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Reconstructing Celibacy : Sexual Renunciation in the First Three Centuries of the Early Church

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Reconstructing Celibacy : Sexual Renunciation in the First Three Centuries of the Early Church View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by OPUS: Open Uleth Scholarship - University of Lethbridge Research Repository University of Lethbridge Research Repository OPUS http://opus.uleth.ca Theses Arts and Science, Faculty of 2007 Reconstructing celibacy : sexual renunciation in the first three centuries of the early church Carroll, Jason Scot Lethbridge, Alta. : University of Lethbridge, Faculty of Arts and Science, 2007 http://hdl.handle.net/10133/534 Downloaded from University of Lethbridge Research Repository, OPUS RECONSTRUCTING CELIBACY: SEXUAL RENUNCIATION IN THE FIRST THREE CENTURIES OF THE EARLY CHURCH Jason Scot Carroll B.A., University of Lethbridge, 1994 M.C.S., Regent College, 1999 A Thesis Submitted to the School of Graduate Studies of the University of Lethbridge in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree MASTER OF ARTS Department of Religious Studies University of Lethbridge LETHBRIDGE, ALBERTA, CANADA © Jason Scot Carroll, 2007 Reconstructing Celibacy: Sexual Renunciation in the First Three Centuries of the Early Church Abstract This thesis explores the philosophical and theological motivations for early Christian celibacy prior to the appearance of monasticism. This thesis will challenge recent scholarly positions that portray early Christian celibacy only in light of the emergence of monasticism in the fourth century, and which argue that celibacy as an ascetic practice was motivated primarily by resistance to the dominant social structures of antiquity. The practice of celibacy was a significant movement in the early church well before the appearance of monasticism or the development of Christianity as the dominant social force in the empire, and although early Christian sexual austerity was similar to the sexual ethics of Greco-Roman philosophical constructs, early Christian sexual ethics had developed in relation to uniquely Christian theological and cosmological views. Moreover, a segment of the early Christian community idealized celibacy as an expression of the transformation of human nature amidst a community that continued to remain sexually austere in general. iii Acknowledgements My heart felt thanks must go out first and foremost to Dr. Tom Robinson who supervised this thesis. Thank you, Tom, for your tireless dedication to your students and for your continual willingness to be available and committed to the work of those under your direction. I appreciate deeply your help and supervision with the thesis, and your diligence as you patiently read and re-read my work. More importantly, thank you for holding me to high standards of scholarship while giving me the freedom to explore my areas of interest without constraint. Finally, thank you, Tom, for putting up with my stubborn independence, occasional flights of fancy and insane schedule. Thanks also to Dr. Hillary Rodrigues, Chair of the Department of Religious Studies, for all your assistance in the long process of completing the M.A., as well as for your participation on the supervisory committee for this thesis. In addition, Dr. Chris Epplett and Dr. Malcolm Greenshields were of great help from the Department of History. Thank you, Malcolm, for your comments and aid with the thesis and for your participation on my supervisory committee. Thank you, Chris, for the helpful work in the guided studies and for chairing the defence of my thesis. Finally, I extend my thanks to Dr. Willi Braun from the University of Alberta who graciously accepted to serve as the external examiner on the thesis. I would also like to express my appreciation to the staff and faculty of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Lethbridge. Your support of my studies is deeply appreciated, as is the investment that the department has made in my career. To the Chair of the Department, Dr. Hillary Rodrigues, my supervisor Dr. Robinson, as well as to Dr. John Harding, Dr. Jim Linville and Bev Garnett, I wish to iv express my sincerest gratitude for the encouragement, acceptance and enthusiasm with which you consistently meet your students. The atmosphere of friendship and openness in the department is a rare gift. Thank you. Finally, I would like to thank my family, especially my wife Lisa, for their continued support and love. Jason Carroll v Table of Contents Foreword 1 1. A Survey of Scholarship on Asceticism and Celibacy I. Early Scholarship on Asceticism 8 II. Twentieth Century Scholarship on Asceticism 10 III. Post-modern Scholarship on Asceticism: Historical-Critical 15 IV. Post-modern Scholarship on Asceticism: Social Theorists 34 VI. Critique of Modern Scholarship on Asceticism 40 2. Early Christian Celibacy from New Testament Times to the Third Century I. Introduction 51 II. The New Testament and Apostolic Fathers 59 III. The Mid to Late Second Century Texts 68 IV. Anti-Gnostic and Apocryphal Texts 74 V. The Third Century Texts 87 VI. Conclusion 97 3. Sexual Ethics in Greco-Roman Philosophy I. Introduction 100 II. The Metaphysical Cosmologies 103 A. Platonism 103 B. Pythagorean Philosophy 119 C. Neo-Platonism 126 III. The Materialist Cosmologies 134 A. Aristotelian Philosophy 135 B. Stoicism 148 C. Epicurean Philosophy 163 IV. Conclusion 174 4. The Transformation of Human Nature: Theological Motives for Celibacy I. Introduction 178 II. The Early Christian Worldview 182 III. Early Christian Sexual Ethics: The New Testament 190 IV. Early Christian Sexual Ethics: The Apostolic Fathers 210 V. Theological Motivations for Early Christian Celibacy 218 A. New Testament And Apostolic Fathers 219 B. Second Century Texts 225 C. Third Century Texts 246 VI. Conclusion 251 vi Does not the Saviour who heals our soul also heal the body of its passions? -Clement of Alexandria Foreword The complexity that confronts anyone studying early Christian celibacy is daunting, to say the least. The primary documents and secondary studies concerning celibacy in the early church confront one with a myriad of historical, textual, cultural and methodological questions, all set within a modern field of study that lacks unity with regard to a theoretical approach to the study of religion in general. In addition, the practice of sexual renunciation, as contrary to basic human biological and social behaviour, stands as a puzzling but seemingly widespread aspect of religion, which only adds to the complexity of the issues surrounding its practice. This thesis is an attempt to sort through the jungle of ancient and modern texts dealing with celibacy in the early Christian church. In particular, this thesis will attempt to answer the simple question of why early Christianity engaged in celibacy as an ideal practice. This necessarily means that how the practice developed as a historical reality must be examined, as well as what sorts of things motivated early Christians to practice sexual renunciation as a spiritual discipline. Contrary to recent scholarship, this thesis will take a methodological position that emphasizes the importance of theological and cosmological speculation as the central motivator behind celibacy, and will attempt to demonstrate that academic explorations of asceticism in the past twenty years have not only failed to account for the entire historical situation in regard to early Christian celibacy, but have also left a portion of historical 1 data on celibacy largely unexplored. The methods of post-modern criticism, at least in the study of early Christianity, have redefined celibacy and asceticism as a kind of social resistance within a given society, and assumed that the role of asceticism is primarily a social one. This a priori assumption about the nature of asceticism has led to recent misinterpretations of historical data, as well as causing a large portion of historical data to be overlooked, oversimplified or simply dismissed. This thesis, then, will ultimately argue that early Christian idealization of celibacy had its roots in the late first and early second century as an amalgamation of Christian theology with Greco-Roman concepts of human anthropology.1 The rises of institutional monasticism, and the ascendancy of rhetorical support for celibacy in the fourth century church, reflect the complicity of the Greco-Roman culture with the Christianisation of the empire. In addition, it will be argued that monasticism was not so much the initial ascetic impulse of early Christianity as it was the employment and transformation of an already well established ascetic form with much earlier roots. It will be argued, therefore, that religious concerns motivate celibacy, which in turn creates social ramifications as the natural by-product of a new belief system. Modern scholarly treatments, then, have placed the cart before the horse, so to speak. The attempt to define asceticism and celibacy primarily as social discourses does not represent the historical reality of celibacy in the early church and results in the misrepresentation of the nature of early Christian celibacy, treating it as an ahistorical and areligious counter-cultural force. 1 Here it must be noted that the term “anthropology” will be used in a very narrowly defined sense for this thesis. Anthropology, in this sense will be used to refer the concepts and constructs specifically pertaining to the ancient understanding of human nature and the relationships between the physical, spiritual and ethical elements of human beings. In that regard, the term “anthropology” will not be used in any way that one might expect to find in the modern academic field of anthropology. 2 In order to proceed logically through this argument, this thesis will have four progressive discussions. In the first chapter, the recent historical conclusions and methodological perspectives on asceticism and celibacy will be discussed, with an aim to demonstrating the scholarly shift towards describing celibacy as a social discourse, and to show how these discussions do not take into account the full range of historical data. The second chapter will be a re-examination of the primary sources on early Christian asceticism in order to gain a full perspective of the historical data on the subject.
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