virginity androgyny celibacy anthropology and sex?

"Perpetua: or,
How Women can become Men"

~*~
~*~



THE MYTH
of the primal androgyne -
that is,
an anthropology whereby souls
are engendered
and only the fallen body is divided
into sexes -
is a dominant
structuring metaphor
of gender for the early church
and for the Christian West
as a whole.


There are
many different versions
of the application
of this myth.


In
some versions
of early Christianity,
all Christians must remain celibate,
and in that spiritual existence a total eradication of gender difference
becomes
imaginable.


In some
communities
such celibate men and women
lived together in the same dwellings,
arousing suspicion and calumny of their pagan neighbors
and the ire of more established
Christian leaders.


In other
communities,
more in tune with the Pauline
and deutero-Pauline message,
there was a two-tiered
society:
the celibate,
in which some form of gender parity obtained,
and the married,
for which the hierarchical Haustafeln
[tables of household practice
found in the "deutero-Pauline" Colossians
and Ephesians]
were the definitive
ethic.


This
could be accompanied
by more or less approbation of the married state,
more or less privilege
for virginity/celibacy
over marriage.


In every case,
however, virginity was privileged
to greater or lesser extent
over the sexual life,
and,
more to the point of
the present argument,
it was only in virginity, that is,
only in a social acting out
of a disembodied
spiritual existence,
that gender parity
ever existed.


Female humans
could escape being "women"
by opting out of
sexual
intercourse.


Just as
in Philo,
virgins were not women
but androgynes,
a representation,
in the appearance of flesh,
of the purely spiritual nongendered,
presocial essence
of human
being.


For all
of these forms
of Christianity,
as for hellenistic Judaism,
this dualism is the base of the anthropology:
equality in the spirit,
hierarchy in the
flesh.


As a
second-century follower of Paul,
Clement of Alexandria,
expressed it,

"As then
there is sameness
[with men and women]
with respect to the soul,
she will attain to the same virtue;
but as there is difference with respect to the peculiar construction of the body, she is destined for
child-bearing
and house-
keeping."


As this
quotation suggests
and Christian practice enacts,
this version of primal androgyny
provided two elements
in the gender politics
of the early
Church.


On the
one hand
it provided an image or vision
of a spiritual equality for all women -
which did not, however, have social consequences
for the married;
on the other hand,
it provided for real autonomy and social parity
for celibate women,
for those who rejected
"the peculiar construction
of the body,"
together with its pleasures
and satifactions.


As
Clement avers
in another place,
"For souls themselves by themselves
are equal.
Souls are neither male nor female
when they no longer marry
nor are given in
marriage."


~*~


Much of
the paradigmatic literature
of early Christianity involves the representation of gender
and its possibilities.


As described in the situation
with regard to one of the earliest
and most explicit texts of this type,
The Gospel
of Thomas:


The double insistence
attributed to Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas saying -
that Mary should remain among the disciples
at the same time as she must be made male -
points to the paradoxical ideological conditions
that helped to shape the lives
of early Christian women.


At once
they are to have access to holiness,
while they also can do so
only through the manipulation
of conventional
gender categories.


~*~


As I have suggested, however,
these were not the paradixical ideological conditions
only of Christianity
but similar indeed to paradoxes
of contemporary Judaism
as well.


The Therapeutrides, too,
have the same access to spirituality
as their male counterparts - for all of them, however,
at the expense of
conventional gender
categories.


One
of the most striking representations
of such manipulation of gender
is the story of the martyr Perpetua,
brilliantly analyzed by Castelli.
This mydistory enacts both sorts
of gender erasure.


On the
social level,
the marks of Perpetua's gendered status
are indicated by her leaving of her family,
renunciation of her husband
[who is not even mentioned],
and eventual giving up
of her baby,
together with a miraculous drying up
of the milk in her breasts,
that is,
a sort of symbolic
restoration of
virginity.


The crux
of the story, however,
and of Castelli's argument is
that in Perpetua's dream in which she becomes a man
and defeats her opponent
in the gladiatorial ring,
her victory is, in fact, paradoxically
a representation of her death
as a martyr, while defeat for her
would have meant
giving in to her father,
renouncing her Christianity,
and continuing
to live.


Life in the spirit
represents death in the body
and the converse,
and the erasure of conventional gender
is thus also an event in the spirit.
This is, then, a drastic version
of Paul's eradication
of gender
in Christ.




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14 aug 2005 - bewerkt op 19 mrt 2008 - meld ongepast verhaal
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