, ὅπερ εἰς αὔξησιν ἔδει προχωρεῖν, τοῦτο δαπανᾶται εἰς τὴν τῶν περιττῶν ἐργασίαν. 59 See W. C. Aird, “Discovery of the Cardiovascular System: From Galen to William Harvey,” Journal of Thrombosis and Haemostasis 9, Supplement 1 (2011): 118–29. 60 Stat. 2.8 (PG 49.44.54–45.7). 61 Hom. Eph. 11.4 (F4.221–22).

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of πνεῦμα in a general sense, as a non-expert, he does mention that the heart receives

πνεῦμα, but then also refers separately to the πνεῦμα distributed by the brain.

Chrysostom concludes by saying that God is the source of the heavenly πνεῦμα, and views the apostle as “the most vital vessel of the body (ἀγγεῖον τοῦ σώματός [ἐστι] τὸ

καιριώτερον),” that is, the brain—the words of the apostle are the arteries by which

God’s πνεῦμα reaches the other members. “Therefore, if we desire to enjoy the benefit of that Spirit which is from the Head,” Chrysostom continues, “let us be united among each another.”62

But Galen also speaks somewhat elusively of a natural πνεῦμα or spiritus naturalis. 63 The fact that the πνεῦμα Chrysostom mentions assisted in digestion confirms a link with the liver.64 Due to the complex structure of hepatic vascular architecture, Galen was more reluctant to make this connection explicitly.65 These types of πνεῦμα in Galenic thought—psychic, vital, and natural—should also not necessarily be seen as counterparts to the three parts of the soul. Galen was quite ambiguous about the role of the natural πνεῦμα. Natural πνεῦμα is related to the liver, but it is not clear what this relationship entails. The πνεῦμα Chrysostom speaks of here in Hom. 1 Cor.

39.9 seems to be a reference to the nutritive natural πνεῦμα, which assisted in growth, related somewhat ambiguously to the blood of the liver (which he also mentions in

62 Hom. Eph. 11.4 (F4.222): Εἰ τοίνυν βουλόμεθα τοῦ πνεύματος ἀπολαύειν τοῦ ἀπὸ τῆς κεφαλῆς, ἀλλήλων ἐχώμεθα. 63 Galen mentions these types of πνεῦμα in Meth. med. 12.5 (K10.839–40); see esp. Julius Rocca, “From Doubt to Certainty. Aspects of the Conceptualisation and Interpretation of Galen’s Natural Pneuma,” in Blood, Sweat and Tears—The Changing Concepts of Physiology from Antiquity Into Early Modern Europe, ed. Manfred Horstmanshoff, Helen King, and Claus Zittel, Interdisciplinary Studies in Early Modern Culture 25 (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 629–60; Julius Rocca, Galen on the Brain: Anatomical Knowledge and Physiological Speculation in the Second Century AD (Leiden: Brill, 2003); Sidney Ochs, A History of Nerve Functions: From Animal Spirits to Molecular Mechanisms (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 24–35. 64 Galen does ascribe a nutritive function to the liver and its blood; Nat. fac. 3.13 (K2.201); see also Rocca, “Galen’s Natural Pneuma,” 638–39; Ochs, A History of Nerve Functions, 27–28. 65 Anat. admin. 6.11 (K2.575–77).

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Hom. Eph. 11.4).66 Gluttony inhibits the intake of this type of πνεῦμα, which causes growth deficiencies—a serious problem if a man wants to develop and become physically strong and dominant. Spiritually, also, as the various types of πνεῦμα of the body sustain it and make it grow, so too God’s Holy Πνεῦμα sustains and feeds the body of Christ that is the church—God’s Spirit is also animative and nutritive.

What is then interesting is that, if the physician that advised Chrysostom was referring to natural πνεῦμα, it may be a misinterpretation or a further development of

Galenic pneumatic theory. It is not surprising that Chrysostom, not a physician proper, may have then linked natural πνεῦμα to the nutritive capabilities of the liver, at least after having the discussion with this unknown physician. Rather significantly, it means that the ascribing of Galen’s three types of πνεῦμα to the three parts of the soul may have occurred already in late antiquity during Chrysostom’s time.

Ironically, gluttony affects the nutrition of the body negatively and stems growth—from Chrysostom’s holistic perspective, overeating actually provides the body with less pneumatic nutrition for growth. Chrysostom continues his tirade against gluttony with gendered invective: “[T]he bodies of the gluttons are flaccid and softer than wax, and besieged with a swarm of illnesses.”67 The composition of the body changes, and it becomes riddled with disease—note the effeminising language and language of sexual impotence—the body becomes soft (μαλακός) and flaccid

(πλαδαρά; which could also mean moist and watery, typical of a female body).

Chrysostom also remarks that because of his protruding stomach, the gluttonous man looks just like a woman who is pregnant.68 Moreover, the obese man cannot speak well

66 See Rocca, “Galen’s Natural Pneuma,” 641. But see also Nemesius, Nat. hom. 26.87.18–27 (Morani 87–89). 67 Laed. 8.9–10 (SC 103.100–1): ἐκείνων δὲ πλαδαρὰ καὶ παντὸς κηροῦ μαλακώτερα καὶ ἑσμῷ νοσημάτων πολιορκούμενα; 68 Hom. 1 Cor. 39.9 (F2.506).

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due to his breathing problems—obesity was therefore also seen as a speech impediment, which would influence one’s masculinity quite negatively.69

Chrysostom frequently identified luxury with effeminate and even homoerotic behaviour. This is because Chrysostom sees same-sex passion as a result of excessive lust—the build-up of desire is the consequence of excessive overindulgence, especially gastronomic indulgence. As Aline Rousselle has shown, one’s diet determines one’s sexual drive, and gluttony often results in excessive sexual desire; this was a major problem for early Christian monks.70 Physical corruption leads to moral corruption. The excess of sexual desire that results from luxury and gluttony drives people to engage in homoerotic sexual relations. Gluttony and luxury are seen as the great sins of Sodom.71

Luxury and excess made the body and the soul “soft.”72 Regarding Chrysostom’s view of gluttony as sin, Karl Sandnes rightly states: “It was the belly which caused Adam to be thrown out of Paradise, Noah’s flood was due to the stomach, and God’s punishment of Sodom was caused by the belly of the inhabitants.”73 Luxury, especially as manifest in gluttony, is made the origin and key denominator in all ancient psycho-somatic pathologies.

The medicalisation of the passions, then, had the important purpose of affirming a masculine code of behaviour, and, in turn, provided an apparatus of fear—all disease

69 See esp. Hom. 1 Cor. 17 (F2.196–205); Hom. Jo. 22.3 (PG 59.136.66–138.36). 70 Rousselle, Porneia, 160–78. 71 Gen. Hom. 1.6 (PG 53.23.58–24.4); Hom. 1 Cor. 39.9 (F2.504–5); Chris L. de Wet, “John Chrysostom on Homoeroticism,” Neotestamentica 48.1 (2014): 207–8; Benjamin H. Dunning, “John Chrysostom and Same-Sex Eros in the History of Sexuality,” in (Re)Visioning John Chrysostom: New Theories and Approaches, ed. Chris L. de Wet and Wendy Mayer (London: Routledge, 2018), Forthcoming. 72 Hom. Rom. 4[5].3–4 (F1.51–52); Inan. 16.239–56 (SC 188.96–101). 73 Sandnes, Belly and Body, 251. Philoxenus of Mabbug held a similar view; Kitchen, “Lust of the Belly.”

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now springs forth from excessive indulgence in the passions.74 As with heresy, gluttony now also experiences a medical persecution by the restraint of the passions. These fields are at times combined—for instance, Chrysostom vilifies Jews and heretics as gluttons.75 He depicts drunkenness and gluttony as the polycephalous Scylla or Hydra.

This interesting depiction of gluttony and drunkenness serves to both pathologise the glutton, who becomes a weak, soft, sick, and shameful victim, and heroicise the moderate ascetic, who is healthy in body and soul, who represents the true herculean soldier of Christ. The mythical teratogenisation of gluttony again operates as a genealogy of vice—gluttony is the body, and all other vices like anger, wrath, sloth, and so on, are the monster’s heads. We must remember again here that immoderate passionate behaviour is understood as the result of humoural and elemental imbalance.

Chrysostom notes, for instance, that if there is an increase in yellow bile, the result is excessive anger (which is also signalled by excessive heat and flushing).76 Gluttony directly affected the humours, which affected one’s entire emotional disposition. This is what made gluttony so dangerous to ancient Christian thinkers like Chrysostom.

A fourth threat to one’s masculinity is further added to the problem of gluttony, namely demonisation. Not only does excessive indulgence lead to ill health and death, but the sick and sinful soul also has the propensity to attract to it demons (also consisting of thin matter, like the soul), leading to even more agony, disease, and demonic

74 We have something very similar, as Foucault has pointed out, in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with the problem of masturbation. As with gluttony in late antiquity, during this period masturbation was considered the root of most bodily illnesses; Foucault, Abnormal, 231–62. 75 Gen. Hom. 1.4 (PG 53.25.42–45); Hom. Jo. 46.1 (PG 59.257.2–258.18); see also Sandnes, Belly and Body, 250. 76 Hom. Eph. 15.1 (F4.253–55); on the heat of anger: Hom. 1 Tim. 13.4 (F6.113); Blake Leyerle, “‘Anger Is a Shameless Dog’: Wrath in the Preaching of John Chrysostom” (presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, San Diego, CA, 2014). On anger and yellow bile, see Mark Grant, Galen on Food and Diet (London: Routledge, 2002), 12–18.

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domination.77 Some ancients, like Porphyry, actually believed that excessive eating

(and sex) could result in a person actually swallowing an evil spirit because of the excessive breathing during gormandising or copulation. The flatulence caused by gluttony is then not only a release of the air swallowed during such practices, but it could also be a sign of an evil spirit leaving the body.78 Differing only minutely from

Porphyry, the early fourth-century Pseudo-Clementine Homily 9.9–10 states that demons actually possess human beings in order to experience the passions through the organs of the humans—the souls of humans and the demon then actually become intertwined. Because demons do not have tongues, teeth, or stomachs, they possess human organs so as to feel the pleasures of taste and eating. It reads:

But the reason why the demons delight in entering into human bodies is

this. Being spirits, and having desires after meats and drinks, and sexual

pleasures, but not being able to partake of these by reason of their being

spirits, and wanting organs fitted for their enjoyment, they enter into the

bodies of people, in order that, getting organs to minister to them, they may

obtain the things that they wish, whether it be meat, by means of people’s

teeth, or sexual pleasure, by means of human sexual organs. Hence, in order

to put the demons to flight, the most useful help is abstinence, and fasting,

and suffering of affliction. For if they enter into human bodies for the sake

of sharing pleasures, it is manifest that they are put to flight by suffering.79

77 Mayer, “Medicine in Transition,” 18. 78 See Porphyry, Phil. orac. frg. 326 in Heidi Marx-Wolf, Spiritual Taxonomies and Ritual Authority: Platonists, Priests, and Gnostics in the Third Century C.E., Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 20–21. 79 Ps.-Clem. hom. 9.10 (Rehm et al., 135): τὸ δὲ τοὺς δαίμονας γλίχεσθαι εἰς τὰ ἀνθρώπων εἰσδύειν σώματα, αἰτία αὕτη. πνεύματα ὄντες καὶ τὴν ἐπιθυμίαν ἔχοντες εἰς βρωτὰ καὶ ποτὰ καὶ συνουσίαν, μεταλαμβάνειν δὲ μὴ δυνάμενοι διὰ τὸ πνεύματα εἶναι καὶ δεῖσθαι ὀργάνων τῶν πρὸς τὴν χρῆσιν ἐπιτηδείων, εἰς τὰ ἀνθρώπων εἰσίασιν σώματα, ἵνα ὥσπερ ὑπουργούντων ὀργάνων τυχόντες, ὧν

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The Pseudo-Clementine Homilies have a Syrian provenance—they were originally written in Greek but have a prominent manuscript tradition in Syria—and reflect at least one view of the relationship between gluttony and demons. This is also the world in which Chrysostom was raised, and we cannot simply rule out influence from similar ideas about gluttony. In this pseudo-Clementine homily, demons are attracted to people by idol worship and vice. Chrysostom, similarly, believes that gluttony attracts demons (whether in the same way as ps.-Clement, by possessing the organs, is not entirely clear). One similarity is evident: both agree that demons do not cause gluttony, but demonisation is a possible result of gluttony.

The least we can say is that psychic health and demonic attacks are interrelated in Chrysostom’s thought; not all diseases of the soul are due to demonic attacks.80 In her insightful analysis of Chrysostom’s correspondence with the monk Stagirius,

Jessica Wright notes carefully that the despondency (ἀθυμία) the monk suffered from served, for Chrysostom, as nourishment for the demon that harassed him.81 Chrysostom says that the glutton is someone “introducing a self-imposed demon to the soul

(αὐθαίρετον τὸν δαίμονα ἐπεισάγοντες τῇ ψυχῇ).”82 In Chrysostom’s thought, demons are understood as being attracted to the sinful soul, but repelled by holiness and psychic health. But it may also be that, as with Pseudo-Clement, the suffering incurred by

θέλουσιν, ἐπιτυχεῖν δυνατοὶ ὦσιν, εἴτε βρωτῶν, διὰ τῶν ἀνθρώπου ὀδόντων, εἴτε συνουσίας, διὰ τῶν ἐκείνου αἰδοίων. ὅθεν πρὸς τὴν τῶν δαιμόνων φυγὴν ἡ ἔνδεια καὶ ἡ νηστεία καὶ ἡ κακουχία οἰκειότατόν ἐστιν βοήθημα. εἰ γὰρ τοῦ μεταλαμβάνειν χάριν εἰσέρχονται εἰς ἀνθρώπου σῶμα, δῆλον ὅτι κακουχίᾳ φυγαδεύονται. Translation: ANF (revised). On provenance, see Nicole Kelley, Knowledge and Religious Authority in the Pseudo-Clementines: Situating the Recognitions in Fourth-Century Syria, Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament II 213 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006), 13– 15; see also Marx-Wolf, Spiritual Taxonomies, 21–22. 80 Wright, “Between Despondency and the Demon.” See Chrysostom’s Stag. (PG 47.423–434). 81 Wright, “Despondency and the Demon,” 360, 366. 82 Laed. 7.37–49 (SC 103.96–99).

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practices of self-mortification repel demons—in the very least, Chrysostom is clear that the practice of virtue makes one resistant to demons. In effect, fasting becomes a ritual that, in itself, repels demons.83 The preacher is thoroughly depicted, here, as a doctor and healer who also gives exorcistic advice.

The pathologisation of excessive indulgence in the passions was absolute in early Christian psychic therapy. It encompassed what we would today refer to as both the medical and “superstitious” or “folk” realms of reality. What is the result of this demonic attraction? Dayna Kalleres calls such instances of demonic attraction diabolisation.84 Kalleres states: “John portrays demons as contaminating a person’s process of sensory perception if that person is engaged in non-Christian (even non-

Nicene) ritual practice.”85 In this case, gluttony has the same effect; it becomes a practice that allows demons to corrupt one’s sensory perception. There is then a double and interconnected clouding of the mind; the mind is clouded both by the fumes of the food rising from the stomach, and by the demons. Masculine practices of rational psychic control, overall, are therefore also anti-demonic practices indicative of psycho- somatic health.

The socio-economic implications of Christian psychic therapy become all the more clear from this analysis of the threats of gluttony. The pathology of pathic excess, for instance, became a potent strategy in Chrysostom’s homilies for the vilification of the rich and their decadent lifestyles. More specifically, it was the gluttony of the rich that was such a cause of anxiety to Chrysostom. The person that gormandises needs to get rid of the excess food, and this is done through the disgraceful acts of vomiting and

83 Hom. Gen. 6.2–3 (PG 53.55.22–41). 84 Dayna S. Kalleres, City of Demons: Violence, Ritual, and Christian Power in Late Antiquity (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015), 2–3. 85 Kalleres, City of Demons, 56.

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defecation. “The increase in luxury,” Chrysostom says, “is an increase in excrement (ἢ

κόπρου πλεονασμός).”86 Not everyone, of course, shared Chrysostom’s views in this regard. Catherine Saliou, for instance, has shown that Libanius viewed luxury (τρυφή or voluptas), which included baths, feasting, and lovemaking, as a positive civic value.

Voluptas was crucial for Libanius’ construction of Antiochene urban identity. 87

Chrysostom’s view, of course, is the stark opposite.

In Hom. Col. 1, Chrysostom contrasts the table of the rich with those living more simply.88 The table of the rich is described as being laden with dainties, especially meats and wine. There are beautiful and exotic slaves performing service, and, of course, prostitutes and courtesans—an entire interconnected ecology of vice and effeminacy. Chrysostom states that surfeit causes much more problems than hunger.

The people participating in this trimalchionian symposium eat until they almost burst, and drink such an excess of wine that they immediately develop extreme health problems. Not to mention the anxieties from managing the numerous chefs and other slaves that need to prepare the feast. The excess of wine and meat, typical of his depictions of the tables of the rich, result in an increase of lust, hence he also points out the presence of prostitutes. As just seen above, the music they play, along with their gluttonous feasting, only attracts demons, which torment them due to their sinful souls.

Their lifestyle also attracts doctors, who have to treat their myriad of health problems.

Chrysostom boldly claims that it is much easier to kill someone by means of gluttony and surfeit, than by means of hunger and starvation. The types of food

86 Hom. 1 Tim. 13.4 (F6.111). 87 See Libanius, Or. 11.134–38 (Foerster, 1.1.480–82); Catherine Saliou, “Jouir sans entraves ? La notion de τρυφή dans l’ Éloge d’Antioche de Libanios,” in Libanios, le premier humaniste. Études en hommage à Bernard Schouler (Actes du colloque de Montpellier, 18–20 mars 2010), ed. Odile Lagacherie and Pierre-Louis Malosse, Cardo 9 (Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso, 2011), 153–65. 88 Hom. Col. 1.4 (F5.179–85).

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Chrysostom refers to here are considered by ancient doctors as “heavy” foods, especially in the case of meat and rich sweet foods. The healthy soul is one that is light, and thus, the body will also enjoy the benefits like drier humours, better digestion, and better sleep—these are all the benefits that Chrysostom lists at Christ’s symposium.89

The souls and bodies of the rich are obese, diseased, demonised, effeminate, and heavy under the weight of their excessive indulgence. A virtuous soul is lean, light, healthy, strong, and manly. Such dietetic principles are even applicable to animals, according to

Chrysostom, since the meat of fat animals is unhealthy and indigestible, and the animals themselves are sluggish and useless.90

The table of simplicity—Christ’s table—Chrysostom says, on the other hand, is an exemplum of moderation in all ways. The food is simple and only served in a necessary quantity, and it is the epitome of modest decorum. In Chrysostom’s thought, hunger was very useful and had numerous health benefits—one must always eat food so as to remain hungry. Hunger kept the soul light, and, most importantly, kept the levels of sexual lust low. In De statuis 6, Chrysostom explains the health benefits of hunger:

And like people who have a disease of the spleen, or dropsy, when they

enjoy a bountiful table, and cold drinks, and a variety of meats, and savoury

dishes, are then especially in a most wretched condition, worsening their

disease in these actions by luxury; but if they should rigorously subject

89 For more on Chrysostom’s views on Graeco-Roman symposia, see Jason König, Saints and Symposiasts: The Literature of Food and the Symposium in Greco-Roman and Early Christian Culture, Greek Culture in the Roman World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 193–95. See also Blake Leyerle, Theatrical Shows and Ascetic Lives: John Chrysostom’s Attack on Spiritual Marriage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 42–74. 90 Hom. Matt. 44.5 (PG 57.470.42–59).

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themselves to hunger and thirst, in accordance with medical laws, they

might have some hope of recovery.91

Chrysostom rarely hesitates to explain the health benefits of fasting—fasting is good for psycho-somatic health and, thus, beneficial for the cultivation of virtue. But fasting, to Chrysostom, meant not only abstaining from meat, but also abstaining from sins. A proper fast means abstaining from lustful thoughts, from envy, and giving to the poor.

In this way, the fast has become full circle, and the positive effects of abstaining from rich and heavy foods would be more visible.

But which foods does Chrysostom recommend as beneficial for psychic control, psycho-somatic health, and a masculine disposition? In this case, it should be noted that

Chrysostom does not impose any form of ascetic rigorism onto his audience. Although

Chrysostom seems to follow, broadly, monastic dietary principles, he does not believe that any food in itself is good or bad, but it is the excessive consumption thereof that is the problem: “For it is not the nature of the food, or of the drink, but the appetite of those who are eating which tends to produce the desire, and is capable of causing pleasure.” 92 Thus, as Teresa Shaw has rightly noted, what gluttony meant for

Chrysostom, and what it meant for an ascetic like Evagrius of Pontus, is quite different.

Gluttony to Chrysostom referred to the almost unnaturally excessive eating habits of his audience, eating so much that they needed to vomit. For Evagrius, who writes

91 Stat. 6 (PG 49.89.39–44): Καὶ καθάπερ οἱ σπλῆνα καὶ ὕδερον ἔχοντες, ὅταν τραπέζης ἀπολαύσωσι δαψιλοῦς, καὶ ψυχροποσίας, καὶ πολυτελῶν ἐδεσμάτων, καὶ καρυκευμάτων, τότε μάλιστα πάντων εἰσὶν ἐλεεινότεροι, τῇ τρυφῇ τὸ νόσημα αὔξοντες· ἂν δ' ἄγχωνται λιμῷ καὶ δίψει κατὰ τοὺς ἰατρικοὺς νόμους, ἐλπίδα τινὰ σωτηρίας ἔχουσιν. 92 Laed. 8.23–25 (SC 103.100–1): Οὔτε γὰρ ἡ τῶν σιτίων φύσις, οὔτε ἡ τῶν ποτῶν, ἀλλ' ἡ τῶν ἑστιωμένων ὄρεξις τὴν ἐπιθυμίαν τίκτειν εἴωθε καὶ τὴν ἡδονὴν ἐργάζεσθαι πέφυκε.

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primarily to monks, a few extra vegetables with one’s meal of salt, bread, and water may be considered gluttonous.

So the first dietary principle for Chrysostom is that of simplicity and necessity.

However, there are foods that he seems to praise above others, mostly foods that, according to Galenic and later monastic standards, had drying and cooling properties.

While meat, sweets, and wine are often associated with the rich, pulse foods like grain, legumes, and seeds are considered the admirable diet of the moderate ascetic. Although

Chrysostom does not give a detailed list and description of the qualities of foods, like

Basil of Ancyra for instance,93 he does associate these foods with exemplary figures of ascetic virtue. Chrysostom explains:

No one prohibits you from this [the necessities]; nor does anyone forbid

you from your daily food. I say food, not feasting; raiment, not ornament.

Moreover, if one should look carefully, this is feasting in the best sense.

For, consider this: which should we say more truly feasted, the person

whose diet was vegetables, and who was in sound health and suffered no

discomfort: or the person who had the table of a Sybarite,94 and was full of

ten thousand disorders? Very clearly the former. Therefore let us seek

nothing more than this, if we would at once live luxuriously and healthfully:

and let us set these boundaries to self-sufficiency [αὐτάρκειαν]. And let the

one that can be satisfied with pulse and can keep in good health, seek for

nothing more; but let the one who is weaker and requires his or her diet to

93 See Shaw, Burden of the Flesh, 81–91. 94 The Sybarites, inhabitants of Sybaris in southern Italy, were characterised by Athenaeus as being excessively indulgent due to their geography and, especially, due to (the misinterpretation of) a Delphic oracle that foresaw conditional abundance in their society; Deipn. 12.18 (LCL 327.46–51).

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be supplemented with vegetables, not be prevented from this. But if anyone

is even weaker than this and requires the support of meat in moderation, we

will not prohibit such a person from this either. For we do not advise these

things to murder and maim people but to cut off what is excessive; and that

which is excessive is more than we need. For when we can live healthfully

and respectably without something, certainly the addition of that thing is

excessive.95

The principle Chrysostom gives is clear. Differing from authors like Basil of Ancyra,96

Gregory of Nyssa,97 and Jerome,98 Chrysostom does not care too much about the qualities of certain foods. He is, after all, not addressing an audience of monks. He advises a strict diet of pulse only if one can remain healthy by it—moderation and the maintenance of health are paramount. One does wonder whether Chrysostom held this opinion because of his own gastric health problems caused by a rigorous ascetic regime, as reported his biographer Palladius—I believe this may be the case.99 Chrysostom, for

95 Hom. 2 Cor. 19.3 (F3.207): Οὐδείς σε τούτων ἀφέλκει, οὐδὲ κωλύει τὴν καθημερινὴν τροφήν· τροφὴν, οὐ τρυφὴν λέγω· σκεπάσματα, οὐ καλλωπίσματα. Μᾶλλον δὲ, εἴ τις ἀκριβῶς ἐξετάσειε, τοῦτo μάλιστά ἐστι τρυφή. Σκόπει δέ. Tίνα ἂν εἴποιμεν τρυφᾶν μᾶλλον, τὸν λαχάνοις τρεφόμενον, καὶ ὑγιαίνοντα, καὶ οὐδὲν πάσχοντα ἀηδὲς, ἢ τὸν Συβαριτικὴν ἔχοντα τράπεζαν, καὶ μυρίων γέμοντα νοσημάτων; Εὔδηλον ὅτι τοῦτον. Οὐκοῦν μηδὲν πλέον τούτου ζητῶμεν, εἰ καὶ τρυφᾶν βουλόμεθα, καὶ μετὰ ὑγείας ζῇν· καὶ τούτῳ τὴν αὐτάρκειαν ὁριζώμεθα. Καὶ ὁ μὲν ὀσπρίοις δυνάμενος ἀρκεῖσθαι, καὶ ὑγιαίνειν, μηδὲν ἐπιζητείτω· ὁ δὲ ἀσθενέστερος, καὶ τῆς διὰ τῶν λαχάνων δεόμενος θεραπείας, μὴ κωλυέσθω. Εἰ δὲ καὶ τούτου τις ἀσθενέστερος εἴη, καὶ τῆς συμμέτρου τῆς ἀπὸ τῶν κρεῶν δέοιτο βοηθείας, οὐδὲ τούτων ἀπείρξομεν. Οὐδὲ γὰρ ἵνα ἀνέλωμεν τοὺς ἀνθρώπους καὶ διαφθείρωμεν, ταῦτα συμβουλεύομεν, ἀλλ' ἵνα τὰ περιττὰ περικόψωμεν· περιττὸν δέ ἐστιν, ὃ τῆς χρείας πλέον ἐστίν. ῞Οταν γὰρ καὶ χωρὶς τούτου δυνάμεθα διάγειν ὑγιῶς καὶ εὐσχημόνως, περιττὸν πάντως ἐκεῖνό ἐστι προστεθέν. See also Hom. Gen. 10 (PG 53.81.50–90.60). 96 Virg. 8–9 (PG 30.685.45–50). 97 Virg. 21.2 (SC 119.506–11); Gregory was possibly influenced by Basil of Ancyra’s views; Shaw, Burden of the Flesh, 93. Chrysostom’s work on virginity does not have the same precise regulations regarding diet. 98 Ep. 54.9 (CSEL 54.475–76), 107.10 (CSEL 55.301); Shaw, Burden of the Flesh, 96–112. 99 Palladius, Dial. 12.1–352 (SC 341.230–60).

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instance, believes that Timothy’s stomach problems, noted in 1 Timothy 5:23, were the result of rigorous ascetic fasting.100

For Chrysostom, it is not the quality of food, but the quantity that is of primary importance. However, he does state that the person who follows a simple diet of grains and seeds is stronger than the one only living off vegetables and herbs—but even eating foods other than these in moderation is acceptable. “Enjoy your baths, take care of your body, and cast yourself freely into the world, and keep a household, have your servants to wait on you, and make free use of your meats and drinks!” Chrysostom tells his audience, “[b]ut everywhere drive out excess, for that it is which causes sin.”101 Yet a little later in this homily, he speaks quite admirably of young female ascetics who have given up their lives of luxury, and now “their only meal is in the evening, a meal not even of vegetables nor of bread, but of flour and beans and pulse and olives and figs.”102

This appears to be a very strict ascetic regimen that Chrysostom describes, especially with the absence of bread.

Despite his focus on moderation rather than the qualities of food, the implication seems that the best diet, in the ascetic sense, for Chrysostom, is a meagre cooling and drying diet consisting of uncooked pulse and certain fruits and vegetables. This is consistent with broader trends in monastic literature that views a diet of uncooked food more beneficial for the health of the soul. Furthermore, no cooking means no need of slaves, another luxury.103 Chrysostom refers to the regimen of ascetic men, “some only partaking of bread and salt, to which others add oil, while the weakly have also

100 See Hom. 1 Tim. 16.1 (F6.139–42); Stat. 1.3 (PG 49.19.47–55). 101 Hom. Eph. 13.3 (F4.241): Καὶ λουτροῖς κέχρησο, καὶ τὸ σῶμα θεράπευε, καὶ εἰς ἀγορὰν ἔμβαλλε, καὶ οἰκίαν ἔχε, καὶ διακόνοις διακονοῦ, καὶ χρῶ σιτίοις καὶ ποτοῖς· πανταχοῦ δὲ τὴν πλεονεξίαν ἔκβαλλε. ᾿Εκείνη γάρ ἐστιν ἡ τὴν ἁμαρτίαν ποιοῦσα. 102 Hom. Eph. 13.3 (F4.242): Τράπεζα δὲ αὐταῖς ἐστιν ἑσπερινὴ μόνη, τράπεζα οὐδὲ λαχάνου οὐδὲ ἄρτου, ἀλλὰ σεμίδαλις καὶ κύαμος καὶ ἐρέβινθος, καὶ ἐλαία καὶ σῦκα. 103 Inan. 13.177–79 (SC 188.90–91), 70.855–56 (SC 188.170–71); Hom. Eph. 12.1 (F4.230–32).

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vegetables and pulse.”104 The diet of bread and salt is the epitome of the monastic regimen. In his commentary on Matthew, he states that the diet of the prophets of the

Old Testament consisted mainly of barley bread (κρίθινος; see John 6:9).105 In the pseudo-Chrysostomic commentary on Daniel, the author states that Daniel and his companions only ate “seeds from the earth (ἀπὸ τῶν σπερμάτων τῆς γῆς)” and only drank water—again, typical of a very rigorous ascetic regimen that Chrysostom himself projected onto these Old Testament figures. According to this pseudo-Chrysostomic source, miraculously, Daniel and his friends became fat from this diet in order to please the king.106

The focus remains, however, not on the type of food, as meat and wine in moderation are allowed by divine command, but rather on the quantity and setting of consumption. A monastic diet is lauded, but it is not essential for psycho-somatic health and masculinity in Chrysostom’s thought. Chrysostom does not tell people to become vegetarians either; unless they are fasting, a moderate amount of wine or portion of meat is allowed. Arguing from Genesis 9:3, Chrysostom states that from the beginning

God has approved meat for human consumption (κρεωφαγία).107 I could not find any clear reference to a prelapsarian or antediluvian vegetarianism often present in other monastic writings.108 Chrysostom actually condemns the Manichaeans for not eating

104 Hom. 1 Tim. 14.4 (F6.123): ἀλλ' οἱ μὲν ἄρτον μόνον καὶ ἅλας, οἱ δὲ ἔλαιον προστιθέντες, ἕτεροι δὲ, ὅσοι ἀσθενέστεροί εἰσι, καὶ λαχάνων ἔχονται καὶ ὀσπρίων. 105 Matt. Hom. 49 (PG 58.497.53–56). 106 Int. Dan. proph. 1 (PG 56.198.2); see also Kathryn Ringrose, “Reconfiguring the Prophet Daniel: Gender, Sanctity, and Castration in Byzantium,” in Gender and Difference in the Middle Ages, ed. Sharon A. Farmer and Carol Braun Pasternack (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 88–89. 107 Gen. Hom. 27. (PG 53.245.62–246.3). 108 See Rousselle, Porneia, 160–78; Shaw, Burden of the Flesh, 170–78; Blake Leyerle, “Monastic Formation and Christian Practice: Food in the Desert,” in Educating People of Faith: Exploring the History of Jewish and Christian Communities, ed. John van Engen (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2007), 85–114.

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meat.109 In fact, in reference to Adam’s dominion of the earth, Chrysostom states that all animals were given by God to be used by humanity, both for eating and for labour.110

Chrysostom rather seems to think that when the eschaton comes, there will be no need for food or eating. “But some say that the words [of 1 Cor. 6:13]111 are a prophecy, declaring the state of being in the life to come, and that there is no eating or drinking there,” Chrysostom tells his audience, “Now if that which is moderate will have an end, much more must we abstain from excess.”112

The food one eats, then, could either disturb or promote the harmony of the entire bodily politeia. The humours may therefore be manipulated by means of regimen so as to aid in the formation of virtue and masculinity. Thus, it is no surprise that gluttony and fasting occupy such prominent positions in Chrysostom’s expositions of

Genesis 1–3, and that the feast of Lent is so appropriate for preaching against gluttony and excessive indulgence. 113 Along with ῥαθυμία, he lists gluttony as one of the primaeval sins of humanity.114 Fasting was one of God’s first commands to Adam and

Eve:

God, you remember, in forming human beings in the beginning, knew that

they had particular need of this remedy for the salvation of their souls, and

109 Hom. 1 Tim. 12.1 (F6.92–94). 110 Gen. Hom. 15.3 (PG 53.122.2–23). 111 The text in 1 Corinthians 6:13 reads: “Food [βρώματα] is for the stomach, and the stomach for food— and God will destroy both one and the other” (ESV). Chrysostom reads βρῶμα here specifically as meat, which does have numerous connotations to gluttony in Chrysostom’s thought. 112 Hom. 1 Cor. 17.1 (F2.198): Τινὲς δέ φασιν, ὅτι προφητεία τὸ εἰρημένον ἐστὶ, τὴν ἐν τῷ μέλλοντι αἰῶνι κατάστασιν δηλοῦσα, καὶ ὅτι οὐκ ἔστιν ἐκεῖ φαγεῖν οὐδὲ πιεῖν. Εἰ δὲ τὸ σύμμετρον ἕξει τέλος, πολλῷ μᾶλλον τῆς ἀμετρίας ἀπέχεσθαι δεῖ. 113 Hom. Gen. 1.5–6 (PG 53.22.24–23.20), 7.19 (PG 53.68.60–61); Serm. Gen. 6.1.1–8 (SC 433.280– 83), 7.1.1–13 (SC 433.300–303). 114 Hom. Gen. 2.1 (PG 53.27.7–8).

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so from the outset he gave the first human creature this command: “From

all the trees in the garden you are to eat your fill, but from the tree of the

knowledge of good and evil do not eat” [Gen. 2:16–17]. That text about

eating and not eating refers figuratively to fasting.115

Chrysostom thus considers fasting, and dietary regimen more generally, as a “remedy for the salvation of their souls (τοῦ φαρμάκου πρὸς τὴν τῆς ψυχῆς σωτηρίαν).” The medical language is clear—fasting is psychic medicine (φάρμακον). Fasting was an important facet of the prelapsarian life of Adam and Eve. Remember again that ῥαθυμία was a failure of exercising masculine control. Fasting, Chrysostom implies, is then a highly masculine discipline, and one of the very first disciplines of masculine formation presented to humanity.

On Exercise, Sleep, and Bathing

One’s masculinity was not only shaped by diet. The amount of exercise a person does along with sleeping and bathing patterns were also crucial aspects of regimen that had to be regulated in service of the formation of manliness. Related to Chrysostom’s understanding of gluttony is a person’s exercise and sleep regimen (we have already seen, for instance, that Chrysostom believes the glutton has sleeping problems, and trouble with breathing and mobility). Chrysostom’s advice on physical exercise is similar to that of diet—all in moderation. As in the case of fasting and gluttony,

115 Hom. Gen. 1.6 (PG 53.23.31–39): Πλάσας γὰρ ἐξ ἀρχῆς τὸν ἄνθρωπον ὁ Θεὸς, καὶ εἰδὼς, ὅτι τούτου αὐτῷ μάλιστα δεῖ τοῦ φαρμάκου πρὸς τὴν τῆς ψυχῆς σωτηρίαν, εὐθέως καὶ ἐκ προοιμίων τῷ πρωτοπλάστῳ ταύτην δέδωκε τὴν ἐντολὴν εἰπών· Ἀπὸ παντὸς ξύλου τοῦ ἐν τῷ παραδείσῳ βρώσει φαγῇ· ἀπὸ δὲ τοῦ ξύλου τοῦ γινώσκειν καλὸν καὶ πονηρὸν, οὐ φάγεσθε ἀπ' αὐτοῦ. Τὸ δὲ λέγειν, τόδε φάγε, καὶ τόδε μὴ φάγῃς, νηστείας ἦν εἰκών. Translation: Robert C. Hill, trans., St. John Chrysostom: Homilies on Genesis 1–17, The Fathers of the Church 74 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1999), 23.

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Chrysostom turned to scripture to inform his opinion. In this regard, 1 Timothy 4:7–8 is relevant, and Chrysostom states:

“Exercise yourself in piety” [1 Tim. 4:7]; that is, toward a pure faith and a

moral life; for this is piety. So then we need “exercise.” “For bodily exercise

[σωματικὴ γυμνασία] profits little” [1 Tim. 4:8]. This has been referred to

as fasting by some, but away with such a fallacy! For fasting is not a

physical but a spiritual exercise. If it were physical it would nourish the

body, whereas it wastes the body away and makes it lean, so that it is not

physical. Thus, he is not speaking of the discipline [ἀσκήσεώς] of the body.

What we need, therefore, is the exercise of the soul [τῆς κατὰ ψυχὴν

γυμνασίας]. For the exercise of the body is done to no gain, but may benefit

the body a little, but the discipline of piety [ἡ δὲ τῆς εὐσεβείας ἄσκησις]

yields fruit and advantage both here and in the hereafter.116

Chrysostom often contrasts spiritual exercise with physical exercise, and he also uses the manly metaphor of athletic training to describe the training of the soul.117 In this sense, the struggle for virtue is pictured as an athletic contest (ἀγών). 118 For

Chrysostom, it is the training of the soul that receives precedence over the training of the body. Physical health was brought about by means of psychic discipline.

116 Hom. 1 Tim. 12.2 (F6.95): “Γύμναζε δὲ σεαυτὸν πρὸς εὐσέβειαν·” τουτέστι, πρὸς πίστιν καθαρὰν καὶ βίον ὀρθόν· τοῦτο γάρ ἐστιν εὐσέβεια. Γυμνασίας ἄρα χρεία ἡμῖν. “Ἡ γὰρ σωματικὴ γυμνασία, φησὶ, πρὸς ὀλίγον ἐστὶν ὠφέλιμος.” Τινὲς περὶ τῆς νηστείας τοῦτό φασιν εἰρῆσθαι· ἀλλ' ἄπαγε, οὐκ ἔστι σωματικὴ γυμνασία, ἀλλὰ πνευματική. Εἰ γὰρ σωματικὴ ἦν, τὸ σῶμα ἔτρεφεν ἄν· εἰ δὲ τήκει αὐτὸ καὶ λεπτύνει καὶ κατισχνοῖ, οὐκ ἔστι σωματική. Οὐκ ἄρα περὶ τῆς τοῦ σώματος ἀσκήσεώς φησιν. Ὥστε ἡμῖν δεῖ τῆς κατὰ ψυχὴν γυμνασίας. ’Eκείνη γὰρ οὐκ ἔχει κέρδος, ἀλλ' ὀλίγον ὠφέλησε τὸ σῶμα· ἡ δὲ τῆς εὐσεβείας ἄσκησις τὸν καρπὸν καὶ ἐν τῷ μέλλοντι ἀποδίδωσι, καὶ ἐνταῦθα ἀνακτᾶται, καὶ ἐκεῖ. See also Hom. Act. 15.4 (PG 60.133.22–134.52). 117 Hom. Heb. 17.5 (F7.211–12); Hom. Matt. 33.6 (PG 57.395.17–33); Hom. Phil. 12[13] (F5.132–41). 118 Hom. 2 Tim. 4.1 (F6.193).

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Chrysostom measures physical health by different standards compared to modern medicine and health studies. Chrysostom understands physical exercise as a practice that would nourish and build the body; hence, fasting is not simply dieting. Fasting is a combination of both spiritual and physical or dietetic principles that serves to cool and dry the body. This entails corporeal mortification. The psychic control of the body will result in holistic psycho-somatic health, not simply physical health. Chrysostom establishes a firm difference between physical exercise (γυμνασία) and discipline

(ἄσκησις). The former has only the health of the flesh in mind, while the latter is concerned with the soul at the cost of corporeal disintegration and mortification.

Performing γυμνασία alone does not make one manly; ἄσκησις is what makes a true man.

However, Chrysostom is not against physical exercise, and when done in moderation, “it may benefit the body a little (ὀλίγον ὠφέλησε τὸ σῶμα).” He seems to be in favour of a moderate amount of light exercise, again similar to Galen,119 as well as Clement of Alexandria.120 More than anything, Chrysostom feels that the daily exercise one gets from one’s work should be sufficient to maintain health and an attractive appearance (it should be remembered that labour was also considered an ascetic practice).121 Referring to those attractively lean poor women he so adored,

Chrysostom remarks: “For their daily exercise, and labours, and hardships, and their

119 For Galen, the quality and quantity of exercise (as well as massages) depended on a number of factors like sex, age, the season of the year, and the climate; San. tuend. 2.7 (K6.125–29). 120 Paed. 3.10.49–52 (SC 158.106–13). 121 Daniel F. Caner, Wandering, Begging Monks: Spiritual Authority and the Promotion of Monasticism in Late Antiquity, Transformation of the Classical Heritage 33 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 38–41. The practice of manual labour was a highly contested matter in late-ancient monasticism. Some felt that manual labour was not fitting for a perfect monk, while others idealised the pleasures of labour; see Peter R. L. Brown, Treasure in Heaven: The Holy Poor in Early Christianity, Kindle Edition (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016). For a slightly different perspective on the complexities of labour in late ancient Syrian monasticism, see also Chris L. de Wet, “Slavery and Asceticism in John of Ephesus’ Lives of the Eastern Saints,” Scrinium 13 (2017): 84–113.

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frugal table, and simple way of life, presents them with very good health, and hence also much beauty.”122 A routine of hard work and limited or no reliance on slaves would provide sufficient physical activity to maintain health both spiritually and physically.

Moderate fasting along with one’s daily physical labour is enough to overcome the dangers of gluttony and ensure psycho-somatic health.

As expected, Chrysostom’s comments on sleep are similar.123 Like food, sleep is a gift that should be enjoyed in moderation—as he does not advise a rigorous monastic diet, so too does he not advise extreme sleep deprivation so common in some monastic circles. He does, however, emphasise the importance of the vigil (παννυχίς) as a remedy for the “tyranny of sleep (ἡ τοῦ ὕπνου τυραννὶς).”124 He speaks positively of the vigil, but also gives advice on how to avoid insomnia (an important distinction to maintain here). Chrysostom recommends his audience to often hold prayerful vigils:

Where are those women now, who sleep through the whole night? Where

are those men, who do not even turn themselves in their bed? Do you see

the vigilant soul? With women, and children, and slaves, the apostles sang

hymns to God, and were made purer than heaven by affliction. But now, if

we see a little danger, we run away. Nothing was ever more splendid than

that persecuted church. Let us imitate these believers, let us emulate them.

The night was not made for this, that we should sleep all through it and to

122 Hom. 1 Cor. 39.9 (F2.505–6): Ἡ γὰρ καθημερινὴ γυμνασία καὶ οἱ πόνοι καὶ αἱ ταλαιπωρίαι καὶ ἡ σύμμετρος τράπεζα, καὶ ἡ λιτὴ δίαιτα πολλὴν μὲν αὐταῖς τὴν εὐεξίαν, πολλὴν δὲ ἐντεῦθεν καὶ τὴν ὥραν παρέχουσιν. 123 For a more detailed discussion of sleep and urban temporal patterns in Chrysostom’s homilies, see Leslie Dossey, “Night in the Big City: Temporal Patterns in Antioch and Constantinople as Revealed by Chrysostom’s Sermons,” in (Re)Visioning John Chrysostom: New Theories and Approaches, ed. Chris L. de Wet and Wendy Mayer (London: Routledge, 2018), Forthcoming. 124 Hom. Act. 36.1 (PG 60.257.40).

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rest. The craftsmen attest to this, the transporters, and the merchants—the

church of God rising up in the midst of the night. You must also rise up,

and behold the choir of the stars, the deep silence, the great repose.

Contemplate with wonder the order of your Master’s household. Then is

your soul purer: it is lighter, and finer, and soars nimbly. The darkness itself,

and the profound silence, are enough to lead you to compunction. And if

you also look to the heavens embroidered with its stars, as with ten thousand

eyes, if you reflect on all those crowds of people who, during the day, are

shouting, laughing, leaping, stamping their feet, up to no good, grabbing,

threatening, inflicting innumerable wrongs, all of them lying down no

different from corpses, you will reject all the stubbornness of humanity.

Sleep has invaded and defeated nature. It is the image of death, the image

of the end of all things. If you gaze out the window and lean over into the

street, you will not hear a single sound. If you look into the house, you will

see all lying down as if it were in a tomb. All this is enough to arouse the

soul, and lead it to reflect on the consummation of all things.125

125 Hom. Act. 26.3 (PG 60.202.33–60): Ποῦ νῦν αἱ γυναῖκες αἱ διὰ πάσης καθεύδουσαι νυκτός; ποῦ δὲ οἱ ἄνδρες οἱ μηδὲ μεταστρεφόμενοι ἐπὶ τῆς κλίνης; Ὁρᾷς νήφουσαν ψυχήν; Μετὰ γυναικῶν καὶ παίδων καὶ παιδισκῶν τὸν Θεὸν ὕμνουν, καθαρώτεροι τοῦ οὐρανοῦ τῇ θλίψει γενόμενοι. Νῦν δὲ, ἂν μικρὸν ἴδωμεν κίνδυνον, ἀναπίπτομεν. Οὐδὲν τῆς ἐκκλησίας ἐκείνης λαμπρότερον ἦν. Μιμησώμεθα τούτους, ζηλώσωμεν. Οὐ διὰ τοῦτο γέγονεν ἡ νὺξ, ἵνα διαπαντὸς καθεύδωμεν καὶ ἀργῶμεν. Καὶ τοῦτο μαρτυροῦσιν οἱ χειροτέχναι, οἱ ὀνηλάται, οἱ ἔμποροι, ἡ Ἐκκλησία τοῦ Θεοῦ ἐκ μέσων ἀνισταμένη νυκτῶν. Ἀνάστηθι καὶ σὺ, καὶ ἴδε τῶν ἄστρων τὴν χορείαν, τὴν βαθεῖαν σιγὴν, τὴν ἡσυχίαν τὴν πολλήν· ἐκπλάγηθι τοῦ Δεσπότου σου τὴν οἰκονομίαν. Καθαρωτέρα τότε ἐστὶν ἡ ψυχή· κουφοτέρα καὶ λεπτοτέρα μᾶλλόν ἐστι, μετέωρος καὶ κούφη· τὸ σκότος αὐτὸ, ἡ σιγὴ ἡ πολλὴ εἰς κατάνυξιν ἀγαγεῖν ἱκανά. Ἂν δὲ καὶ τὸν οὐρανὸν ἴδῃς τοῖς ἄστροις ὥσπερ τισὶ μυρίοις κατεστιγμένον ὀφθαλμοῖς, πᾶσαν ἡδονὴν καρπώσῃ, ἔννοιαν λαβὼν εὐθὺς τοῦ Δημιουργοῦ. Ἂν ἐννοήσῃς, ὅτι οἱ μεθ' ἡμέραν κράζοντες, γελῶντες, σκιρτῶντες, πηδῶντες, ἀδικοῦντες, πλεονεκτοῦντες, ἀπειλοῦντες, μυρία ἐπανατεινόμενοι δεινὰ, οὗτοι νῦν τῶν νεκρῶν οὐδὲν διαφέρουσι, καταγνώσῃ τῆς ἀνθρωπίνης αὐθαδείας ἁπάσης. Ὕπνος ἐπῆλθε, καὶ τὴν φύσιν ἤλεγξεν· εἰκών ἐστι θανάτου, εἰκών ἐστι συντελείας. Ἂν διακύψῃς εἰς τὸν στενωπὸν, οὐκ ἀκούσῃ οὐδὲ φωνῆς· ἂν ἴδῃς εἰς τὴν οἰκίαν, πάντας ὄψει καθάπερ ἐν τάφῳ κειμένους. Ταῦτα πάντα ἱκανά ἐστι διαναστῆσαι ψυχὴν, καὶ εἰς ἔννοιαν συντελείας ἀγαγεῖν.

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As with most monastic practices, the vigil had both symbolic and physical meaning. Symbolically, it was a symbol of watchfulness and a focus on the next life to come. Death and the current life are considered a sleep; the vigil, a symbol of resurrection and eternal life, where there will be no sleep. Chrysostom uses sleep and dreams symbolically to refer to postlapsarian existence, which is like a dream that will soon pass.126 Chrysostom also constructs night as a useful social and symbolic space.

“No vainglory then annoys. How could it, when everyone is sleeping, and not looking at you? Then neither sloth nor idleness are imposed upon you,” Chrysostom continues,

“how could they, when your soul is aroused by such things? After such vigils come sweet sleep and amazing revelations.”127 Vigils therefore actually combat insomnia

(just as hunger makes eating more pleasurable). Vigils invigorate the soul, since it is a solitary space, similar to the desert or the monastic cells in the mountains. Night-time is a time and space of seclusion, useful for prayer.

Excessive sleep immobilises the soul, and places it in an inactive state, thereby linking it to sloth—which is very similar to an irrational and effeminate state of indifference, or ῥαθυμία. The practice of psychic watchfulness is representative of a will to avoid the great lapse of Adam. Adam was lazy and unawake, and thus, he ate.128

The vigil is a manly symbol of humility and contemplation, and a safeguard against gluttony. Despite often being used as a negative symbol, night in this case is deployed most positively as a creative space that signals the majesty of the creator and the life to come.

126 Hom. Rom. 24[25] (F1.393–403). 127 Hom. Act. 26.4 (PG 60.203.12–16): Τότε οὐ κενοδοξία παρενοχλεῖ· πῶς γὰρ, πάντων καθευδόντων καὶ οὐχ ὁρώντων; τότε οὐ ῥᾳθυμία καὶ χάσμη ἐπιτίθεται· πῶς γὰρ ὑπὸ τοσούτων τῆς ψυχῆς διεγειρομένης; Μετὰ τὰς τοιαύτας παννυχίδας καὶ ὕπνοι ἡδεῖς καὶ ἀποκαλύψεις θαυμασταί. 128 Hill, Homilies on Genesis 1–17, 15.

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Proper psychic control and corporeal discipline will result in a good night’s sleep.129 Physically, the vigil also dried out the body and thus kept the passions at bay— just like fasting. During the vigil, as Chrysostom notes above, the soul is healthy and light. Chrysostom’s Galenic medical framework is also present when discussing sleep.

Galen notes the links between moistening elements and sleep: “Those things, then, that make moist alone are properly called hypnotics.”130 Hunger and poverty cause the body to dry out, which results in sleeplessness. Extreme fasting is therefore directly related to sleeplessness; hence the partial sleep deprivation so common among monastics who also follow rigorous fasting practices.131 But vices like gluttony and greed often cause insomnia and bad dreams,132 weighing the soul down. Such nightmares are part of the whole network of mental threats caused by gluttony. Gluttony also results in breathing problems during sleep, possibly referring to sleep apnoea. As Chrysostom explains:

Both these things usually result in sleeplessness, namely indigence, and

excess of food; the one drying up the body, stiffening the eyelids and not

suffering them to be closed; the other straitening and oppressing the breath,

and inducing many pains. But at the same time so powerful a persuasive is

129 Galen also highlighted the dynamics between digestion and sleep; Sympt. caus. 1.8.1–4 (K7.139–45), 3.1.3 (K7.208–9). 130 Sympt. caus. 1.8.3 (K7.143): ὅσα μὲν οὖν ὑγραίνει μόνον, ὑπνωτικὰ δεόντως ὀνομάζεται. Translation: Johnston, Galen on Diseases and Symptoms, 234. 131 Rousselle, Porneia, 170; Bronwen Neil, “Dream Interpretation and Christian Identity in Late Antique Rome and Byzantium,” in Christians Shaping Identity from the Roman Empire to Byzantium: Studies Inspired by Pauline Allen, ed. Geoffrey Dunn and Wendy Mayer, Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae 132 (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 334–35. For the medical effects of religious sleep deprivation, see Núria M. Farré-i-Barril, “Sleep Deprivation: Asceticism, Religious Experience and Neurological Quandaries,” in Religion and the Body: Modern Science and the Construction of Religious Meaning, ed. David Cave and Rebecca Sachs Norris (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 217–34. 132 Hom. 1 Cor. 39.9 (F2.506); Laed. 7.37–49 (SC 103.96–99).

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labour, that though both these things should befall him, the servant is able

to sleep.133

Just like ascetic practices, hard work tires out the body, and thus brings on sleep. Too much sleep, however, would not be good either, since it would over-moisten the body

(like a bath), contrary to ascetic aims. Sleep was also linked to the irrational dimension of the psychic.134 Chrysostom was highly critical of slothful people indulging in luxury and gluttony, who sleep until midday when others are already hard at work.135 Gluttony is therefore a vice of extremes—on the one hand, it can cause insomnia due to sleep apnoea, but on the other, it increases laziness and hypersomnia. Chrysostom is also critical of people sleeping on luxurious beds. He advises simplicity when it comes to one’s sleeping arrangements.136

It should be remembered in this instance that extreme sleep deprivation, according to ancient medical knowledge, dried out the brain and could result in phrenitis. Phrenitis was a severe form of mental illness, usually accompanied by fevers and more insomnia.137 Chrysostom’s focus on moderation in terms of diet and sleep, and other aspects of regimen more generally, should also be understood as a measure

133 Stat. 2.8 (PG 49.44.54–45.7): Ἀμφότερα ταῦτα ἀγρυπνίαν ἐμποιεῖν εἴωθεν, ἔνδεια καὶ ἀδηφαγία· ἡ μὲν τὸ σῶμα ξηραίνουσα, καὶ κερατοποιοῦσα τὰ βλέφαρα, καὶ οὐκ ἀφιεῖσα καταστέλλεσθαι· ἡ δὲ τὸ πνεῦμα στενοχωροῦσα, καὶ ἀποθλίβουσα, καὶ πολλὰς παρέχουσα τὰς ὀδύνας. Ἀλλ' ὅμως τοσαύτη ἐστὶν ἡ τῶν πόνων παραμυθία, ὡς εἰ καὶ ταῦτα ἀμφότερα προσγένοιτο, δύνασθαι τὸν οἰκέτην καθεύδειν. 134 Neil, “Dream Interpretation,” 334–35. 135 Hom. Act. 35.3 (PG 60.256.41–53). 136 Stat. 2.8 (PG 49.44.54–45.32). 137 For more on ancient understandings on phrenitis, see Peregrine Horden, “The Late Antique Origins of the Lunatic Asylum?,” in Transformations of Late Antiquity: Essays for Peter Brown, ed. Philip Rousseau and Emmanuel Papoutsakis (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 259–78; Jessica Wright, “Preaching Phrenitis: The Medicalisation of Religious Difference in Augustine’s Sermons” (presented at the Annual Meeting of the North American Patristics Society, Chicago, 2016).

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against phrenitis (φρενῖτις). He wants the bodily humours and elements to be in balance so as to avoid the phrenetic threat.

Where does phrenitis come from? Where does insomnia come from?... Is

phrenitis not resultant from an excess of fever? And is fever not the result

of the elements [στοιχείων] being too excessive in us? And is this excess of

elements not the result of our carelessness? For when either from deficiency

or excess we lead any of the things within us to beyond the limits of

moderation, we kindle that fire.138

The links between phrenitis, fever, insomnia, diet, and excess more generally, are apparent, and the links between gluttony and mental illness have already been noted.

Finally, bathing was also recommended only in moderation, since excessive bathing had the same effect as gluttony—it made the body soft and weak. Monks generally avoided bathing (βαλανεῖα) because of the apparent moistening effect it had on the body (and the fact that it was seen as vain luxury, not to mention the problem of public nudity). Bathing was recommended for medical reasons, and elderly persons were encouraged to bathe more frequently in order to retain moisture. It is somewhat ironic, since the Roman public baths were no doubt breeding grounds for all sorts of diseases. Chrysostom, however, advises his audience to bathe only in moderation.139

“For the things of this life, baths, I mean, and dinners, even if they are necessary, if

138 Hom. 1 Thess. 9.4 (F5.415): πόθεν φρενῖτις; πόθεν ὕπνος βαρύς;… ἡ φρενῖτις οὐχὶ ἀπὸ ὑπερβολῆς πυρετοῦ; ὁ δὲ πυρετὸς οὐχὶ ἀπὸ πλεοναζόντων ἐν ἡμῖν στοιχείων; ἡ πλεονεξία δὲ τῶν ἐν ἡμῖν στοιχείων οὐχὶ ἐξ ἀπροσεξίας; Ὅταν γὰρ ἢ ἐνδείᾳ, ἢ πλεονεξίᾳ εἰς ἀμετρίαν τι τῶν ἐν ἡμῖν ἐξαγάγωμεν, ἀνάπτομεν ἐκεῖνο τὸ πῦρ. 139 Hom. Eph. 13.3 (F4.241); Hom. Jo. 18.4 (PG 59.118.58–60); see also Estee Dvorjetski, Leisure, Pleasure and Healing: Spa Culture and Medicine in Ancient Eastern Mediterranean, Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism 116 (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 410–11.

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continually repeated, render the body weak,” Chrysostom warns, “but the teaching of the soul, the more it is cultivated, the stronger it renders the soul which receives it.”140

As with gluttony, excessive bathing was seen as an effeminate luxury that actually weakened the body and the soul due to the moisture, and its basic leisure. Excessive bathing would actually work against the effects of fasting, which dried out the body.

The moderate ascetic regimen that Chrysostom wants his urban audience to adopt was, in toto, one that aimed to cool and dry out the body. This regimen was the best suited for holistic psycho-somatic health. Ironically, psycho-somatic health, in Chrysostom’s mind, was the correlate of corporeal mortification. A corpse was, after all, cold and dry.

Health was not a matter of having a better quality of life while alive on earth, but to prepare for the afterlife.

Conclusion

With the transformation of the preacher into a medical philosopher and psychic therapist, and the homily into a medical treatise, anatomy in itself was utilised as a political discourse of masculine power. If we assume that the body may serve as a model for most social systems, we find in this transformation that the body itself became absorbed into institutions of masculinity. This corporeal strategy signifies the mirroring of masculine structures of dominion present in postlapsarian society. As Adam and Eve did not require social structures of domination (except for Adam ruling over Eve, perhaps), they also did not require these rigid guidelines with regard to regimen—they only had to abstain from one tree. This politicisation of the body is particularly visible in the early Christian medical persecution of gluttony and luxury, in which the preacher

140 Hom. Jo. 18.4 (PG 59.118.58–60): Τὰ μὲν γὰρ βιωτικὰ, βαλανεῖα λέγω καὶ δεῖπνα, εἰ καὶ ἀναγκαῖα, ὅμως συνεχῶς γινόμενα τὸ σῶμα ἐξίτηλον ἐργάζεται· ἡ δὲ τῆς ψυχῆς διδασκαλία, ὅσῳπερ ἂν ἐπιτείνηται, τοσούτῳ τὴν δεχομένην ἰσχυροτέραν ποιεῖ ψυχήν.

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occupied an external locus of control over the stomach, almost acting as a second rational soul, a second brain if you will, since the brain of the glutton is unable to exercise control over the stomach. Just as real institutional slaves were not supposed to rebel and enslave their masters, so too should the stomach remain a slave to the rational soul that is seated in the brain. This reveals an interesting and crucial dynamic between medical discourse, enslavement, and masculinity in Chrysostom’s thought. The figure of the preacher, quite masculine in itself, as a “therapist of the soul,” signifies then the conjunction of cosmic and psychic control. It is in the figure of the preacher that social domination and psychic mastery intersect and become infused. The preacher stands as a beacon of universal masculine kyriarchality.

What a person ate made a difference—one’s regimen and diet could be manipulated in order to facilitate psychic control. This included the types of food one ate, but even more importantly, the quantities of food one consumed. Chrysostom was a man of moderation and balance—he was realistic regarding his expectations for his audience. He does not force a monastic regimen on them, just as he does not force them to remain celibate or without slaves—but he does believe that the ideal move toward prelapsarian masculinity can be found in virginity, celibacy, not owning slaves, and especially following a monastic regimen consisting of foods that had a cooling and drying effect on the body. But one had to eat so as to remain hungry. A little bit of exercise is acceptable, but ascetic discipline must take priority. He also does not advise sleep deprivation, yet spiritual watchfulness was crucial. The glutton’s soul was not masculine—it was a mirror of the glutton’s body—heavy, obese, weak, and soft. This chapter aimed to delineate the masculine dynamics of psychic control, and to show why

Chrysostom saw the monastic life as the greatest of all institutions of masculinity. The aim of cooling and drying, but in moderation, was found in his comments on diet,

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exercise, sleep, and bathing. But what are the effects of following such a monastic regimen? If masculinisation implied, medically at least, cooling and drying out the body, what would the effects of these practices and processes imply? This question will be the topic of the next chapter.

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CHAPTER 6

Dead Man Walking: Gerotranscendence and Corporeal Mortification as Desiderata of

Masculinity

Introduction

In our analysis of the dynamics of psychic control, as delineated from Chrysostom’s recommendations on regimen and general psycho-somatic health, it was found that

Chrysostom advised a moderate ascetic regimen to his audience, which included practices that cooled and dried out the body. There is now a need to move from our conclusion on the dynamics of psychic control to its effects, and to also ask how these effects relate to the formation of masculinity in Chrysostom’s medical-theological thought. The cooling and drying regimen that Chrysostom’s popular ascetic vision entails has its analogue in another developmental process, namely aging, and finally, death. This is a welcome finding, since the study of old age, in particular, has been rather neglected in early Christian studies more generally, and very much side-lined in the study of ancient masculinity. Thus, the discourses of old age, that is, gerontology, and corporeal mortification (that is, thanatology) are key to accounting for what

“masculinisation” in Chrysostom’s thought actually means.

In this chapter, I will propose that the aged body, the gerontological body, which is representative of corporeal mortification, is in effect both the aim and representation of masculinity. Aging and corporeal mortification signify, then, the transformation of martyrdom, which was in itself a highly masculine discourse in antiquity. Chrysostom provides us with ample sources for understanding old age and death, and their relation to masculinity. Yet his views are complex. Chrysostom’s statements about aging, for

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instance, have also featured in previous studies on old age in antiquity. In this regard, I also intend to correct a past perspective on old age specifically in Chrysostom, namely that of Georges Minois who says, “John Chrysostom does not appear to like old people.” 1 Along with informing scholarship about Chrysostom’s thought on the fashioning of masculinity, I aim to provide a more nuanced reading of old age and corporeal mortification in Chrysostom.2

I am, in essence, enquiring about the discursive nature of the gendered knowledge that is carried and displayed in the old man’s body, as well as in the corpse, and with this, what is at stake for understanding the formation of ancient Christian masculinity.

The focus on masculinity and Christian society also inevitably compels us to relate gerontology and thanatology to the issue of asceticism.3 I will start by asking what old age entails both as discourse and cultural phenomenon. The chapter will then proceed with a discussion of how gerontology detracts power, especially masculine power, from individuals. Yet, after this discussion, by applying the theory of gerotranscendence, I will also demonstrate that old age functioned as a symbol of power and sign of masculinity, and was discursively meshed with ascetic and monastic foundations in

Chrysostom’s thought. This excursus thus implies looking at senescence first as a challenge to masculinity and then, in contrast, as a masculinising discourse in

Chrysostom, giving attention to both its medico-cultural and psychic-geriatric (that is, old age as related to the health of the soul) contexts. It will be shown that Chrysostom’s

1 Georges Minois, History of Old Age: From Antiquity to the Renaissance, trans. Sarah Hanbury Tenison (Cambridge: Polity, 1989), 125. 2 Some of the findings in this chapter also appeared in my articles, “Grumpy Old Men? Gender, Gerontology, and the Geriatrics of Soul in John Chrysostom,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 24.4 (2016): 491–521; “The Practice of Everyday Death: Thanatology and Self-Fashioning in John Chrysostom’s Thirteenth Homily on Romans,” HTS Theological Studies 71.1 (2015): 1–6. 3 For the relationship between Christian masculinity and monasticism, see Mathew Kuefler, The Manly Eunuch: Masculinity, Gender Ambiguity, and Christian Ideology in Late Antiquity, The Chicago Series on Sexuality, History, and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).

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advice on psychic control was aimed at aging the body before its time. In conclusion, the relationship between masculinisation, aging and corporeal mortification, and the late antique transformation of martyrdom will be examined.

An Age-Old Subject

When they heard that Simone de Beauvoir was working on the topic of old age, people seemed surprised that she had chosen such a “dismal subject” as the coming of age for analysis.4 De Beauvoir makes the claim that it is actually impossible to write a history of old age because old people rarely have a history, or at least, the aged in society were never hip topics of history.5 Even in some of the works of antiquity that we do have, like Cicero’s De senectute,6 we have a history, mostly, of elite male old age in society, with very little said about the aged poor, women, and enslaved.7 Along with the social marginalisation many aged persons experience today (and likely in antiquity),8 one of the important points that De Beauvoir’s study highlights is the marginalisation of the aged even in the operation of historiography.

Studies on old age in Christian antiquity are few and far between.9 While there are several enlightening works on old age in the Roman Empire, notably those of Tim

4 De Beauvoir, Old Age, 8. 5 De Beauvoir, Old Age, 88–89. 6 See LCL 154.2–102. 7 A point especially raised by Moses I. Finley, “The Elderly in Classical Antiquity,” in Old Age in Greek and Latin Literature, ed. Thomas M. Falkner and Judith de Luce (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1989), 1– 20. 8 Debbie Plath rightly notes that dependency and marginalisation in the period of old age “can be viewed not as a natural process of ageing, but rather as a socially structured state, maintained by dominant ageist values in society”; see “Independence in Old Age: The Route to Social Exclusion?,” British Journal of Social Work 38.7 (2008): 1356. 9 This lack of attention to ancient gerontology should also be viewed in comparison to the numerous handbooks and monographs written on children and youth in antiquity. For an extensive disciplinary and bibliographical overview, see Judith Evans Grubbs and Tim Parkin, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Childhood and Education in the Classical World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). See also the highly expansive bibliography of Ville Vuolanto, Reidar Aasgaard, and Oana M. Cojocaru, “Children in the Ancient World and Early Middle Ages: A Bibliography (Eight Century BC–Eight Century AD),”

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Parkin10 and Karen Cokayne,11 these studies rarely draw on early Christian sources. A handful of studies treat old age in early Christianity, the most significant being the work of Christian Gnilka.12 Edward Watts, in turn, has provided an excellent overview of how non-Christian elites, especially Themistius and Libanius, may have experienced old age in a “young man’s empire.”13 Minois does look at early Christian sources, but his analysis, as I will show, is somewhat problematic.14 Karen King provides a very insightful study of old age and immortality, especially from the perspective of Christian

Academia.Edu, 2018, https://www.academia.edu/36705877/CHILDREN_IN_THE_ANCIENT_WORLD_AND_THE_EAR LY_MIDDLE_AGES._A_BIBLIOGRAPHY_EIGHT_CENTURY_BC_EIGHT_CENTURY_AD_VI LLE_VUOLANTO_REIDAR_AASGAARD_and_OANA_MARIA_COJOCARU?auto=download&ca mpaign=upload_email. 10 Tim G. Parkin, Old Age in the Roman World: A Cultural and Social History, Ancient Society and History (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004). 11 Karen Cokayne, Experiencing Old Age in Ancient Rome (London: Routledge, 2003). 12 See especially Christian Gnilka, Aetas spiritualis: Die Überwindung der naturlichen Altersstufen als Ideal frühchristlichen Lebens (Bonn: Peter Hanstein, 1972). Other useful articles of Gnilka include: “Das ‘gute Alter’: Ein Leitbild des frühen Christentums,” in Zwischen Historiographie und Hagiographie: Ausgewählte Beiträge zur Erforschung der Spätantike, ed. Jürgen Dummer and Meinolf Vielberg, Altertumswissenschaftliches Kolloquium 13 (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 2005), 27–46; “Das puer senex- Ideal und die Kirchenbauten zu Nola,” Boreas 18 (1995): 175–84; “Kαλόγηρος: Die Idee des ‘guten Alters’ bei den Christen,” Jahrbuch für Antike und Christentum 23 (1980): 5–21; Christian Gnilka, “Neues Alter, neues Leben: Eine antike Weisheit und ihre christliche Nutzung,” Jahrbuch für Antike und Christentum 20 (1977): 5–38. For a discussion of old age in Augustine, see Alexander Sizoo, “Augustinus de senectute,” in Ut pictura poesis. Studia latina P. I. Enk septuagenario oblata (Leiden: Brill, 1955), 184–88. Jerome’s views are discussed by Paul Antin, “La vieillesse chez S. Jérôme,” Revue des études augustiniennes et patristiques 17 (1971): 43–54. A good discussion of the “ages of man” in Ambrose is given by Emilien Lamirande, “Les âges de l’homme d’après Saint Ambroise de Milan,” Cahiers des études anciennes 14 (1982): 227–33. See also the (now dated) literature review of Emiel Eyben, “Old Age in Greco-Roman Antiquity and Early Christianity: An Annotated Select Bibliography,” in Old Age in Greek and Latin Literature, ed. Thomas M. Falkner and Judith de Luce (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1989), 230–51. 13 Edward J. Watts, The Final Pagan Generation, Transformation of the Classical Heritage 53 (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015), 191–211. 14 Georges Minois, History of Old Age: From Antiquity to the Renaissance, trans. Sarah Hanbury Tenison (Cambridge: Polity, 1989), especially 113–32.

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literature influenced by so-called “Gnostic” thought.15 Shulamith Shahar gives us a useful overview of old age in the Middle Ages.16

Old age is a biological and a cultural phenomenon, a symbol of how a society copes with time and the body—but we should not limit gerontology to the biological, social, or psychological spheres alone. As Bryan Green surmises, old age is a discourse, a way of speaking about the individual and social body, and its ideals and anxieties.17

In his helpful study on the dynamics between gerontology, knowledge, and disciplinarity, Stephen Katz further elaborates the broad nature of the gerontological field:

Aging and old age are intrinsic to every form of knowledge and cultural

practice: spiritual, ritual, mythical, symbolic, artistic, metaphorical, and

architectural. They are the central organizing resources for a multitude of

social structures from nomadic pastoralism to complex kinship systems to

statelike bureaucracies. Indeed, aging and old age have been so diversely

and richly understood that no single knowledge of them is universal. Nor

should it be. The meanings of aging and old age are scattered, plural,

contradictory, and enigmatic. They are confirmation that the mysteries of

age have furnished the human imagination with limitless opportunities to

15 Karen L. King, “‘In Your Midst as a Child’—‘In the Form of an Old Man’: Images of Aging and Immortality in Ancient Christianity,” in Metamorphoses: Resurrection, Body and Transformative Practices in Early Christianity, ed. Turid Karlsen Seim and Jorunn Økland, Ekstasis: Religious Experience from Antiquity to the Middle Ages 1 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009), 59–82. 16 Shulamith Shahar, Growing Old in the Middle Ages: “Winter Clothes Us in Shadow and Pain” (London: Routledge, 2004); see also Graham P. Mulley, “A History of Geriatrics and Gerontology,” European Geriatric Medicine 3.4 (2012): 225–27; and several essays in Paul Johnson and Pat Thane, eds., Old Age from Antiquity to Post-Modernity (London: Routledge, 1998); and esp. Christian Krötzl and Katariina Mustakallio, eds., On Old Age: Approaching Death in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, Studies in the History of Daily Life (800–1600) 2 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2012). 17 Bryan S. R. Green, Gerontology and the Construction of Old Age: A Study in Discourse Analysis (New York: Aldine De Gruyter, 1993), 1–3.

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express itself. Age is everywhere, but the world’s cultures have taught us

that age has no fixed locus.18

This discursive nature of old age inevitably means that old age has a very distinct relationship with knowledge, especially knowledge of the self, and if we were to follow

Michel Foucault’s maxim,19 this epistemological link also makes old age an important factor in the dynamics of power in society, whether it is psychic power or social and political power. In antiquity, and especially in Christian asceticism, as I will demonstrate, gerontological discourse was readily used in the transference of power.

Gerontology could assign power: Parkin rightly notes the etymological link, albeit somewhat superficial, between the terms senex, senior, and senator, in the Roman context, and γέρων and γερουσία in the Spartan context.20 It also seems that the office of the elder (πρεσβύτερος), according to the New Testament, came with substantial authority.21 In later monastic culture, the term “venerable” (καλόγηρος/venerabilis) was used to denote nobly aged and respected priests and ascetics. 22 The etymology, however, has its limits—the late ancient Roman senate, for instance, consisted of members “primarily of young and middle-aged men,”23 and Chrysostom himself claims that old age is not a qualification in itself for the priesthood.24 Gerontology could also

18 Stephen Katz, Disciplining Old Age: The Formation of Gerontological Knowledge (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1996), 1. 19 Foucault has meticulously shown how knowledge and power are intertwined and interdependent in society; see Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon et al. (New York: Vintage, 1980). 20 Parkin, Old Age in the Roman World, 102–3. 21 See esp. R. Alastair Campbell, The Elders: Seniority within Earliest Christianity (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1994); John M. G. Barclay, “There Is Neither Old Nor Young? Early Christianity and Ancient Ideologies of Age,” New Testament Studies 53.2 (2007): 225–41. 22 Gnilka, “Kαλόγηρος,” 5–11. 23 Watts, Final Pagan Generation, 194. 24 Sac. 3.11.39–65 (SC 272.196).

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detract power, especially when the once strong and virile bodies of men were no longer that, and their abilities for public speaking and reasoning failed them. Thus, a study in ancient gerontology inevitably becomes a study in ancient power dynamics, notably when taking issues of gender, and particularly masculinity, into consideration.

Along with acknowledging biological realities, what is important to note here is that old age and aging are also socially constructed phenomena—they are signifiers of changes in the individual and social body that are interpreted in a certain way, sometimes even in contradictory ways. It would be wrong to assume that old age and aging represents, for example, a decline in and of itself. Interestingly enough, Sigmund

Freud, who, according to his biographers, was terrified of aging, regarded old age as loss, decline, and decay—more specifically, Freud understood aging as castration, which was accompanied by a loss of psychic energy and libido, which is also why he believed that it was difficult for older persons to undergo psychoanalysis.25 Freud’s view, of course, is not novel. I hope to demonstrate in this chapter precisely how fluid the discursivities of gerontology were in late ancient Christian thought, particularly in

Chrysostom.

An issue that does come out in the few studies we do have on old age in Roman antiquity is that old age was considered a gendered problem.26 With the biological and mental “decline” of the body, as some ancients perceived it, came various challenges to a Roman man or woman’s gender identity, problems related to bodily strength and posture, beauty, libido, fertility, and mental prowess. It is in this regard, namely the transformation of the aging body, that one of the main observations from De Beauvoir’s

25 Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams: The Complete and Definitive Text, trans. James Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 370; see also Catherine B. Silver, “Gendered Identities in Old Age: Toward (De)Gendering?,” Journal of Aging Studies 17.4 (2003): 381–82. 26 For example, Cokayne, Experiencing Old Age, 113–72; Parkin, Old Age in the Roman World, 193– 235. As is the case, also, in modern, postindustrial societies; see Silver, “Gendered Identities in Old Age.”

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study on old age may be highlighted—that is, the alterity, the otherness, the frightening transcendence, of old age. “The myths and clichés put out by bourgeois thought aim at holding up the elderly man as someone who is different, as another being,” remarks De

Beauvoir, “[t]hinking of myself as an old person when I am twenty or forty means thinking of myself as someone else, as another than myself. Every metamorphosis has something frightening about it.”27 Old age is therefore a problem of subjectivity— individually, socially, and politically. Along with the neglected aspect of the study of old age in early Christianity, it is this subjective (and subjectivising) effect of gerontological discourse and alterity on the gender (and masculinisation) of the body, and in turn, its function in Chrysostom’s thought, that is the main focus of this chapter.28

Let us now turn, first, to the challenges that old age could pose for masculinity.

A Cold and Dry Castration: Senescence as a Problem of Masculinity

As is the case in modern times, old age is an ambiguous topic in ancient Roman literature. If we were to start at its biological premise, old age becomes, of course, a highly relative term, not necessarily based on the number of years one has lived. With low levels of numeracy, no concept of retirement as we have it in modern times

(retirement meant something rather different in Roman antiquity29) or any other formal rite of passage into old age, lower life-expectancy rates (Parkin speculates that about

7% of the population in the ancient world were above the age of sixty), and a general non-temporal perspective on aging in the Roman world, we should be hesitant to prescribe a set age that defines “old age” in antiquity. Many ancient persons may not

27 De Beauvoir, Old Age, 3–5. 28 For a more general discussion of gerontology as discourse, see Green, Gerontology and the Construction of Old Age. 29 Parkin, Old Age in the Roman World, 123–29.

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have been entirely sure of their actual age. Slaves, for instance, were often made to appear younger than they are by some of those deceptive slave-traders, as this would increase their value.30 For the purposes of argument, while acknowledging that many ancient men considered themselves “old” from their forties onward, I will cautiously side with Parkin, who uses sixty years as a guideline for considering old age in ancient

Roman society.31

The age of sixty for categorising “old age” also appears to be in line with

Chrysostom’s own views. Chrysostom seems to follow a system of four ages for human development.32 The Pythagoreans also followed such a system, which ranges between zero to nineteen, twenty to thirty-nine, forty to fifty-nine, and sixty to eighty. 33

Chrysostom’s life cycles, however, do not tend to strictly follow the Pythagorean system in the first ages.

In one of his trademark nautical metaphors, Chrysostom describes the four different seas of life through which the soul must steer.34 Chrysostom’s developmental psychology is interwoven with his virtue discourse. The first age is that of childhood days (τὸ τῆς παιδικῆς ἡλικίας), referring to the period of infancy and early childhood.

This age is marked by ignorance and folly, and is therefore also the age when

30 J. Albert Harrill, “The Vice of Slave Dealers in Greco-Roman Society: The Use of a Topos in 1 Timothy 1:10,” Journal of Biblical Literature 118.1 (1999): 97–122. 31 Parkin, Old Age in the Roman World, 13–56. See also Walter Scheidel, “Roman Age Structure: Evidence and Models,” Journal of Roman Studies 91 (2001): 1–26. 32 In a different homily, however, Chrysostom combines the first age of childhood and second age of puberty into one age; Hom. Col. 4.3 (F5.217). 33 Parkin lists numerous “ages of man” that ancient authors formulated. Varro listed five ages, while Augustine expanded it to six, which also corresponded to the historical development of humanity, namely from Adam to Noah, Noah to Abraham, Abraham to David, David to the Babylonian exile, from the exile to Christ, and finally the eschaton (compare Matt. 1:17); Gen. Man. 1.23.35–42 (CSEL 91.104– 12). The age of sixty as the beginning of old age overlaps in these systems; see also Lamirande, “Les âges de l’homme.” Clement of Alexandria (Strom. 6.16.144.3–6 [SC 446 TLG]) may be following Solon’s elegies of the seven ages of human development; see Parkin, Old Age in the Roman World, 17– 18, 312–14. 34 Hom. Matt. 81.5 (PG 58.737.18–738.3); see also Hom. Tit. 4 (F6.293–303); Stat. 3 (PG 49.47.9–59.13).

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pedagogues and teachers enter. The next age, that of adolescence or puberty

(μειρακιεία), is the age when the pedagogues depart, and when lust is in full swing.

This is most likely not, as the Pythagorean system would dictate, the age of twenty years, since many pedagogues probably left their pupils, formally at least, a few years earlier, perhaps around sixteen or so, at the donning of the toga virilis and just before entering the army and cursus honorum. After this comes the period of manhood (τὸ τῶν

ἀνδρῶν), when he marries, and starts a household—a period where greed and envy often flourish. Although Chrysostom envisioned men to marry at a much younger age, as a safeguard from fornication, perhaps close to the same time as girls, men in the

Roman Empire generally married in their late twenties or early thirties. Finally, and without much qualification, Chrysostom speaks of the period of old age (τὸ γῆρας), which follows middle age,35 when a man must bear the consequences of concupiscent living. Although sixty years may serve as a guideline for this period, since it overlaps with the life cycles of other age systems of Roman antiquity, and makes sense both socially and mathematically (in the Pythagorean sense), Chrysostom also believed that living a sinful and immoderate life speeds up aging.36 So old age should be seen more as a corporeal state resulting from psychic excess, rather than a chronological age in the way we see it today.

Furthermore, although being old was not considered sinful per se, aging was seen by many Christian authors of late antiquity as a consequence of sin.37 Being seized by disease, decay, and death is the final legacy of sin on the body, as we have seen in

35 Hom. Jo. 88.1 (PG 59.479.43–46); here Chrysostom refers to the age of Peter during his final conversation with Jesus (John 21:15–25). At this stage Peter was not young, nor old, but a middle-aged man (ἀνὴρ τέλειος; that is, “a fully developed man”). 36 Hom. Matt. 30.6 (PG 57.370.31). 37 Christian Gnilka, “Griesenalter,” Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum 12 (1983): 995–1094.

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the chapters covering Chrysostom’s interpretation of Genesis 1–3. 38 Chrysostom believed that sin and indulgence in the passions aged the body and the soul.39 As with

Hesiod’s golden age of man, Chrysostom also states that the sufferings that go with growing old are the inevitable consequences of sin, and a testament to the sad and weak nature of humanity. There will, of course, be no old age in the next life: “[T]here is no old age there, nor any of the evils of old age, but everything akin to decay is entirely removed, and incorruptible glory reigns in all.”40 This signifies a return to a glorious prelapsarian state.

In most cases, however, it is not the aging process itself that is the topic of ridicule or praise, but the behaviour of the aged individual.41 From an ancient perspective, old age is therefore a state that is shaped by one’s behaviour, and in relation to gender, a state judged by gendered performance.42 Old men were expected to behave and act in very particular ways. Chrysostom, too, had very precise expectations for the older men in society, and had little patience for elderly men behaving badly.43 What problems could senescence pose to Roman masculinity? Chrysostom was very aware of the problems an old man may face. In a dramatic start to his homily De beato Abraham, a

38 Minois, History of Old Age, 118–20. 39 Chrysostom especially addresses this issue in Hom. 1 Cor. 28.1 (F2.340); Hom. Heb. 9.3 (F7.119); Hom. Rom. 11[10].3 (F1.152); Laed. 8 (SC 103.98–101). 40 Theod. laps. 1.11.20–21 (SC 117.138–39): οὐκ ἔστι γῆρας ἐκεῖ καὶ τὰ τοῦ γήρως κακά, ἀλλὰ πάντα ἐκποδῶν γίνεται τὰ τῆς φθορᾶς, τῆς ἀφθάρτου δόξης κρατούσης πανταχοῦ. 41 Cokayne, Experiencing Old Age, 1–6. 42 For the critical theoretic underpinnings of and intersections between age and gender, see especially Julia Twigg, “The Body, Gender, and Age: Feminist Insights in Social Gerontology,” Journal of Aging Studies 18.1 (2004): 59–73; Clary Krekula, “The Intersection of Age and Gender Reworking Gender Theory and Social Gerontology,” Current Sociology 55.2 (2007): 155–71. 43 Hom. Jo. 58.4 (PG 59.320.54–60); Hom. Matt. 20.6 (PG 57.294.6–24); Vid. dom. 1.4.1–16 (SC 277.60–63).

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work formerly regarded as spurious, that Demetrios Tonias has argued is authentic,44

Chrysostom relays the following paradox about Abraham:

Do you see the vigorous gray hair and the ripe old age [γῆρας ἀκμάζον]?

Do you see the noble athlete take a battle stance toward nature and heart?

Do you see a man in extreme old age [ἐν ἐσχάτῃ πολιᾷ] hard as steel? While

the tone of his flesh has become slack [κεχάλαστο], the tone of his faith has

become muscular—for such are the achievements of the Church since the

weakness [ἀτονία] of the body does not wipe away the eagerness of faith—

moreover, the Church rejoices in this sober old age and winged faith which

is an adornment for the church. The old man is useless [ἄχρηστος] for

external things and, because he is weak, he enjoys the excuse of not being

useful for necessary things. By this I mean that the old man is not able to

prepare himself for battle, nor able to mount a horse, nor throw a spear, nor

brandish the shield, nor endure the heat of the sun, nor endure a long

journey, nor endure severe hunger, nor swelling crowds but rather sits in a

peaceful place having old age as his excuse.45

Chrysostom praises Abraham because despite of his hoary and aged appearance,

44 Demetrios E. Tonias, Abraham in the Works of John Chrysostom (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2014), 184–86. 45 Abr. 1 (PG 50.737.3–21): Εἴδετε πολιὰν σφριγῶσαν, καὶ γῆρας ἀκμάζον; εἴδετε ἀθλητὴν γενναῖον πρὸς φύσιν καὶ σπλάγχνα παραταξάμενον; εἴδετε ἄνδρα ἐν ἐσχάτῃ πολιᾷ ἀδάμαντος στεῤῥότερον; Κεχάλαστο μὲν αὐτοῦ ὁ τόνος τῶν σαρκῶν, νενεύρωτο δὲ αὐτοῦ ὁ τόνος τῆς πίστεως. Τοιαῦτα γὰρ τῆς Ἐκκλησίας τὰ κατορθώματα, ὅτι ἡ ἀτονία τοῦ σώματος οὐδὲν λυμαίνεται τὴν προθυμίαν τῆς πίστεως· κόσμος γὰρ Ἐκκλησίας πολιὰ κατεσταλμένη, καὶ πίστις ἐπτερωμένη, καὶ ἐν τούτῳ χαίρει ἡ Ἐκκλησία μᾶλλον. Ἐπὶ μὲν γὰρ τῶν ἔξω πραγμάτων ὁ γέρων ἄχρηστος, εἰς οὐδὲν ἐπιτήδειος, ἀλλὰ πανταχοῦ συγγνώμης ἀπολαύει, διὰ ἀτονίαν μὴ δυνάμενος χρησιμεῦσαι τοῖς ἀναγκαίοις. Οἷόν τι λέγω· Οὐ δύναται ὁ γέρων εἰς πόλεμον παρατάξασθαι, οὐχ ἵππῳ ἀναβῆναι, οὐ δόρυ κινῆσαι, οὐκ ἀσπίδα σεῖσαι, οὐχ ἡλίου θερμότητα ὑπενεγκεῖν, οὐχ ὁδοιπορίας μέγεθος βαστάσαι, οὐ λιμοῦ δεινότητα ὑπομεῖναι, οὐ θορύβων ὄγκον· ἀλλ' ἐν ἡσύχῳ τόπῳ καθέζεται, συνήγορον ἔχων τὴν πολιάν. Translation: Tonias, Abraham in John Chrysostom, 187.

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he conquered his weakness and became a legend of the faith. Chrysostom uses very similar rhetoric in a homily preached in Antioch, after the destruction of the imperial statues, to describe the bishop Flavian, who departed on a journey to intercede for the city despite his bodily infirmity and old age.46 In this section I will point out five challenges that aging posed for Roman masculinity, relating, firstly, to the vulnerability to disease, secondly, to decreased libido (or, at least, a social expectation of a diminishing sexual drive), thirdly, to the problem of dementia, mental illness, and a low tolerance to alcohol, fourthly, to a general decline in physical fitness and agility, and fifthly, to less involvement in civic and military duties.

Let us start by looking at the physical effect of aging on the body in ancient terms, since this is where Chrysostom’s argument begins. As noted, in ancient humoural theory, which was as we know the cornerstone of Chrysostom’s own medical framework, aging was considered a process of cooling and drying. Other medical authors, like some in the Hippocratic tradition,47 believed that it was one of cooling and an increase in moisture, but Galen refutes this in his De sanitate tuenda, saying that this view is mistaken, and confused by the prevalence of phlegm in the aged body.48 The

“leakiness” of the aged body contributed to its drying. Although the excess and imbalance of phlegm, the main humour associated with old age, was indeed a distinctive feature of old age, the body itself was cool and dry—like a corpse, hence the link between old age and corporeal mortification.49 Galen did not consider aging to be a disease, but aging did mean that the humours were becoming more and more

46 Stat. 3.1 (PG 49.47.21–35). 47 See Parkin, Old Age in the Roman World, 420n49. 48 San. tuend. 5.8 (K6.349–51). 49 See Florian Steger, “Altern im Leben: Alterstopoi in der antiken Medizin?,” in Alterstopoi: Das Wissen von der Lebensaltern in Literatur, Kunst und Theologie, ed. Dorothee Elm and et al. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009), 104–8; Jan Godderis, Antieke Geneeskunde over Lichaamskwalen en Psychische Stoornissen van de Oude Dag (Leuven: Peeters, 1989), 15–63.

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imbalanced, hence the onset of disease.50 According to Chrysostom, Abraham’s body had already become subject to the corruption caused by old age. Calling Abraham an athlete is then a rhetorical paradox, which prepares Chrysostom’s audience for the introduction of Abraham as an athlete and soldier of the soul and faith, despite his physical frailty.

The first challenge, then, that old age posed to one’s masculinity was the vulnerability of the aged body to disease, especially due to the secretion of superfluous phlegm. Chrysostom also associated old age with the prevalence of phlegm (along with black and yellow bile), and describes the leaky nature of extreme old age.51 As old age progresses, the humours become imbalanced, and the body deteriorates. As Chrysostom himself notes, in typical Galenic fashion, “when there is an excess of phlegm, many diseases are produced.”52 Old age was a time of pain and grief,53 always close to the grave.54 The prevalence of phlegm such as a runny nose and drivelling is also linked to the ancient view that old age represented a state of infantility, a second childhood.55

This was supported by the decrease of mental ability and the onset of disease.56

What we need to realise, in this instance, is that with the prevalence of disease

50 Parkin, Old Age in the Roman World, 252. 51 See especially Hom. Rom. 11[10].3 (F1.152). 52 Stat. 9.4 (PG 49.109.30–31): καὶ φλέγματος πλεονάζοντος πολλὰ νοσήματα φύεται. 53 For Chrysostom’s views on grief and its treatment, see Blake Leyerle, “The Etiology of Sorrow and Its Therapeutic Benefits in the Preaching of John Chrysostom,” Journal of Late Antiquity 8.2 (2015): 368–85. 54 Hom. Tit. 4.1 (F6.293); Stag. 2.11 (PG 47.468.42–43). 55 This is a reality especially stressed by Clement of Alexandria, who quotes Sophocles, Antiphon, and Plato regarding the nursing of the old (γηροτροφία)—“For the aged man is once again a child!” (Strom. 6.2.19.5–8 [SC 446 TLG]). See Herbert C. Covey, “A Return to Infancy: Old Age and the Second Childhood in History,” International Journal of Aging and Human Development 36.2 (1992): 81–90; Angus Crichton, “‘The Old Are in a Second Childhood’: Age Reversal and Jury Service in Aristophanes’ Wasps,” Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 38.1 (1993): 59–80; Cokayne, Experiencing Old Age, 70; Parkin, Old Age in the Roman World, 83, 88, 229. 56 See especially Chrysostom’s metaphor of the sinful soul as an old, sick, and overworked slave in Hom. Rom. 11[10].3 (F1.152).

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during old age, the masculinity of the aged male is under threat.57 The sick old man assumes a passive role, while those over whom he had to dominate, namely the females, children, and slaves of the household, take up an active role in caring for him.58 We see this preoccupation with bodily health with Chrysostom himself in later years during exile. The topic of bodily health surfaces constantly in most of his exile letters, perhaps showing how elderly elites, like Chrysostom at that stage, had to cope with their physical infirmities and frailness. Along with having numerous illnesses, Chrysostom also describes the desolation of Cucusus and the harsh winters he had to endure.59

Ancient physicians advised the elderly against living in colder regions so as not to increase corporeal cooling and hasten death.60 Sending an old bishop to a clod region was perceived in itself as a death sentence.

The second challenge comes with the cooling of the body and its effect on male sexuality. The loss of blood and thus warmth typically characterised old age. Despite the dry nature of the old man’s body, what we need to understand here is that corporeal cooling was considered a feature of the female body—by cooling down, the male body loses its ability to successfully produce semen by the “cooking” of the blood—hence the relation between old age and sexual impotence and sterility.61 Aristotle viewed women as the colder sex, which also meant that women aged more quickly than men,

57 Helen King, Hippocrates’ Woman: Reading the Female Body in Ancient Greece (London: Routledge, 1998), 1. 58 The distinction between “nursing” and “doctoring” as we have it today did not exist in the ancient world. In most cases doctors performed some of the basic “nursing” roles, while members of the household (especially slaves) had to care for the ill. Chrysostom readily admonishes his audience to send their slaves to care for the sick; see Hom. Eph. 13.4 (F4.243). For a more general discussion of the “nursing” of sick persons in antiquity, see King, Hippocrates’ Woman, 157–71. 59 Livia Neureiter, “Health and Healing as Recurrent Topics in John Chrysostom’s Correspondence with Olympias,” Studia Patristica 47 (2010): 267–72. 60 Brent D. Shaw, “Seasons of Death: Aspects of Mortality in Imperial Rome,” Journal of Roman Studies 86 (1996): 119–21. 61 Joyce E. Salisbury, Church Fathers, Independent Virgins (London: Verso, 1992), 20; Cokayne, Experiencing Old Age, 115–32.

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and died sooner.62 We see a direct link between old age and feminisation in Aristotle.

The coldness of aging and loss of libido also meant that old men were no longer seen as dominators and penetrators in the socio-sexual sense. Galen, Soranus, and

Oribasius believed that having sex could be quite dangerous for an old man. 63 In addition to the medical dangers, the old man who was still sexually active, the senex amator, was a target of ridicule by both satirists and homilists alike, 64 including

Chrysostom. For Chrysostom, it is not so much the impotence of old age that is the problem (which he actually considers an advantage), but old men who are still sexually active when they are supposed to be rid of such passions. Thus, although we know, from modern-day sociological and medical research,65 that a decreased libido is not necessarily a given factor of aging, ancient society had the expectation that an old man was no longer supposed to be troubled by sexual impulses (both due to corporeal cooling and drying, and unattractiveness). So an aged man who was still sexually active was often teratogenised, seen as some type of ridiculous monster.66 The construction of elderly male sexuality is then either totally flaccid and impotent (normal), or libidinally ravenous and monstrous (abnormal). For Chrysostom, as we will see in the rest of this chapter, sexual abstinence was the only way in which an old man could retain some of his masculinity in the sexual sense.

Corporeal cooling, sexual impotence, and infertility were also problems that

62 Aristotle, Gen. an. 775a13–15 (LCL 366.460). Helen King’s observation suffices: “[W]ith a little extra heat, women can become men: with a little less, men risk feminization”; Hippocrates’ Woman, 10. 63 See Soranus, Gyn. 1.7.30–32 (Ilberg 4.20–22); Kuefler, Manly Eunuch, 80; Cokayne, Experiencing Old Age, 115. 64 Cokayne, Experiencing Old Age, 15–17. 65 See especially the work of Linn Sandberg, Getting Intimate: A Feminist Analysis of Old Age, Masculinity and Sexuality (Linköping: Linköping University Press, 2011); see also Osmo Kontula, “Sexuality among Older Adults,” in International Handbook on the Demography of Sexuality, ed. Amanda K. Baumle (Dordrecht: Springer, 2013), 195–216. 66 See more in Cokayne, Experiencing Old Age, 115–33; Parkin, Old Age in the Roman World, 193–202.

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Abraham and Sarah had, as Chrysostom describes in a homily on Genesis: “[T]he patriarch by this stage was impotent through old age and without the capacity to have children, and Sarah in addition to her sterility had the extra handicap of extreme old age.”67 In another homily on Romans, Chrysostom refers to the cold womb of Sarah— this being consonant with the ancient view, also prevalent in modern popular parlance, that the womb was like an oven in which the baby was “baked.”68 As in the case of being debilitated to a state of care by disease, the corporeal cooling of old age was also a process of feminisation that an old man had to face. This cold and sexually sterile construction of gerontological sexuality is also the reason why Chrysostom advises fathers to only let old and unattractive women be in the presence of the young filiusfamilias.69 And in his treatise against the subintroductae, Chrysostom says that if a male ascetic does want a female housekeeper to assist him with domestic duties, it should preferably be a much older woman.70

Yet, when Abraham chooses to have sex with Hagar, Chrysostom does not see it as sinful (that is, adultery) or even shameful, since his wife gave the permission and, apparently according to Chrysostom, there was no pleasure in the act for Abraham—

Abraham was not driven by his heated passions to violate his slave girl, and he never loved Hagar.71 Abraham escaped the ridicule directed towards the senex amator, but not all other men were so fortunate. In his seventh homily on Hebrews, the locus classicus

67 Hom. Gen. 40.3 (PG 53.369.55–59): ὁ πατριάρχης ὑπὸ τοῦ γήρως λοιπὸν ἀνενέργητος ὢν, καὶ πρὸς παιδοποιίαν ἄχρηστος, καὶ ἡ Σάῤῥα μετὰ τῆς στειρώσεως ἔχουσα καὶ τὴν ἀπὸ τῆς ἡλικίας καὶ τοῦ γήρως προσθήκην. Translation: Robert C. Hill, trans., St. John Chrysostom: Homilies on Genesis 18–45, The Fathers of the Church 82 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1999), 391. 68 Hom. Rom. 17[16].4 (F1.277). For more on the womb as oven, see Page duBois, Sowing the Body: Psychoanalysis and Ancient Representations of Women (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 110ff; King, Hippocrates’ Woman, 52. 69 Anna 1.6 (PG 54.642.25–33); Inan. 79.944–46 (SC 188.182–83). 70 Fem. reg. 5.11–13 (Dumortier 110–11). 71 Hom. Gen. 38.1–2 (PG 53.351–53); Hom. Eph. 20.6 (F4.313–14). Chrysostom is rather oblivious to Hagar’s violation—as a slave, she was expected to be sexually available to her master.

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of Chrysostom’s views on old age, he states: “What then, you say, when we see old men more stubborn than young ones? You are mentioning to me an excess of wickedness…. Thus, when an old man has the diseases of the young [τὰ τῶν νέων

νοσῇ], this is an excess of wickedness.”72 Among some other evils, excessive sexual lust was often considered the prime vice of youth, especially because of the heat and moisture of the body. An old man who behaves like a libidinally charged young man is disgraceful for Chrysostom—although his sexual heat is supposed to be in the deficit, here it is now only in excess. The senex amator is thus an unnatural figure, hot when he should be cold. Chrysostom calls this excess in lust a disease, specifically then, a sickness of the soul. Again we see that old age in itself is not the problem, but the behaviour during old age. Chrysostom criticises the old man who has not learnt any austerity coming with senescence, behaving, ironically, like a child himself (perhaps playing on the pun of old age as a second childhood). “An old man sits in the taverns.

An old man scurries to the horseraces. An old man goes up into the theatres, running along with the crowd as if they are children,” Chrysostom complains, “[t]ruly it is a disgrace and a joke, to be adorned on the outside with grey hairs, but to have the mind of a child within.”73

A third problem with the cooling and drying of the body is the effect it had on the brain and mental health of the aged person. Dotage (λήρησις) and forgetfulness (λήθη and λήθαργος) were the results of the body’s natural loss of heat and the deadening of the senses.74 This could have serious consequences for an elderly paterfamilias and his

72 Hom. Heb. 7.3 (F7.95–96): Τί οὖν, φησὶν, ὅταν ἴδωμεν τῶν νέων χαλεπωτέρους τοὺς γέροντας; Ὑπερβολήν μοι λέγεις κακίας…. Ὅταν οὖν καὶ γέρων τὰ τῶν νέων νοσῇ, ὑπερβολὴ τοῦτο κακίας ἐστί. 73 Hom. Heb. 7.3 (F7.96): Γέρων ἐν καπηλείοις καθέζεται, γέρων εἰς ἱπποδρομίας σπεύδει, γέρων εἰς θέατρα ἀναβαίνει, καθάπερ παιδία τρέχων μετὰ τοῦ πλήθους. Ὄντως αἰσχύνη καὶ γέλως, τῇ μὲν πολιᾷ κοσμεῖσθαι ἔξωθεν, ἔνδοθεν δὲ παιδὸς φρόνημα ἔχειν. See also similar accusations in Vid. dom. 1.4.1– 16 (SC 277.60–63). 74 Parkin, Old Age in the Roman World, 228–29.

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family, since, in principle, the paterfamilias retained his potestas until he died. 75

Moreover, masculinity was especially determined by one’s rationality. In his exegesis of Titus 2:2, which calls for the elders (πρεσβύτας) of the assembly to be “sober- minded, dignified, self-controlled, sound in faith, in love, and in steadfastness,” 76

Chrysostom warns that this command serves as a safeguard against the dangers of senility and alcohol abuse:

There are some weaknesses that old age has, which youth alone does not

have. Some disadvantages it indeed has in common with youth, but it also

has mental slowness [νωθρὸν], timidity [ὀκνηρὸν], forgetfulness

[ληθαργὸν], insensibility [ἀμβλὺ], and irascibility [ἀκρόχολον]. Therefore

Paul admonishes old men about these matters, “old men must be sober-

minded.” As I said, there are many things at this time of life that make men

all but sober-minded. What I said at first, their general insensibility

[πανταχόθεν ἀμβλύνεσθαι], and the difficulty of arousing or exciting them.

Thus he also adds, “dignified, self-controlled.” By self-controlled he means

“prudence” [φρονίμους]. For self-control [σωφροσύνη] is derived from the

healthy mind [τῶν φρενῶν σωτηρία]. For there are, indeed there are, among

the elderly, men who are madly enraged [λυττῶντες] and deranged

[παράφρονες], some from wine, and some from grief. For old age makes

them small-minded [μικροψύχους].… He has fittingly added, “in patience,”

75 Some families had to make legal arrangements to protect their inheritance in light of the dementia of some household heads; Cokayne, Experiencing Old Age, 153–72. 76 NA28: νηφαλίους εἶναι, σεμνούς, σώφρονας, ὑγιαίνοντας τῇ πίστει, τῇ ἀγάπῃ, τῇ ὑπομονῇ. Translation: ESV.

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[τῇ ὑπομονῇ] for this virtue most of all befits old men.77

Chrysostom provides here an entire geriatric psychopathology, with the social and psychological challenges elderly Roman men faced as their bodies and mental abilities declined—a virtual catalogue of ancient λήρησις.78 He is especially concerned with the mental aspects of old age, and his list is highly descriptive. The mind is sluggish (νωθρός), timid (ὀκνηρός), forgetful (ληθαργός), and insensible (ἀμβλύ)— they are also difficult to excite and arouse—these are all consequences of the excess of phlegm, and general humoural imbalance, during old age.79 In a homily on Romans,

Chrysostom directly links the leakiness of old age with forgetfulness, sluggishness, and derangement.80 He also notes that the membranes of the brain (αἱ μήνιγγες τὴν βλάβην) are impaired by old age.81 This is due to the over-drying and cooling of the brain.

Chrysostom asserts that old men are prone to irritability and quick to anger, sometimes even madly enraged. The prevalence of anger and irritability during old age corresponds to another humour that characterises aging, namely the cool and dry humour that is black bile (χολή); hence the term for irascibility, ἀκρόχολος, which contains the root of the term for black bile.82 Anger, in Chrysostom’s thought, was seen

77 Hom. Tit. 4.1 (F6.293–94): Ἔστιν ἃ καὶ τὸ γῆρας ἐλαττώματα ἔχει, καὶ οὐχ ἡ νεότης μόνη· ἐλάττονα μέν τῆς νεότητος, ἔχει δὲ ὅμως· τὸ νωθρὸν, τὸ ὀκνηρὸν, τὸ ληθαργὸν, τὸ ἀμβλὺ, τὸ ἀκρόχολον. Διὰ τοῦτο περὶ τούτων παραγγέλλων φησί· “Πρεσβύτας νηφαλίους εἶναι.” Πολλὰ γάρ ἐστι, ὅπερ ἔφην, τὰ ποιοῦντα μὴ νήφειν τοὺς ἐν ἡλικίᾳ τοιαύτῃ· πρῶτον μέν αὐτὸ ὅπερ ἔφην, τὸ πανταχόθεν ἀμβλύνεσθαι, καὶ δυσκόλως διεγείρεσθαι, καὶ δυσκόλως κινεῖσθαι· διὰ τοῦτό φησι· “σεμνοὺς, σώφρονας.” Σώφρονας ἐνταῦθα τοὺς φρονίμους φησί· σωφροσύνη γὰρ τοῦτο λέγεται ἡ τῶν φρενῶν σωτηρία. Εἰσὶ γὰρ, εἰσὶ καὶ ἐν τοῖς γεγηρακόσι λυττῶντες ἄνθρωποι, παράφρονοι, οἱ μὲν ὑπὸ οἴνου, οἱ δὲ ὑπὸ λύπης· μικροψύχους γὰρ τὸ γῆρας ποιεῖ…. Καὶ καλῶς ἐπήγαγε, “τῇ ὑπομονῇ·” καὶ τοῦτο γὰρ μάλιστα τοῖς γέρουσιν ἁρμόζει. 78 Godderis, Stoornissen van de Oude Dag, 91–92. 79 Galen, Temp. 2.2 (K1.580ff). 80 Hom. Rom. 11[10].3 (F1.152). 81 Hom. Tit. 4.1 (F6.294). 82 Jacques Jouanna, Greek Medicine from Hippocrates to Galen: Selected Papers (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 355; Parkin, Old Age in the Roman World, 420.

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particularly as a vice of women and elderly persons.83 Hence the need for patience

(ὑπομονή, the new trademark of Christian masculinity84) and self-control (σωφροσύνη).

Furthermore, Chrysostom does not hesitate to point out the threat of senility to a man’s self-control (σωφροσύνη), and even shows, etymologically, that a man’s self- control is dependent on a healthy state of mind (linking σωτηρία and φρενόω). The virtue of σωφροσύνη, which included self-control, discipline, moderation, and modesty, was one of the chief characteristics of masculinity for Chrysostom, and the threat of old age to σωφροσύνη was a threat to the very essence of manhood.85 We will return to the issue of σωφροσύνη and old age in Chrysostom shortly.

Old men and women, according to Chrysostom, were also prone to drunkenness due to the cooling and drying of their bodies—note again the close link between women and old men. By looking at the intersection of gender and old age in antiquity, much of the relationship between ancient gender conceptualisations and the use of alcohol is laid bare. In principle, Chrysostom did not have a problem with drinking wine in moderation, but he strongly condemned excessive imbibing: “For this [inebriation] was particularly the vice of women and of old age. The desire for wine arises because of the natural coldness at that period of life.”86 Chrysostom rightly interprets the admonition to the elders in Titus 2:2 by noting that the coldness of old age often leads to excessive drinking. According to Chrysostom, elderly persons are not very tolerant of the effects of wine, and he explains this with a medical rationale common to his time: “For the fumes build up more easily from below [in the stomach], and the membranes of the

83 Hom. Eph. 15.2 (F4.258–59). 84 Brent D. Shaw, “Body/Power/Identity: Passions of the Martyrs,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 4.3 (1996): 269–312. 85 For more on Chrysostom’s views regarding σωφροσύνη, see De Wet, Preaching Bondage, 220–70. 86 Hom. Tit. 4.1 (F6.294): Μάλιστα γὰρ τοῦτο γυναικῶν τὸ ἐλάττωμα καὶ τοῦ γήρως· τῷ γὰρ κατεψῦχθαι τὰς ἡλικίας πολλὴ καὶ τούτου γίνεται ἡ ἐπιθυμία.

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brain are harmed from being impaired by age, and this especially results in intoxication,” Chrysostom explains, “[y]et wine is necessary at this age, because of its weakness [ἀσθενὴς], but much is not needed.”87 Along with the coldness of old age, it is also the grief of life’s winter that may lead to excessive drinking. 88 Geriatric depression is an issue that often surfaces in Chrysostom’s comments on old age, showing that as in modern times, geriatric depression was also an acute problem in antiquity.

While we need to be hesitant to simply accept Chrysostom’s word about social practices, other sources attest to the same phenomenon, and it does seem that alcohol abuse may have been prevalent among some women, slaves, 89 and older men— especially if kyriarchal society marginalised these groups to such an extreme. For older people, Chrysostom believes, wine is even more dangerous since the fumes (ἀτμοί) of the wine have a more potent effect on the brain weakened by age. As ancient medical treatises and Chrysostom himself also note, the brain was a highly ventilated organ, which is why drunkenness is seen as an affliction of the brain by the fumes of the wine.90

Wine is also related to infantility, since little children were often given meat and wine since they had not yet developed sexual desire. Since wine was also the primary aphrodisiac in antiquity, too much thereof could also cause sexual desire to arise in elderly persons, who were not expected to be sexually active (as is the case with children). Being in an embarrassing state of drunkenness was seen as effeminate behaviour.

87 Hom. Tit. 4.1 (F6.294): Καὶ γὰρ εὐκολώτερον καὶ οἱ κάτωθεν ἀτμοὶ ἀναφέρονται, καὶ αἱ μήνιγγες τὴν βλάβην δέχονται τῷ πεπαλαιῶσθαι αὐτὰς τῷ χρόνῳ· καὶ ἐντεῦθεν ἡ μέθη μάλιστα γίνεται. Δεῖ μὲν οὖν οἴνου τῇ ἡλικίᾳ ταύτῃ μάλιστα, ἀσθενὴς γάρ· δεῖ δὲ οὐ πολλοῦ. 88 Hom. Tit. 4.1 (F6.294). 89 Regarding alcohol abuse among slaves in Chrysostom’s works, see Hom. Eph. 15.2 (F4.259). 90 Stat. 11.3 (PG 49.123.37–38). For more on the ventilative nature of the brain in ancient thought, see Marke Ahonen, Mental Disorders in Ancient Philosophy (New York: Springer, 2014), 74–75.

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The fourth challenge to the masculinity of the elderly Roman man is related to the general decline in physical fitness. The drying of the body meant that it lost its beauty, strength, and agility, which was a great cause for anxiety in older elite Roman men, who had to walk, sit, and speak in a manly way—many old men were extremely distressed about the effect of age on their gait. Along with the Hippocratic notion of balance, the Methodist School of ancient medicine, especially Soranus, also emphasised tension and laxity, muscularity and elasticity, as central to understanding health. 91 Chrysostom seems to find these Methodist concepts of health useful in describing the aged body (and the youthful soul). In Chrysostom’s description of

Abraham’s body, he contrasts the tone (τόνος) of Abraham’s faith with that of his body.

Chrysostom notes that Abraham’s body was ἀτονία, that is, debilitated or weak, and

κεχάλαστο, referring to his flesh becoming slack or soft—the opposite of the balanced muscular body of a younger male, and so resembling more the soft and “spongy” texture of female flesh.92 It is quite remarkable to see how these ancient concepts present in

Soranus, Galen, and Chrysostom also influenced Freud, who, along with viewing old age as castration and a loss of psychic energy, also believed that aged persons lost

“elasticity of mental processes.”93

Chrysostom similarly contrasts the weak bodies of the elderly Eleazar and the martyr-mother of the Maccabees with their robust faith. They are not “vigorous in the flesh, but they are vigorous in their faith,” their “bodies are disabled by old age,” and they even require walking-sticks. In terms of physicality, they represent a “useless age group” (ἡλικία ἄχρηστος). Here we see the practical implications of Chrysostom’s

91 Joan Cadden, Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science, and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 26–27. 92 King, Hippocrates’ Woman, 47–50. 93 Robert A. Nemiroff and Calvin A. Colarusso, The Race Against Time: Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis in the Second Half of Life (New York: Springer, 2013), 196.

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comments, noted in the previous chapter, on the few benefits of physical exercise. Their flesh is not in a state of full health, but their faith is strong; they are not masters of

γυμνασία, but they are well-trained psychic athletes of ἄσκησις. Chrysostom states,

“their thoughts [φρονήματα] are trained by the desire for piety [εὐσεβείας].”94 The control of thought was a fundamental exercise in early Christian monastic literature.

Chrysostom combines here the principles of 1 Timothy 4:7–8 and Titus 2:2. The text in

1 Timothy noted that Christ’s athletes must be trained in piety (εὐσέβεια), and in his reading of Titus 2:2, he noted that σωφροσύνη means that someone is wise (φρόνιμος).

Here Eleazar and the martyr-mother’s thoughts (φρονήματα) are trained in piety, making them ascetic super-athletes of σωφροσύνη. The physical challenges they experienced were significant, but they overcame them.

Regarding the domestic and civic duties of older men, we also see a fifth problem arising. Although a paterfamilias retained his patria potestas until death, becoming frail meant that one was always dependent on inferiors, usually women and slaves. The onset of disease in old age meant that constant care was required from one’s subordinates: “For the old man requires much care, since old age makes him frail.”95

While discouraging virgins from getting married, Chrysostom highlights the discomfort and grief of losing a spouse in old age—an inevitable fact for many married couples.96

In his homily on Abraham, and in the first homily on the Maccabees, Chrysostom notes that elderly persons are considered “useless” (ἄχρηστος) for worldly matters.97 The same language was used in his descriptions of Eleazar and the martyr-mother seen

94 Macc. 1.2–3 (PG 50.619.4–5, 15–34): Οὐ σφριγῶσι κατὰ τὴν σάρκα οἱ ἀθληταὶ, ἀλλὰ σφριγῶσι κατὰ τὴν πίστιν… παραλέλυται τὰ σώματα τῷ γήρᾳ…. συγκεκρότηται τὰ φρονήματα τῷ πόθῳ τῆς εὐσεβείας. Translation: Wendy Mayer, trans., The Cult of the Saints, Popular Patristics Series (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2006), 138–39. 95 Hom. Heb. 7.3 (F7.98): Ἐκεῖνος μὲν γὰρ πολλῆς δεῖται θεραπείας, τοῦ γήρως ἐξασθενοῦντος αὐτόν. 96 Virg. 58.1.1–21 (SC 125.316–19). 97 Abr. 1 (PG 50.737.13); Hom. Jo. 88.1 (PG 59.479.48–49); Macc. 1.2 (PG 50.619.4–5).

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above. The term ἄχρηστος was often used to describe old slaves who were no longer productive.98 Old age could make a man unproductive in terms of labour and managing relationships with family, clients, and patrons, and in a world where most households had to be productive, this could pose a serious threat both economically and psychologically to the old man. Although there was no such thing as official retirement in the ancient Roman world, many older men excused themselves from those civic duties offering exemption due to old age (not all civic duties offered such exemption), with many “retiring” to a life of leisure (otium) on their villas.99 This was, of course, not an option for the poor and enslaved aged persons.

If we look at Chrysostom’s second homily on Titus, cited above, we must highlight the term μικροψύχος, being “small-minded,” which denotes a sense of pettiness, or perhaps weak-heartedness. Chrysostom uses this term in the typical

Aristotelian sense. 100 It is the opposite, here, of being a generous benefactor

(μεγαλόψυχος), and carries the notion of a man who is no longer concerned with public affairs and civic responsibilities. Roman masculinity was defined by μεγαλοψυχία, a man’s propensity to be generous and civic-minded, while μικροψυχία was a self- centred cowardice. Very interestingly, Suzanne Stern-Gillet highlights Aristotle’s use of μικροψύχος with ὀκνηρός, timidity101—a link that Chrysostom, too, makes—that again stresses the cowardice and unmanliness implicit in μικροψυχία. Moreover, the

98 Jennifer A. Glancy, “The Utility of an Apostle: On Philemon 11,” Journal of Early Christian History 5.1 (2015): 72–86. 99 Kuefler, Manly Eunuch, 55–67. 100 See especially Aristotle, Eth. Nic. 4.3.1125a16–34 (Bywater 78–79); see Robert C. Bartlett and Susan D. Collins, trans., Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics: A New Translation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 80; Suzanne Stern-Gillet, “Souls Great and Small: Aristotle on Self-Knowledge, Friendship, and Civic Engagement,” in Ancient and Medieval Concepts of Friendship, ed. Suzanne Stern- Gillet and Gary M. Gurtler (New York: SUNY Press, 2014), 51–83. 101 Aristotle, Eth. Nic. 4.3.1125a24 (Bywater 79); see also Bartlett and Collins, Nicomachean Ethics, 80; Stern-Gillet, “Souls Great and Small,” 72–73.

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problem of speech impairment due to old age, a reality that Chrysostom also expresses, was especially traumatic to men in a world where manliness was fashioned, almost primarily, by means of speech and public orations. 102 Watts notes that some, like

Themistius, were well aware of the social stigmas surrounding old men who spoke in public, and retired when the time called for it; others, like Libanius, continued with public orations well into old age.103 Chrysostom’s praise of Flavian rests exactly in the fact that, despite his old age, he was still involved in civic affairs, even those stressful ones surrounding the destruction of the Antiochene statues. Libanius, in his old age, was also involved in resolving this matter.104 Chrysostom groups elderly men with women, children, and slaves, who are mostly excluded from public life—yet, they are all still expected to perform their religious duties along with everyone else.105

These are the main challenges old age posed to Roman masculinity.

Interestingly, old age, in the sense of weakness and unmanliness, was also a common metaphor in early Christianity. In Ephesians 4:22–24 and Colossians 3:9–10, we find the notion of the old or former man (ὁ παλαιός ἄνθρωπος) that needs to be replaced by the new. Chrysostom, of course, reads this in terms of virtue and vice, and relates vice with the corruption and decay of extreme old age. “The young man is strong; therefore let us also become strong in doing good deeds,” Chrysostom explains, “The young man has no wrinkle, therefore neither should we have. The young man does not falter, nor is he easily afflicted with diseases, therefore neither should we be.” 106 In another

102 Hom. Rom. 11[10].3 (F1.152); see Maud W. Gleason, Making Men: Sophists and Self-Presentation in Ancient Rome (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995). 103 Watts, Final Pagan Generation, 191–95. 104 Watts, Final Pagan Generation, 200–203. 105 Anna 3.5 (PG 54.659.36–40). 106 Hom. Eph. 13.2 (F4.239): Ὁ νέος ἰσχυρός ἐστιν· οὐκοῦν καὶ ἡμεῖς ἰσχυροὶ γενώμεθα πρὸς τὴν ἐνέργειαν τῶν ἀγαθῶν πράξεων. Ὁ νέος ῥυτίδα οὐκ ἔχει· οὐκοῦν μηδὲ ἡμεῖς. Ὁ νέος οὐ περιφέρεται, οὐδέ ἐστιν εὐάλωτος τοῖς νοσήμασιν. See also Hom. Heb. 9.3 (F7.118–19).

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exposition of the metaphor, Chrysostom says that παλαιός points to the “shame, ugliness, and weakness [τὸ αἰσχρὸν αὐτοῦ… καὶ τὸ δυσειδὲς καὶ τὸ ἠσθενηκός]” of the old man of vice.107 This statement is in agreement with Chrysostom’s wider framework of virtue as psychic health, as we will see below, and vice as disease and decay.

Chrysostom contrasts the weakness and limitations of the former man with the manly strength of the young by referring to the figure of Barzillai, a man from the Old

Testament who was, apparently, 80 years old. In 2 Samuel 19:31–40, we read about

Barzillai who assisted David with provisions. He crossed the Jordan with David, but due to his old age, could not go with David to Jerusalem. For Chrysostom, Barzillai is the personification of the weakness and limitations of old age. Just as Barzillai could not go with David to Jerusalem, so too is the old man of vice not able to cross with

Christ into the land of salvation. The metaphor sketches moral corruption in terms of the physical decay of old age. As in our own society today, the community of seniors in the Roman world, often regardless of one’s status, each experienced some measure of marginalisation, exclusion, and even teratogenisation. These were the main challenges of old age to Roman masculinity in late antiquity.

Gerotranscendence: Gerontology as Masculinising Discourse

It is important to note that Chrysostom is not negative about old age in itself. The problem with Minois’ reading of Chrysostom, in his book on the history of old age, is that he predominantly focuses on the old man as an “image of sin” in Chrysostom,108 and more generally, that old age “constituted an abstract and symbolic problem,” and does not take into account the close relationship between body and soul, and the

107 Hom. Col. 8.2 (F5.255). 108 Minois, History of Old Age, 118–20.

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materiality and corporeal effects of the soul.109 There is need for a more corrective examination of old age, as physical reality and as discourse, in Chrysostom’s thought.

Gnilka’s foundational work on Christian attitudes toward the elderly has already contributed much to the debate. Gnilka has noted that early Christianity was predominantly positive about old age due to the association between old age and wisdom, and has shown that the care of the elderly (γηροτροφία), especially impoverished elderly persons, was an integral part of the practice of Christian pietas in late antiquity.110 Chrysostom also believed that children were supposed to care for their elderly parents,111 and was very annoyed by people caring for the aged only to secure an inheritance.112 In Judeo-Christian tradition, growing old was considered a reward for caring for one’s own parents. 113 But here I wish to move beyond the issue of

γηροτροφία, and especially relate the issue of gerontology in Chrysostom to masculinity and, thus, asceticism. Although Minois is not wrong in noting that the old man was a symbol of sin and decay, I will argue here that it functioned even more as a sign and symbol of ascetic virtue and, thus, masculinity.

I will propose in this analysis that, despite the problems senescence posed to masculinity, gerontology actually functioned as a masculinising discourse in

Chrysostom’s thought. In other words, the gerontological body became the new standard for Christian masculinity. Of course, the gerontological body was not the new masculine standard by default—it had to behave in a very particular way. Yet, when

109 Minois, History of Old Age, 132. 110 Gnilka, “Griesenalter,” 995–1094; Aquinata Böckmann, Around the Monastic Table: Growing in Mutual Service and Love, trans. Marianne Burkhard and Matilda Handl (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2009), 169–80. 111 Hom. 1 Thess. 10.3 (F5.428). Chrysostom notes that some greedy children are wearied by their parents’ old age; see also Hom. Matt. 28.5 (PG 57.357.14–17). 112 Exp. Ps. 5.2 (PG 55.62.43–49). 113 Exod. 20:12; see also Eph. 6:2–3; Chrysostom, Serm. Gen. 4.3.227–96 (SC 433.242–49).

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behaving appropriately, the gerontological body had the potency to transcend all the traditional challenges of masculinity. To demonstrate this, I will utilise the theory of gerotranscendence, developed by Swedish social gerontologist, Lars Tornstam.114

Tornstam formulated the theory of gerotranscendence after having conducted his Ph.D. research, which indicated that there was a discrepancy between theories in social gerontology and empirical evidence.115 He noticed that many of the perceptions of old age, and especially the notion of “successful aging,” which is a very common concept in socio-gerontological theories,116 were based on the projection of mid-life success factors into the period of old age. In other words, someone who “aged successfully” was someone who managed to stretch those success factors of the mid- life period, which Tornstam lists, inter alia, as economic success, multiple (yet often superfluous) social interactions and networks, and career advancement, as far as possible into the period of old age. Yet, after conducting substantial quantitative surveys, Tornstam opines that most elderly persons were not traumatised by the traditional stigmas associated with old age.117 His theory of gerotranscendence therefore implies that the period of old age should not be judged by the success factors of the mid-life period, but should be understood from the perspective of old age as a period that differs from mid-life, with its own set of success factors.118

Therefore, if we were to understand gerotranscendence in its ancient sense, it means that we also need to take care not to haphazardly apply ancient mid-life success factors (and foundations of masculinity) as a standard on the elderly individuals of the

114 Lars Tornstam, Gerotranscendence: A Developmental Theory of Positive Aging (New York: Springer, 2005). 115 Tornstam, Gerotranscendence, 1–5. 116 Tornstam, Gerotranscendence, 6–30. 117 Tornstam, Gerotranscendence, 78–154. 118 Tornstam, Gerotranscendence, 3–4.

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ancient world. Of course, the problem of applying the theory of gerotranscendence to ancient cultural history is that we do not have the advantage that Tornstam had, namely to interview real, flesh-and-blood elderly persons on their experiences of old age. What we do have are Chrysostom’s texts, and from these one needs to reconstruct his own unique vision of gerotranscendence. Chrysostom believed that the gerontological body had the capacity to transcend all of the difficulties of masculinity it may face. In most of the cases noted in the previous section, Chrysostom explained how masculinity was challenged by old age, but then immediately indicated how the aged person, be it

Abraham, Eleazar, or Flavian, conquered these difficulties—they were able to achieve gerotranscendence. Rhetorically, Chrysostom almost overemphasises their old age in order to shock his audience into realising how exceptional and masculine these individuals were.

In his defence of the monastic life, Chrysostom addresses the common notion that old age is a burden:

“But surely,” you will reply, “old age is a burden because youth brought us

great advantages.” What great advantages? Show me an old man who

possesses these advantages. If he possessed them, and if they lasted any

length of time, he would not be mourning now as if he were deprived of all

these things. But if they have flown away and faded, why call them great

advantages when they disappear so quickly? But your son will not suffer

this. If he should live to a great old age, you will not see him complaining,

as you yourself do; rather he will be full of joy, delight and contentment,

for then his goods are in full flower. But the delights which your wealth

procures, many though they may be, are limited to the first part of your life.

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Not so with your son; his wealth endures into old age and accompanies him

even after death. That is why you feel discontented in your old age; despite

the increase of your wealth and abundance of occasions for glory and

luxury, your age does not allow you to enjoy these things. That is why you

tremble in the face of death and declare yourself to be the most miserable

person in the world at the very hour of your prosperity. But your son will

enjoy peace especially when he grows old, since he hastens to enter the

harbor, and remains ever young, and never grows old. But you wanted your

son to live in luxury which would have caused him a thousand regrets and

grief in old age.119

Chrysostom thus also illustrates that one should not judge the aged body according to those masculine factors of Roman middle age (for example, physical strength, wealth, beauty, or civic participation, and so on). According to Chrysostom, a man’s gait, for example, is not something about which one should at all be concerned.120

A man should rather walk in righteousness. The so-called “success factors” of middle age are not advantageous at all, especially wealth. The riches of the gerotranscendent

119 Adv. oppug. 2.9 (PG 47.345.40–346.9): Καὶ μὴν διὰ τοῦτο, φησὶν, αὐτὸ δυσχεραίνομεν, ὅτι μεγάλα ἡμᾶς ὤνησεν ἡ νεότης. Ποῖα μεγάλα; δεῖξον ἔχοντα τὸν γέροντα τὰ μεγάλα ἐκεῖνα· εἰ γὰρ εἶχεν αὐτὰ, καὶ μεμενήκει διαρκῆ, οὐκ ἂν ὡς ἔρημος ὢν ἁπάντων τούτων οὕτως ὠδύρετο· εἰ δὲ ἀπέπτη καὶ ἐμαράνθη, ποῖα μεγάλα τὰ οὕτω ταχέως σβεννύμενα; Ἀλλ' οὐχ ὁ παῖς τοῦτο πείσεται ὁ σὸς, ἀλλ' εἴ ποτε εἰς γῆρας ἔλθοι μακρὸν, οὐκ ὄψει ταῦτα ἀποδυσπετοῦντα ἅπερ καὶ ὑμεῖς, ἀλλὰ χαίροντα καὶ γαννύμενον καὶ ἀγαλλόμενον· τὰ γὰρ ἀγαθὰ αὐτῷ τότε ἀκμάζει μᾶλλον. Ὁ δὲ πλοῦτος ὁ ὑμέτερος, κἂν μυρία ἀγαθὰ κεκτημένος ᾖ, ἐπὶ τῆς πρώτης αὐτὰ συνέστειλεν ἡλικίας· οὗτος δὲ οὐχ οὕτως, ἀλλὰ μένει καὶ ἐν γήρᾳ καὶ μετὰ τὴν τελευτὴν συναπέρχεται. Διὰ ταῦτα ὑμεῖς μὲν τὴν οὐσίαν ὑμῖν αὐξανομένην ὁρῶντες ἐν γήρᾳ, καὶ πολλὰς καὶ δόξης καὶ τρυφῆς ὑποθέσεις ἔχοντες, ἐπηρεάζεσθε, ἅτε οὐκ ἀρκούσης τῆς ἡλικίας πρὸς τὴν ἀπόλαυσιν· διὰ τοῦτο καὶ πρὸς τὴν τελευτὴν φρίττετε, καὶ πάντων ἐλεεινοτέρους εἶναί φατε τότε μάλιστα, ὅταν εὐδοκιμῆτε. Ἐκεῖνος δὲ τότε ἀναπαύσεται μάλιστα, ὅταν γηράσῃ, ἅτε εἰς λιμένα ἐπειγόμενος ἐλθεῖν, καὶ νεότητα μὲν ἔχων ἀεὶ ἀκμάζουσαν, εἰς γῆρας δὲ οὐδέποτε ἐπείγουσαν. Σὺ δὲ τοιαύτην τρυφὴν τὸν υἱὸν ἐβούλου τρυφᾷν, δι' ἣν ἂν μετενόησε μυριάκις, καὶ ἤλγησεν ἐν γήρᾳ γενόμενος. Translation: David G. Hunter, trans., A Comparison between a King and a Monk; Against the Opponents of the Monastic Life: Two Treatises by John Chrysostom (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 1988), 116–17. See also similar statements in Exp. Ps. 5.6 (PG 55.69.13–27), 7.16 (PG 55.106.2–5). 120 Hom. Rom. 21[20].4 (F1.358).

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man persist in old age and even in the afterlife.121 Chrysostom rather implies that the gerotranscendent body was the pinnacle of ancient Christian manhood. The link between old age and the ascetic life should not be downplayed—it is an issue to which we will shortly attend. So how does gerotranscendence represent ideal masculinity in

Chrysostom’s thought? How can the gerontological body transcend its symbolism related to weakness, femininity, and sin, and become a symbol of new Christian manliness?

The interplay between ancient gerotranscendence and masculinity operates on both a physical level, as pertaining to the body, and a psychic level, as pertaining to the soul. As we have noted, Chrysostom was convinced that the soul had a very real material effect on the body of an individual, and believed that soul and body were related in the most intricate way.122 Thus, when I refer to the psychic dimension of aging, I still consider this dimension as being highly corporeal.

On a physical level, the gerontological body, surprisingly perhaps, becomes the very essence and definition of masculinity in the ancient Christian sense. Mathew

Kuefler has convincingly shown that traditional Roman masculinity was in a crisis during the period of late antiquity. 123 But Christianity, Kuefler argues, offered an alternative vision to ameliorate this crisis, and in this new proposition of male virtuosity, the eunuch-monk became the new standard of masculinity, perhaps even hypermasculinity—“monks represented the new ideal man.” 124 The monk did not necessarily have to be a physical eunuch. The church rather preferred monks who were

121 For more on the role of wealth in Christian conceptions of the afterlife, see Peter R. L. Brown, The Ransom of the Soul: Afterlife and Wealth in Early Western Christianity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015). 122 Hom. Act. 2.3 (PG 60.32.34–40). 123 Kuefler, Manly Eunuch, 283–98. 124 Kuefler, Manly Eunuch, 277.

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spiritual eunuchs who castrated their desires but not their bodies.125 While Kuefler’s analysis focused exclusively on the late antique West, concurrent findings have been made with regard to Chrysostom’s views on manliness and monks,126 and Chrysostom most certainly considered spiritual castration a great accolade and sign of masculinity.127

The monastic body was the ideal masculine body, but there are remarkable similarities between the gerotranscendent body and the monastic body. We should keep in mind here that Chrysostom envisioned a popular type of “monasticism” that could also be lived within the household and in daily civic life. The monastic body in

Chrysostom is not necessarily limited to monasteries or the wilderness. In

Chrysostom’s seventh homily on Hebrews, the link between old age, virtue, and monasticism is made explicit when he proclaims that a young man can become “old in youth” by means of ascetic practices.128 The entire monastic routine and regimen, as we have seen, was one that aimed to cool and dry out the body.129

Chrysostom had a positive view of corporeal cooling and drying—for the same reason as most other ascetic authors. Corporeal cooling and drying was synonymous with sexual frigidity, and the cooling and drying of the body, whether by aging or ascetic discipline, cultivated wisdom and, especially, self-control (σωφροσύνη)—aging

125 Kuefler, Manly Eunuch, 260–82. 126 Chris L. de Wet, “Virtue and the (Un)Making of Men in the Thought of John Chrysostom,” in Men and Women in the Early Christian Centuries, ed. Wendy Mayer and Ian Elmer, Early Christian Studies 18 (Strathfield: St. Paul’s, 2014), 227–50. 127 Hom. Heb. 17.5 (F7.212). 128 Hom. Heb. 7.4 (F7.97). The provenance of the homiletic series on Hebrews is notoriously difficult to determine. It seems that some homilies were preached in Antioch, and some in Constantinople. There is then a chance that while Chrysostom was preaching this homily, he was already hoary and considered a senex (that is, over the age of forty, not sixty), or at least approaching old age; see Pauline Allen and Wendy Mayer, “The Thirty-Four Homilies on Hebrews: The Last Series Delivered by Chrysostom in Constantinople,” Byzantion 65 (1995): 309–48. 129 Aline Rousselle, Porneia: On Desire and the Body in Antiquity, trans. Felicia Pheasant (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1996), 160–78.

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was nature’s, and so God’s, antidote to the problem of desire (ἐπιθυμία). The term

σωφροσύνη, in Chrysostom, has a very wide semantic scope—it was one of the key virtues of a man, and encompassed notions of self-control, moderation, chastity, abstinence, austerity, and discipline. As we have seen above, Chrysostom also associated σωφροσύνη with mental health—it was also practically synonymous with good old age, and a prime prerequisite for gerotranscendence. The topos of the virtuous and self-controlled old man, in Chrysostom, is therefore a correlate to the monk. The self-controlled γέρων may have been an image that would find more resonance with

Chrysostom’s urban audience, some of whom were suspicious of monks. This also explains Chrysostom’s biting criticism against the old man who is not self-controlled, the gambler, the fool, and the senex amator, who brings “disgrace upon the hoary head”; he rebels against the natural cooling of the passions and forfeits the wisdom and experience he should have gained from old age. Grey hair was a biological consequence of the cooling of the body,130 but it had to be accompanied by the correct behaviour:

For the hoary head is thus venerable, when it behaves as such—but when it

acts as if it is a rebellious juvenile [νεωτερίζῃ], it will be even more

ridiculous than the youth. How then will you who are old men be able to

give these admonitions to the young when you are intoxicated by your life

of disorder? I do not say this in order to accuse the old, but the juvenile [τῶν

νέων]. For in my opinion, they who act in such a way are juvenile even if

they are a hundred years old! Just as the young, even if they are only little

children, yet act with self-control [σωφρονῶσι], are better than the old. And

130 Aristotle (Hist. an. 3.518A.1–23 [LCL 437.202–5]) and Galen (Simp. med. 4.1–2 [K11.619–21]) considered grey hair as a type of mildew or frost that accompanies old age—baldness, is the result of the cooling and drying of the scalp; Cokayne, Experiencing Old Age, 11.

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this is not my own argument, but scripture also acknowledges this

distinction. “For old age,” it says, “is not honoured for length of time, but

an unblemished life is old age” [Wis. 4:8–9]. For we respect the grey hair,

not because we honour the white colour above the black, but because it is

proof [τεκμήριόν] of a virtuous life, and when we see them we endeavour

after the inward greyness [τὴν ἔνδον πολιάν]. But if they constantly do what

is contradictory to the hoary head, they will thus become more ridiculous....

We are not making these accusations against all elderly persons, nor is our

argument against old age per se—I am not as mad as that!—but we are

against a juvenile soul [κατὰ ψυχῆς νέας] that disgraces old age…. For the

old man is a king, if you will, and more regnant than the Emperor who

wears the purple, if he rules over his passions [τῶν παθῶν κρατῶν], and

keeps them under subjection as in the rank of guards. But if he is tossed

around and cast down from his throne, and if he becomes a slave of greed,

vainglory, outward adornment, luxury, drunkenness, anger, and sexual

pleasures, and has his hair styled with oil, and displays an age insulted by

his reputation, of what punishment would someone like that not be

worthy?131

131 Hom. Heb. 7.3–4 (F7.96–98): Ἡ γὰρ πολιὰ τότε αἰδέσιμος, ὅταν τὰ τῆς πολιᾶς πράττῃ· ὅταν δὲ νεωτερίζῃ, τῶν νέων καταγελαστότερος ἔσται. Πῶς οὖν δυνήσεσθε τῷ νέῳ ταῦτα παραινεῖν ὑμεῖς οἱ γέροντες, μεθύοντες ὑπὸ τῆς ἀταξίας; Οὐ τῶν γερόντων δὲ κατηγορῶν ταῦτα λέγω, ἀλλὰ τῶν νέων. Οἱ γὰρ ταῦτα πράττοντες, ἐμοὶ, κἂν εἰς ἑκατοστὸν ἔλθωσιν ἔτος, νέοι εἰσί· καθάπερ οἱ νέοι, κἂν παιδία μικρὰ ὦσι, σωφρονῶσι δὲ, γερόντων εἰσὶν ἀμείνους. Καὶ οὐκ ἐμὸς οὗτος ὁ λόγος, ἀλλὰ καὶ ἡ γραφὴ ταύτην οἶδε τὴν διάκρισιν· “Γῆρας γὰρ, φησὶ, τίμιον, οὐ τὸ πολυχρόνιον, καὶ ἡλικία γήρως βίος ἀκηλίδωτος.” Καὶ γὰρ τὴν πολιὰν τιμῶμεν, οὐκ ἐπειδὴ τὸ λευκὸν χρῶμα τοῦ μέλανος προτιμῶμεν, ἀλλ' ὅτι τεκμήριόν ἐστι τῆς ἐναρέτου ζωῆς, καὶ ὁρῶντες ἀπὸ τούτου στοχαζόμεθα τὴν ἔνδον πολιάν· ἂν δὲ τἀναντία τῇ πολιᾷ διαπράττωνται, καταγέλαστοι γενήσονται διὰ τοῦτο μᾶλλον…. Οὐ κατὰ πάντων ταῦτα λέγομεν, οὐδὲ κατὰ τοῦ γήρως ἁπλῶς ἡμῖν ὁ λόγος, οὐχ οὕτω μέμηνα, ἀλλὰ κατὰ ψυχῆς νέας τὸ γῆρας αἰσχυνούσης…. Βασιλεὺς γάρ ἐστιν ὁ γέρων, ἐὰν ἐθέλῃ, καὶ τοῦ τὴν ἁλουργίδα ἔχοντος βασιλικώτερος, τῶν παθῶν κρατῶν, καὶ ἐν τάξει δορυφόρων ὑποτάττων τὰ πάθη· ἐὰν δὲ ἕλκηται, καὶ καταβιβάζηται ἀπὸ τοῦ θρόνου, καὶ χρημάτων ἔρωτος καὶ δόξης κενῆς καὶ καλλωπισμοῦ καὶ τρυφῆς καὶ μέθης καὶ ὀργῆς καὶ ἀφροδισίων γίνηται δοῦλος, καὶ καλλωπίζηται ἐλαίῳ τὴν τρίχα, καὶ τὴν ἡλικίαν ὑπὸ τῆς προαιρέσεως ὑβριζομένην δεικνύῃ· ποίας οὐκ ἂν εἴη κολάσεως ὁ τοιοῦτος ἄξιος;

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Chrysostom makes it clear here that old age is not venerable by default—it is only respectable, even royal, when it exhibits σωφροσύνη, or control of the passions—what should be the natural result of corporeal drying and cooling. Chrysostom states that grey hair “is proof of a virtuous life [τεκμήριόν ἐστι τῆς ἐναρέτου ζωῆς]”; here one should not neglect the important relation between virtue and masculinity. An old man must rule over his passions like an emperor, and not become a slave of them. If he becomes a slave, all that remains is a terrible punishment, worthy of a slave.

Gerontology becomes a discourse representative of σωφροσύνη, while the lack thereof is seen as true puerility and juvenile delinquency. It is also at this point where

Chrysostom’s discourse on biological old age intersects with the psychic dimension of aging, an interiorisation of gerontology, which Chrysostom calls “inward greyness [τὴν

ἔνδον πολιάν]”.

Gerontology played an important role in the understanding of the soul and psychic therapy in Chrysostom’s thought, and gerotranscendence especially progresses from the position of the soul. Because of the corporeal dimension of the soul, we find in antiquity a very potent biologisation of the soul both in Greek philosophical as well as early Christian thinking.132 The soul is given a life cycle—like the body, and in relation to the body, it can become diseased through pathic excess or healthy through moderation and self-control. The soul can become old and decrepit, or remain young and vibrant. Yet it could not, according to Chrysostom, die—the soul was immortal, but still subject divine punishment.133 Due to the links between old age and mental

132 For more on the development of the soul in Greek thought, see Jan Bremmer, The Early Greek Concept of the Soul (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987). 133 Serm. Gen. 7.4.346–48 (SC 433.336–36).

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illness, Galen believed that old age also damaged the soul.134 Aristotle believed that the effect of aging on the body directly influenced the soul. The mind, however, according to Aristotle, kept on developing until the age of forty-nine, after which one can experience a decline. The rate of aging in the body, soul, and mind was not exactly the same.135

Chrysostom followed this belief in the aging soul. However, he believed that although one’s body ages, one can keep one’s soul youthful, strong, and ageless by practicing virtue—paradoxically, by adopting ascetic practices that mortify and age the body, the soul remains youthful. Sin aged the body and soul prematurely. Chrysostom states:

But the soul is strengthened in health [ῥώννυται] during old age—then it is

in its prime [ἀκμάζει]—then is it in its pride! For just as the body, while it

is afflicted with fevers and one illness after another, is worn out even if it

is strong, yet when it is liberated from this onslaught, it recovers its regular

strength, so too is the soul feverish during one’s youth, and is mostly seized

by the love of glory, and luxury, and sexual lust, and many other fantasies.

But the onset of old age drives away all these passions, some through

surfeit, and some through philosophy. For old age relaxes the powers of the

body [τόνους χαλάσαν τοῦ σώματος], and does not allow the soul to use

them even if it wants to, but subdues them like manifold enemies. Old age

sets the soul in a place free from worries and affects great serenity, and

introduces greater fear. For if nothing else does, it is said, they who have

134 Parkin, Old Age in the Roman World, 252. 135 Cokayne, Experiencing Old Age, 60–61.

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grown old know that they are nearing their end, and that they are certainly

close to dying. Therefore, when the desires of this life are receding, and the

expectation of judgment is approaching, which softens the stubbornness of

the soul, does it not become more attentive, if someone is willing?136

In terms of virtue, and despite the possible onset of senile dementia, old age could be very beneficial to the psychic life of an individual, and in fact signals full psychic maturity. In old age, the soul is strong and in good health, and it has reached its prime.

The language of psychic therapy, the geriatrics of soul, is most evident in this section above. While the physical energies of the body—its physical tone and strength—are slack, just like that of Abraham, the soul is like a calm sea. We have already noted

Chrysostom’s thalassic metaphor in the description of the various ages of life. If adolescence and middle age represented tempestuous seas, old age is (or should be) one of serenity. The reason for this is that the passions are supposed to have been driven away by old age. The fact that death is looming near also bridles the soul, and drives it to confession.

The fear of death made the soul obedient, but the prevalence of disease could do the same.137 While Chrysostom’s views on the origin and reasons for sickness are complex, he seems to believe that, in many cases, disease is the result of excessive

136 Hom. Heb. 7.3 (F7.95): ἡ δὲ ψυχὴ ἐν γήρᾳ ῥώννυται μᾶλλον, τότε ἀκμάζει, τότε γαυροῦται. Καθάπερ γὰρ σῶμα, ἕως μὲν ἂν πυρετοῖς συνέχηται καὶ ἐπαλλήλοις νοσήμασι, κἂν ἰσχυρὸν ᾖ, τεταλαιπώρηται, ἐπειδὰν δὲ ἀπαλλαγῇ τῆς πολιορκίας ἐκείνης, ἀνακτᾶται τὴν οἰκείαν δύναμιν· οὕτω καὶ ἡ ψυχὴ ἐν νεότητι πυρέττει, καὶ δόξης αὐτὴν ἔρως κατέχει μάλιστα καὶ τρυφῆς καὶ ἀφροδισίων καὶ πολλῶν ἄλλων φαντασιῶν· τὸ δὲ γῆρας ἐπελθὸν, πάντα ταῦτα ἀπελαύνει τὰ πάθη, τὰ μὲν διὰ τὸν κόρον, τὰ δὲ διὰ τὴν φιλοσοφίαν. Τοὺς γὰρ τόνους χαλάσαν τοῦ σώματος τὸ γῆρας, οὐδὲ βουλομένην ἀφίησιν αὐτοῖς χρήσθαι τὴν ψυχὴν, ἀλλ' ὥσπερ πολεμίους παντοδαποὺς καταστεῖλαν ἐν καθαρῷ θορύβων χωρίῳ καθίστησιν αὐτὴν, καὶ πολλὴν ἐργάζεται τὴν γαλήνην, καὶ τὸν φόβον ἐπεισάγει πλείονα. Εἰ γὰρ μηδεὶς ἕτερος, φησὶν, ἀλλ' οἱ γεγηρακότες ἴσασιν, ὅτι τελευτῶσι, καὶ ὅτι πάντως ἐγγὺς ἑστήκασι τοῦ θανάτου. Ὅταν οὖν αἱ μὲν ἐπιθυμίαι ὑπεξιστῶνται αἱ βιωτικαὶ, ἡ δὲ τοῦ δικαστηρίου προσδοκία ἐπεισέρχηται, τὸ δυσπειθὲς αὐτῆς μαλάττουσα, οὐχὶ μᾶλλον προσεκτικωτέρα γίνεται, ἐὰν θέλῃ; 137 Hom. 2 Cor. 22.3 (F3.230–33).

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indulgence in the passions. Therefore, physical illness may be seen as psychic medicine for diseases of the soul. Disease is medicine administered by the divine physician.138 So although disease renders an old man often in a helpless, passive, and effeminate state, disease, in Chrysostom’s thought, also had the ability to cultivate self-control and discipline. Disease was seen as punishment, for which Chrysostom uses the term

σωφρονίζω, but the punishment had a purpose, it was meant to teach σωφροσύνη.

Sinfulness and excessive indulgence in the passions negatively aged the body and soul, and destroyed any chance of achieving gerotranscendence. Chrysostom meticulously sketches the old sinful soul in a vivid ekphrasis:

But we return to our former vomit, after the youth of grace, building up the

old age of sins [τὸ ἀπὸ τῶν ἁμαρτιῶν κατασκευάζοντες γῆρας]. For both

the lust for money, and the slavery to disgusting desires, and whichever

other sin, have the habit of making the one who works for them old. “Now

that which is decaying and growing old soon disappears” [Hebrews 8:13].

For there is no body, not one, to be seen so paralyzed [παραλελυμένον] by

the passing of time as a soul that is festering [σαθρουμένην] and collapsing

[καταπίπτουσαν] with many sins. This soul is led out further to extreme

prattling [ἐσχάτην ληρωδίαν], producing unintelligible sounds [ἄσημα

φθεγγομένη], like people who are very old and mad [οἱ γεγηρακότες καὶ

παραπαίοντες], bloating with stupidity [κορύζης ἀναπεπλησμένη], and

much derangement [παραπληξίας], and forgetfulness [λήθης], and having

eyesores [λήμας πρὸ τῶν ὀφθαλμῶν], and nauseating people, and an easy

prey to the devil. Such then are the souls of sinners. But not those of the

138 Hom. Jo. 38.1 (PG 59.211.26–41).

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righteous, for they are youthful and invigorated [νεάζουσι καὶ σφριγῶσι],

and are constantly in the very prime of life, always ready for any fight or

struggle.139

The sinful soul is here described as a slave who did not age very well.140 The passage poignantly betrays the hardship old age may have held for non-elites and slaves. We need to realise in this instance that his description of the sinful soul as aged is not simply

“abstract”, as Minois seems to believe141—the metaphor represents a very real psychic geriatrics that had a physical effect on the body. Aging, to Chrysostom, was as much a psychic reality as a physical one, as we see above. In his masterful rhetoric, Chrysostom provides the audience with a sensational psychic-geriatric nosography and symptomatology. The principle behind this section is that a healthy soul was a dry and light soul (the result of an ascetic diet or the natural cooling and drying progression of age).142

The sinful soul, described here by Chrysostom, is exactly the opposite. The language of unbalanced humours abounds—the soul is leaky, bloated, and slimy, with excessive phlegm, which characterised negative old age. The old age of sin has paralyzed this soul, and left it festering. It experiences seizures and various species of mental decline and illness. This psychic state is in contrast to the youthful soul—which can, and often does, inhabit an old body. The paradox of the youthful and manly soul in the aged body is one that Chrysostom applied to both Abraham and Eleazar. Because

139 Hom. Rom. 11[10].3 (F1.152). 140 See also De Wet, Preaching Bondage, 76–77. 141 Minois, History of Old Age, 132. 142 Teresa M. Shaw, The Burden of the Flesh: Fasting and Sexuality in Early Christianity (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1998), 44–45.

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of their psychic youth, they are described in highly masculine terms, like monks, they are soldiers and athletes of Christ.143 Kuefler has noted how faith became the new guarantor of masculine privilege and marker of manly identity in late antiquity,144 and this is also seen in Chrysostom when he lauds the strong and manly faith of Abraham and Eleazar. 145 Old age does not exclude men from participating in the religious activities and duties of the church,146 and this was probably a useful way for many men to fashion their masculinity in old age. However, old age did not simply qualify a man, even a priest, to serve in church.147 Old age had to be accompanied by virtue. It is only by living a virtuous life, Chrysostom believed, that the grief associated with advanced age may be overcome.148

The beauty of the youthful soul is also associated with the wrinkles of good old age. Chrysostom often proclaims that the beauty of youth fades along with its sexual desire, but a good old age is indicative of great and pure inner beauty.149 Physical beauty is nothing but humours, arteries, veins, and flesh, but what is more enamouring is “the beauty of the soul,” Chrysostom muses, “even in old age it has many in love with it, and it never withers, but blooms eternal.”150 In contrast, fretting only about external physical beauty actually brings about premature and negative old age.151 The image of the troublesome senex amator is now replaced by a heavenly and transcendent

143 Abr. 1 (PG 50.737.3–21); Macc. 1.2 (PG 50.619.4–5); see also Catech. 2.3.13–26 (SC 366.174–77). For more on spiritual soldiery and athletics, see Kuefler, Manly Eunuch, 105–24. 144 Kuefler, Manly Eunuch, 206–44. 145 Abr. 1 (PG 50.737.3–21); Macc. 1.2 (PG 50.619.4–5). 146 Anna 3.5 (PG 54.659.36–40). 147 Sac. 3.11.39–65 (SC 272.196–97). 148 Hom. 2 Tim. 1.3 (F6.170). 149 Exp. Ps. 44.9 (PG 55.181.13–182.1); Hom. Heb. 28.7 (F7.326–27). 150 Hom. 2 Cor. 7.7 (F3.98); see also Stat. 16.6 (PG 49.170.22–24); Theod. laps. 1.14.54–91 (SC 117.164–69). 151 Hom. Matt. 30.6 (PG 57.370.25–32).

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gerontological erotic.

We can therefore discern three operations of gerotranscendence, namely castration, mortification, and alterisation (or othering). But these operations are also fundamental to understanding monastic subjectivity in late antiquity, and are also the new foundations of Christian masculinity. The monastic body is then the ideal masculine body that has been positively aged before its time—a gerotranscendent body.

The same was true for the virgin’s body, marked by a “pale face” and “wasted limbs.”152

Let me elaborate on these three key operations of gerotranscendence.

First, it has been stressed that the cooling and drying of old age (just like the monastic diet and environment), was synonymous with sexual impotence and frigidity.

Freud’s view that aging was a type of castration held true to its ancient antecedent.

Unlike Freud, though, Chrysostom did not consider the sexual cooling of old age as negative. With good old age came wisdom and, more importantly, discipline and self- control (σωφροσύνη). Although it was not necessarily physical castration, gerotranscendence may be seen as a correlate of the spiritual castration and psychic eunuchism that early Christian authors like Chrysostom so applauded. This is also why the senex amator is vilified in Chrysostom’s works, and why Abraham was not considered a senex amator after his sexual relations with Hagar. The youthful soul of the gerotranscendent body enkindles a true spiritual erotic, which functioned as the parallel contrast to the senex amator.

Second, gerotranscendence was considered a process of corporeal self- mortification and psychic vivification. The mortification of the flesh was a key principle in Christian monasticism, and it is seen in the extreme ascetic discipline of some monks.

The cooling and drying of aging can be considered as the progression of death, slowly

152 Virg. 6.1 (SC 125.110–11).

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turning the warm-blooded, living body into a cold, bloodless corpse. Chrysostom explains that the elderly person is perhaps more aware of death than anyone else, and this makes his or her soul more submissive to God. Aging was nature’s (and hence,

God’s) ascetic exercise. The dissipation of physical beauty, the onset of disease, and the battle with grief and fear all attest to the mortification presented by old age. In his explanation of the metaphor of the old man in Colossians 3:9–10, Chrysostom there too expounded that living in sin and vice ages the body and the soul. But just as vice ages the soul, virtue and the mortification of the flesh (see Col. 5:3–7) vivify and rejuvenate the soul. As the new, virtuous man grows, “he does not progress to old age, but to a youthfulness greater than the former.”153

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, gerotranscendence represented a transformation into otherness—it was an operation of alterisation. Peter Brown, in his influential study of the holy man in Syrian monasticism, states: “The life of the holy man (and especially in Syria) is marked by so many histrionic feats of self-mortification that it is easy, at first sight, to miss the deep social significance of asceticism as a long drawn-out, solemn ritual of dissociation—of becoming the total stranger.” 154 De

Beauvoir also stressed the strangeness and otherness of old age,155 of imagining oneself as other, and Chrysostom, too, saw old age as a dissociation from bodily passions and worldly troubles. The centrality of this otherworldly transcendence in late ancient

Christian masculinity has also been aptly demonstrated by Virginia Burrus. 156 The gerotranscendent man is also a liminal stranger, an “other”—like the monks, he is

153 Hom. Col. 8.2 (F5.255): οὐ πρὸς γῆρας ἐπείγεται, ἀλλὰ πρὸς νεότητα μείζονα τῆς προτέρας. 154 Peter R. L. Brown, “The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity,” Journal of Roman Studies 61 (1971): 91. 155 De Beauvoir, Old Age, 3–5. 156 Virginia Burrus, “Begotten, Not Made”: Conceiving Manhood in Late Antiquity, Figurae: Reading Medieval Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000).

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someone almost between the present and future reality, somewhere between prelapsarian and postlapsarian states. These three operations of gerotranscendence provide us with a window into the interchanges of power and identity between gerontology, gender, and asceticism in late ancient Christianity.

Chrysostom constantly contrasts the challenges of old age to masculinity simply to illuminate his image of the gerotranscendent man, for which Abraham served as prime example—but the operations of gerotranscendence were not only reserved for the old and for monks. Rather than projecting mid-life success factors onto old age,

Chrysostom wanted people of all ages, but especially the young, to embody the values of gerotranscendence as soon as possible. Gerotranscendence is used to redefine true youth and middle age success. “Because it is possible to be old in youth; as there are juveniles in old age, so also the opposite,” Chrysostom explains, “[f]or as in the one instance the white hair saves no one, so in the other the black hair is no obstacle.”157

Chrysostom gave very concrete and practical guidelines for becoming gerotranscendent in one’s youth. The most basic principle is to perform ascetic exercises. “And if, in terms of self-control [σωφροσύνῃ], the young man thinks that he cannot be held accountable, see that here also he has much assistance, if he is willing,”

Chrysostom assures the youth. We see the homily focusing again on σωφροσύνη. “For although desire troubles him more violently than it does the old man, there are still many things that he can do more than an old man, and so charm that wild animal. What are these things? Manual labours, readings, nightly vigils, and fasts.”158 Chrysostom

157 Hom. Heb. 7.4 (F7.98): Ὥσπερ γὰρ ἐκεῖ οὐδένα ἡ θρὶξ λευκαινομένη σώζει, οὕτως οὐδὲ ἐνταῦθα μέλαινα οὖσα ἐμποδίζει. 158 Hom. Heb. 7.4 (F7.98): Εἰ δὲ ἐν τῇ σωφροσύνῃ νομίζει μὴ δύνασθαι ἐγκαλεῖσθαι, ὅρα αὐτὸν καὶ ἐνταῦθα πολλὰ ἔχοντα τὰ βοηθήματα, ἐάνπερ βούληται. Εἰ γὰρ καὶ σφοδρότερον αὐτὸν τοῦ γέροντος ἡ ἐπιθυμία ἐνοχλεῖ, ἀλλ' ὅμως ἐστὶ πολλὰ, ἃ μᾶλλον τοῦ γέροντος ποιῆσαι δυνήσεται, καὶ ἐπᾴδειν τὸ θηρίον ἐκεῖνο. Ποῖα δὴ ταῦτά ἐστι; Πόνοι, ἀναγνώσεις, παννυχίδες, νηστεῖαι.

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here equates ascetic exercises with aging—they are all the answer to the problem of desire (ἐπιθυμία). The passions are here, again, equated to that primal animality that every human being must battle—aging conquers the bestial passions of the body. A detractor may ask:

What then are these things to us, one says, who are not monks? Are you

saying this to me? Tell it to Paul, when he says, “Watching with all

perseverance and supplication” [Eph. 6:18], when he says, “Do not make

not provision for the flesh, to fulfill its desires” [Rom. 13:14]. For surely he

wrote these principles not only to monks, but to all who are in the cities.

For ought the man who lives in the world have any advantage over the

monk, except for living with a wife? In this point he has made an allowance,

but in other things not. It is his duty to do all things equally with the monk.159

Chrysostom assumes that his audience will immediately see the relation between what he is saying about old age and the monastic life. All these exercises—labours, nightly vigils, and fasts—dry out the body and expel lust. Chrysostom continues to confirm, again, that the lifestyle and regimen of an urban Christian should not be different from that of the monk, with the exception of being married. This passage perfectly demonstrates Chrysostom’s vision for a domesticated and urbanised form of asceticism, which would be more realistic to his audience members.

159 Hom. Heb. 7.4 (F7.98): Τί οὖν πρὸς ἡμᾶς ταῦτα, φησὶν, τοὺς μὴ μονάζοντας; Ταῦτα ἐμοὶ λέγεις; εἰπὲ Παύλῳ, ὅταν λέγῃ, “Ἀγρυπνοῦντες ἐν πάσῃ προσκαρτερήσει καὶ δεήσει·” ὅταν λέγῃ· “Τῆς σαρκὸς πρόνοιαν μὴ ποιεῖσθε εἰς ἐπιθυμίας·” οὐ γὰρ δὴ μοναχοῖς ταῦτα ἔγραφε μόνον, ἀλλὰ πᾶσι τοῖς οὖσιν ἐν ταῖς πόλεσι. Μὴ γὰρ ὁ κοσμικὸς ὀφείλει τι ἔχειν πλέον τοῦ μονάζοντος, ἢ τὸ γυναικὶ συνοικεῖν μόνον; ἐνταῦθα ἔχει τὴν συγγνώμην, ἐν δὲ τοῖς ἄλλοις οὐκέτι, ἀλλὰ πάντα ἐξ ἴσης τῷ μονάζοντι πράττειν αὐτὸν προσῆκε.

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While trying to convince non-Christian parents of the benefit of the monastic life, Chrysostom implied that living the monastic life would result in good old age.160

For those boys not entering monasticism, Chrysostom wanted them to marry early (in contrast to traditional Roman custom). 161 By hastening the boy into marriage,

Chrysostom aims to subject the boy to the conditions of married and family life early— he pushes the boy into an older period of life. In this way, he guards the young man against fornication, but also, as we have shown, marriage was considered a way to extirpate desire—just like aging. This is also another reason why Chrysostom was against remarriage. Elderly persons were not supposed to be burning with lust, hence the superfluity of marriage later in life.162

Moreover, Chrysostom teaches that “a young man has the greatest need of seriousness [σπουδῆς].”163 The virtue of seriousness or esteem (σπουδή) is here related to those pivotal values of Roman old age, namely severitas and gravitas. The young man must already have the demeanor and poise of the virtuous old man, and he must embody the essential habitus of good old age, of gerotranscendence. Like those ancient

Greek sculptors who purposefully “youthened” the statues of the illustrious men they created,164 Chrysostom, in De inani gloria et de educandis liberis,165 wishes to age the living statue that is the filiusfamilias before his time, and carve the outlines and features

160 Adv. oppug. 2.9 (PG 47.345.40–346.11). 161 Inan. 61.757–75 (SC 188.158–61), 81.984–82.1009 (SC 188.186–91). 162 Iter. conj. 2.74–88 (SC 138.166–69). 163 Inan. 62.769 (SC 188.160–61): ὅτι πολλῆς μάλιστα δεῖται τῆς σπουδῆς ὁ νέος.

164 For more on the “youthening” of statues (a term coined by Sir John Beazley), see Andrew Stewart, Art, Desire and the Body in Ancient Greece (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 75–85. 165 Chrysostom himself articulates childhood education in terms of sculpting; see Inan. 22.306–324 (SC 188.106–9).

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of gerotranscendence—that is, castration, mortification, and alterisation—upon the very body and soul of the youth.

The positive and masculine aspects of old age are also used to sketch Christian group-identity more generally. In Chrysostom’s fourth homily on Colossians, he infantilises Jewish identity, and explains that God worked differently in the Old

Testament because the Jews were like little children. David Rylaarsdam has shown that

Chrysostom understands God’s revelation as a type of progressive pedagogy with the aim of maturing the human race and preparing them for Christ.166 Chrysostom often infantilised and effeminised Jewish identity.167 The implication is that the current age of Christ and the church represents the old age of maturity, wisdom, and σωφροσύνη— a manly age. Chrysostom’s statements about old age have, in some instances, been misconstrued as hostile. However, if one understands old age as a gendered discourse in Chrysostom’s works, a different picture emerges. Katz’s statement earlier, namely that “[a]ging and old age are intrinsic to every form of knowledge and cultural practice,” 168 also proved true in the case of Chrysostom. Yet, the aim of gerotranscendence was, ultimately, corporeal mortification.

The Practice of Everyday Death: Mortification, Martyrdom, and Masculinity

The conclusion of aging is, inevitably, death. For an event so mutual among human beings, death is often quite difficult to express, let alone fully understand. Michel de

Certeau explains this difficulty as follows:

166 Hom. Col. 4 (F5.211–21). For an excellent in-depth discussion of this homily and the maturation of humanity, see David Rylaarsdam, John Chrysostom on Divine Pedagogy: The Coherence of His Theology and Preaching, Oxford Early Christian Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 90– 96. 167 Susanna Drake, Slandering the Jew: Sexuality and Difference in Early Christian Texts, Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 78–98. 168 Katz, Disciplining Old Age, 1.

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Considered on the one hand as a failure or a provisional halt in the medical

struggle, and on the other, removed from common experience and thus arriving

at the limit of scientific power and beyond familiar practices, death is an

elsewhere… given over, for example, to religious languages that are no longer

current…. Death is the problem of the subject.169

Ascetic practices of cooling and drying, along with aging, all served to alterise the subject, to create a sense of transcendence, which became a foundational feature of early Christian masculinity. But it is in death, as De Certeau states, that this facet of alterity, of ineffableness, of the unnameable as he calls it,170 reaches its pinnacle. By utilising the discourse of death, or thanatology, Chrysostom believes corporeal mortification becomes the final aim of all practices of masculinisation. Returning again to Chrysostom’s interpretation of Genesis 1–3, he explains what virtue and manliness truly is: “Virtue it is to adopt the attitude of a corpse in regard to the affairs of this life and like a corpse take no active interest in what threatens the soul’s salvation.”171

Few experiences have so profoundly shaped the ancient Christian imaginaire as death. Martyrdom, both as discourse and practice was, after all, one of the most influential discursive formations in early Christianity, and central to early Christian understandings of masculinity. Stephanie Cobb’s work on the intersection between

169 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven F. Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 191–92; see also Thomas W. Laqueur, The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 55–105. 170 De Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, 190–91. 171 Hom. Gen. 8.18 (PG 53.75.49–52): Ἀρετή ἐστι τὸ καθάπερ νεκρὸν οὕτω διακεῖσθαι πρὸς τὰ τοῦ βίου τούτου πράγματα, καὶ πρὸς μὲν τὰ λυμαινόμενα τὴν τῆς ψυχῆς σωτηρίαν. Translation: Robert C. Hill, trans., St. John Chrysostom: Homilies on Genesis 1–17, The Fathers of the Church 74 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1999), 115.

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martyrology and masculinity attests to this influence. Every aspect of Christian martyrdom, especially the courage to embrace death as an inseparable part of Christian identity, afforded to these martyrs a superior measure of manliness.172 Some of the greatest exemplars of masculinity, according to Chrysostom, were martyrs; this has already been seen in the cases of Eleazar and the martyr-mother of the Maccabees.

The immense influence and power of martyr shrines have been emphatically noted by Brown, who concludes that the martyr shrines significantly changed the behavioural ebb and flow of late ancient society.173 In the image of the martyr, death became something that was mystified and even eroticised.174 A righteous and holy death was considered a precious commodity, a grace that was not afforded to all. And despite the widespread association of death and corpses with impurity, the remains of the holy martyrs were seen as being holy and blessed, carrying the praesentia of both the saint and God. It is within the cult of the saints and the popularisation of literatures of martyrdom that death became purified and thus highly ritualised.175 The death of the martyr was celebrated as his or her spiritual “birthday”—hence, martyrdom and death was afforded its own measure of androgenerativity in early Christian thought. This ritualisation, in turn, added a new dimension to the mnemonic aspect of death. The faithful dead were no longer only remembered and memorialised, but their deaths were celebrated. Their deaths, in fact, gave them life. Long after the inscriptions on their tombs and sarcophagi faded, their presence lingered in the solemnisation of their deaths.

The martyrs became memorials of masculinity.

172 L. Stephanie Cobb, Dying to Be Men: Gender and Language in Early Christian Martyr Texts, Gender, Theory, and Religion (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), esp. 60-91; Lucy Grig, Making Martyrs in Late Antiquity (London: Duckworth, 2004), 83–84. 173 Peter R. L. Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). 174 Mayer, Cult of the Saints, 14. 175 Mayer, Cult of the Saints, 14–17.

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Besides the value and emphasis placed on the deaths and tombs of the martyrs,

Éric Rebillard has also identified a shift, more generally, in late ancient Christian views regarding cadavers, a shift also relevant to the significance of Christian thanatology.176

From his reading of Augustine’s De cura mortuis gerenda, Rebillard concludes that there was a valuation of the body of a dead person in the fourth century, especially visible in the emphasis placed on providing an honourable burial, even for the poor, the proliferation of legislation focusing more on the prohibition of cadaver violation instead of tomb violation, and the general preference for inhumation rather than cremation.177

The body as corpse is valuated as an object of significance during this period.

The martyr accounts let slip an important clue in the understanding of the mortification and masculinity—early Christian thanatologies were pregnant with opportunities for masculinisation. Thus, to understand the relationship between martyrdom, mortification, and masculinity in Chrysostom’s thought, the martyr accounts themselves are probably not in all cases the most logical starting point—they rather seem to be closer to a point of conclusion. Chrysostom’s accounts of the martyrologies of early Christianity were part of a much wider and pervasive thanatological discourse, one that manifests itself not only in the arenas on the days of the games or in later festivals commemorating the martyrs, but also in the very bodies of Christians in their vie du quotidienne. For Chrysostom, the great martyr figures like

Eleazar and the Maccabean martyr-mother were superstars of the practice of death, that is, masculinisation to the fullest extent. And this process of dying and becoming masculine started the first time a believer fasted or in the act of baptism. In

176 Éric Rebillard, The Care of the Dead in Late Antiquity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009), 37–88. 177 Rebillard, Care of the Dead, 55–88; see also Paula Rose, A Commentary on Augustine’s De cura pro mortuis gerenda: Rhetoric in Practice, Amsterdam Studies in Classical Philology 20 (Leiden: Brill, 2013).

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Chrysostomic thought, then, the event of martyrdom is simply the moment in which this discursive practice of death—masculinisation through mortification—is fulfilled to the extreme, where the grip of thanatology on the masculine body becomes so fierce and full-circle that the body itself magnificently collapses like a star experiencing gravitational disintegration. Daniel Boyarin rightly points out that martyrdom is a discourse, and it is “as a practice of dying for God and talking about it, a discourse that changes as develops over time and undergoes particularly interesting transformations.” 178 In this case, I am interested in Chrysostom transformation of martyrological discourse, and how it relates to the effects of psychic control and masculinity.

Yet death, and its relation to masculinity, is complex. Corporeal mortification, as the aim of psychic control, must therefore be read within Chrysostom’s theological framework. I will focus here specifically on Chrysostom’s interpretation of Romans

7:14–8:15, in his fourteenth homily on Romans, 179 in which he makes a crucial connection between sin, death, and the earthly body, as well as giving a detailed description of corporeal mortification through psychic control. Death has varied consequences. As with aging, death was the result of sin, and in this way, death has seized the body and so made it mortal. However, the problem of mortality and the brevity of the earthly life also introduced yet another crisis—death instigates an inclination toward pathic excess—physical death has the capacity to become a problem of masculinity:

178 Daniel Boyarin, Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism, Figurae: Reading Medieval Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 94. 179 See F1.198–225. I have already conducted a preliminary exploration of this text and its relation to mortification in De Wet, “Practice of Everyday Death.”

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For with death, Paul says, the trouble of passions also came in. For when

the body had become mortal, it was hence required of it to receive

concupiscence, and anger, and pain, and all the other passions, which

required a great deal of discipline to prevent them from flooding us, and

sinking reason into the depth of sin. For in themselves they were not sin;

but, when their excessiveness was unbridled, it resulted in this

transgression.180

We see here that Chrysostom blames death for causing people to excessively indulge in the passions. Because people are subject to death, they necessarily want to experience as much pleasure and indulgence as they can; it is at this point that the passions turn sinful. So how should the reality and consequences of death be dealt with, how should the body be managed in light of its mortality? In what appears to be a veiled anti-

Manichaean polemic, Chrysostom introduces an impassioned apology for the flesh. The flesh is not in itself sinful. “Do not think that he is accusing the flesh,” Chrysostom explains while expositing Paul’s reference to “the body of this death” (Rom. 7:24), which Chrysostom simply considers as “the mortal body—that which has been overcome by death, not that which generated death.” Thus, “the body is explained as being ‘of death,’ as being restrained by it,” Chrysostom affirms, “not as producing it.”181

But although the flesh is not sinful in itself, it remains weak because of its subjection to death. The consequences of death and the weakness of the flesh can only

180 Hom. Rom. 14[13].1 (F1.199): Μετὰ γὰρ τοῦ θανάτου, φησὶ, καὶ ὁ τῶν παθῶν ἐπεισῆλθεν ὄχλος. ῞Οτε γὰρ θνητὸν ἐγένετο τὸ σῶμα, ἐδέξατο καὶ ἐπιθυμίαν ἀναγκαίως λοιπὸν, καὶ ὀργὴν καὶ λύπην καὶ τὰ ἄλλα πάντα· ἃ πολλῆς ἐδεῖτο φιλοσοφίας, ἵνα μὴ πλημμύραντα ἐν ἡμῖν καταποντίσῃ τὸν λογισμὸν εἰς τὸν τῆς ἁμαρτίας βυθόν. Αὐτὰ μὲν γὰρ οὐκ ἦν ἁμαρτία· ἡ δὲ ἀμετρία αὐτῶν μὴ χαλινουμένη, τοῦτο εἰργάζετο. 181 Hom. Rom. 14[13].3 (F1.205–6): μὴ νόμιζε τῆς σαρκὸς αὐτὸν κατηγορεῖν…. τὸ θνητὸν σῶμα, τὸ χειρωθὲν ὑπὸ τοῦ θανάτου, οὐ τὸ γεννῆσαν τὸν θάνατον.… οὕτω καὶ τὸ σῶμα θανάτου λέγεται, ἐπειδὴ κατεσχέθη παρ' αὐτοῦ, οὐκ ἐπειδὴ προεξένησεν αὐτόν.

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be managed by the governance of the soul. “Now we agree that the flesh is not as great as the soul, and is inferior to it, yet not contrary, or in opposition to it, or evil,”

Chrysostom intimates, “but that it is placed beneath the soul as a harp beneath a harper, and as a ship under the pilot.”182 We are reminded here of the creational succession of the soul over the body. Because the soul was created after the flesh, it must rule the flesh just like humanity ought to rule over animals. The body is not something the soul should escape from; the soul becomes the safeguard and refuge for the body. Paul “is not finding fault with the body, but pointing out the soul’s superiority,” Chrysostom believes, Paul is simply “attributing the governing power [κῦρος] to the soul.”183 It is this kyriarchality of the soul that keeps the bestial body restrained, killing it softly and slowly.

Thus, Christian self-fashioning and self-mastery, in other words, psychic governmentality, in this instance, represents the processes in which the individual aims to manage and overcome the grip of death, and its oft-sinful consequences, on the body.

The mortal flesh becomes the harp with which the soul produces a symphony of righteous volition that drowns out the grave silence of death, ushering in the corporeal song of health and immortality. The question of moral choice (προαίρεσις) features extensively in the discussion here. “Now the essence of the soul and body and that of moral choice are not the same,” Chrysostom explains, “for the first two are God’s works, and the other is a motion [κίνησις] from ourselves towards whatever we wish to direct it.”184 Thus, volition, or free will, becomes the energy that drives the psychic

182 Hom. Rom. 14[13].2 (F1.201): ῾Ημεῖς δὲ ἐλάττονα μὲν ὁμολογοῦμεν εἶναι τῆς ψυχῆς τὴν σάρκα καὶ καταδεεστέραν, οὐ μὴν ἐναντίαν οὐδὲ μαχομένην οὐδὲ πονηρὰν, ἀλλ' ὡς κιθάραν κιθαριστῇ, καὶ ὡς ναῦν κυβερνήτῃ, οὕτως αὐτὴν ὑποκεῖσθαι τῇ ψυχῇ. 183 Hom. Rom. 14[13].2 (F1.202): οὐ τὸ σῶμα διέβαλεν, ἀλλὰ τὸ ὑπερέχον τῆς ψυχῆς ἔδειξεν…. τὸ κῦρος τῆς ψυχῆς τιθέμενος. 184 Hom. Rom. 14[13].2 (F1.202): Οὐ γὰρ ταυτὸν ψυχῆς οὐσία καὶ σώματος, καὶ προαιρέσεως, ἀλλὰ τὰ μέν ἐστιν ἔργα Θεοῦ, τὸ δὲ ἐξ ἡμῶν αὐτῶν γινομένη κίνησις, πρὸς ὅπερ ἂν αὐτὴν βουληθῶμεν ἀγαγεῖν.

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governance of the flesh. So in this sense, physical death is the result of sin, which now also brings about the problem of the passions—death thus works against masculinisation in this sense.

On the one hand, for some people the inevitability of death creates a problem in the formation of masculinity; it results in pathic excess. But for others, the realisation of death can be an aid to masculinity. Death is therefore very subjective. As with slavery, imperial governance, and old age—all those other repercussions of sin—

Chrysostom also considers death to have a didactic function, acting as a teacher and pedagogue of virtue. Utilising the language of putrefaction, Chrysostom states:

When a man sees someone who was walking with him yesterday and the

day before now dissolved into worms and rot and ashes and dust, even if he

has the madness of the devil, he is terrified, he is humbled, he is restrained,

he trains himself in discipline, and he establishes in his mind the mother of

good things, humility. And the one who passes away is in no way harmed

by it, for he will receive this inviolate and incorruptible body. And the one

who is still in the trench benefits greatly from that which does not harm the

other. Not perchance was death introduced into our life as a teacher of

discipline [διδάσκαλος φιλοσοφίας], training [παιδαγωγῶν] our thought,

and bridling the passions of the soul, calming the waves and producing

serenity.185

185 Scand. 7.36–37 (SC 79.128–29): Ὅταν γὰρ ἴδῃ τὸν χθὲς καὶ πρώην μετ' αὐτοῦ βαδίζοντα, τοῦτον εἰς σκώληκας διαλυόμενον καὶ εἰς ἰχῶρα καὶ τέφραν καὶ κόνιν, κἂν αὐτοῦ τοῦ διαβόλου τὴν ἀπόνοιαν ἔχῃ, καταπτήσσει, συστέλλεται, μετριάζει, φιλοσοφεῖν παιδεύεται καὶ τὴν μητέρα τῶν ἀγαθῶν τὴν ταπεινοφροσύνην εἰς τὴν διάνοιαν εἰσοικίζει. Καὶ οὔτε ὁ ἀπελθών τι παρεβλάβη· ἀπολήψεται γὰρ τοῦτο τὸ σῶμα ἀκήρατον καὶ ἄφθαρτον· ὅ τε ἔτι ἐν τῷ σκάμματι ὤν, ἀφ' ὧν οὐδὲν ἕτερος ἐβλάβη, τὰ μέγιστα κερδανεῖ. Οὐχ ὁ τυχὼν διδάσκαλος φιλοσοφίας ὁ θάνατος εἰσηνέχθη εἰς τὸν ἡμέτερον βίον, παιδαγωγῶν τὴν διάνοιαν καὶ τὰ πάθη τῆς ψυχῆς χαλινῶν καὶ τὰ κύματα καταστέλλων καὶ γαλήνην ποιῶν. See also Exp. Ps. 111.1–2 (PG 55.280.42–281.39).

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This instance of didactic thanatology then leads to the paradoxical interiorisation of death.186 “Do not permit your body then to live in this world now, so that it may live then! Make it die, that it may not die,” the preacher admonishes, “the one who is dead to this life, is then most alive.”187 This is in fact the very beginning of

Christian martyrdom and masculinisation—those minute ephemeral suicides, practices of cooling and drying, of induced aging, of self-renunciation and transcendence, moments of unbecoming that believers need to experience in their very flesh. The martyrs in the arena are simply those who have taken the spiritual life cycle to its most extreme conclusion. Through their physical deaths, they have become truly alive. But for Chrysostom martyrdom dawns from the daily practices of self-renunciation and unbecoming, practices that represent the sole foundation of Christian masculinity. The humility and humiliation that death brings are also wrought by ascetic practices of psychic control. Burrus, once again, eloquently formulates this dynamic between ascetic practice, death, humiliation, and transcendence:

A plunge into the abyss of abjection was necessarily undertaken by those

who aspired to transcendence. In imitation of Christ, holy men and women

of late antiquity engaged in elaborate rituals of self-humiliation through

which they might hope to escape the unbearable weight of selfhood

registered in the relentless drag of bodily existence…. Salvation never

seemed nearer than… when the stench of one’s own putrification gave rise

186 For an excellent discussion of the problems of the dualism between body and soul, and corporeal mortification and psychic vivification, see Elizabeth A. Castelli, “Mortifying the Body, Curing the Soul: Beyond Ascetic Dualism in the Life of Saint Syncletica,” Differences 4.2 (1992): 134–53. 187 Hom. Rom. 14[13].8–9 (F1.218–19): Μὴ τοίνυν ἀφῇς τὸ σῶμα ζῆσαι νῦν, ἵνα τότε ζήσῃ· ποίησον αὐτὸ ἀποθανεῖν, ἵνα μὴ ἀποθάνῃ…. Οὐκοῦν ὁ ζῶν οὗτος μάλιστά ἐστιν ὁ νεκρωθεὶς τῷ βίῳ.

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to the nauseous revolt of flesh against flesh.188

Chrysostom stops short of advising suicide, but the unbecoming of corporeal mortification has the same end in mind. “Let us continually mortify the flesh in its works,” Chrysostom says, “I do not mean in its substance, certainly not, but in its impulses [ὁρμὰς] towards evil works.”189 The more the works and passions of the flesh are mortified (νεκρόω), the more the spirit comes to life. Just as the passions often appeared as demons to the monks living in the desert, so too the mortification of the flesh is described as “competing with the angels” by Chrysostom. 190 Through the mortification of the flesh, psychic control brings life.

At this point the pilotage of the soul reaches its pinnacle. By mastering the body and the passions, the spirit can truly live, while revelling in excess only brings death.

When Chrysostom lauds the martyrs, he does not simply admire their act of physical self-sacrifice—the martyrs are praised above all for being individuals who have mastered their flesh and their passions. In praise of the virgin-martyr Drosis,

Chrysostom describes her as an anti-type to Eve: “Because of a woman he [the Devil] prevailed, because of a woman he was defeated.” He then chastises the men in his audience: “What defense, then, could there now be for men who have grown soft

[μαλακιζομένοις], and what pardon, when women act like men [ἀνδρίζωνται]?” 191

When speaking of the martyr-mother of the Maccabees, Chrysostom constantly

188 Virginia Burrus, Saving Shame: Martyrs, Saints, and Other Abject Subjects, Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 81–82. 189 Hom. Rom. 14[13].9 (F1.218): ἐπὶ τῶν ἔργων αὐτῶν διηνεκῶς αὐτὸ νεκρώσωμεν. Οὐχὶ τὴν οὐσίαν λέγω, μὴ γένοιτο, ἀλλὰ τὰς ὁρμὰς τὰς ἐπὶ τὰς πονηρὰς πράξεις. 190 Hom. Rom. 14[13].8 (F1.217): τὸ τοῖς ἀγγέλοις ἁμιλλᾶσθαι. 191 Dros. 7 (PG 50.687.57–58, 688.3–5): διὰ γυναικὸς ἐκράτησε, διὰ γυναικὸς ἥττηται…. Τίς οὖν ἂν γένοιτο λοιπὸν ἀνδράσι μαλακιζομένοις ἀπολογία, τίς δὲ συγγνώμη, ὅταν γυναῖκες ἀνδρίζωνται; Translation: Mayer, Cult of the Saints, 199.

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highlights how she overcame her passions, and when admonishing his audience to follow her example, he focuses less on her physical sacrifice, but more on how she overcame the passions. Using masculinising language, Chrysostom encourages his audience to follow her example:

Let us… inscribe her contests and wrestling matches on our heart… so that

by imitating the virtue of these saints here, we may be able to share their

crowns too there, with us displaying as much endurance in the irrational

passions as they exhibited philosophy in their tortures, in anger and desire

for money, bodies, vainglory and all other such things.192

Here it is not so much the concept of martyrdom that is interiorised, but rather an instance where Chrysostom reaches back to the already interiorised symbolic roots of martyrdom, namely the mortification of the flesh. The masculinity of the martyr-mother must become an inscription on the heart. “For it is from the actions that it becomes manifest which is alive and which is dead,” Chrysostom proclaims.193 Death was also interiorised and given its place in the spiritual life, in which the desires of the flesh had to be mortified daily in order to truly live. Masculinity was life. By mortifying the passions of the flesh, the spirit was vivified. As I have repeatedly noted, the psychic pilotage of the flesh had very physiological effects. Excessive indulgence rendered the body a restless living corpse, diseased and mad. Aging, death, and thus martyrdom

192 Macc. 1.11 (PG 50.622.51–63): τοὺς ἀγῶνας καὶ τὰ παλαίσματα… τῆς καρδίας ἡμῶν ἀπογράψαντες… ἵνα ἐνταῦθα μιμησάμενοι τὴν ἀρετὴν τῶν ἁγίων τούτων, κἀκεῖ τῶν στεφάνων δυνηθῶμεν αὐτοῖς κοινωνῆσαι, ὅσην ἐν τοῖς κινδύνοις φιλοσοφίαν ἐπεδείξαντο, τοσαύτην ἐν τοῖς ἀλόγοις πάθεσιν ἡμεῖς καρτερίαν ἐπιδεικνύμενοι, θυμῷ, καὶ ἐπιθυμίᾳ χρημάτων, σωμάτων, δόξης. Translation: Mayer, Cult of the Saints, 145. 193 Hom. Rom. 14[13].9 (F1.219): ἀπὸ γὰρ τῶν πράξεων καὶ ὁ ζῶν καὶ ὁ τεθνηκὼς φαίνεται.

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inscribed itself onto the very diet of early Christian ascetics, onto their sleeping habits, and every other aspect of the masculine lifestyle.

Conclusion

If the dynamics of psychic control were to cool and dry the body, the effects and aim of this control was the aging and mortification of the body. The discourses of gerontology and corporeal mortification signify the pinnacle of masculinisation.

Encapsulated with transcendence, both the aged body and the corpse became symbolic of a return to the ideal Masculine. Aging may be understood as a natural ἄσκησις, an operation that taught wisdom and self-control, of which the purpose was to bring a man into a state of gerotranscendence. The gerotranscendent man represented a body that had its sexual desire castrated, a body of which the flesh was mortified, a body almost in-between this world and the next—a corporeality of otherness—but a soul that was vivified and rejuvenated by the life of virtue. By these operations, the gerotranscendent body was a correlate to the monastic body, both symbolising ideal Christian masculinity. Gerotranscendence had to be the effect of masculine psychic control. Even young men were expected to assume the values of gerotranscendence. Yet, in this pedagogy of aging, not all students learned the lesson, not all behaved appropriately.

For these men the most scolding critique is reserved; not only are they a shameful spectacle, but they are also weak, ugly, and unmanly. From this analysis of gerontology in Chrysostom, we have found that old age was a prospect many people could identify with, and a positive evaluation thereof may have been encouraging to many men, who were themselves afraid of the challenges old age posed to their masculinity. By means of participation in ecclesiastical rituals and duties, and by exhibiting a corporeality akin to that of the monks, many late ancient Christian men fashioned their masculinity by

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the standards of gerotranscendence.

Yet martyrdom was still the definitive discourse of masculinity in early

Christianity. But for Chrysostom’s audience, traditional martyrdom was not a close and real possibility while they remained living their lives in the city. They could relive something of that age of the church in the stories of the martyrs Chrysostom so often told, or by visiting the shrines and participating in the feasts. Chrysostom transforms martyrdom into something different through the discourses of aging and corporeal mortification. After some centuries, the intense overlapping of masculinity and martyrdom seemed to have created a fusion of the two. “Our whole life is a contest

[ἀγών],” Chrysostom declares.194 In practices of masculinisation, which implied the aging and mortification of the body via psychic control, there is now an automatisation of martyrdom. Psychic control is martyrdom because psychic control aims at corporeal mortification. The conclusion is perhaps not surprising, considering the firm links established between martyrdom and masculinity. The pinnacle of masculinity, in its earthly stasis, is then martyrdom through corporeal aging and mortification. It is an unbecoming directed towards affecting transcendence, thus becoming one with God, the ultimate and ideal Masculine.

194 Hom. Heb. 14.4 (F7.182): ὁ πᾶς βίος ἀγών ἐστι.

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CHAPTER 7

Conclusion: Man Made

During his episcopate in Constantinople, John Chrysostom preached a sermon with the help of an interpreter to a Gothic parish. At the start of the sermon, Chrysostom contrasts the traditional demeanour or habitus (σχῆμα) of the Greek philosopher with the “wilder” appearance of his Gothic audience members, “who exhibit façades more like lions than men.” Unlike the Greek philosophers who strut through the marketplace with neatly trimmed locks of hair and beards, bearing a cane in the hand, the Gothic

Christians’ “values are not of such a nature, they do not lie in matters of appearance, but the matters of [their] philosophy reside in self-mastery [σωφροσύνῃ].”1 In this statement, Chrysostom shows his concern with the internal, psychic structures of masculinity, rather than with external habitual structures. He is not interested in turning his “barbarian” congregants into conventional philosophical types. Those traditional markers of Greek and Roman masculinity are less important to Chrysostom. Christians are those “who do not have physical beauty, who cannot be adorned with filial respect, or eloquence and well-rounded speech, or conventional diction,” and so on.2 Even one

1 Hom. Goth. 1 (PG 63.501.11–14): λεόντων μᾶλλον ἢ ἀνθρώπων ἐπιδεικνύμενοι πρόσωπα…. οὐ τὰ ἡμέτερα τοιαῦτα, οὐδὲ ἐν τῷ σχήματι, ἀλλ' ἐν σωφροσύνῃ τὰ τῆς φιλοσοφίας. See also Chris L. de Wet, “Religious Conflict, Radicalism, and Sexual Exceptionalism in the Rhetoric of John Chrysostom,” in Reconceiving Religious Conflict: New Views from the Formative Centuries of Christianity, ed. Wendy Mayer and Chris L. de Wet, Routledge Studies in the Early Christian World (London: Routledge, 2018), 72–74. For Chrysostom’s views on the Goths, see Chris L. de Wet, “John Chrysostom and the Mission to the Goths: Rhetorical and Ethical Perspectives,” in Sensitivity towards Outsiders: Exploring the Dynamic Relationship between Mission and Ethics in the New Testament and Early Christianity, ed. Jakobus Kok et al., Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament II 364 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2014), 543–65; and for a somewhat different view from my own, see Jonathan P. Stanfill, “Embracing the Barbarian: John Chrysostom’s Pastoral Care of the Goths” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Fordham University, 2015). 2 Hom. Goth. 1 (PG 63.501.24–26): φυσικὸν κάλλος οὐκ ἔχοντες, οὐδὲ εὐσεβείᾳ κοσμεῖσθαι δυνάμενοι, εὐγλωττίᾳ καὶ ῥήμασιν ἀποτετορνευμένοις, καὶ συνθήκαις λέξεων.

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of the most important traits of manliness in antiquity, namely eloquence, is no longer a prerequisite for the new standard of Christian masculinity. We have seen a similar type of rhetoric at the beginning of this study in reference to the young boy who was secretly becoming a monk against his father’s wishes. In this episode, too, Chrysostom was far more concerned with the internal structures of masculinity than the external. The conventional external markers of masculinity were only useful insofar as they had to deceive the father and society at large. But this internal structuring of masculinity in

Chrysostom exhibits a complex genesis and dynamics.

The purpose of this research was to examine John Chrysostom’s views on masculinity and its formation, to ask about the nature and characteristics of masculinity in Chrysostomic thought, and to enquire about more closely about the medical- theological presuppositions that undergird the formation of masculinity. This analysis of the formation of masculinity in Chrysostom’s medical-theological discourse has shown is that Chrysostom is not necessarily opposed to the traditional scheme(s) of

Roman masculinity. He does not argue so much that one mode of masculinity should replace another. He rather seems to suggest that the new Christian standard of masculinity, which is primarily defined by the virtue of σωφροσύνη (which becomes an indicative of psycho-somatic health), is by far superior, and actually restructures and internalises many of the foundational elements of pre-Christian Roman masculinity/- ies. Chrysostom’s vision of Christian masculinity in fact borrows from conventional

Roman manliness. The notion of control, especially of one’s passions, but also one’s wife, children, and slaves, remains central in traditional Roman and Christian conceptualisations of masculinity. A strictly moderated regimen was not unique to

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Christian ascetics. Asceticism itself is a feature of Greek and Roman philosophy.3

Conventional masculine discourses such as soldiery and fertility are also still prevalent in Christian formations of masculinity, but they are often simply internalised and spiritualised, or simply de-centred. Chrysostom’s vision of masculinity is not so much a brand new discursive formation as it is a transformation of conventional Roman frameworks of masculinity. Chrysostom presents his vision of Christian masculinity as a viable alternative to other contemporary masculinities—an alternative that was not wholly different from those others.

Unlike other Greek and Roman authors who understand masculinity especially in terms of one’s rhetorical prowess or military and civic participation, Chrysostom as a medical philosopher and psychic therapist especially conceives his vision of “true” masculinity within his medical-theological discourse. Military service, rhetoric, civic duty, ethnic and social identity, and even physical strength and outward appearance, are not unimportant to Chrysostom, but they are to an extent decentred and at times placed in the periphery of masculinity discourses in Chrysostomic thought. In this sense, even women and slaves have the capacity to receive a measure of masculinity. Chrysostom lauds masculine women and slaves. Furthermore, theology and psycho-somatic health are not two separately distinct concepts in Chrysostom’s understanding of masculine self-fashioning. Good theology will result in psycho-somatic health, and psychic illness may often be a symptom of bad theology and ethics.

Masculinity is something that is fashioned, man is someone who is made. It then also comes as no surprise that the most important, detailed, and cogent arguments in

Chrysostom’s conceptualisation of masculinity are found in his expositions of the

3 See esp. James A. Francis, Subversive Virtue: Asceticism and Authority in the Second-Century Pagan World (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995).

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creation narrative in Genesis 1–3. It is less a question of whether God made man, or man made God. We rather see that man makes man through the making of God.

Chrysostom thus starts his construction of masculinity and man through the construction of God. In his Gottesbild, God emerges as the ideal but unattainable

Masculine. Two main features of masculinity are extrapolated in this sense, namely incorporeality and autonomy. Masculinity, in Chrysostom’s thought, is always in some sense directly in opposition to corporeality. Masculinity is essentially defined by the constant struggle between that which is not corporeal and the corporeal. Masculinity is the colonisation and domination of the corporeal. Since God is incorporeal, he is the ultimate dominating principle, the perfect Masculine. The existence of corporeality is then a prerequisite for the existence of masculinity. Masculinity is therefore not defined or informed by what may seem to be its opposite, namely femininity. Although binary dichotomisations are best to be avoided if we are to grasp the complex discursivities of ancient masculinity, if pressed for an answer, I would argue that the “opposite” of masculinity is corporeality, at least in Chrysostom’s thought. Chrysostom cares less about human sexual difference. Rather, it is actually the sexual similarity between

Adam and Eve, man and woman, that serves to differentiate them from what is truly their opposite, namely the divine and incorporeal. Man is weighed down by flesh—the flesh pinned to his own body, his own subjectivity, but also by those subjects that are often characterised as particularly “fleshy”, namely women, slaves, and unmanly men.

Hence there is the requirement of a central dominating principle, namely the soul. So while God’s essence as the ideal Masculine cannot be mirrored or copied, his roles as father, son, slaveholder, landowner, and creator could and should be mimicked.

Masculinity in Chrysostom is therefore characterised by a tension between dominion and subjugation.

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What is important to further grasp is that by creating a standard of masculinity which is the correlate of the divine, masculine formation becomes a practice rather than a goal or a state as such. The practice of masculinity is domination. It is both the domination of all that which is corporeal, but also being indomitable. The masculine subject therefore always strives for autonomy. In the case of human beings, the practice of masculinity is conceptualised by Chrysostom as one action: struggle. In this sense, masculinisation should be understood as a contest, or ἀγών. Soon after the creation of human beings, a crisis of masculinity occurs. Chrysostom reproduces the space of Eden as a space of struggle, tension, and eventually, failure and exile. After the Fall, humanity finds itself in a struggle where its divine and psychic ruling principles are constantly in tension with its animalistic corporeality. This struggle is characterised by the battle between the soul and the passions, and eventually also the battle between man and his subjects. The failure of Adam was a failure of masculinity, the inability to properly control and dominate others in the garden—Chrysostom calls this ῥαθυμία.

Because the Fall is seen as a failure in masculinity, a failure to dominate and control, Chrysostom argues that other forms of dominion were introduced by God in order to remedy the situation and limit the consequences of sin. Because of Adam’s great failure, the masculine struggle becomes even fiercer. These forms of dominion are marriage (in which women and children are controlled), slavery (which may be seen as the ultimate domination of unmanly individuals), and civic and imperial governance

(the dominion of patrons over clients, political rulers over subjects, and soldiers over outlanders). These structures of domination have been introduced by God, according to

Chrysostom, to mitigate the effects of sin. Marriage, slavery, and imperial governance are then the great institutions of masculinity, measures of security to ensure the consequences of sin are as far as possible controlled. The greatest institution of

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masculinity, however, is asceticism and the monastic life. To escape the effects of sin and the Fall, an individual should pursue asceticism. The struggle of the monk and virgin, who are both now seen as those closest to the ideal Masculine, is a pure struggle against flesh. For Chrysostom’ theirs is the truest art of masculinity. The average person who is not technically a monk or virgin especially needs to strive for the values of monasticism and follow ascetic practice if they want to be masculine and conquer vice and sin.

Sin, however, always ends in death. Thus, in order to gain victory over sin and be restored to a prelapsarian masculine state, a new creative process, a new birth is required—masculinity should, in effect, be re-made. With the introduction of a new birth also comes the development of a new mode of natality that is specifically directed towards masculine formation. Contrary to conventional views, this new birth is a highly masculine operation. The birth that produces the new Christian masculine subject is a birth that is androgenerative. When God created Adam and Eve, they were not created by means of sexual reproduction. Their births were androgenerative. All reproduction after the Fall becomes subject to lust and sexual intercourse, an inferior mode of human reproduction. The return to the androgenerative reproduction of masculine subjects in

Chrysostom’s thought unfolds consecutively with Christian salvation history, from the miraculous conception of individuals like Sarah, Rachel, and Mary herself, to the new spiritual rebirth of all Christians as found in the Gospel according to John chapter 3.

Humanity’s fallen earthly natality is now replaced by a new spiritual natality, a natality that is pregnant with possibilities for masculinisation.

With the multiplication of institutions of masculinity in society, there is also an intensification of the psychic mode of control that will ensure masculinity is produced and retained. So as with all new-borns, nutrition is key to healthy growth and

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development. In the case of the formation of masculinity, the same is true. Chrysostom prescribes a very specific regimen for his audiences; a psychic nutrition, so to speak.

Because Chrysostom is not preaching to an audience of monks, he adapts his teaching of dietary regulations to be viable to an urban audience. Although the traditional monastic diet is lauded, Chrysostom is more concerned with the quantities of food consumed rather than the qualities of the foods (for example, small quantities of meats and wine are permissible). If ῥαθυμία represented the great failure of masculinity, then gluttony (λαιμαργία) was its absolute correlate. Chrysostom often classifies the vices of ῥαθυμία and λαιμαργία as the great primordial sins. The overall regimen Chrysostom prescribes rests on the principle of moderation, which again mirrors conventional

Roman masculine knowledge. His admonitions on diet also apply to exercise, sleep, and bathing—all in moderation. The aim of this regimen was to cultivate psychic control and a masculine disposition.

The effect of Chrysostom’s regimen was to cool and dry out the body. Yet the cooling and drying out of the body is parallel to processes of aging and, eventually, dying. In this way, discourses of aging (gerontology) and corporeal mortification

(thanatology) become driving forces in the medical-theological formation of masculinity. The natural process of aging no longer needs to be an impediment to masculinity. In fact, aging well—that is, aging with the cultivation of σωφροσύνη— brings about a measure of transcendence similar to that of the famed Syrian desert monks, the “old men” of the desert. The gerotranscendent man is one who has conquered and disciplined his corporeality. The discourse of aging then acts as a discourse of masculinisation. Even the young need to age their bodies prematurely through ascetic discipline in order to become manly. This man is also a martyr—not in the arena of the beasts, but in the arena of asceticism. Through everyday feats of

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asceticism the body is mortified, and the subject draws every closer to the original and ideal Masculine. Martyrdom has always been a masculinising discourse, and in

Chrysostom, the conceptual eclipse of martyrdom and asceticism intensified this operation of masculinisation even further. Psychic control is martyrdom because psychic control has corporeal mortification as its aim. Martyrdom almost becomes, in a sense, democratised.

In conclusion, this study has illustrated the importance of understanding the intersections between religion, medicine, health, and gender status in late antiquity.

Being true to his nature as a medical philosopher and popular preacher, Chrysostom envisions the formation of masculinity in vivid medical-theological terms. Masculinity is conceptualised as health, and any opposing state is pathologised. Masculinity and one’s gender status and performance now become a matter of private and public health and hygiene. A healthy society, for Chrysostom, is a masculine society. But the masculine society is a society of domination.

In more recent research in Gender Studies and Psychology, such modes of dominant masculinity have been described as “toxic masculinities”, and it has been shown that rather than signifying social health, such masculinities actually cause much social harm.4 Labeling Chrysostom’s vision of masculinity as a toxic masculinity is perhaps an oversimplification of the matter, and maybe even anachronistic. However, in Chrysostom’s context, the social harm of his vision of masculinity is evident, to use only one example, in the establishment and promulgation of slavery as an institution of masculinity. Many other examples, such as the abhorrence of same-sex passion, the

4 See for instance the studies of Thomas Keith, Masculinities in Contemporary American Culture: An Intersectional Approach to the Complexities and Challenges of Male Identity (London: Routledge, 2017); Stewart M. Hoover and Curtis D. Coats, Does God Make the Man?: Media, Religion, and the Crisis of Masculinity (New York: New York University Press, 2015).

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marginalisation and violation of women, and medical persecution of alternative religious groups, or heretics, may be added to the list. Masculinities like that of

Chrysostom may have been the antecedents of modern-day toxic masculinities. What is perhaps more important to take away from a study such as this is the realisation that our understanding of God and health shape how gender identity is fashioned and vice versa. In order to cultivate alternative, meaningful, and socially constructive masculinities—and to disrupt toxic masculinities—we are called to re-evaluate, redescribe, and give birth to new understandings and languages relating to God, cosmology, medicine, healthcare, and essentially, ourselves as enigmatic gendered subjects.

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ABBREVIATIONS

ANF Ante-Nicene Fathers series, 1867–97. www.newadvent/fathers.

CCSL Corpus Christianorum: Series latina. Turnhout: Brepols, 1953–.

CMG Corpus medicorum graecorum. Leipzig: Teubner, 1927–.

CML Corpus medicorum latinorum. Leipzig: Teubner, 1915–.

CSEL Corpus scriptorum ecclesiasticorum latinorum. Vienna, 1866 –.

ESV The Bible: English Standard Version, 2001.

F Ioannis Chrysostomi interpretatio omnium epistularum Paulinarum.

Edited by F. Field. 7 vols. Oxford: J. H. Parker, 1854–62.

GCS Die griechischen christlichen Schriftsteller. Leipzig/Berlin, 1897–.

K Claudii Galeni opera omnia. Edited by K.G. Kühn. Leipzig: G. Olms,

1821–33.

LCL Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,

1912–.

LSJ Liddell, H.G., R. Scott, H.S. Jones, and R. McKenzie. A Greek–English

Lexicon. Oxford: Clarendon, 1996.

NA28 Nestle-Aland Novum Testamentum Graece. Institute for New Testament

Textual Research. 28th ed. Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2012.

NIV The Bible: New International Version, 1978.

PG Patrologiae cursus completus: Series graeca. Edited by J.-P. Migne. 162

vols. Paris, 1857–86.

PL Patrologiae cursus completus: Series ecclesiae latinae. Edited by J.-P.

Migne. 217 vols. Paris, 1844–64.

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PO Patrologia orientalis (Patrologia syriaca). Edited by R. Graffin et al. 49

vols. Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1894–.

PTS Patristische Texte und Studien. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1963–.

SC Sources chrétiennes. Paris: Cerf, 1941–.

TDNT Theological Dictionary of the New Testament. Edited by G. Kittel and

G. Friedrich. 10th ed. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1977.

TLG Thesaurus linguae graecae. Online: http://stephanus.tlg.uci.edu.

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