"Arts, Faculty of"@en . "Classical, Near Eastern and Religious Studies, Department of"@en . "DSpace"@en . "UBCV"@en . "Wilkinson, Kevin Wayne"@en . "2009-07-13T18:26:29Z"@en . "2000"@en . "Master of Arts - MA"@en . "University of British Columbia"@en . "This thesis contains two movements. In the first chapter, I evaluate the Apostle\r\nPaul's self-presentation in the city of Corinth (as reconstructed through his Corinthian\r\ncorrespondence). Employing the insights of recent scholarship on gender in antiquity, I\r\narrive at the conclusion that Paul's deficiency as a public speaker, his unnamed physical\r\naffliction, and possibly his circumcision combined to feminize his image. All three of\r\nthese characteristics contravene the Greco-Roman canons of masculine appearance and\r\ndeportment. And, although the social situation in Corinth is by no means clear, it appears\r\nthat some were challenging Paul's leadership on the basis of his damaged masculinity. In\r\nchapters 2 and 3, I explore one element of the Apostle's self-presentation that may have\r\nameliorated his problematic image: sexual renunciation. Self-control in the culture of\r\nantiquity was closely associated with the masculine activity par excellence, control over\r\nothers. Thus, by simply practicing this virtue, Paul was making a meaningful statement\r\nboth about his body and about his ability to lead. I go on, however, to identify the places\r\nin 1 Corinthians 7 (Paul's only extended treatment of marriage and celibacy) where he\r\ndiverges from classical models of ascetic practice. I contend that these very alterations to\r\nthe meaning of self-control further rehabilitate his damaged masculinity. This thesis is\r\nintended to be, not only a contribution to the social history of early Christianity, but also\r\npart of a broad movement in contemporary scholarship to destabilize the foundations of\r\n'masculinity' in the West."@en . "https://circle.library.ubc.ca/rest/handle/2429/10675?expand=metadata"@en . "8887945 bytes"@en . "application/pdf"@en . "BUILT: (RE)CONSTRUCTING M A S C U L I N I T Y A N D AUTHORITY IN 1 CORINTHIANS 7 by K E V I N W A Y N E WILKINSON B.A. , The University of British Columbia, 1997 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF M A S T E R OF ARTS in THE F A C U L T Y OF G R A D U A T E STUDIES (Department of Classical, Near Eastern and Religious Studies) We accept this thesis as conforming to the required standard THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH C O L U M B I A April 2000 \u00C2\u00A9 Kevin Wayne Wilkinson, 2000 In presenting this thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements for an advanced degree at the University of British Columbia, I agree that the Library shall make it freely available for reference and study. I further agree that permission for extensive copying of this thesis for scholarly purposes may be granted by the head of my department or by his or her representatives. It is understood that copying or publication of this thesis for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission. Department of OA'SICA^ MBftg-\u00E2\u0082\u00ACKX\u00C2\u00AEU>1 th\u00C2\u00A3b ft&U/VHn )S \u00C2\u00A3 f V D l 5 \u00C2\u00A3 The University of British Columbia Vancouver, Canada Date A P f t A L . tfb . ZO^O DE-6 (2/88) 11 Abstract This thesis contains two movements. In the first chapter, I evaluate the Apostle Paul's self-presentation in the city of Corinth (as reconstructed through his Corinthian correspondence). Employing the insights of recent scholarship on gender in antiquity, I arrive at the conclusion that Paul's deficiency as a public speaker, his unnamed physical affliction, and possibly his circumcision combined to feminize his image. A l l three of these characteristics contravene the Greco-Roman canons of masculine appearance and deportment. And, although the social situation in Corinth is by no means clear, it appears that some were challenging Paul's leadership on the basis of his damaged masculinity. In chapters 2 and 3,1 explore one element of the Apostle's self-presentation that may have ameliorated his problematic image: sexual renunciation. Self-control in the culture of antiquity was closely associated with the masculine activity par excellence, control over others. Thus, by simply practicing this virtue, Paul was making a meaningful statement both about his body and about his ability to lead. I go on, however, to identify the places in 1 Corinthians 7 (Paul's only extended treatment of marriage and celibacy) where he diverges from classical models of ascetic practice. I contend that these very alterations to the meaning of self-control further rehabilitate his damaged masculinity. This thesis is intended to be, not only a contribution to the social history of early Christianity, but also part of a broad movement in contemporary scholarship to destabilize the foundations of 'masculinity' in the West. Table of Contents Abstract... : . . . . . . i i List of Abbreviations 'v Acknowledgements v i Introduction 1 Chapter 1 (Re)Constructing Paul's Body: The Corinthian Fragments 6 1.1 Masculinity in the Roman World 6 1.2 Paul and Sophistic Performance 11 1.3 Circumcision and Damaged Masculinity 22 1.4 Paul's \"Thorn in the Flesh' 31 1.5 Conclusion 33 Chapter 2 Contending With Desire 36 2.1 The Agonistic Construction of Self-Control 37 2.1.1 The development of the agonisticidiom 37 2.1.2 The goal of combat: enslavement, not extirpation 43 2.1.3 The body as locus of self-control 47 2.2 Paul's Anti-askesis 52 2.2.1 1 Corinthians 7.1-2 52 2.2.2 1 Corinthians 7.5 54 2.2.3 1 Corinthians 7.7 57 2.2.4 1 Corinthians 7.8-9 60 2.2.5 1 Corinthians 7.36-38 64 2.2.6 1 Corinthians 9.25-27 65 2.2.7 1 Thessalonians 4.3-5 66 2.2.8 Galatians 5.16-25 ...68 2.3 Conclusion 71 Chapter 3 Man of the House 78 3.1 The Power to Govern 78 3.1.1 The household virtue 78 3.1.2 The civic virtue 82 3.1.3 Cosmic city and household of the gods 86 3.1.3.1 Stoics 86 3.1.3.2 Cynics 91 3.1.3.3 Epictetus 95 3.2 Paul: Man of the House 100 3.2.1 1 Corinthians 7.32-35 103 3.2.2 1 Corinthians 7.32-35 and Cosmopolitanism I l l 3.3 Conclusion 115 Conclusion 118 Nomenclature 119 Bibliography 120 1.0 Appendix A 133 V List of Abbreviations A B Anchor Bible ABR A ustralian Biblical Review A G D A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature, second edition, trans, and ed. William F. Arndt and F. Wilbur Gingrich, revised and augmented by Gingrich and Frederick W. Danker (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1979) AJP American Journal of Papyrology CBQ Catholic Biblical Quarterly GRBS Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies HNTC Harper's New Testament Commentaries HTR Harvard Theological Review HUCA Hebrew Union College Annual ICC International Critical Commentaries JBL Journal of Biblical Literature JRS Journal of Roman Studies JSNT Journal for the Study of the New Testament JSPs Journal for the Study of the Psuedepigrapha L C C Library of Christian Classics L C L Loeb Classical Library LSJ A Greek-English Lexicon, compiled by Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott, revised and augmented by Henry Stuart Jones (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968) MJ Modern Judaism NICNT New International Commentary on the New Testament NIGTC New International Greek Text Commentary NIV New International Version N R S V New Revised Standard Version NT Novum Testamentum NTS New Testament Studies OTP Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, ed. James H. Charlesworth (New York: Double Day, 1985) SBLDS Society of Biblical Literature Dissertation Series SPS Sacra Pagina Series TDNT Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, edited by Gerhard Kittel, translated and edited by Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1964) YCS Yale Classical Studies vi Acknowledgements This project was conceived in enthusiasm, but the gestation period has been long and arduous, and the birthing process downright painful. The thesis surely would have remained malformed if not for the encouragement and advice of several people. First and foremost, I would like to thank Dr. Dietmar Neufeld and Dr. Richard Menkis, to whom the present work is dedicated. They encouraged me to develop my acumen long before this thesis was a glimmer in my eye. The other members of my committee, Dr. Daphna Arbel and Dr. Rob Cousland, offered valuable criticism and generous support. I would also like to thank all those who read parts or all of this manuscript: Chris Beall, Dr. Daniel Boyarin of U . C. Berkeley, Dr. Sander L. Gilman of The University of Chicago, Brian Hansen, Dr. Dale B. Martin of Yale University, and Rod Wilkinson. And I owe a debt of gratitude to Dr. Stanley K. Stowers of Brown University for providing me access to an unpublished essay. Finally, my wife, Warrena, has endured the kind of ascetic behavior not uncommon in graduate students, and has given me in return a bounty of support and encouragement. Without her this thesis would not have been possible. 1 Introduction 1 Corinthians 7 is Paul's only extended treatment of marriage and celibacy -indeed it is the only such text in the New Testament - and the proliferation of secondary literature purporting to expound it suggests that it may currently be the sexiest topic in Pauline studies. A summary of this scholarship here would be superfluous, since Wi l l Deming has carried out this task very thoroughly in his recent monograph, Paul on Marriage and Celibacy} but I shall briefly identify the characteristics of the secondary literature that I find most problematic. The most troubling tendency of twentieth-century exegetes of this passage is the palpable drive to dissociate Paul from anti-marriage or broadly ascetic views. This is characteristic of no one particular class of scholar. Naive and sophisticated, male and female, Protestant and Catholic, all are implicated in a grand march to reclaim Paul for our modern sensibilities. Remaking Paul in one's own image is nothing new, of course. He has suffered this at intervals since the deutero-Pauline epistles began to circulate mere 1 Wi l l Deming, Paul on Marriage and Celibacy: The Hellenistic Background of 1 Corinthians 7, Society for New Testament Studies Monograph Series (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 5.49. 2 Dale Martin (The Corinthian Body [New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995], 209) lodges a similar complaint, but he identifies the advocates of this view as being primarily Protestant, male, and married. This is true, but then this class of scholar dominates New Testament Studies in general. I think that those who want to rehabilitate Paul's \"attitude toward sexuality\" represent a cross-section of the discipline. See, for example, the Catholic Michael L. Barre, \"To Marry or to Burn: HvpoDadai in 1 Cor 7:9,\" CBQ 36 (1974): 193-202; and the Catholic and female Carolyn Osiek RSCJ, \"First Corinthians 7 and Family Questions,\" The Bible Today 35, no. 5 (1997): 275-279. See also W. E. Phipps, \"Is Paul's Attitude towards Sexual Relations Contained in 1 Cor. 7.1?\" NTS2% (1982): 125-31; Jeremy Moiser, \" A Reassessment of Paul's View of Marriage with Reference to 1 Cor. 7,\" JSNT19 (1983): 103-22; G. J. Laughery, \"Paul: 2 decades after his death. He has been, at turns, ascetic and defender of marriage, orthodox and gnostic, pro-slavery and anti-slavery, Jewish and anti-Jewish, misogynist and feminist. To be sure, some of these hinge on Paul's own elusiveness, and, in some sense, it is the fate of every author to be misread. But the pro-marriage, anti-ascetic readings of 1 Cor. 7 have become so implausible, the ruses to make Paul say what we want so elaborate, that it is surely time to readjust our sights.3 One of the strategies employed by contemporary scholars to explain away \"ascetic\" elements of 1 Cor. 7 is to claim that they are governed by eschatological expectation. This is the second characteristic of contemporary scholarship on this passage that I find problematic. If the world is about to end, so the logic goes, there will be a deemphasis on marriage and procreation. Paul's ostensible ascetic tendencies in 1 Cor. 7, therefore, represent nothing more than \"an interim ethic\" 4 It is true, of course, that a belief in the imminent end of the world left its mark on early Christian ethics, but this insight is not a panacea for every conundrum of contemporary Pauline scholarship. So often, eschatological expectation is invoked as a final answer to issues that are surely much more complex. I am convinced that the ascetic strain in earliest Christianity is one Anti-Marriage? Anti-Sex? Ascetic? A Dialogue with 1 Corinthians 7:1-40,\" The Evangelical Quarterly 69, no. 2 (1997): 109-128. 3 Some recent scholars have produced work that takes seriously Paul's asceticism. See, for example, Vincent L. Wimbush, The Worldly Ascetic: Response to the World and Self-understanding According to 1 Corinthians 7 (Macon: Mercer University Press, 1987); Daniel Boyarin, A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Stanley K. Stowers, A Rereading of Romans: Justice, Jews, & Gentiles (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994); Martin, Corinthian Body; Dale B. Martin, \"Paul Without Passion: On Paul's rejection of desire in sex and marriage,\" Constructing Early Christian Families: Family as social reality and metaphor, ed. Halvor Moxnes (London and New York: Routledge, 1997). 4 Deming, Paul on Marriage, 215. See also Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 57. of these issues that have been vastly oversimplified. What we need, i f we intend to do any justice to the complexity of human actions, is to build up layers of meaning, meticulously pieced together from ancient ascetic discourses. We need to lay these overtop of, and wrap them around, existing end-time readings. In other words, we need to put some flesh on our interpretations of 1 Cor. 7. The present project represents a modest venture in this direction: to find meaning outside of the eschaton. The focus of my inquiry is Paul's body, and more specifically Paul's body-as-text. If a text, in its broadest sense, is simply a meaningful sequence of signifiers, then the human body certainly qualifies. One's appearance and deportment are interpreted by observers according to the grammar of a \"body language\" that is specific to each culture. At the beginning of the twenty-first century in North America, one can make a \"statement\" by extending a middle finger, body piercing and tattooing, weight training, and any number of other acts on or with the body. As with any text, the language of one's body is open to interpretation, but each signifier possesses a conventional sense that allows the entire communicative act to be meaningful. The same holds true for the inhabitants of Greco-Roman antiquity, who had, of course, their own vernacular body language. The first chapter of this thesis begins with an outline of the grammar of a single, but highly significant, referent of one's body-talk in antiquity: gender. This provides a prelude to my reading of Paul's body (as it can be reconstructed from the Corinthian correspondence) according to the logic of classical gender codes. I consider three elements of the Apostle's appearance and deportment: his oratorical deficiencies, 4 his circumcision, and his unnamed physical affliction. I conclude that these draw Paul into a semiotics of feminization.5 Chapter one sets the stage for my treatment of Paul's enkrateia (self-control)6 Continuing to read the body as a text, I explore in chapters two and three some of the conventional meanings of this physical act in antiquity. For philosophers and moralists from Classical Greece to the Roman Period, enkrateia was the masculine virtue par excellence. Chapter two treats the role of agonistic imagery in constructing enkrateia as a masculine (or masculinizing) activity. And chapter three treats the isomorphic relations between self-control and the male realm of domestic and political authority. These 5 On reading the body in antiquity, see Maud Gleason, \"The Semiotics of Gender: Physiognomy and Self-Fashioning in the Second Century C.E.\", in Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient Greek World, ed. David M . Halperin, John J. Winkler, and Froma I. Zeitlin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 389-415, passim; idem, Making Men: Sophists and Self-Presentation in Ancient Rome (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), passim; John J. Winkler, The Constraints of Desire: The Anthropology of Sex and Gender in Ancient Greece (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), 66-7. 6 For this and other Greek terms that appear in Latin script, see below, p. 119. 7 By using these sources I am not assuming that Paul was exposed to them in any significant way. It is possible, of course, that Paul did receive a standard (i.e., for the elite) Greco-Roman education (see below, chapter one), but this is not necessary for these sources to be useful in our analysis of the Pauline epistles. First of all, I contend that the meaning of Paul's body-text is not coterminous with his own intentions (see below, note 7). In other words, meaning depends at least as much on the expectations and assumptions of the reader/audience, making any conventional construction of self-control in antiquity potentially constitutive of the meaning of Paul's self-control. Secondly, philosophy in antiquity was not conducted in an ivory tower; it was a public activity, and philosophers were public figures. The ideas discussed in these circles, therefore, in outline i f not in their particulars, were available for popular consumption. One did not need the very best education to be exposed to some of the debates that occupied more speculative minds. Thirdly, in a very real sense, Pauline Christianity had more in common with philosophical schools than it did with traditional forms of religious practice. (See Stanley K. Stowers, \"Does Pauline Christianity Resemble a Hellenistic Philosophy?\" Paul Beyond the Judaism/Hellenism Dualism, ed. Troels Engberg-Pederson [forthcoming].) Because his Christian communities were structured in similar ways to philosophical groups, Paul faced some of the same issues and problems. This insight will 5 traditional associations contribute to the conventional meaning of enkrateia, which means that they must be taken into account when considering Paul's practice of this virtue.8 Whether Paul is employing a conscious strategy of masculinization or not, his self-control serves to offset the image of effeminacy established in the first chapter. It is my contention, then, that part of the meaning of Paul's self-control is to be found in the conventions of Greco-Roman antiquity. But part of its meaning is also to be found in the idiosyncrasies of Paul's own encratic discourse. Does Paul endorse the conventional elements that made enkrateia a masculine virtue, or does he manipulate or even contradict them? And, i f Paul is offering a different construction of enkrateia from most classical models, what effect does this have on the masculinization that is produced in a general way by his practice of self-control? These questions are explored in the second and concluding sections of chapters two and three. I offer exegeses of passages (sticking mainly to 1 Corinthians 7) that explicitly or implicitly treat sexual self-control. After piecing together a peculiarly Pauline encratic discourse, I suggest that his manipulation of the conventional meaning(s) of this virtue actually serves to further combat his problematic body image and ensconce him in a position of authority.9 be especially useful in chapter three when I consider social organization and authority in the Cynic and Stoic cosmopolis and in Paul's universal community of faith. 8 This assumes a perspective on 'meaning' that does not equate it with 'intention.' A useful analogy for understanding my approach is the division of a speech-act into locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary forces. (The classic treatment of these terms is contained in J. L. Austin, How To Do Things With Words [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961].) The fact of Paul's celibacy (the locution) is a given, and the actual effect it had on his audience at Corinth (the perlocution) is irrecoverable. But the illocution - the act's conventional sense - can be built up through analysis of the meaning of sexual continence in antiquity. This orientation allows me to bracket the empirical Paul's motivations. 9 The conflation of authority and masculinity in antiquity ensures that issues of power are also implicitly about gender and vice versa. 6 I (Re)Constructing Paul's Body: The Corinthian Fragments Gender has become an important category for thinking about the social world of antiquity. This is true because it is now widely recognized that \"masculine\" and \"feminine\" are not simply descriptive terms applied to certain \"natural\" traits, but are rather prescriptive terms that smuggle in a whole series of social and cultural corollaries. As such, gender is not merely about sorting out the women from the men (or identifying anomalous figures like the \"girly\" man and the \"butch\"); it is about relations of social dominance. A consideration of Paul's gender, therefore, is neither frivolous nor deliberately provocative. It provides one way of thinking about such canonical topics as status and authority within the early Christian communities. But, before we turn our attention to the gendered body of Paul, a few statements about masculinity in antiquity are in order. 1.1 Masculinity in the Roman World Pierre Bourdieu's theory of the habitus is a useful one for exploring the gender codes of Roman antiquity.1 I shall not discuss it here in great detail, but a brief outline will help to structure the inquiry. Habitus is a Latin word, meaning \"condition, expression, demeanor, character,\" from which our English words habit, habituate, and the like are derived. But it assumes a central position in Bourdieu's theory of socialization as a designation for the coherence of unconscious activity - those things we do without deliberation, the things that are \"natural\" or \"second nature\". According to Bourdieu, these \"natural dispositions\" (the habitus) are not inherent traits (if by that we mean \"biologically encoded\"), rather they are acquired practices. As such, individual praxis (like all things learned) is a fundamentally social phenomenon. It is the result of a society's cumulative history, and the reproduction of a society's most deeply held beliefs. Like a child's first language, habitus is learned more frequently through experience and unconscious mimesis than through explicit instruction and conscious reflection. What makes the dispositions \"natural\" is that we are unconscious of their very acquisition. But the great advance of Bourdieu's theory over most rival theories of socialization is his emphasis on the body's place in this process. He treats body rather than mind as the locus of a society's shared values. Acquisition of the habitus comes through learning how to control and manipulate the body according to the conventions of the group - something Bourdieu calls \"bodily hexis\". Seemingly innocuous commands given to a child - e.g., \"stand up straight,\" \"look at me when I'm talking to you\" - encode the society's values in the habitual behavior of its constituent members. \" A whole cosmology\" is instilled, says Bourdieu, through these insignificant injunctions.3 And it all takes place \"below the level of consciousness, expression and the reflexive distance which these presuppose.\"4 1 See, e.g., Gleason, Making Men. 2 Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 54, 56. 3 Ibid., 69. 4 Ibid., 73. Such a theory is perfectly suited to a discussion of masculinity in antiquity. The practices that defined a Roman man as either masculine or effeminate were encoded in the habitus that was learned (below the level of consciousness) from virtually the time of birth. Even the birthing process itself was a chance to reaffirm Roman values through an evaluation of the offspring's body. A child who survived the delivery was examined by the midwife for signs of deformity and imperfection. If she found any cause for dissatisfaction with the baby, it was her prerogative to see to it that the child did not survive.5 The criteria to be used by midwives were bodily signs such as the sound of the infant's cry, size and shape, complexion, and physical intactness. Furthermore, the baby might be accepted or rejected by the father on the basis of sex as well as physical vigor. While unaware of what was taking place, the child was nevertheless being initiated into a process of acquiring the values of the social group. The acquisition of the habitus began in earnest, however, with a regimen of bandaging, bathing, massaging, stretching, and shaping, all finely orchestrated to produce a \"normal\" figure.6 The infant's body was wrapped entirely in bandages. Boys were wrapped with even pressure around the thorax while girls were wrapped tightly around the chest and loosely around the loins to produce respectively masculine and feminine body types (2.15). When it came to bathing, the nurse took care not to bathe the infant too frequently, for this produces a child who is weak in both body and mind (2.30). After being softened in the bath, the child should be held upside down \"in order that the vertebrae may be separated, the spine given the right curves, and the sinews be untangled, 5 Soranus Gynecology 2.10. Aline Rousselle, Porneia: On Desire and the Body in Antiquity, trans. Felicia Pheasant (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 51. so to speak\" (2.32). The nurse should then massage and mold the baby's features. The malleable skull of the young child should be brought \"into proper proportions, so that it may become neither too lengthy nor pointed\" (2.33). Flat noses are to be raised, aquiline noses pressed down (2.34). And a short foreskin should be stretched and fastened, \"for i f gradually stretched and continuously drawn forward it easily stretches and assumes its normal length, covers the glans and becomes accustomed to keep the natural good shape\" (2.34). Soranus seems to detect no contradiction in his call to produce the \"natural\" body, as when he advises the nurse to \"model every part [of the child's body] so that imperceptibly that which is as yet not fully formed is shaped into its natural characteristics\" (2.32). But the invasive production of these \"natural characteristics\" is, of course, a reproduction of the society's most deeply held beliefs about normal masculine and feminine traits (and hence about normal masculine and feminine social roles).7 Physical manipulation of the body, such as I have just described, is more immediate than the unconscious mimesis that characterizes Bourdieu's notion of bodily hexis, but it operates according to a similar logic. Shared ideas about the \"natural\" appearance of both male and female bodies are impressed (quite literally) upon young children. With the corporeal impression comes a mental one in which socially agreed upon notions of the \"beautiful\" are unconsciously conflated with the \"normal\" and ultimately the \"natural\". These dispositions are then reproduced again and again in social 6 Sor. Gyn. 2.12-16, 30-35; English translations of this treatise are from Soranus' Gynecology, trans. Owsei Temkin (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1956). See Rouselle, Porneia, 52-54. 7 See Bourdieu, Logic, 69. 10 interaction and finally impressed upon the bodies of the next generation, thereby ensuring the durability of the habitus. A more conventional application of Bourdieu's theory, and the one explored by o Maud Gleason, is to be found in what Gleason calls the \"semiotics of gender\". The \"rules\" of masculine deportment - i.e., bodily hexis - comprised a sort of language that was learned \"below the level of consciousness\" by young Roman boys. It was primarily a negative code that required men, among other things, not to waggle their hips while walking, not to depilate their bodies, not to coif their hair with too much flair, and not to scratch their heads with one finger. As Gleason notes, the boundary drawn is often ostensibly one between men and women, but it is intended to separate the effeminates from the virile men.9 Polemo provides an excellent example of the ostensible division of characteristics into male and female, as well as an example of the essentially negative quality of masculine deportment: Now I will relate the signs of male and female physique and their physiognomical significance. You will note which prevails over the other (in any single individual) and use the result to guide your judgment. The female has, compared to the male, a small head and a small mouth, softer hair that is dark colored, a narrower face, bright glittering eyes, a narrow neck, a weakly sloping chest, feeble ribs, larger, fleshier hips, narrower thighs and calves, knock-knees, dainty fingertips and toes, the rest of the body moist and flabby, with soft limbs and slackened joints, thin sinews, weak voice, a hesitant gait with frequent short steps, and limp limbs that glide slowly along. But the male is in every way opposite to this description, and it is possible to find masculine qualities also in women.10 Although arbitrary, these rules were tacitly accepted as naturally occurring norms of appearance and deportment. They show up in physiognomic literature, of course, but Gleason, \"Semiotics of Gender;\" idem, Making Men. 9 Gleason, Making Men, 80. 1 0 Translated by Gleason, Making Men, 60 (emphasis hers). Cf. Pseudo-Aristotle Physiognomonica 5, 808B. 11 also in speeches and rhetorical handbooks, satirical epigrams, histories, in almost every form of cultural production that has come down to us, and always bearing the weight of the obvious. Fluency in this \"language\" included not only the largely unconscious performance of masculine traits, but also the ability to detect fissures in the performances of others. It is well known that the ancient Mediterranean world was characterized by intense rivalry among public males. One of the most important skills to master in this context was the ability to manipulate the code of gender performance to one's own advantage and to the disadvantage of one's rivals. Oratory in particular was a privileged site for the performance of masculinity (not to mention rival charges of effeminacy), and it is to this realm that I shall now direct my attention. 1.2 Paul and Sophistic Performance The performative nature of masculinity, which remained largely implicit and \"below the level of consciousness\" in day-to-day social relations, became explicit in the realm of public declamation. Here the crafting of a speech and the crafting of a masculine identity, forged in the intensity of audience scrutiny, were melded into a single but complex performative act. Maud Gleason has suggested that the \"semiotics of gender\" formed a parallel discourse to the formal oration. While words - the skill of expression, the subtlety of argumentation, etc. - were important, equally important in the entire communicative act were such considerations as the pitch and tone of one's voice, the refinement of one's appearance, the tempo of one's movements, and myriad other 12 signs. These are, of course, precisely the same signifiers of gender that were acquired through the habitus, but raised to a higher level of conscious reflection. The hegemonic paradigm of masculine deportment was the one considered above and championed by orators-cw/w-physiognomists like Polemo, who was perhaps more zealous than most in both guarding his own masculine persona and detecting fissures in the performances of his rivals. The rivalry between Polemo and Favorinus, the brilliant eunuch-rhetor from Gaul, forms the backdrop for Gleason's consideration of constructed masculinities in the Second Sophistic. But the cultural logic of \"making men\" (and unmaking them too) infuses oratory going back to Cicero's Rome and beyond him to Demosthenes, Aeschines, and their predecessors in the Athenian tradition.11 It was always necessary to produce and sustain a masculine identity in each performance, for the threat of gender slippage was ever present.12 Paul's place in this sophistic milieu is a matter of debate. Bruce Winter has recently suggested that Paul was probably highly trained in rhetoric, and yet ineffective in public declamation. The ground for this proposal is Paul's claim, in 2 Cor. 11.6, that he is \h6)-n)<; rep \6y

'Um'\u00C2\u00ABfie<^v^y~]mmic the classicpostures of Plato, Xenophon, and others. But this cannot be the entire story unless we suppose that the Roman period is wholly derivative. And this is patently untrue. A more prudent, i f still only partial, explanation for the appearance of the Greek agonistic idiom in Roman guise is to be found in those activities that replaced combat as the definitive occupation of important men. Increasingly, under Roman rale, rhetorical training replaced military exercise and success in declamation superseded glory won in 1 6 The word agon itself can mean not only \"struggle\" or \"competition\" but also \"assembly\" and \"lawsuit\". 1 7 Cf. the 'observation' made by Plato's Socrates: \"the mob of motley appetites and pleasures and pains one would find chiefly in children and women and slaves and in the base rabble of those who are freemen in name.\" (PI. R. 4.431C) 1 8 E.g. X . Dec. 9.19. 42 battle. More importantly for our purposes, this shift in cultural perspee-tive was accompanied b}' an attendant shift in perceptions of the masculine ideal from the warrior to the temperate public man. At least this is the position argued by Halvor Moxnes in a recent article.19 He suggests that when agonistic competition became obsolete, first-century figures like Dio and Plutarch turned away from this model and toward other modes of being masculine. This is a plausible (if unoriginal) reconstruction, but it suffers, in my opinion, from a lack of insight into the emerging masculine ideal of the Roman period. The point is precisely not that the agonistic idiom disappeared. Rather it was suppressed and then reemerged in modified form - a kind of cultural sublimation. It reemerged as the spirit of competition in public rhetorical contests, whether forensic or purely-declamatory. Orators attacked their opponents and defended themselves with gesture, voice, and wit as their only weapons. Observe, for example, the explicit comparison made by Quintilian between oratory and war: \"let the youth whom we are ttaimng devote himself, as far as in M fact that the battles of the forum that await him are not few, let him strive for victor}' in the schools and learn how to strike the vitals of his foe and protect his own.\" To be sure the sort of military example that the Athenians found so pertinent to their own experience became 4ess so in the Roman period, but it still retained a modicum of relevance as the paradigmatic image-of an agonistic idiom that continued to inform the normative definition of masculinity. Perhaps, then, the use of agonistic imagery to describe self-s Halvor Moxnes, \"Conventional Values in the Hellenistic World: Masculinity,\" Conventional Values of the Hellenistic Greeks, ed. Per Bilde, Troels Engberg-Pedersen, Lise Hannestad, and Jan Zahle (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 1997), 263-84. 2 0 Ibid., 266-70. 2 1 Quint. Inst. 5.12.22. Trans. H. E. Butler, volume 2, L C L (London: William HeinemannLtd., Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966). 43 control in the first century and beyond (during the so-called Second Sophistic) is not as surprising as it first appears. At any rate the idiom continued to form that vital link 99 between the virtue known as self-control and constructions of the masculine ideal. 2.1,2 The goal of combat: enslavement, not extirpation Perhaps it i sa needless thing to say at the close of this bloody century, but I shall say it nonetheless: warfare during the classical period was not nearly as destructive as modem warfare has been. This owes much, of course, to me development of military technology, especially weapons of mass destruction; but it also owes something to a transformation of military objectives. The goal of combat in classical Greece was not usually to destroy as many enemy soldiers as possible. Rather, success was achieved when the- opposing army turned baGk. To be sure, battles often resulted in huge numbers of casualties (although not by our standards), but more frequently slavery was visited upon the vanquished. In some of the passages considered above it is already apparent that the agon between reason and passion is a battle for supremacy rather than a fight to the death. Consider, for example, Xenophon's image of the aggressive passions: \"fight for our freedom against ^ This is not to say, however, that there are no differences between the earlier Greek and later Greco-Roman models. Nicole Loraux has argued that the paradigmatic death for a hoplite in Greek epic is through the thrust of a weapon (The Experiences of Tires ias: The Feminine and the Greek Man, trans. Paula Wissing [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995], 98). But femininity is introduced into the masculine body precisely at this point of penetration that brings a glorious death. Loraux-suggests that this indicates some appreciation for the role of the feminine in masculine identity. For Romans, however, wounds won in battle are glorious only when one can later reveal a scar - a testament to bravery but also evidence of the true entirety of the male body (i.e. not the gaping wound, 44 these tyrants [gluttony, lechery, drink,.and ambition]-as persistently- as i f they -were armed men trying to enslave us.\"23 The passions are tyrants and armed men.2 4 A battle must ensue, but they aim only to enslave reason, not to extinguish it. The converse is also true. The bodily urges one feels for food, drink, or-sex cannot be-eradicated-entirely.25 Rather the goal of agonistic self-control is merely to masterthem, to decide when they should be indulged and when they should not. In other words, it is desirable to enslave one's passions, undesirable (and impossible) to slaughter them. This enslavement metaphor, which is frequently coupled with agonistic imagery, continues to hold currency in the Roman period. Cicero, for example, provides this picture: They say that the -fountain-head of all -disorders is intemperance (intemperantiam), which is a revolt from all guidance of the mind and right reason, so completely alien from the control of reason that the cravings of the soul cannot be guided or curbed. Therefore just as temperance allays thecravings (appetitionesf and causes them to -obey right reason, and maintains the well-considered judgments of the mind, so -intemperance its enemy -kindles, confounds and agitates the whole condition of the soul, with the result that from it come distress and fear 97 and all other disorders For Cicero, as for Xenophon and others, the goal is to avoid the shackles of slavery by -establishing the inverse relation - mastery over pleasure. In fact, once controlled, pleasure- can even become an ally. Seneca-makes just this point,and in doing so extends but the restoration of the body's integrity is valorized). See Ibid., 88-90; Walters, \"Invading\". 2 3 X . Oec. 1.22-3. 2 4 For other examples of the passions, or more specifically Eros, as a tyrant, see, e.g., PI. R. 9.573B, 9.573D; Euripides Hippolytus 538. 2 5 Bruce S. Thonn:on,-Ems: X/je Myth of Ancient Greek Sexuality (Boulder, CO: WestviewPress, 1997), 13; see also Foucault, Use of Pleasure, 69 2 6 Foucault, Use of Pleasure, 53-62. 45 the agonistic metaphor: \"if we shall count that the gratifications of the body [corporis grata], unessential as they are, have a place like to that of the auxiliaries and light-armed troops in camp - i f we let them serve, not command - thus and thus only will these things be profitable to the mind.\" 2 8 Nevertheless, although Cicero and Seneca continue to employ images of warfare and enslavement, they, do not exhibit the same sense -of ineluctability that appears in Classical Greek.constructions of desire, Seneca calls the \"gratifications of the body\" ^ inessential, and -Cicero declares that desire is entirely voluntary. In fact, Stoics from Zeno to Aurelius maintained that there -was something unnatural, -or at least -unnecessary, about -desire. Perhaps it could even be extirpated altogether. Epictetus, for example, says: \"Have you not heard over.and over again that you ought to eradicate desire utterly apai but a kind of synthesis of the two, the person in training must take care of both, the better part, the soul, more zealously, as is fitting, but also of the other, i f he shall not be found lacking in any part that constitutes man.\"4 5 Although the traditional emphasis on body in the practice of enkrateia was mitigated somewhat by Stoic preference for internal attitudes, it still played a subordinate role in philosophical constructions of self-control. Meanwhile, a different and more compelling link between self-control and the masculine body was emerging in the medical literature of this period. Most physicians during the early centuries of the Common Era maintained that sexual continence (or at 4 3 E.g. Petr. Sat. 132.12-13; Mart. 1.58; 7.91. For discussion see Amy Richlin, Garden of Priapus, 115-19. 4 4 Cic. Tusc. 4.76; cf. ibid. 4.65. 4 5 Musonius Rufus, fr. 6. A l l translations of Musonius are taken from Cora B. Lutz, \"Musonius Rufus: The Roman Socrates,\" YCS10 (1947): 3-147, fragment ?. Cf. Diogenes Laertius Lives of Eminent Philosophers 6.70. 51 least moderation) was healthy.46 Soranus, a doctor of the early second century, endorsed celibacy for both women and men .as, the surest .way to protect against th\u00C2\u00A7 dangers presented to one's constitution by sexual intercourse.47 But the biology of sex and abstention found its most elaborate expression in the works of Galen. He places great emphasis on the benefits of retaining one's semen though sexual continence. Because it contains, vital pneuma, semen is. an important source of the body's, warmth, strength, vigor, and courage. In short, the presence of semen in the body produces a masculine appearance and character.48 During frequent sexual activity, this, substance (and the vital pneuma with it), is exhausted: \"So it is not at all surprising that those who are less moderate sexually turn out to be weaker, since the whole body loses the purest part of both substances.\"49 The continent man5 on the other hand:, is warmer, stronger, and more courageous - that is, more masculine - owing to the higher concentration of vital pneuma in his system. Once again a connection has been established between the masculine body and the biological processes of self-control. And, as with the Platonic model, the body itself is the locus of intense scrutiny, this time as the object of a health regimen. Traditional constructions of enkrateia placed the subject's body squarely in the foreground (either as the site of physical conflict, or as the object of a health regimen), and guaranteed the subject's masculinity (through its agonistic character or through the retention of semen). Paul's practice of self-control, therefore, vouched for the masculine 4 6 See especially Foucault, Care of the Self 4 7 Sor. Gyn. 1.7. Cf. also Sen. Vit. Beat. 13.5: voluptas nocet nimia. Galen De Semine 1.16.2,16-18. This is proved, Galen says, by the fact that males whose testicles have been excised are effeminate. 4 9 Ibid. 1.16.31. Galen On Semen, Edition, Translation and Commentary by Phillip De Lacy (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1992). Cf. Sen. Vit. Beat, 13.4: \"he who follows pleasure (yoluptatem) is seen to be weakly (enervis), broken (fractus), losing his 52 authority o f his person. B y participating in the discourse o f enkrateia, he could eloquently rehabilitate his bodily presence without uttering a word. But what o f the few words he did utter about sexual continence? D o they affirm the traditional notions o f self-control? Or can we observe an encratic discourse that is peculiarly Pauline? This is what I shall tentatively proffer in this chapter: a Pauline construction of self-control that ostensibly participates in traditional, masculinizing norms but diverges in ways that are significant for his particular situation at Corinth. 2.2 Paul's Anti-askesis 2.2.1 Corinthians 7.1-2 Chapter 7 o f 1 Corinthians begins with an intriguing introduction to the topic o f sexual continence: Hepi M on> eypa^'are, KO^.OV avQpt'imtji jvveuKoq \m\ a T r r e o & w . (\"Concerning what you wrote, it is a good thing for a man not to have sex with [lit. touch] a woman.\") 5 0 H o w sweet it would be to hold in our hands the document to which Paul alludes, evidently a letter drafted by some members o f the Corinthian community and sent to Paul with the hope o f procuring his response. But, like listening to one end of a telephone conversation, we are reduced to speculative reconstruction of the actual dialogue. Even so, there are a few things to be said about the nature o f their exchange based on Paul 's remarks. First o f a l l , it is clear that the issue o f sexual renunciation was one of the topics o f the Corinthian letter. Paul's response is clearly addressed to some specific concerns o f that community. Secondly, as we w i l l discover, the position Paul manhood (degenerans viro)\"; Epict. Diss. 2.10.17; Aretaeus On the Causes and Signs of Chronic Diseases 2.5 (cited in Foucault, Use of Pleasure, 15). 53 takes on celibacy seems designed to mitigate Corinthian zeal for this practice. We can deduce, thm, with some confidence that a significant group of Corinthian Christians would have agreed with the statement, \"it is a good thing for a man not to have sex with a woman.\" In fact, most modern commentators propose that this is a Corinthian slogan cited by Paul. 5 1 If this is the case, then we do indeed possess a portion of that letter to which Paul is responding. But far too much has been made of the difference this makes S9 for our assessment of Paul's position: Whether the slogan is his or someone else's he is clearly not in disagreement with it and only wishes to limit its application under certain circumstances. These \"circumstances\" are made clear in verse 2: &d- de ra$ \u00E2\u0080\u00A2nopvelaq eKaaroq T T ? V -iauroQ juvaiKa e%eTO) Kai-eKOOTT) rov tdiov m/Bpa ex^tio. (\"But because of [cases of] sexual immorality, each man should have intercourse with [or remain married to] his own wife and each woman should have intercourse with her own husband.\") The adversative M indicates that this advice qualifies the valorization of celibacy expressed in verse 1, but it is not a call for everyone in the community to get married (as some have taken it). 5 3 The English translations of Pauline texts are mine unless otherwise noted. 5 1 E.g. Barrett, First Epistle, 154; O. Larry Yarbrough, Not Like the Gentiles: Marriage Rules in the Letters of Paul (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1985), 93-4; Gordon D. Fee, The First Epistle to the Corinthians, NICNT (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1987), 274-277; for a slightly modified view, see Robertson and Plummer, First Epistle, 132. For the position that the phrase is Pauline, see F. W. Grosheide, Commentary on the First Epistle to the Corinthians, NICNT (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1953), 154-55; Hans Conzelmann, 1 Corinthians, Hermeneia, tr. James W. Leitch (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975), 115. 5 2 E.g. William E. Phipps (\"Paul's Attitude,\" 130) who, based on the position that this is a Corinthian slogan, arrives at the conclusion that Paul shared the \"Hebraic view of the goodness of sexuality.\" 3 E.g. Robertson and Plummer, First Epistle, 133. They place a good deal of emphasis on the appearance of avSpainq) (\"man\") rather than avBpi (\"husband\") in verselb. They argue that this indicates that Paul wants everyone in the community to get married. But i f verse lb is a statement of the Corinthian position, then it is Corinthians who are 54 verb \u00E2\u0082\u00AC%etv is a common euphemism for sex,54 so Paul's concern is with the sexual practices of those who are already married. This indicates that some married couples in Corinth were practicing celibacy in accordance with the rule, \"it is a good thing for a man not to have sex with a woman\". Paul objects to this practice on account of rac rcapveiaq. The plural recommends an interpretation such as \"actual cases of immorality\" rather than simply \"the possibility of immorality\".55 Thus, Paul seems to be saying: \"Because of some actual cases of immorality, all husbands and wives should maintain sexual relations with each other.\" Some commentators have suggested that, in light of the discussion immediately preceding chapter 7 (6.15-20), ra$ n&pveias refers to a situation in which married men are turning to prostitutes because of a commitment to celibacy within their marriages.56 This is a plausible reconstruction, but also highly speculative. The most we can say with certainty is that Paul opposed the practice of conjugal celibacy (i.e. spiritual marriage) by emphasizing the sexual obligation owed to one's spouse, a principle that he develops at length in verses 3-5. 2.2.2 I Corinthians 7.5 Verse 5 is extremely important for our investigation into the peculiar development of Paul's encratic discourse. Here is the text in full: pjq aTmorepeTre \u00C2\u00ABAAV Be ea-r^Kev h TJ} Kapdip, avrov idpatoc). Because current translations treat them as though they are in a paratactic construction (which substantially alters the sense), I have here offered my own translation. 66 the ascetic, that is, the one who practices virtue through bodily control. And yet, a closer examination of the context will reveal the near irrelevance of this passage for our present purposes. First of all, the occurrence of kyKpareveotiai in verse 25 is not a reference to sexual self-mastery. Secondly, and perhaps even more decisively, it does not describe Paul's relation to his body at all. As Victor Pfitzner has pointed out, we should not understand these verses to be a description of the Apostle's ascetic mortification. Rather Paul employs a conventional image - the athlete who practices self-control - for the sake of elucidating his commitment to the gospel.81 2.2.7 1 Thessalonians 4.3-5 Although the topic of enkrateia (or lack of it) dominates parts of the Pauline corpus,82 there are very few passages outside of 1 Corinthians 7 that deal explicitly with sexual continence. I introduced one of these, 1 Thess. 4.4, into my discussion of marital akrasia as though it were more or less straightforward. It is not. Here is the full text of verses 3-5: Touro yap kariv SkXtjiva rod Beou, 6 ayiaayMg ufjuav, 6jne%eoQ(n vfj^dg and T % \u00E2\u0080\u00A2nopve'iag, eiBkvai SKOOTOV iipuav ro eauroO a-Kevog Kraotiai kv ayiaoy^ Kai rifi,1}), /MJ kv izadei km%v[hiaq Kadamp KOA ra edvy ra /XTJ eiBora rbv 6e6v. (\"This is the will of God, your sanctification, that you abstain from fornication, that each of you know to take a wife for himself in holiness and honor, not in passionate lust like the gentiles who do not know God\") The sense is by no means clear, particularly on account of the expression a-Keuog KrcUrdai (4), 8 0 Yarbrough, Gentiles, 103, 107. SI Victor C. Pfitzner, Paul and the Agon Motif: Traditional Athletic Imagery in the Pauline Literature (Leiden, 1967), 91-93. Cf. Grundmann, \"kyKpareta\" 342. See Stowers, Rereading, 42-82. 67 which, rendered literally, is \"to take a vessel\". Some have argued that a-KeOog means \"body\".8 3 And there is support for this reading in at least one other New Testament text (2 Cor. 4.7). A variation on \"body\", not attested elsewhere in the New Testament, but possible in the context of 1 Thess. 4.4, is \"penis.\"84 And a third possible translation, attested both in the New Testament and in other contemporary literature, is \"woman, wife\". 8 5 Thus Paul might be saying, \"this is the will of God... that each one of you know how to control your own body [or penis] in holiness and honor, not with lustful passion, like the Gentiles who do not know God\" (NRSV). Or he might be saying, \"this is the will of God... that each one of you take a wife for himself in consecration and honor, not with lustful passion, like the Gentiles who do not know God.\" 8 6 From a grammatical and lexicographical standpoint there is really very little to choose between these readings.87 If we accept \"body\" or \"penis\", these verses represent a position appreciably different from the one Paul adopts in 1 Cor. Here there is an explicit emphasis not only on ascetic control, but also on the body (or even the penis) as the site of self-mastery. In the conclusion to this chapter I shall argue that it is precisely the anti-ascetic impulse and the substitution of spirit for body that define Paul's encratic 8 J E.g., J. Whitton, \" A Neglected Meaning for XKevoc in 1 Thessalonians 4.4,\" NTS 28 (1982): 142-3. 8 4 LSJ , 1607; A G D , 754. 8 5 E.g., 1 Pet. 3.7; see A G D , 754. 8 6 A G D , 455, 754. 8 7 See discussion in Yarbrough, Gentiles, 65-87. Yarbrough, however, mistakenly sees a parallel between these verses and 1 Cor. 7.2. For a critique of Yarbrough's work, and the presentation of a bold new thesis, see Jouette M . Bassler, \"SKCOO^: A Modest Proposal for Illuminating Paul's Use of Metaphor in 1 Thessalonians 4:4,\" The Social World of the First Christians: Essays in Honor of Wayne A. Meeks, ed. L. Michael White and O. Larry Yarbrough (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1995), 53-66. She suggests that 1 Cor. 7.36-38 provides a closer parallel, and Paul may be making reference in both passages to spiritual marriage. 68 discourse. For this reason I prefer the second proposed translation of 1 Thess. 4.4 : \"this is the will of God...that each one of you take a wife for himself in consecration and honor, not with lustful passion, like the Gentiles who do not know God.\" This, then, is the installment of some constraint on the expression of desire between men and women.8 9 There is no reason to follow Dale Martin's suggestion that Paul means for married couples to eliminate desire completely from their sexual relations.90 2.2.8 Galatians 5.16-25 This passage offers an interesting comparison to the pneumaticization of self-control in 1 Corinthians 7. Paul begins: Live by the Spirit, I say, and do not gratify the desires of the flesh. For what the flesh desires is opposed to the Spirit, and what the Spirit desires is opposed to the flesh; for these are opposed to each other, to prevent you from doing what you want (5.16-17). Verses 16-17a are reminiscent of the conventional agon, but with an important difference: Spirit is substituted for reason. Furthermore, Spirit is not a component of the human soul; it is rather an external power, the Spirit of God. 9 1 Some We could, however, account for the differences between 1 Thess. and 1 Cor. by appealing to the different rhetorical purposes of each. See below, for example, the discussion of Gal. 5.16-26 and its relation to 1 Cor. 7. OA Bassler (iKevog, 57-8) maintains that this reading conflicts with 1 Cor. 7.8-9, where Paul depicts marriage as a haven for those whose sexual desire is out of control. I have been trying to make the case, however, that \"those who lack self-control\" in 1 Cor. 7 are not sex maniacs, but merely people who experience a natural physical urge for intercourse. There is no reason why these people cannot \"take a wife in consecration and honor.\" Just because they experience desire, and seek to satisfy it in the marriage bed, does not mean that they should be unrestrained. 9 0 Martin, \"Paul Without Passion\". 9 1 J. B. Lightfoot, The Epistle of St. Paul to the Galatians (London: MacMillan and Co., 1884), 210; Ernest De Witt Burton, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians, ICC (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1921), 297; Hans Dieter Betz, Galatians, 69 suggest that flesh, in this case, is also an external force in conflict with Spirit, making this passage an obvious analogue to Romans 7.15-24. Hans Dieter Betz, for example, says of Gal. 5.17: \"the human body is a battlefield on which the powers of the flesh and the Spirit fight against each other.\" This seems to express a similar anthropology to that found in Rom. 7.15-24 where Sin (apuLpria) is a power that resides in the person and forces her to do what she does not want. At any rate, the essential point expressed in both passages is that human will (i.e. reason) is not an active participant in the struggle for control.9 3 As Gal. 5.16 relates, control over \"desires of the flesh\" comes from walking in the Spirit. The fundamental passivity of the self-controlled subject is reaffirmed in verses 22-23 where enkrateia is listed as a \"fruit of the Spirit\" (i.e. something you receive) in obvious contrast with the \"works of the flesh\" (i.e. something you do), 9 4 and again in verse 25 where Paul writes: If the Spirit is the source of our life, let the Spirit also direct our course. The second outstanding feature of Paul's encratic discourse in 1 Cor. 7 is also present in Galatians 5, namely the idealization of complete lack of sexual desire. In verse 17b, it is already apparent that Paul has moved away from the valorization of agonism, which, Hermeneia (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1979), 279-280; Gerhard Ebeling The Truth of the Gospel: an Exposition of Galatians, trans. David Green (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985), 255; Ronald Y. K. Fung, The Epistle to the Galatians, NICNT (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1988), 249; Frank J. Matera, Galatians, SPS (Collegeville, M N : The Liturgical Press, 1992), 199, 206; James D. G. Dunn, The Epistle to the Galatians, BNTC (Peabody, M A : Hendrickson Publishers, 1993), 298. 9 2 Betz, Galatians, 280-81. See also, F. F. Bruce, The Epistle to the Galatians, NIGTC (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1982), 243. 9 3 \"Avant d'etre a Lui, l'homme est le theatre d'une lutte acharnee entre la chair, representant les instincts de jouissance et l'egoisme de l'homme, domine par Taction du peche depuis la chute d'Adam, et d'autre part la simple raison humaine, a laquelle la Loi ne donne aucun secours efficace. Par l'union a Jesus tout change. Le chretien est conduit par son Esprit\" (Le P. M.-J. Lagrange, Saint Paul Epitre aux Galates [Paris: Librairie Lecoffre, 1950], 146). 70 according to most classical models, is sine qua non for acquiring self-control. He says that the very struggle between flesh and Spirit prevents a person from exercising her will. The Spirit may suppress actions that stem from desire, but the same desire is a hindrance to walking in the Spirit. Each keeps the other in check. Paul seems to suggest that the agon itself is counterproductive, a distraction.95 The resolution to this quandary is not, as we might expect, a hierarchical relationship in which Spirit governs flesh; instead it is complete eradication of flesh, which then allows one to walk in the Spirit unopposed. The striking image for this idea appears in verse 24: Those who are of Christ have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires96 Rather than mastering the body and its desires, one should aim to eliminate them altogether.97 This passage tends to corroborate Fung, Epistle, 262; Matera, Galatians, 210. 9 5 There is considerable debate over this verse. Most of the disagreement stems from the ambiguity in Paul's phrase, to prevent you from doing what you want. There are four possibilities: a) Spirit prevents desires of flesh, b) flesh prevents desires of Spirit, c) Spirit and flesh mutually frustrate each other, and d) the absolute opposition between Spirit and flesh prevents anyone from remaining neutral (which is what they want to do). I have adopted the third. The first two are contrary to the reciprocity that characterizes the rest of the verse. The fourth, advocated by Fung {Epistle, 251) and Matera (Galatians, 207), is criticized by Dunn (Epistle, 299) for being \"too remote from the sense of the Greek.\" 9 6 On the unusualness of this image, see Dunn, Epistle, 314. 9 7 Paul's use of the aorist suggests that this act has already been accomplished in those who are \"of Christ Jesus\". Such a perspective seems to be at odds with 1 Cor. 7 where enkrateia is only for the gifted few. There are several ways to reconcile the two passages. We might follow Lightfoot's suggestion that the aorist denotes \"that the change is complete and decisive, without reference to any distinct point of time\" (Galatians, 213). On the other hand, we might understand the aorist as a reference to either Christ's death or the believer's baptism as that time in the past when a decisive victory was won over the flesh. Between that point and the eschaton, there may be some residual effects of fleshly existence, but the ultimate eradication of desire is inevitable. To my mind, the second option is preferable, but it still falls considerably short of a declaration that enkrateia is a charisma, available to some and not others. In the end, these two passages cannot be reconciled on this point. They say slightly different things that are probably best accounted for by pointing to the different situations at Corinth and Galatia. In Corinth, Paul wants to curb the zeal for asceticism that apparently existed in segments of the congregation. In the Galatian churches, on the other hand, Paul has no such concern and can afford to advocate enkrateia for all who would walk in the Spirit. 71 the two primary features of Paul's encratic discourse from 1 Cor. 7: that enkrateia comes from above rather than within, and it consists of eliminating rather than merely modulating desire. 2.3 Conclusion I contend that Paul's mere \"practice\" of enkrateia is itself a masculinizing commentary. Its close association with philosophical and medical paradigms of manliness makes it a crucial and often contested element of a man's identity. The very fact, then, of Paul's enkrateia, for which he clearly had a reputation in Corinth, challenges the image of effeminacy discussed in the previous chapter. It contributes to the rehabilitation of Paul's manhood. This form of rehabilitation is especially germane to his situation i f the construction of a \"weak physical presence\" was governed in part by stereotypes of the male Jew. Of course, one of the effeminate traits attributed to male Jews was a lack of sexual control. Paul's reputation for enkrateia, therefore, does not merely speak to his manliness in a general sense; it breaks an important link in the semiotics of his feminization. In the course of this chapter, however, two fundamental incongruities have emerged between Paul's encratic discourse and traditional models. The first and most striking is his substitution of charisma for askesis. In every other construction of self-control, from the fifth century B C E to the second century CE, the onus is on the individual to struggle against desire. For some philosophical schools, like the Cynics, self-sufficiency was This discrepancy should not overshadow the fundamental similarities between these two passages. 72 highly valued. But one hardly requires this sort of commitment to eschew the notion that enkrateia might be granted or refused by something external to oneself. Paul's position, as far as I can determine, is unique.98 To be sure, there are subsequent Christian writers who approximate Paul's anti-askesis, but they are writing from a tradition that has already been heavily influenced by the Apostle. Consider, for example, The First Epistle of Clement to the Corinthians: \"He who is continent must not put on airs. He must recognize that his self-control is a gift from another.\"99 And Clement of Alexandria writes: \"The human ideal of continence, I mean that which is set forth by Greek philosophers, teaches that one should fight desire and not be subservient to it so as to bring it to practical effect. But our ideal is not to experience desire at all. Our aim is not that while a man feels desire he should get the better of it, but that he should be continent even respecting desire itself. This chastity cannot be attained in any other way except by God's grace.\"100 He does not say that self-control is a gift exactly, but it comes from divine grace rather than human practice. Clement's words in the previous paragraph also reflect the second outstanding feature of Paul's encratic discourse: the apparent eradication of sexual desire. As with Paul's charismatic construction of enkrateia, this idea provides a sharp contrast with the classical models. Almost everyone thought that desire was an intrinsic component of human existence. At most one might prevent it from raging out of control. It is true that the Stoic belief that a wise person is free from passion seems to be much closer to the Pauline model. But, as we have seen, apatheia is not complete insensitivity; it is rather With the possible exception of Letter ofAristeas 290. 99 First Epistle of Clement 38. Trans. Cyril C. Richardson (London: S C M Press Ltd., 1953). Cf. Ibid. 35, 58. 73 freedom from mental disturbance. For the Stoics, passion (TTO&J) is not equivalent to urge or desire. It is a mental state, a bad judgement, and can therefore be eradicated through reason. Could this be what Paul means mutatis mutandis101 when he tells the Galatians that they have crucified the flesh with its passions (Txafyrpamv) and desires? After all, he uses the same vocabulary. But the crucial association with flesh (o-apE) indicates that Paul categorizes passions and desires as a part of physical existence. Furthermore, the appearance of the verb \u00E2\u0080\u00A2mpovoQai in 1 Cor. 7.9 suggests that dysfunction stemming from the physical urge (and not bad judgement) is at stake. The individual gifted with self-control is freed not just from the mental disturbance but from the physical urge itself. It is not that Paul and others like him are unperturbed by an inclination for sexual intercourse; they do not experience an inclination for sexual intercourse in the first place. His true ideal is the disruption or eradication - the crucifixion - of natural desire. It is anorexia.103 What difference do these modifications of the classical models make? How do they alter the initial illocutionary force of Paul's sexual renunciation? For theologians, the obvious answer will resemble Victor Pfitzner's conclusion about the agonistic motif in Paul: \"Not the honour and glory of the 'spiritual athlete', but the honour of God who has set the contest, is that which is sought in the good contest of faith for the faith.\" 1 0 4 With respect to enkrateia, then, Paul removes the emphasis from struggle and personal victory, 1 0 0 Clement of Alexandria Stromateis 3.7.57. Trans. John Ernest Leonard Oulton and Henry Chadwick (London: S C M Press Ltd., 1954). 1 0 1 By this I simply mean substituting Spirit for reason. 1 0 2 As a further warning against equating Paul's nullification of passions and desires with Stoic apatheia, I think it extremely doubtful that Paul would have assimilated such a technical and idiosyncratic philosophical position as the Stoic distinction between urge and passion. An-orexia is literally the negation of desire. 74 and places it on God's grace to grant it as a gift. 1 0 5 There is much to commend this reading. But what i f we consider it against the backdrop of Paul's self-presentation in Corinth? How do his anti-ascetic and anorexic tendencies alter Paul's image? The first thing to note is that an anti-ascetic construction of enkrateia undermines forms of renunciation that were being practiced by members of the Corinthian community. The first to be attacked on the basis of Paul's anti-askesis are married couples who have suspended sexual relations. Because they are not gifted they should resume regular conjugal sex. But even widows and those who are not married should only continue in their present state i f they have been gifted with lack of desire. Paul implies that there are some in this group who are indeed akrates despite the fact that they are practicing celibacy: circumstances that can only lead to dysfunction. They should marry, for it is better to get married and have sex than to go on burning. Why does Paul seek to limit the practice of celibacy in this manner? Ostensibly it is because of rag \u00E2\u0080\u00A2nopveiag (1 Cor. 7.2), and it is certainly not due to Paul's deep appreciation for marriage. But there may be another reason that lurks just beneath the surface. Antoinette Clark Wire has argued convincingly that much of Paul's correspondence with the Corinthians concerns a group of women prophets who were using celibacy to augment their authority.106 Thus, by calling into question the ascetic practices of this group (probably made up of wives who had separated from their husbands [verses 1-7] and unmarried widows [verses 8-9]), Paul challenges the legitimacy of their leadership. Paul's absolute 1 U 4 Pfitzner, Agon Motif, 185. 1 0 5 Grundmann, \"ev eauroO \u00E2\u0080\u00A2nadtov]; i f desire (prevails), he is described in the opposite way and is said to be incontinent [aKpa-nfc]. But when a person is led by reason alone to the experience of pleasant things, such a person is called temperate [o-ojfowv], for he has made his aim in choosing them not the enjoyment but the benefit; and in the same way, the man who is led by desire alone is self-indulgent [aKoXaoroc.], his reason following his desire like a servant.7 However, the influence of this model was not absolute. In fact, examples of the old lexical imprecision are quite frequent in the Roman Period. Cicero certainly 3 Euripides: ibid., 20, 33, 68-84; Antiphon: ibid., 86, 88-90; Xenophon: ibid., 123-132; Plato: ibid., 158,160, 165. 4 PI. Symposium 196C; cf. idem Gorgias 491D, idem R. 430E. 5 North, Sophrosyne, 158; Foucault, Use of Pleasure, 63-64. 6 Arist . EN 7. Gal. De Placitis Hippocratis etPlatonis 4.2.39-42. A l l translations of this treatise are from Galen On the Doctrines of Hippocrates and Plato, Edition, Translation and Commentary by Phillip de Lacy, First Part (Books I-V), Third Edition (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1984). Cf. Epict. Diss. 3.1.18. 80 recognized the polyvalence of sophrosyne: \"[Greeks] apply the term a-oi^poavvrig to the virtue which I usually call, sometimes temperance (temperantiam), sometimes self-control (moderationem), and occasionally also discretion (modestiam).\"8 Dio Chrysostom makes the familiar link between sophrosyne and enkrateia in his phrase g apecrj) rq> Kvpitp- 6 Be jap.rr]oug p*epip,i>g. ra rod KOOJWV, rroyg apiay rjj yvvatKt, Kai pepJpioTat. Kai 19 yvvr) 15 ayapjoq Kai ij napdevog puepip^va ra rod Kupiov, )'va ayia Kai rip a-iapMri Kai r

opov Xeyco, ov% )'va $ph%ov upJiv emjSaXu) aXXa npog ro evoxqpbov Kai eunapehpov rep Kupiq) ampicrnaoroig. (\"I want you to be free from anxiety. The unmarried man cares for the affairs of the Lord, how to please the Lord; the married man cares for the things of the world, how to please his wife, and he is divided. Likewise, the unmarried woman and the virgin care for the affairs of the Lord, so that she might be holy in both body and spirit; the married woman cares for the affairs of the world, how to please her husband. I say 8 5 David L. Balch, \"1 Cor 7:32-35 and Stoic Debates about Marriage, Anxiety, and Distraction,\" JBL 102/3 (1983): 435-6. 8 6 E.g. Robertson and Plummer, First Epistle, 158; James Moffatt, The First Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians (London: Hodder and Stoughton Limited, 1938), 95; Raymond F. Collins, First Corinthians, SPS, Volume 7 (Collegeville, M N : The Liturgical Press, 1999), 291. 104 this for your own advantage, not to place restrictions on you but to promote good order and devotion to the Lord without hindrance.\") These four verses have figured prominently in attempts to elucidate possible connections between 1 Cor. 7 and Cynic-Stoic marriage debates. One of the first to broach this subject in the English-speaking world was David Balch in his influential 1983 article in the Journal of Biblical Literature^1 Following the German scholar, Johannes Weiss, Balch understands amepurnao-TOig to be a technical word found in the marriage debates of late Stoicism. Its appearance in 1 Cor. 7.35, therefore, and precisely in the context of a discussion of marriage, signals to Balch that Paul is drawing on a traditional Stoic topos. According to Stobaeus, the ancient anthologist who excerpted some of the participants in this debate, there were three stances on marriage, all aimed to avoid distraction: it is good (i.e. the wife can keep house allowing her husband to pursue the contemplative life), it is bad (i.e. distracting in itself), and it is good for some and bad for others.89 Balch, in employing this schema to locate Paul's position relative to several Stoic philosophers, arrives at this conclusion: In partial summary, Antipater, Epictetus, Hierocles and Paul agree that one should be \"undistracted\" from one's primary duty or call. Musonius, frag. 13A, Epictetus, Dis. 3.22, and Hierocles, in Stobaeus 4.22.22, agree (against Antipater) that marriage is helpful for some but not advantageous (would be distracting) for others. Like these Roman Stoics, when Paul advises the Corinthians about marriage, he writes for their \"advantage\" [av\i4>opov, 1 Cor 7:35). Like these three Roman Stoics, in 1 Cor 7:32-35 Paul chooses Stobaeus's third option; he advises the Corinthians that marriage is helpful for some, but not advantageous for others.90 8 7 David L. Balch, \"1 Cor 7:32-35 and Stoic Debates about Marriage, Anxiety, and Distract ion,\" /^ 102/3 (1983)429-39. 8 8 Ibid, 431. 89 As Deming notes (Paul on Marriage, 7), Stobaeus has four other categories, but the ones mentioned by Balch get at the heart of the debate. 9 0 Balch, \"Stoic Debates\", 434, Vincent Wimbush, who follows Balch closely, oddly suggests that Epictetus belongs in the second category (Worldly Ascetic, 63). But I 105 To this point I am in complete agreement. But Balch goes on to adopt C. K. Barrett's proposal that ttepiu,vaco (\"to be anxious\") as used by Paul in verses 32-34 is \"uniformly negative\". In other words, anxiety for the things of the Lord is not compared favorably with anxiety for the things of the world; both are undesirable.91 If this is indeed the sense, then Paul is here reiterating his claim (first made in verses 7-9) that some are better off being married and others are better off being single. As Balch writes: '\"since every person has his own special gift from God' (1 Cor 7:7), Paul observes that celibacy makes some men and women anxious and distracted while marriage makes others anxious and distracted.\"92 The reading proposed by Barrett and Balch is problematic on at least two fronts. First of ail, there is the position of these verses in the chapter. If Paul were arguing here against ascetic tendencies, these verses would logically appear alongside the arguments contained in 1-9, where this issue is addressed. As it is, they occur in the middle of a long stretch of verses in which Paul argues that, while marriage is permissible, singleness is better. The second difficulty with Balch's reading is this: although Paul adds a gloss explaining how the married person is distracted from service to God, he does not do the same for the single person. And, i f anything, it is the latter scenario that needs to be explained. These deficiencies far outweigh the solitary support offered by Balch for his reading: an undocumented claim that (jbepipvau) is always negative for the Stoa. For, even demonstrated in my discussion of Epictetus that he clearly assumes marriage to be a good thing for most of the population while singleness is for a select few. 9 1 Barrett, First Epistle, 178-82 9 2 Balch, \"Stoic Debates,\" 435. 106 i f this claim is true, he is still begging the question, surely, by assuming that Paul's use of the word is typically Stoic. 9 3 Vincent Wimbush has produced a very different reading of these verses. Unlike Balch and Barrett, who suggest that Paul is countering ascetic tendencies in Corinth, Wimbush proposes that Paul is encouraging a kind of \"ascetic\" detachment for married people.94 Whatever the external conditions of one's life, whether one is married or single, undistracted devotion to \"the things of God\" should be sought. These verses are an elaboration, therefore, of Paul's advice in 29-31, and particularly his exhortation to those who have wives to live as though not having wives. Living as though not having a wife means cultivating spiritual withdrawal (innerworldly asceticism), and it does not depend upon one's external relation to the world. Wimbush concludes his reinterpretation of these verses by claiming that the expression fiepifivgL ra rod Kvpiov, which is the inner attitude that both married and unmarried should strive for, is equivalent to Stoic a-nadeia95 \"It is assumed by Paul that the supreme commitment must be to the Lord (v. 35). So what is required is inner detachment (apatheia), not physical withdrawal.... What Paul recommends is a relativizing of all things in the world.\" 9 6 The primary difficulty with this interpretation has been clearly identified by Wil l Deming: [I]t depends on equating the notion of living a life free from distraction, which Paul invokes in 7.32-5 and which some Stoics invoke in their discussions of marriage, with a Stoic ideal of apatheia. Yet these are not analogous concepts. The former has to do with the proper management of one's outward routine, the result of which is a measure of freedom from civic, social, and economic obligations, and access to leisure time. The 9 3 Cf. Wimbush, Worldly Ascetic, 51-2, 64; Yarbrough, Gentiles, 104. 9 4 Wimbush, Worldly Ascetic, 49-54. 9 5 Ibid. 56-71. 9 6 Ibid., 70. 107 latter, by contrast, concerns release from mental and emotional attachment to things and people, resulting in an inner freedom of the soul. For this reason, too, the notion of apatheia plays no part in the Stoics' discussion of marriage.97 The attempts made by Balch and Wimbush to identify Stoic themes in verses 32-35 are hardly satisfactory. Much more compelling is Deming's careful analysis of these verses in the context of Stoic and Cynic marriage debates. His reading of 1 Cor. 7 is set up by a comprehensive summary of Cynic, Stoic, and hybrid positions on marriage.98 For my present purposes, the most important thing about Deming's summary is his recognition of the role played in these debates by cosmopolitan theory.99 He correctly views the contrasting perspectives on the value of marriage as being representative of a larger disagreement over the relationship between the cosmopolis and contemporary social-political norms. Stoics believed that marriage (which entails procreation as well as domestic, economic, and political responsibilities) was consistent with the duties of a world-citizen; Cynics believed that they were in conflict. In his reading of 1 Cor. 7.32-35, however, Deming does not develop the comparison between Paul's logic and Stoic-Cynic cosmopolitanism.100 He concentrates instead, and with justification, on the issue of distraction. He notes that Paul's position in these verses is identical to the Cynic claim that marriage is distracting. They represent, therefore, a defense of the unmarried life. This is a welcome corrective to the problematic readings of Balch and Wimbush, but it leaves so much unexplored. In what follows I shall extend his comparison of Paul and the Cynics to include the Cynic-influenced cosmopolitanism of Epictetus. Deming, Paul on Marriage, 10. 9 8 Ibid., 50-107. 9 9 Ibid., 54-61. 108 Any interpretation of verses 32-35 must account for the relationships between cbfjuepifivovg, u^ptfivgi, and \i\u00C2\u00A3\t\u00C2\u00A3pujro,i. Paul begins by saying, \"I want you to be without anxiety.\" There is little doubt that aiu-pfavous (\"without anxiety\") here is a positive descriptor - it is, at any rate, what Paul wishes for the Corinthians. The difficulties occur in the subsequent sentence when Paul says that \"the unmarried man iu-pi\wq. the things of the Lord (how he might please the Lord), but [or and] the married man [i*piu,vg, the things of the cosmos (how he might please his wife).\" It has been commonplace to understand the first occurrence of u\u00C2\u00A3piu.v\u00C2\u00A7, as a positive word and the second as a negative word. 1 0 1 To be anxious for the things of the Lord is a good thing; to be anxious about the things of the cosmos is a bad thing. On this reading, the expressed desire that the Corinthians be without anxiety (atieplfivovg) refers only to the anxieties of marriage and not to the anxieties of singleness. But this seems irredeemably arbitrary. I have already noted how C. K. Barrett and David Balch resolve the problem. They make both (or, including verse 34, all four) occurrences of u^pi^vq, negative.102 It is bad to be anxious for the Lord, and it is bad to be anxious for the cosmos. I have already registered my dissatisfaction with this solution. A much better reading is offered by Gordon Fee, who suggests that icepipvqL is the same in all occurrences, but positive rather than negative.103 He wants to translate the word with \"cares for\" rather than \"is anxious about.\" On this view, Paul is not elaborating on his wish for the Corinthians to be without anxiety. Rather, he is indulging in a little paronomasia: \"I want you to be 1 0 0 Ibid., 197-205. 1 0 1 E.g., Robertson and Plummer, First Epistle, 157; Moffatt, First Epistle, 94-5; Conzelmann, / Corinthians, 134. 1 0 2 Barrett, First Epistle, 178-82; Balch, \"Stoic Debates\". See also, Jean Hering, The First Epistle of Saint Paul to the Corinthians, Translated from the Second French Edition by A. W. Heathcote and P. J. Allcock (London: The Epworth Press, 1962), 62. 109 without anxiety (aiiepip,vovc). The unmarried man cares for (fiepiu,vg,) the things of the Lord... the married man cares for (p*pip,vg,) the things of the cosmos.\"1 0 4 If this is correct, then verse 32a is not as closely connected to 32b-35 as most have thought. In fact, I propose that 32a concludes the previous section (on detachment from one's activities)1 0 5 and 32b begins the new section (on the relative merits of marriage and singleness). Paul's punning, then, provides a clever bridge from one topic to another. The advantage of Fee's translation for p*piu.vg, is that it clearly identifies the topic of verses 32b-35 as the management of external responsibilities. Wil l Deming's work has shown that ancient marriage debates were always about the externals - the demands on one's time and energy - and not about inner turmoil or anxiety. The division between p^epifivg, ra rod Kvplou and iiepiu-vg, ra rod Koo-pjou, therefore, is the delineation of two sets of responsibilities. Unmarried men and women are responsible for managing the affairs of the Lord; their goal is to please God. Married men and women, however, are responsible for managing the affairs of the household.106 Epictetus, who makes a similar division, goes into more detail about what the latter existence involves: \".. .To make a long story short, he must get a kettle to heat water for the baby, for washing it in a bath-tub; wool for his wife when she has had a child, oil, a cot, a cup (the vessels get more and more W i Fee, First Epistle, 344-5. Cf. Hering, First Epistle, 60. 1 0 4 This reading is strengthened by the fact that there is already an unmistakable pun in the pericope (usptp,vg. and pxpApiarai). 1 0 5 32a makes excellent sense when attached to the preceding. After exhorting those who have a wife to live as though not having a wife, those who mourn to live as though not mourning, etc., Paul says, \"(31b) for the form of this world is passing away, (32a) and I want you to be free from anxiety.\" 1 0 6 Managing a household in antiquity meant more than washing dishes and raising children. The oiKog (domus) was an economic entity. It was more like operating a small business, often including the oversight of workers and relations with patrons and clients. 110 numerous); not to speak of the rest of his business, and his distraction.\"107 As for the Cynic, \"it is his conscience which affords him this power [i.e., to censure and punish], and not his arms and his bodyguards. When he sees that he has watched over men, and toiled in their behalf... and that every thought which he thinks is that of a friend and servant to the gods, of one who shares in the government of Zeus..., why should he not have courage to speak freely to his own brothers, to his children, in a word, to his 1OR kinsmen?\" What we have then, for Epictetus as for Paul, are two separate economies: a heavenly one and an earthly one. Unmarried followers of Christ are administrators in the former economy; married followers of Christ, while they do participate in that realm, are primarily taken up with managing the earthly economy, and therefore cannot serve the Lord with undivided devotion. Is this an argument against marriage? Some have read verses 32-35 in this way. 1 0 9 But elsewhere in 1 Cor. 7 Paul attempts to limit the practice of ascetic activity. Indeed, we have concluded, based on other verses in the chapter, that he establishes marriage as the norm - it is celibacy that requires a special dispensation. Thus, I propose that, rather than a general call to celibacy, verses 32-35 promote a division of labor among followers of Christ. Most members of the community are concerned with the affairs of the world. This is a good thing: it is necessary for the maintenance of the community (not to mention the maintenance of Paul's mission). But the unfortunate 1 0 7 Epict. Diss. 3.22.71-2. 1 0 8 Ibid. 3.22.95. 1 0 9 E.g. Robertson and Plummer, First Epistle, 157; Hodge, 130-1; Moffat, First Epistle, 94-7. But many recent exegetes, in reaction to this reading, have substituted their own implausible interpretations in an attempt to recover Paul as a supporter of marriage. See, for example, Jean Hering's (First Epistle, 60-1) conclusion: \"Has celibacy moral superiority? The opposite rather, for it is easier to remain faithful to the Lord when one is not 'divided'.\" I l l consequence of this lifestyle is a division of interests between the cares of the world and devotion to God. Those who are called to a life of celibacy, on the other hand, operate solely in the spiritual economy. Paul identifies their primary responsibility as the administration of the affairs of the Lord, thereby ensconcing the unmarried (i.e. those who possess enkrateia) in positions of privilege within the power structures of God's community. Verse 35 begins, \"I say this for your own benefit.\" It has often been thought that TOVTO here refers to a putative general exhortation to celibacy in the preceding verses. If this is the case, then Paul says that he urges them to be celibate for their own good. The exhortation is not intended to restrict them, it is intended to bring about good order and devotion to the Lord without hindrance. This view has been very influential, but, since I do not believe that verses 32-34 contain a general exhortation to celibacy, I read this verse in a different light. I propose that TOVTO refers, not to a call for celibacy, but to the division of labor that I have already outlined. Paul does not intend the division of labor to be a noose around anyone's neck (Bpvxpv) - i.e. a curtailment of their freedom. Rather, it is for their own good; it is intended to produce good order in the community and allow the community to wait on the Lord without hindrance.110 3.2.2 1 Corinthians 7.32-35 and Cosmopolitanism The argument of these verses bears some resemblance to Cynic cosmopolitanism. There are two realms: one mundane, made up of the conventional social relations of the Cf. Collins, First Corinthians, 292-3. 112 household and city, the other universal.1 1 1 In contrast with most Stoics, both Paul and the Cynics set these two realms over against each other.112 On the Cynic model, whoever assumes a position of authority in the mundane realm, as householder and politician, is distracted from the duties of the universal realm. He occupies a low-status position in the cosmopolis. But whoever shuns domestic and political power to devote himself to higher things will occupy a high-status position in the universal economy. Even i f he is a slave or a beggar, however powerless or degraded according to conventional standards, he has authority over those who exercise power in the mundane realm. Likewise, for Paul, it is not the householder, the one with conventional power, who occupies a privileged place in the spiritual economy (the ouranopolis), for his interests are divided. It is the unmarried person who administers the things of the Lord, and therefore possesses authority over the other followers of Christ. Unlike the Cynics, however, Paul does not want everyone to abandon marriage and become like him. Not only would this erode the foundations of his support, but it 1 1 1 One of the peculiarly Christian characteristics of Paul's model is the use of (obrog) KO(T\wq to designate mundane associations. In addition, it is not reason but faith that is the bond between citizens of the heavenly polity. See Gal. 6.10: \"And so, as we have opportunity, let us work for the good of all, especially those who are related by faith [roiig oiKelovg Trie mWetds].\" (NRSV) But these should not obscure the considerable similarities. 1 1 2 In addition to 1 Cor. 7.32-34, consider Philippians 3.18-20: \"For many people, about whom I have spoken to you often, and now speak in tears, live their lives as enemies of the cross of Christ, whose end is destruction, whose god is the belly and glory in their shame, who think about earthly things [TO emVeia]. For our commonwealth [TO -noXireutw,] exists in heaven, whence we expect the savior and Lord, Jesus Christ.\" (NRSV) The notion of a heavenly commonwealth is picked up by later Christian authors. E.g. Hebr. 11.10, 16; 12.22; 13.14; Letter to Diognetus 5; Augustine, De Civitate Dei. With the exception of the Letter to Diognetus, however, these texts are clearly future-oriented. Perhaps Paul is merely operating with a horizon that has been foreshortened, but his ouranopolis seems to exist already in the Christian communities on earth. See discussion in Wayne A. Meeks, The Origins of Christian Morality: The First Two Centuries (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993), 37-51. 113 would undermine the special authority that he is trying to claim for himself (more about this below). So, Paul constructs a scenario in which it is incumbent upon most people to fulfil the conventional domestic, economic, and political responsibilities, but in which a gifted few give these up to manage the things of the Lord, including his community of followers. This is almost identical to the Cynic-influenced cosmopolitan theory of Epictetus considered above. He admonished people to fulfil the duties of a citizen, including marriage and procreation, but left open the possibility that a few Cynics would reject marriage so that they might devote themselves to God and become, in effect, the chief administrators in God's cosmic household. On Epictetus' model, the relationships that define one's status within the mundane household - brother, father, servant - are used to define the Cynic's status within the universal, cosmic community. He has made all mankind his children; the men among them he has as sons, the women as daughters; in that spirit he approaches them all and cares for them all. Or do you fancy that it is in the spirit of idle impertinence he reviles those he meets? It is as a father he does it, as a brother, and as a servant of Zeus, who is Father of us a l l . 1 1 3 These are precisely the titles that Paul applies to himself in his role as unmarried overseer of the Christian churches. He is father and brother to Christians, and slave of Christ. 1 1 4 As Dale Martin has demonstrated, \"slave of Christ\" is not an admission of low status. It is quite the reverse. By claiming to be the O\KOVO[W<; (managerial slave) of a very important person (Christ), Paul is claiming the considerable authority (albeit derivative) 1 1 3 Epict. Diss. 3.22.81-2; cf. ibid. 3.22.96. 1 1 4 Brother: 1 Thess. 1.4; 3.2; 4.13; 5.12, 14,25; Gal. 4.12,28; 6.1,18; Philem. 20; Rom. 1.13; 8.29. Father: 1 Thess. 2.11; Phil. 2.22; Philem. 10; 1 Cor. 4.14-15; cf. Gal. 4.19 and 1 Thess. 2.7. Slave: Phil. 1.1; Rom. 1.1; 15.16. 114 that accrues to one who manages the master's affairs.115 1 Cor. 7.32-35 seems to be of a piece with this logic. The unmarried few (Paul included) manage the affairs of the Lord, their only goal is to please their master. This gives them higher status within the Lord's (universal) household than the married majority whose interests are divided. As with Cynic cosmopolitan models, Paul recontextualized the social power that was traditionally ascribed to householders, making it the possession of the unmarried \"fathers\" or \"administrators\" of the cosmic/heavenly realm. It will be remembered that, in keeping with this transvaluation, the virtue of enkrateia (with its links to domestic and political mastery) was also transferred from the household to the realm of the unmarried philosopher/pedagogue. Paul's model is similar. I have already discussed at length his allocation of enkrateia and akrasia, one to the gifted, single person, the other to the household. This logic is implicit in 1 Cor. 7.32-34 where he distinguishes between the unmarried men and women who operate in the spiritual economy on the one hand, and husbands and wives who are divided between the duties of this world and service to the Lord on the other. But Paul also makes an explicit connection between akrasia and earthly things, over against the heavenly polity, in Philippians 3.18-20. Here he says that those who think about earthly things (oi ra kmyeia foovodvreq) have as their god the belly (TJ Koikia) and glory in their shame (hotjp, kv -rjj aioycvvy aur&v). To have one's belly as a god is a classic expression for akrasia. People of this sort are contrasted with the citizens of the commonwealth in heaven (TO -rcokhevua kv oupavoTg)m Thus, self-control is to be found not in earthly structures, but among the things of the Lord. 1 1 5 Dale B. Martin, Slavery as Salvation: The Metaphor of Slavery in Pauline Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 50-85. 1 1 6 Paul would not include married Christians among those who are \"enemies of the cross of Christ\" and have \"the belly as a god\". He says in 1 Cor. 7.34 that they are divided, 115 3.3 Conclusion Unlike the anti-askesis and anorexia encountered in the previous chapter, Paul's manipulation of the traditional domestic and political correlatives of enkrateia is part of a much broader movement among Greco-Roman moralists. Above all, his tendency to associate enkrateia with the unmarried, undistracted individual, who then assumes the role of father figure in the universal community, resembles Cynic cosmopolitanism. Certainly, there are elements of Paul's ouranopolis that make it unique. Citizenship, for example, is based on faith rather than reason.117 And, perhaps most significantly, Paul's community is eschatological, which means that its contrast with the mundane is even more radical. But the social dynamics of both Cynic and Pauline universal polities seem to be the same: a few people who reject traditional social roles exercise authority over the cosmo-/ouranopolis, a universal community defined by reason/faith. In many ways, Cynic (and Cynic-influenced) cosmopolitan theory as well as Paul's ouranopolis share in a much broader revaluation of domestic and political roles in the Hellenistic and Roman Periods. I have already made reference to Michel Foucault's analysis of the changing social relations within the Greco-Roman household. These innovations reflect new ways of relating the subject to himself (sic) and to others. In addition to the shifting power relations within the household, however, a gradual shift was also occurring from local forms of knowledge centered around the aristocracy to which means that they are citizens of the heavenly polity, but still have ties to this world. They are progressing along the path of citizenship but have a long way to go. 1 1 7 See Gal. 6.10: \"And so, as we have opportunity, let us work for the good of all, especially those who are related by faith.\" 116 specialized knowledge that transcended regionalism. Stanley Stowers has advanced this hypothesis in a recent essay. It is worth quoting at length. The traditional religion and wider cultures of Greeks, Judeans, Romans and so on were based on the local knowledges of face to face communities led by aristocrats who administered the lore and practices, e.g., how to sacrifice an animal, calculate when to have a festival, read events for signs from the gods of the place. Led by the so-called Greek enlightenment, the centuries before the common era saw a massive growth in the specialization of knowledge that was no longer local. Greek philosophy led this trend for many areas of knowledge. The particular character of the Hellenistic philosophies derived from creating specialized knowledge and practices about the soul or \"how to live an entire life.\" Judean scribes and scholars also attained a similar authority as specialists in knowledges that were becoming increasingly important to Judean culture. The shift in knowledge practices also meant a shift in authority toward the specialists and away from the local knowledges of the aristocrats who now had to employ specialist [sic] themselves.\"119 Increasingly, knowledge was being managed by philosophers and teachers rather than the local elite. And, as a reflection of the authority that had been usurped from householders, philosophers occasionally adopted fictive kinship roles, notably as a component of cosmopolitan theory. Epictetus' hierarchization of the divine household/cosmopolis is a prime example, and Paul's use of fictive kinship also shares in this dynamic. 1 2 0 Thus, the transference of authority - from householder and politician to unmarried philosopher/pedagogue - that is observable in both Cynic cosmopolitanism and in Paul's ouranopolis is part of a broader revaluation of traditional social roles. This accounts for Paul's use of (ourog) Koajwg to describe the mundane world. 1 1 9 Stowers, \"Pauline Christianity,\" 20. 1 2 0 Stowers (\"Pauline Christianity,\" 19) writes: \"The dominant [Pauline] metaphor of a family, albeit an oxymoronic family not founded on marriage, descent and property, might be counted as a dissimilarity from the Hellenistic philosophies, but needs to be better understood.\" He remarks on the tendency of philosophers to associate as friends. This is true, but as we have seen, they also draw on kinship as a source of metaphors for describing social relations. 117 The effect of Paul's discourse is to ensconce him more securely in a position of authority. By creating a division of labor in which married folk administer worldly things, and an unmarried few administer the affairs of the Lord, he has shifted the balance of power from the householder to the celibate leader (i.e., himself). This shift is further reflected in the allocation of enkrateia (with its strong link to the exercise of authority) to the realm of the celibate leader. And, as I have stated repeatedly, a claim on authority is simultaneously a claim on masculinity. 118 Conclusion If Paul's body is a text, this thesis represents an extended reading of a rather minor passage. I have demonstrated how certain bodily signifiers drew him into a semiotics of feminization. And, because gender, as I have been emphasizing all along, is a grid for charting power relations, his feminization is equivalent to a decrease in authority. Paul's enkrateia, on the other hand, has a masculinizing effect, and is therefore rehabilitative. It too is a kind of bodily semiotics. In the first place, the physical act itself is a conventional signifier of masculine authority. But also important is Paul's textual construction of the meaning of enkrateia, which makes it the spiritual possession of a minority who are given authority over the rest. The general connection between self-control and authority, along with Paul's peculiar encratic discourse, make for a complex semiotics of masculinization that rehabilitates his image as an effective leader. 119 Nomenclature Enkrateia = self-mastery, self-control, continence Enkrates = adjectival form of enkrateia = self-controlled, continent Akrasia = lack of self-control, incontinence (usually paired with enkrateia) Akrates = adjectival form of akrasia = incontinent Sophrosyne = moderation, temperance Akolasia = intemperance (usually paired with sophrosyne) Encratic = an adjective that I invented for the purposes of this thesis meaning \"of or relating to enkrateia\" N.B. Going against my usual practice, I have tended to use masculine pronouns for the generic. The subject matter dictated this decision. 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London: Epworth Press, 1992. Whitton, J. \" A Neglected Meaning for 2icefi* in 1 Thessalonians 4.4.\" NTS 28 (1982): 142-3. Wimbush, Vincent L. The Worldly Ascetic: Response to the World and Self-understanding According to 1 Corinthians 7. Macon: Mercer University Press, 1987. Winkler, John J. The Constraints of Desire: The Anthropology of Sex and Gender in Ancient Greece. New York and London: Routledge, 1990. Winter, Bruce W. Philo and Paul among the Sophists. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Wire, Antoinette Clark. The Corinthian Women Prophets. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990. Yarbrough, O. Larry. Not Like the Gentiles: Marriage Rules in the Letters of Paul. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1985,93-4 133 Appendix A UupoDoSai in 1 Cor. 7.91 \"It is better to marry than to burn\" (1 Cor. 7.9b) is a phrase that scarcely requires introduction. For some this excerpt from Paul's advice to the unmarried in Corinth represents the very worst of Pauline (indeed of Christian) sexual ethics - marriage as remedium concupiscendiae. But i f the meaning of the verse seems obvious, this is only the result of a rather vague \"consensus\" that has won the day. At the heart of this \"consensus\" is an implicit move to replace mjpovaQai (\"to burn\") with something like emBviieiv (\"to desire\"), yielding an unbearably pessimistic view on marriage - i.e. \"better to marry than to experience desire\". More than a few commentators have marshaled their creative talents in an effort to weaken the ostensible thrust of Paul's rationale. While most of these point to mitigating contextual details like the Apostle's expectation of an imminent end, others challenge the \"consensus\" interpretation of the verb -nvpovaftai. Of the latter sort, Michael Banc's article of a quarter-century ago is the most significant.3 After surveying Jewish literature from the Septuagint forward, he concludes that 1 This paper was originally delivered at the Northwest Regional Meeting of the A A R / S B L , May 7-9,1999 (?) (Pacific Lutheran University, Tacoma, WA). I have chosen to append it without major revision. As a result, there is some repetition of material that appears in the body of the thesis. There is also a disagreement between my interpretations of 1 Cor. 7.32-35 in this appendix and in chapter three. I leave it up to the reader to resolve the discrepancy, but I will say that chapter three represents a later and more sustained reading of these verses. 2 The full text of verses 8-9 is as follows: Aiyoi he ro?g ayaywiq KOA ra?q xqpaiq, KOXOV avroiq iav [le'ivoxriv tog Kayof et he OVK iyKparevovrai, ya^crarojouv, KpeTrrov yap iarw yau/t^rai % \u00E2\u0080\u00A2mipovcrSai. (\"I say to the unmarried and the widows, it is a good thing i f they remain as I also am. But i f they lack self-control, they should marry; for it is better to marry than to burn.\") 3 Michael L. Barre, \"To Marry or to Burn? Tlvpovodai in 1 Cor 7:9,\" CBQ 36 (1974): 193-202. 134 mipouotiai in 1 Cor. 7.9 can only be a reference to the fires of judgement. A metaphorical reading of the verb (\"burn with desire\"), Barre suggests, is poorly attested and not to be countenanced. But, besides the obvious limitations of his study,4 Barre appears to be possessed of the same misunderstanding that plagues the old \"consensus\" - an assumption that \"burning desire\" could only be metaphorical. The modern reader imagines a smoldering fire to be romantic convention - cliche even - for what is primarily a psychological phenomenon. But Bruce Thornton has recently demonstrated how far removed our insipid figure is from the ancient fires of Eros (Amor).5 The burning sensation was real and it was symptomatic (rather than symbolic) of sexual desire. I employ a medical vocabulary advisedly in this instance, as erotic passion is frequently delineated on the model of a pathology. It might be argued that this too is part of a well-developed metaphorical topos, except that the medical tradition itself treats sexual desire largely as an illness that requires diagnosis and treatment. Before reconsidering 1 Cor. 7.9, therefore, I shall first outline the classical physiology of desire paying special attention to burning as a symptom, and secondly compare accounts of a related pathological condition known as satyriasis. I shall then proceed to construct a reprisal of the old \"consensus\" - i.e. that Paul does indeed treat marriage as a remedium concupiscendiae, or better yet, a remedium incendii. 4 As Gordon Fee notes, Barre limits his inquiry to the appearance of -nvpow and cognates in Jewish sources only. Gordon D. Fee, The First Epistle to the Corinthians, NICNT (Grand Rapids. William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1987), 289, n.13. Bruce Thornton, Eros: The Myth of Ancient Greek Sexuality (Boulder, CO: WestviewPress, 1997), 11-47. 135 The Classical Physiology of Desire: An Outline Any attempt to relate the classical physiology of sexual desire is perhaps a doomed task from the outset. Diversity of opinion, and even inconsistencies within the corpus of a single author, render any one account necessarily reductive. A highly detailed study of the subject, on the other hand, while interesting in its own right, would soon outstrip its usefulness for our purposes. Thus, although cognizant of the pitfalls, I have chosen to present a synoptic account based largely on Galenic theory.6 But I shall also incorporate supporting (and sometimes dissenting) opinions from other medical texts and literary sources, the latter often containing strikingly physiological descriptions of sexual desire. While an approach such as this may run the risk of manufacturing an illusory consensus, I think that the resulting synthesis will fairly represent the outline of a classical physiology of desire. Virtually all of our sources, medical and otherwise, agree that the desiderative mechanism is initiated by an external stimulus. Paradigmatically this stimulus is the sight of something beautiful as in Aristotle's classic expression: \"passion arises through the pleasure of sight. For no one loves without being charmed by a beautiful image.\"7 This simple etiology is also adopted by medical writers in the transmission of a common 6 1 use Galen as the backbone of my inquiry because (from our perspective) the sheer volume of his extant works makes him the preeminent medical authority of the Roman period. He flourished some 120 years after Paul's career, but represents a kind of crystallization of accumulated medical opinion from the preceding centuries. 7 Aristotle Ethica Nicomachea 9.5.3. Trans. H. Rackham, L C L (London: William Heinemann Ltd., Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1942). Cf. Plato Cratylus 420B. 136 Q diagnosis topos. Typically in these accounts the physician is able to properly diagnose a mysterious illness (actually sexual passion) when he observes the deleterious effects on the patient's condition produced by viewing his or her object of affection. It is the image of something beautiful that initiates (and also exacerbates) sexual desire. The connection between an external stimulus and the internal operations of desire is also rendered explicit by Lucretius: \"[Youths] meet with images from some chance body that fly abroad, bringing news of a lovely face and beautiful bloom, which excites and irritates the parts swelling with seed, so that, as i f the whole business had been done, they often pour forth a great flood and stain their vestment.\"9 I shall comment on the accumulation and emission of semen below, but for now it is sufficient to acknowledge that an external stimulus (especially a beautiful image) triggers the body's desiderative mechanism.10 This perspective on the genesis of erotic desire was appropriated to great effect by the novelists, especially Achilles Tatius, who provides a more poetic version of Aristotle's observation: \"the eye is the path for love's wounds\".11 He claims that this image enters through the eyes and imprints itself on the heart.12 But an object of beauty is not the only effective stimulus: wine (2.3.3), erotic songs (1.5.5-6), embraces (5.15.5), and kisses (Longus 1.17) are a few other conventional examples. The body's immediate response to these stimuli is, more often than not, a burning sensation. Longus, in his tale Q E.g., Valerius Maxim us Facta et Dicta Memorabilia 5.7.ext. 1; Plutarch Demetrius 37.2-3; Galen De Placitis Hippocratis et Platonis 6.1-10; Caelius Aurelianus Celeres Passiones 3.180-1. 9 Lucretius De Rerum Natura 4.1032-36. Trans. W. H. D. Rouse, L C L (London: William Heinemann Ltd., Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953). 1 0 For this reason Galen advises that desire is controlled by avoiding erotic images and spectacles (De Locis Affect is 6.6). Cf. Lucr. 4.1063-67. 1 Achilles Tatius 1.4.4. Trans. S. Gaselee, L C L (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1947). 1 2 Ibid. 5.13.4. 137 about Daphnis and Chloe, describes the torments of desire as an actual physical heat that Daphnis attempts to quench by drinking cold water (1.23). This heat is intensified by external stimuli like kissing (1.17) or watching animals mate (3.13). In the story of Leucippe and Clitophon erotic songs and stories are said to burn one's heart and fuel desire (1.5.5,6). Vision, as I have noted, is also central to the production of desire in this novel. The villainous Thersander, for example, burns at the sight of Leucippe (1.18.1). Melitte likewise burns for Clitophon (5.15.5, 22.3, 26.1), and his embraces only kindle the flame (5.15.5). We might be tempted to dismiss these as nothing more than inane cliches, except that we find in these novels further elaboration of the physiological process. Achilles Tatius, for example, describes the conflict between love's fire in the liver and anger's fire 13 in the heart. This may sound bizarre but it is taken directly from medical arguments about the precise location of sexual desire (and its attendant heat) in the body. Aristotle maintains that desire is generated in the heart when some stimulus produces a surge of blood kindling the organ's innate heat.14 Chrysippus holds a similar position: \"it is evident that the affections of angry men arise in the region of the chest, and also those of lovers; therefore desire also arises especially in these regions.\"15 The citation from Achilles Tatius, on the other hand, is in agreement with Galen who, following Hippocrates and Plato, locates the desiderative part of the soul in the liver. In either case, it is a matter of general agreement that the stimulated heart/liver triggers an increase both 1 3 Ibid. 6.19.2. 1 4 Arist. De Anima 1.1.403B is a description of anger, but he imagines a similar process for desire. Cf. De Partibus Animaliian 3.3.665al0-13, where Aristotle calls the heart the source of life as well as all movement and sensation. 138 in body temperature and ultimately in the production of seed. In fact, in animals that have internal testes, the warm lower organs serve as a kind of heating element that aids the transformation of excess blood into hot semen.16 Given these widely accepted \"scientific\" claims, we can conclude that the literary descriptions of erotic conflagration, while surely conventional, are nevertheless rooted in a broader cultural understanding of the desiring body.1 7 With the introduction of semen as an important element in the desiderative mechanism it appears that the desiring subject (purporting to be generic) is again shown to be male. But we should not overlook the fact that semen was not always (perhaps even not usually) considered a uniquely male humor. Following Hippocrates, Galen asserts that both men and women have testicles - men outside the body, women inside - and both secrete seed during sexual intercourse. Although the male's is thicker, hotter, and more copious, female semen is also required for conception to take place.18 Galen identifies two separate mechanisms for the production of this vital fluid. First of all, it is generated in the large artery and vein that extend from the heart to the genitals. As the blood flows along this track it gradually alters to become the white, frothy substance that is ultimately excreted.19 But there is also a second, better kind of semen which is produced wholly within the testicles themselves and contains more vital pneuma, a compound of air and 1 5 Gal. Plac. Hipp, et Plat. 3.7.32. Trans. Galen On the Doctrines of Hippocrates and Plato, Edition, Translation and Commentary by Phillip De Lacy, First Part: Books I - V , Third Edition (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1984). Cf. Achilles Tatius 5.13.4. 1 6 Gal. De Semine 1.15.26. 1 7 1 am trying to avoid the error of treating literary accounts as \"mere metaphors\" for the \"literal\" or \"scientific\" discourse of medical texts. I place primary importance on the latter in this paper simply because, in the detail of their analyses, they render more explicit the logic of cultural assumptions. 1 8 Gal. Sent. 1.7, 10; 2.4. 1 9 Ibid. 1.12.5-6. 139 fire that contributes to the increasing torridity of the desiring body. This testicular semen is the all-important final component in the desiderative mechanism. Galen, at least, insists that the urge for intercourse would not exist without the testicles and their special kind of seed. One has only to observe, he says, those (animals or humans) who have had their testicles excised to know that this is true. Galen deduces from this observation that testicular semen houses an intrinsic desire for ejaculation.21 No semen, no desire. And conversely, abundant semen, abundant desire. This, then, is the body's mechanism for maintaining balance: desire for sexual activity as a means of evacuating excess seed. The ambivalence of ancient medical discourse vis-a-vis desire and sexual intercourse is well known. Although they were recognized to be natural and necessary for perpetuating the species, Soranus speaks for many anxious souls when he remarks that the body is made i l l by desire. Indeed, as we have already seen, there existed a common diagnosis topos in which a patient who displays physical symptoms that could derive from any number of illnesses is discovered to be suffering from acute sexual passion. Apuleius, in his version of this topos, says that the effects on one's health and appearance are the same in those who are i l l (aegris) and those who are in love For pneuma as air and fire see Gal. Plac. Hipp. etPlat. 5.3.8. 2 1 Gal. Sem. 1.15.29,48,2.1.32,2.4.13; cf. Lucr. 4.1041-1046: \"As soon as the seed comes forth driven from its retreats, it is withdrawn from the whole body through all the limbs and members, gathering in a fixed place in the structure, and arouses at once the genital parts alone. Those parts thus excited swell with the seed, and there is a desire to emit it towards that whither the dire craving tends.\" 99 \" Soranus Gynecology 1.30. Cf. Longus 1.14,18 and Chariton 1.1.10, where desire is called voavq (disease). Donald Beecher and Massimo Ciavolella attribute the systematization of the concept of desire as disease to Aristotle (Jacques Ferrand, A Treatise On Lovesickness, translated and edited and with a critical introduction and notes by Donald A. Beecher and Massimo Ciavolella (Syracuse, N Y : Syracuse University 140 (amantibus)23 More specifically, excess semen - the culmination of the desiderative mechanism - has pathological consequences when retained. Here, for example, is Galen's opinion: \"Scrutinizing these [observations] it appeared to me that the retention of semen does greater harm to the body than the suppression of the menstrual flow, [especially] in persons who have an abundance of poorly conditioned humors, who lead a lazy life, and who initially had indulged quite frequently in sexual relations but suddenly stopped their previous habit. I realized that in these patients the physical desire for seminal discharge was the cause [of the disorder], because all people of this type must ejaculate their abundant semen.\"24 Galen's realization gets at the crux of the matter for our present purposes. The desiderative mechanism is always cause for concern, something to be guarded and controlled. But when it is allowed to spiral out of control, producing an abundance of semen that is retained, the result is pathological imbalance. The cure for this condition quite simply is ejaculation. Sometimes masturbation is advised, although never for 25 women. Just as often sexual intercourse is identified as a cure, or at least a temporary reprieve. And frequently it is \"burning\" in particular that is purportedly quenched by the ejaculation of hot sperm. Lucretius, for example, admits: tandem ubi se erupit nervis conlecta cupido, parva fit ardoris violenti pausa parumper26 Once again there are parallels in the novels. Marriage (i.e. sex) is proposed as the only remedy that will save Press, 1990), 44-45). But, as they explain, the roots of this idea can be found much earlier. 23 Apuleius Metamorphoses 10.2. He also claims that the diagnosis is easily made when one sees an individual who burns without having a fever (aliquem sine corporis calore flagrantem). 2 4 Gal. Loc. Aff. 6.5; English translations of this treatise are from Galen on the Affected Parts, trans. Rudolph E. Siegel. (Basel and New York: S. Karger, 1976). 2 5 Lucr. 4.1063-67; Gal. Loc. Aff. 6.6. Chaereas and Callirhoe from wasting away. Apuleius tells a tale of a woman who, in the course of propositioning her stepson, calls him both the cause of her illness (i.e. sexual desire) and its cure (medela et salus). Even more striking is Clitophon's description of his sexual liaison with Melitte, who was burning with desire: he says that he healed her (JWO^V).29 This pathological complex - erotic passion as disease, burning its most salient symptom, and ejaculation an antidote - was already firmly established by the Roman Period and it retained its currency right through the middle ages in both Christian and Muslim medical traditions. If we end the inquiry right here we have already garnered enough evidence to improve upon the traditional interpretation of 1 Cor. 7.9 (i.e. marriage as remedium concupiscendiae). But I would like to extend the discussion a little further to include a related pathological condition known as satyriasis (priapism)30 - a state of persistent genital tension in non-sexual situations. Galen provides the most comprehensive, i f somewhat inconsistent (not to mention entirely androcentric), description of this dysfunction. Of particular interest is his etiological analysis. After concluding that Z b Ibid. 4.1115-16. 2 7 Chariton 1.1.11. 2 8 Apuleius Metamorphoses 10.3. 2 9 Achilles Tatius 6.1.1. 3 0 There is some confusion about whether in fact these two names designated the same disease. Caelius Aurelianus, in his fifth-century Latin paraphrase of Soranus' works on acute and chronic diseases, considers them related but distinct pathologies. If this division goes back to Soranus, then it is at least as old as the second century CE. But in the Gynecology, and in the works of Galen and others, there is no indication that there were two distinct pathologies. In fact, Aetius titles his version of Rufus' account JTepi otiai ye %eipov ^aiverai (Aristophanes Lysistrata 1079). 3 9 Cael.Aur. CP 3 All 4 0 Gal. Loc. Aff. 6.6. considered above), a confluence that stems evidently from the excess semen characteristic of both conditions. Of the symptoms found in both descriptions of erotic passion and descriptions of satyriasis we can confidently assign a position of primary importance to \"burning\". Finally, I should make a brief lexicographical note before moving on. Numerous terms are employed in medical and literary texts alike to designate the \"burning\" sensation as it relates either to sexual desire or to satyriasis. In literary contexts words for \"fire\" (e.g. T O TWP, ignis) are more common, although T O Kadpjj, (\"heat\") is not infrequent. Medical writers, on the other hand, prefer the more prosaic \"burning\" (e.g. ij ^Ae-y/Aovij, mjperog, incendia). Forms of /ca/w are the most commonly used verbs for describing this phenomenon. But fykeyoi, depfjbaivco, and mjpooi among others are also employed, and there is no basis independent of context for distinguishing between them. It cannot be ruled out, therefore, that Paul's use of \u00E2\u0080\u00A2mjpovaQa.t in 1 Cor. 7.9b reflects the common symptomatology of sexual desire or indeed of a graver pathology like satyriasis. But we must now consider the passage in more detail. 1 Corinthians 7.9b: the threat of disease In the only significant article devoted wholly to the occurrence of -nvpovoQcLt in 1 Cor. 7.9b, Michael Barre levels a criticism at \"the usual interpretation\" (i.e., \"to be tortured by [unsatisfied] desire\"). This, he says, \"is stretching the semantic possibilities 146 of the word to the breaking point!\"41 But Barre's exclusive use of Jewish sources and his failure to consider words other than rwpooi artificially constrict the inquiry. His alternative reading - better to marry than to burn in hell for committing sexual sins -supposes a Jewish apocalyptic context that I, for one, have a hard time envisaging.42 Everything in the surrounding verses points to the proper management of sexual desire and the threat of immorality as Paul's primary concern. Even i f Paul had intended to introduce the notion of final judgement into this discussion, it is dubious at best that his gentile audience would have understood it in this way. 4 3 In any case, whatever the particular merits of Barre's thesis, he cannot justifiably reject \"the usual interpretation\" on \"semantic grounds\". Gordon Fee recognizes the weaknesses of Barre's position, but his own resolution is even less satisfying. He suggests, following Barre, that Paul is addressing the situation of unmarried believers who are fornicating. The Apostle advises them to marry not because their fornication will bring judgement but simply because it is better to marry than to fornicate. Or, as Fee himself says: \"Paul intended that those who are committing sexual sins should rather marry than be consumed by the passions of their sins.\"4 4 But, besides the fact that an argument for marriage over fornication seems superfluous at this stage,45 it is not at all clear how -nvpovoQat can be a synonym for -nopveveiv. When \"burning\" is used to describe a body stricken by sexual desire, it almost always connotes 4 1 Barre, \"To Marry\", 201. 4 2 So does Gordon Fee, First Corinthians, 289. 4 3 Martin, The Corinthian Body (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995), 212. 4 4 Fee, First Corinthians, 289. 4 5 C. K. Barrett, The First Epistle to the Corinthians, HNTC (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1968), 161. Paul has already argued in chapter 5 that the community should not associate with brothers and sisters who are sexually immoral. 147 desire that has not yet culminated in a sexual act. And, while verbs like -nupoo) and Kaico or ardeo appear in contexts where the desire is illicit, the words themselves contain no nuance of moral judgement. Even in the Hellenistic Jewish literature one is hard pressed to find parallels.46 The burden of proof, therefore, is wholly on Fee to demonstrate that the Corinthian passage demands such an unusual rendering of -nvpouotiai. Both of these interpretations (Barre's and Fee's) rise or fall with their analysis of a second problematic verb in verse 9, eyKpareuovrai. They postulate that the phrase er he OUK ejKpareuovTat should be rendered, \"If in fact they are not practicing continence\", rather than, \"If they cannot exercise self-control\". Barre calls the \"cannot\" \"not only an unwarranted interpolation which weakens the sense of the passage, but actually misleading.\"47 This is absolutely correct i f we base our reading of this verb on Aristotelian usage. According to Aristotle's model, it is patently ludicrous to say that people who have successfully resisted the urge for sex are lacking in self-control (OUK eyKparevovrai). This expression would ordinarily be reserved for those who are, in fact, incontinent. Barre and Fee, therefore, confidently assert that the usual, unexamined view of 1 Cor. 7.9 cannot be correct. Paul must be addressing the issue of fornication among unmarried Christians. But, while their point about the meaning of eyKpareuo^iai might be true in general, it should not be slavishly applied to the occurrence in 1 Cor. 7.9 without first considering Paul's concept of ejKpareta (\"self-control\"; henceforth enkrateia). Obviously, a nuanced treatment of this topic is beyond the scope of the present study, but I shall briefly consider a few of the important verses in chapter 7 before endorsing a different reading of ei he OUK eyKpareuovrai. 4 6 Sirach 23.16 ( L X X 23.17) may be the leading candidate. But even here it is far from certain that the burning itself refers to fornication. 148 Traditionally, enkrateia is a virtue that entails the victory of reason over passion. Victory in this case is not construed as the eradication of passion, but rather as the establishment of a master-slave relationship that threatens to reverse itself at any moment. The key, therefore, to remaining eyKpa-nfig (self-controlled) is to cultivate one's strength and resolve through practice (as fees is). With this in mind, the reader of 1 Cor. 7 will discover that Paul has some very different ideas about the nature of sexual continence. His idiosyncrasies are especially apparent in verse 7: \"I wish that all were as I myself am [i.e. e^pa-rfc]. But each has a particular gift from God, one having one kind and another a different kind.\" If indeed enkrateia is the charisma in question, this represents a significant departure from all other models of sexual continence.48 Whereas the classical construction of enkrateia emphasizes effort, practice, and perseverance, verse 7 suggests that it is a matter of divine dispensation.49 The upshot of this, of course, is that some people - no matter how much effort they exert - can never be truly eyKpcL-rqc. It is a gift - either you have it or you don't. 4 / Barre, \"To Marry\", 199. 4 8 There have been some recent challenges to the assumption that Paul is in fact speaking of enkrateia in this verse, but I have yet to come across a plausible alternative. The most recent and most implausible reading is contained in John C. Poirier and Joseph Frankovic, \"Celibacy and Charism in 1 Cor 7:5-7,\" HTR 89/1 (1996): 1-18. They deem \"facile\" the equation of enkrateia with the charisma mentioned in verse 7(16). Incredibly, they proceed to suggest that Paul is referring to prophecy. But even i f this were true (and that seems to be a stretch), there is nothing in the surrounding verses that prepares the reading audience for such an oblique reference. If meaning, then, is something more than authorial intention - and surely it is - we cannot accept their shaky reconstruction. 4 9 Hans Conzelmann (1 Corinthians: A Commentary on the First Epistle to the Corinthians, tr. James W. Leitch (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975), 120) is most perceptive: \"Since eyKpareia is a charisma, it is not practiced as a virtue. It is not a standard that has to be achieved and is measured by criteria of a general kind, but it is an individual gift which cannot be acquired by imitation.\" Barre dismisses this interpretation with a fashionable (for its time) and mean-spirited swipe at German scholarship (\"To Marry\", 199, n.16). 149 This opinion appears to lie at the root of Paul's advice in the chapter's initial seven verses. He exhorts married members of the community to maintain sexual relations on account of their aKpaa-la (akrasia; i.e. because they are not gifted with enkrateia). Paul does not encourage them to practice enkrateia with greater diligence. Nor does he pass judgement on them because they are afcpaTvfc. And why should he? It is not a matter of choice.5 0 Rather he is concerned that they might be tempted to seek out extramarital sex i f their regular conjugal relations are interrupted. Akrasia, therefore, is not fornication; it only renders one susceptible to fornication. We might describe it as a sensitivity to sexual desire that only becomes problematic when a licit avenue for erotic activity is closed off. Paul expresses his wish that they too were gifted so that they would not experience temptation. But, alas, they have their own gifts and he has his. This peculiar sense of self-control is reaffirmed in verses 36-38, where Paul addresses the hypothetical case of a man and his betrothed. There are conditions under which this man should marry, and conditions under which he should not. He should marry \" i f he is not behaving properly toward his fiancee, i f his passions are strong.\" The word imepaKfwg (translated here as \"his passions are strong\") is notoriously difficult. If, however, the word describes the man's libido, as most commentators believe, it seems to place the condition for marriage on the amount of desire he experiences (\mip=o\ex; a/f/A\u00C2\u00A9y=limit).51 There is a similar logic at work in the opposite scenario. The man should This does not mean that Paul abandoned them to their lust so long as it was expressed in the marriage bed. He expected the married members of the community to be moderate in the expression of their desire (see 1 Thess. 4.3-5). 5 1 The point I am making here is not changed appreciably i f we accept Dale Martin's suggestion that imepaKfiog refers to the virgin's desire (Corinthian Body, 219-28). 150 not marry if, \"because of a lack of sexual desire, he stands firm in his own heart.\" ^AvaryKv), often left ambiguously as \"necessity\" in English translations, is here specifically the compulsion or urge for intercourse. Paul says remarkably that one should only seek a life of singleness and celibacy i f one does not experience sexual desire. Presumably this is the gift of enkrateia, which, we can now say, resembles Aristotle's notion of insensitivity more closely than it does traditional notions of self-control.53 The gift of enkrateia is actually the disablement of one's desiderative mechanism. If this tentative reconstruction of Pauline enkrateia is accepted, then the reading of eyKparevovrai offered by Barre and Fee is problematic. While it is true that Aristotle uses this word with the sense \"to practice self-control\", this is only because he perceives enkrateia to be a virtue that one practices. For Paul, however, enkrateia is a gift (the gift of insensitivity), which is granted rather than achieved. Thus, while eyKpareveodai (merely the verbal form of enkrateia) conventionally means \"to practice self-control\", Paul employs it differently with the sense \"to be gifted with enkrateia\". Those who OIK eyKparevovrai are to be pitied rather than condemned. Their hearts are in the right place, but without the gift of enkrateia (insensitivity) their bodies crave sexual contact.54 The danger inherent in such a condition has already been established: images (or stories, songs, memories) stimulate the hotter organs and generate excess blood, which in turn It is my opinion that a close connection should be retained between the participial clause (/AT? e%(av avayKfiv) and the phrase to which it is subordinated (oV Be e "Thesis/Dissertation"@en . "2000-05"@en . "10.14288/1.0089565"@en . "eng"@en . "Classics"@en . "Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library"@en . "University of British Columbia"@en . "For non-commercial purposes only, such as research, private study and education. Additional conditions apply, see Terms of Use https://open.library.ubc.ca/terms_of_use."@en . "Graduate"@en . "Built: (re)constructing masculinity and authority in 1 Corinthians 7"@en . "Text"@en . "http://hdl.handle.net/2429/10675"@en .