The Fathers are the authoritative teachers of the Christian Church in the centuries of its formation within Graeco-Roman culture. Patristics, the study of their writings, conveys almost overwhelmingly the weight of male authority. Fatherhood meant legal power over children, even over their life or death; Christians, especially the newly baptised, were encouraged to think of themselves as children, even as babies, in relation to the spiritual fathers who raised and directed them (see further Clark 1994). Most of the Fathers were bishops, adding the authority of hierarchy to the authority of intellect and spirituality. It is just possible to identify a few spiritual mothers, and to find a few scraps of what they (probably) said.1 But even the women who were acknowledged as spiritual superiors were wary of the teaching role – or else their male biographers were wary of showing them in it, for Paul had said (1 Timothy 2.12) ‘I do not permit a woman to teach’ (see further Nürnberg 1988). So in patristics, as elsewhere, we have male perspectives on women, but not female perspectives on men.
We also have few male perspectives on men. Historians of women are used to the Graeco-Roman assumption that the male human being is the norm and that females can be taken for granted, unless they are directly under attack or being advised on proper conduct. This makes it difficult to find out much about women, but also makes it difficult to find out about men: not about what they did, but about how they experienced the social construct of masculinity and the pressures exerted on men to conform. Male authors take masculinity for granted, except when they are attacking an enemy who lacks it; effeminacy, rather than femininity, may be the ‘other’ of masculinity and thereby reveal something about its opposite (Gleason 1995: 160–1). So patristics may be especially helpful in exploring what it was to be a man. Christian preaching included explicit moral guidance on the domestic roles of different members of society. It expounded a creation-narrative of the making of the first man as well as the first woman. It had to deal with attempts by some Christians to abandon traditional gender roles and set up alternative Christian households and communities (Clark 1986b: 175–228; Elm 1994). Many patristic texts have been examined for what they have to say about women, or rather about the construct of femaleness which women had to negotiate (Clark 1979. 1986b; Clark 1993): similar questions can be asked about men and maleness.
The obvious starting place for investigations of proper conduct is the Paedagogus of Clement of Alexandria, a second-century guide to deportment and etiquette for Christians who want to live every aspect of their lives, including table manners (Leyerle 1995), as befits a Christian. A paedagogus was not a teacher, but the slave who escorted his young charge to school and monitored his behaviour, and Clement describes his ‘tutor’ as the instructor who moderates the passions, rather than expounding doctrine. He makes a point of saying that the Paedagogus speaks to women as well as to men:
So then, embracing this good obedience the more, let us give ourselves to the Lord, grasping the cable – which is most secure – of faith in him, and understanding that virtue is the same for men and for women. If there is one God for both, there is one Tutor for both; one church, one chastity, one modesty; the same nourishment for both, a shared yoke in marriage; breathing, sight, hearing, knowledge, hope, obedience and love are all alike. Those who have life in common have grace in common and salvation in common, and common to these are love and upbringing. For (it says) ‘in this age they marry and are given in marriage’, and in this alone the male is distinguished from the female; but in the age to come, no longer. There, the rewards of this communal and holy life, the life based on being paired, are laid up not for male and female, but for the human being, when the desire which divides the human being is put aside. So the name ‘human’ [anthropos] is also common to men and women.
(Paedagogus 1.4, PG 8.260–1)2
In practice, the ‘Tutor’ speaks far more to women, attacking female extravagance, vanity, immodesty and bad manners. When he speaks to men, it is to warn them against not being manly. Men are told that they must not be effeminate in clothing: this means that they must not wear long robes and soft, thin fabrics (Paedagogus 2.10, PG 8.524–5). They must also not be effeminate in showing general helplessness: for instance, they should not expect their slaves to push them up hills (Paedagogus 3.11, PG 8.650). They should not weaken themselves by bathing: whereas women should bathe for cleanliness and health, men should bathe only for health, and that with caution (Paedagogus 3.9, PG 8.617). Decorum is also important.
If there are ladies present at a dinner party, proper behaviour for men is (to the modern reader) a hostess’s nightmare: they should fix their eyes on the couch, lean on their elbows without moving, and ‘be present with their ears alone’; and when sitting, they must not cross their feet or their legs, or prop the chin on the hand, because it is vulgar not to carry oneself without support, and fidgeting shows frivolity of character (Paedagogus 2.7, PG 8.458).
It is hair which most moves Clement. His chapter against men who embellish themselves is mostly about depilation. Men with smooth cheeks are enervated, and look like women.
God wanted women to be smooth, and to rejoice in the spontaneous growth of their [head] hair alone, as a horse rejoices in its mane, but has adorned man, like lions, with a beard, and has made him manly with shaggy breasts. This is a sign of strength and rule (Paedagogus 3.3, PG 8.580–1; cf. Gleason 1995: 68–70)
Grey hair is a sign of wisdom; and beards are particularly important:
This, then, is the sign of the man, the beard, by which he is seen to be a man, is older than Eve, and is the symbol of the superior nature. God saw fit that he should stand out in shagginess, and dispersed hairs over man’s whole body. All that was smooth and soft in him He took from his side when He made the woman Eve, adapted to the reception of seed, his help in generation and in household management. But he, having lost all smoothness, remained a man, and shows himself man. To him it has been assigned to act, as to her to experience, for what is shaggy is naturally drier and hotter than what is smooth. So males have more hair and more heat than females, entire animals more than castrated animals, perfect than imperfect. It is therefore impious to desecrate the symbol of manhood, hairiness (Paedagogus 3.3, PG 8.581)
Clement, like Paul in 1 Corinthians (11.2–14), is inconsistent about men’s hair. It is God-given, but men should still have haircuts. Clement prudently avoids Paul’s claim that short hair is natural to men, but offers practical reasons. Hair should be kept out of the eyes. Short hair makes a man easier to identify, whereas long hair makes it easier for him to sin without being recognised. Short hair accustoms the skull to both cold and heat: these are otherwise absorbed by the hair, and the resultant moisture is bad for the brain. The moustache should be trimmed (with scissors, not vulgarly with a razor) so that it is not dirtied by food. But the beard should be allowed to flourish, trimmed only for neatness. Clean-shaven men are almost as bad as depilated men, who are, of course, effeminate. Hair on the chin gives no trouble, but lends the face dignity and paternal terror. The Psalmist shows his appreciation of beards in the verse ‘as the ointment that descends upon the beard, the beard of Aaron’ (Psalm 133.2): his approval is evident because ‘beard’ is repeated.3
Males, then, are hairy, active, warm, superior, and not effeminate; effeminacy implies physical smoothness (especially the removal of body hair), undue care for appearance, general weakness, and particular ways of moving or holding the body. Clement’s advice shows the battery of observation and assessment which was trained on men, as it is nowadays on politicians who hire image makers. Women in Graeco-Roman culture could at least win approval by staying out of sight, but a man who stayed out of sight was unmanly: he was a public being, judged by body language as well as behaviour, educated to control gesture and stance as well as voice and language.4 Ambrose of Milan remarked that he once refused to ordain a man priest because of his unbecoming gestus, and that he objected to the arrogant walk of another cleric. Both came to a bad end: the first man joined the Arians, the second – perhaps a crypto-Arian – was persuaded to leave the clergy (Ambrose, On Duties 1.72 [Testard 1984]; McLynn 1994: 54–5).
Patristic exegesis of the creation narratives is another likely place to look for expectations about maleness. There are questions to ask about the physical difference between Adam and Eve, about their different responses to temptation and to being discovered in sin, and about the proper relationship between men and women. Modern feminist exegetes, tired of the assumption that Eve was a secondary (and therefore subordinate) creation, point out that there are two creation accounts in the book of Genesis. In Genesis 1.26–7 God makes ‘man’ in the generic sense: ‘God said, Let us make man [adam] in our image and likeness: male and female created he them.’ In Genesis 3 the human being, the adam, is lonely, and cannot find a mate in the rest of God’s creation, so God makes woman from Adam’s rib, and it is the male human who takes on the name of the original human. But patristic exegesis of Genesis 1–3 regards Chapter 3 as an expansion, not a contradiction, of Chapter 1, and the primary concern of such exegesis is not with the relationship of male and female, but with the claim that human beings are in the image of God (Clark 1986b: 353–85). Several patristic authors feel bound to combat the argument that if humans are in the image of God, then God must be like humans, so Christians are anthropomorphists. Augustine in On Genesis against the Manichaeans confronts the mocking question: does God have nostrils and teeth and a beard, and even insides?5
These Manichaeans took it for granted that ‘human’ means the normative male human (with a beard). In theory, Greek anthropos and Latin homo should not allow the same confusion as English ‘man’, because Greek and Latin have separate words (aner and vir) for ‘male human’.6 In practice, Greek and Latin usage is much less clear. Augustine frequently uses homo where ‘male human’ is the only possible sense; there are striking examples in a recently discovered sermon on post-marital celibacy. He also claims that vir in Scripture can mean homo, as in beatus vir qui timet Dominum, ‘blessed is the man who fears the Lord’, because women who fear the Lord are also blessed (Dolbeau 1992; De civ. D. 22.18, CCL 48.837). Basil has to reassure women readers of Scripture that anthropos also applies to them, even when it has the masculine article (Homily 10 on the Six Days of Creation, PG 30.33). John Chrysostom uses anthropos to mean ‘male human’, but keeps the sense ‘human being’ when it suits him – for instance, when he is meeting the challenge that if human beings are in God’s image, God is not just an anthropos (with the masculine article), but also a gyne, a woman, and therefore a subordinate being.7 But the usual response to the ‘anthropomorphism’ argument was to discount bodies, whether male or female, as irrelevant, on the grounds that it is the human soul, not the human body, which is in God’s image.
Christians, like Graeco-Roman philosophers, generally agreed that the soul is not sexed (Horowitz 1979; Clark 1993: 121). Patristic writers, therefore, emphasise not the physical maleness of Christ, but rather Christ’s restoration of God’s image in all humanity (Norris 1976). There is no particular need for them to discuss differences between male and female humans, because they hold that the physical distinction between male and female is simply for reproduction: God foreknew that humans would fall from immortality and would need to reproduce. The soul inhabiting a weaker female body may have more difficulty keeping bodily desires under control, and may need the help of greater social precautions, but it is not itself female and does not suffer from distinctively female temptations. This point is made especially by the Cappadocians, who want to argue that women are just as capable of spiritual effort and success as men are – an argument which perhaps comes naturally to Basil, son of the formidable Emmelia, brother of Macrina, grandson of a lady who studied with Gregory Thaumatourgos in time of persecution.8 It should follow that men do not experience distinctively male temptations.
Although the soul was held not to be sexed, social perceptions of gender persisted in the characterisation of its qualities as male and female. Augustine, at his most allegorical, interprets ‘male and female created he them’ in terms of the masculine and feminine characteristics of the soul: ‘male and female, that is intellect and action, through whose copulation a spiritual offspring fills the earth, that is, subdues the flesh” (On Genesis against the Manichaeans 1.25.43, PL 34.194). Action, actio, is unexpectedly enterprising for a feminine quality, but this is executive action directed by the masculine intellect. Similarly, Augustine suggests why Adam greeted Eve as ‘bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh’: ‘bone from bones perhaps because of fortitude, flesh from flesh because of temperance, for these two virtues are thought to belong to the inferior part of the soul, which is ruled by rational judgement’ (Gen. Man. 2.13.18, PL 34.206). The grammatical gender of a word is not decisive: Augustine has virilis ratio, ‘manly reason’, controlling the desires of the soul (Gen. Man. 2.11.15, PL 34.204). But virilis is always a term of praise, connoting energy and mastery, just as muliebris, ‘womanly’, is always disparaging.
When a writer forgets that he is talking about humans in general, and talks instead in terms of the normative male human, he erases women from the text: but he also erases men. This is apparent in treatises on the creation which engage in elaborate praise of the works of God. There are surprisingly few accounts of the wonderful human body; perhaps it was a theme with potential for embarrassment. John Chrysostom does not discuss it in his Homilies on Genesis, and Gregory of Nyssa, in On the Making of Man, has only a general discussion of male and female, because he is preoccupied with the image of God in the soul and with division only for purposes of reproduction. Augustine’s Literal Interpretation of Genesis is concerned with the precise sense, spiritual and physical, in which the original human was male and female, 9 but not with descriptions of the male and female body. But Ambrose in his Hexaemeron, which is heavily indebted to Basil’s (now incomplete) work with the same title, does describe the amazing human body as the culmination of God’s creation. The description of the body is not gender-specific; it is perhaps a male body by omission of female breasts and lactation. When Ambrose’s description reaches the genitals, he avoids the problem by asking ‘What shall I say of the genitals, which from the veins in the region of the neck, through the kidneys and loins, receive the generating seed designed for the function and satisfaction of procreation?’ (Hexaemeron 6.9.73, CSEL 32.1 p.260; Horowitz 1979). Unfortunately, there is no answer to this rhetorical question. Ambrose continues ‘What of the duty of the feet?’, for his interest is not in the reproductive system, but in veins. ‘The generating seed’ is not decisive for a male body, because some medical writers, including Galen, thought that women also produce seed.10 But Ambrose is almost certainly assuming a male body with external genitalia, just as, a little earlier in the text, he assumes a male audience attracted by the beauty of a neighbour’s wife (Hexaemeron 6.8.50, CSEL 32.1 p.242). Yet his description of the body is no more illuminating about physical maleness than it is about physical femaleness.
In accounts of the Fall, it is the tendency to load the blame on Eve which makes Adam disappear from sight. Ambrose makes it explicit in On Paradise:
She took of its fruit, we are told, and ate it, and also gave some to her husband and they both ate. Omission is made, and rightly so, of the deception of Adam, since he fell by his wife’s fault and not because of his own (Ambrose, On Paradise 13.62, CSEL 32.1 p.322)
On Paradise is a heavily allegorising text, which follows Philo in interpreting Adam as reason and Eve as desire (see further Baer 1970; Harrison 1995). In the simpler discourse of his Homilies on Genesis, John Chrysostom has more to say about Adam (but still much less than about Eve). Adam’s sin is twice characterised as rhathumia, slackness.11 He is not allowed to put the blame on ‘the helpmate you gave me’, because he has allowed the proper order to be reversed (Homily 17.17–18). Adam, according to John Chrysostom, is the ‘first-formed’, the elder and superior, and ought to be in charge. Even attempts to share the blame leave us not much the wiser about Adam, as when Gregory Nazianzen, discussing the moral and spiritual equality of male and female, says ‘the woman sinned, and so did Adam. The serpent deceived them both: the one was not found to be weaker and the other stronger’ (Oration 37.7, PG 36.290).
Both the assumption that males are normative humans, and the assumption that there is no spiritually important difference between males and females, produce silence about men. But the now-classic techniques of women’s history can help: we have to look for men in the silences of the texts, and in opposition to what is said about women or about effeminate men. Clement is most informative about masculinity when he is denouncing effeminacy, and patristic texts are most informative when they discuss the unmaking of masculinity: that is, Christian asceticism as it applies to the male. Asceticism is the second major concern of patristic exegesis of Genesis 1–3. Christian ascetics affirmed the need for a return to Paradise: by renouncing marriage and procreation, and making their bodies immune to sexual desire, they could undo the effects of the Fall and live as the angels do, praising God without distraction. The obvious danger was they they would, like the Manichaeans, reject the human body as evil, regarding it not as God’s good (although fallen) creation, but as a corrupting environment for the soul and a device for entrapping other souls in bodies. This danger explains why later fourth-century exegesis does not allegorise away the bodies and the relationship of Adam and Eve.12
Sexual renunciation was not the only aspect of asceticism, but it was the most prominent. It was supported by a powerful analogy between the physical corruption of death and the physical corruption of sexual experience: the inherited discourse of sex presented the first sexual experience of women, in particular, as invasion and loss.13 Patristic treatises on virginity are more often addressed to women than to men, and modern opinions differ on whether this is because men like telling women what to do, or because women needed more convincing, or because it was a more drastic renunciation for a woman to abandon marriage and childbearing than it was for a man to renounce marriage and worldly status. Readers of these treatises in the late twentieth century have particularly noticed their insistence that ascetic women must transcend everything that makes them female – their physical weakness, their vulnerability to desire, and their ability to provoke desire in men – and will then achieve the spiritual status of maleness. What then is the spiritual condition of the ascetic male, who renounces not only male sexual desire, but also the wealth which gives him status and the power which prevents him from becoming an unmanly victim?
The inherited assumption was that the male is physically normative, that male biological characteristics are signs of superiority, and that moral qualities characterised as male are superior. But the image of God is in the soul, which is not sexed, and the soul needs both the traditionally male qualities of courage and ruling reason, and the traditionally female qualities of desire and receptivity in relation to God. Both sexes were told that they could be ‘manly’ as soldiers and athletes for God, and both sexes were encouraged to receive the seed of the Word and bear spiritual children in virginity (Harrison 1995). So female characteristics might be valued in an ascetic male. He could still manifest his ‘manliness’, his andreia or virtus, in fasting and endurance, and he could be urged to masculine competitiveness by writers who pointed out that women were often better at fasting, and that it was disgraceful for a man to let a woman beat him at renunciation. But male physical strength was no longer relevant. Single-sex ascetic lifestyles revealed that traditional gender roles were rarely necessary: women might not to be able to manage heavy digging or building work, but men could learn to cook and mend (see further Clark 1993: 104). These traditionally female tasks were a threat to masculinity if there were women available to do them. John Chrysostom scathingly described the ascetic New Man who shares a house with a celibate female partner, and becomes embarrassingly feminised (like a cowardly lion) by running her errands and chatting about wool-work.14 Traditionally male tasks were less easy to characterise. All women, whatever their social level, were liable to Eve’s penalty of painful childbearing, and to the cares of maintaining a house, and propagandists for the ascetic life pointed out that they would be liberated by celibacy. But most of the men who wrote, or read, treatises on asceticism shared Adam’s penalty, ‘in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread’, only in a metaphorical sense. Augustine thought that the metaphorical sense was the right one. Even the rich, he said, do not escape, for the ‘thorns and thistles’ that the earth will bear are ‘the stabs of involved questions, or else thoughts about providing for this life’ (Gen. Man. 2.20.30, PL 34.211). He was still arguing the point, with Julian of Eclanum, forty years later (Unfinished Work against Julian 6.27, PL 45.1566–75). But most writers downplay Adam’s hard labour in comparison with Eve’s, even though it could be argued that the renunciation of worldly status and of marriage removed most of the male administrative and political workload – unless, of course, the ascetic was forced to become a bishop.15
The physical superiority of the male was challenged by ascetic fasting practices. Ascetic men, like ascetic women, aimed to unsex the body, using techniques of drastic food reduction to make the body dry out. The standard medical theory was that surplus blood in women is either shed in menstruation, transformed into milk, or used to develop a foetus; in men it is refined into semen. So the object of fasting was not only to discipline the body, but to have no surplus left for reproduction and its associated desires. Ascetic men, like ascetic women, hoped neither to experience nor to stimulate sexual desire. There is more emphasis on the need for the female ascetic not to provoke desire: it was acknowledged (especially by Basil of Ancyra) that women do feel desire for men, but male writers inevitably offer the male gaze directed to women.16 It is difficult to tell what signals the male ascetic was expected to send or to avoid sending, except that his clothes had to declare humility instead of status (see further Clark 1995). A letter ascribed to Basil, and addressed to a lapsed monk, describes the fasting male body:
Piercing your body with rough sackcloth, and binding your loins with a stiff belt, you resolutely put pressure on your bones. Through your abstinence, your sides became hollow and flabby back to the spine. You refused to wear a soft binding. You collapsed your flanks from within like a gourd, forcing them to adhere to the area of the kidneys. Then, emptying your flesh of fat, you nobly dried out the channels of the hypogastric region, and by fasting compressed your stomach itself, so that you made your ribs, like the eaves of a house, cast a shadow over the place of your navel. So. with your whole body shrunken, you confessed God’s glory in the night hours, and with streams of tears you soaked and smoothed your beard (Basil. Letter 45, ed. Y. Courtonne 1957)
The emphasis is on spectacular physical modification (even of the beard), whereas the corresponding letter to a lapsed nun regrets her loss of:
dignified appearance, orderly conduct, simple clothing suitable for a virgin, beautiful blush of modesty, becoming pallor which blooms through self-control and vigils, and has a radiance more charming than any fresh complexion (Basil, Letter 46)
The ascetic female acquires a special beauty.17
What are the physical characteristics which the male ascetic must seek to transcend in order to unsex his body? Late antique medical writers usually accept the ‘one-sex’ model of the human body: that is, they think male and female human beings are made of the same basic stuff and have the same structure. The main difference is that in the male the reproductive system goes outward, in the female it goes inward.18 This, they believed, is one consequence of men’s being warmer than women. The extra heat, it was argued, also makes it possible for men to refine surplus blood into semen, and causes them to grow more facial and body hair. The medical writer Aretaeus associated semen with other male characteristics:
Semen, when alive, makes us men, hot, well set up, hairy, well voiced, spirited, strong in thought and action. Those in whom semen is not alive are shrivelled, weak, thin-voiced, hairless, beardless and effeminate: eunuchs show this. If a man is in control of his semen, he is strong, daring, valorous even against beasts: chaste athletes are a proof of this (Aretaeus, On acute and chronic diseases 4.5, CMG 2.71)
Loss of semen was thought to be debilitating. Galen challenges a belief that only the testicles generate semen. It is found, he says, in the spermatic veins and arteries, and if these are drained of semen by excessive sexual activity, they draw semen from other parts of the body by (in effect) osmosis. Semen is nourishment for blood vessels, so the whole body is weakened by this process; moreover, with the semen goes pneuma, vital heat, and there is ‘an addition of pleasure which can by itself dissolve the vital tone; people have died from excess of pleasure’ (Gal., On the Seed 1.14-16; CMG V 3.1). So athletes in training, and gladiators, abstained from sex, and some doctors argued that men who remained chaste were bigger, stronger and healthier than those who did not. Other doctors, including Galen, argued that seminal retention endangers health in men (Oribasius 6.37, CMG Vl.1.1 p.187–8). But there was a clear reason for sexual moderation, especially in public men who needed their surplus to fuel vocal exercises. Heat also explained why men have broader chests and deeper voices than women. Galen thought that the broad chest was associated with thumos, the aggressive or assertive spirit, and that narrowchested creatures were more cowardly.19 Assertion might turn into anger, which was the most obvious temptation for the powerful man, just as vanity, the wish to attract desire, was the most obvious temptation for women: but, to risk a big generalisation, Christian preaching is more concerned with male lust than male anger, whereas Graeco-Roman philosophy is more concerned with anger.
The male physical body, for an ascetic Christian, is considered chiefly in terms of its involuntary manifestations of sexual desires. Erection and seminal emission cannot be controlled by reason, and are proof that the body is not yet transformed to match the soul (Brakke 1995; Clark 1996a). Fasting will reduce sexual desire, and eventually remove the surplus which makes seminal emission possible; John Cassian held that emissions could be ended in six months by drastic reduction of food, sleep and fluid intake, combined with the right attitude of mind.20 The only legitimate use of erection and emission is for procreation within marriage, which the ascetic has renounced. In doing so he has lost the traditional sexual dominance of the male, and his traditional lordship of the household. He is compensated in that he is no longer dominated by sexual desire: as Basil of Ancyra put it, ‘the female is subordinate to the rule of the male, but the male is tamed by the pleasure of the female’ (PG 30.673). Yet the male virgin is a more puzzling figure than the female virgin. The hero of a second-century AD novel by Achilles Tatius says to the heroine ‘You will find that I have matched your virginity, if there be any virginity in men’ (Leukippe and Kleitophon 5.20; see further Goldhill 1995: 98). He means that he has resisted temptations to sexual intercourse. Is the criterion of male virginity only that the man has not penetrated a woman? What about other sexual objects, and is a monk virgin if he has suffered sexual abuse as a young novice, forced into the role of a woman?21 The standard metaphors of loss, violation and corruption apply less successfully to the male; and the metaphor of circumcision is used apparently without awareness that it is a specifically male physical sign of commitment to God. It is applied to God’s people as a whole because it foreshadows baptism, and Optatus even uses, against Donatist rebaptism, the argument that circumcision cannot be repeated without damage to health.22
The lack of male imagery of virginity, its preservation and its loss, becomes particularly striking in fourth-century exegesis of the Song of Songs. The Bride begins to be interpreted as the individual virgin rather than as the Church or the human soul. The image of the closed, intact virginal body, ‘a garden enclosed, a fountain sealed’, becomes central to Ambrose’s understanding of virginity, both in consecrated virgins and in Mary mother of Jesus.23 Jerome, in his efforts to ‘rewrite’ erotic desire as the desire of the virgin for God, can describe his protégée Eustochium as the ascetic bride, but uses for himself the image of the repentant Magdalen: burning with desire in the desert, ‘I threw myself at the feet of Jesus, watered them with tears, dried them with my hair, and I subdued my reluctant body with weeks of fasting.’24 He also appropriates an image of nuptial rape to describe a would-be celibate bridegroom contemplating suicide on his wedding night. Where other fourth-century bridegrooms are described as triumphant warriors giving the death-thrust, this young man cries verte in te gladium: ‘turn the sword on yourself’.25 Virginity, like spiritual childbearing, required men to become female.
The overwhelming range of male-authored patristic texts is less helpful than we might hope on what it was to be male. To put the central question in the familiar form ‘what difference did Christianity make to the discourse of masculinity?’ is to invite the now familiar response: for most people, very little; for a few, an immense difference. Feminist critique has brought clearly into view the continuity of Christian teaching with traditional Graeco-Roman androcentrism. Patriarchy was maintained in the family (see Harlow, Chapter 12 in this volume) and in the male church hierarchy. Change occurred in attempts to restrict male sexual freedom, and in willingness to support women who opted for celibacy, but women were still excluded from any position of authority, including teaching, and were still harangued about their vanity, their extravagance, and their provocation of desire. Women who renounced all female vices were praised for being male. Yet Christianity supplied a new tool-kit. if that is not too loaded an expression, for the deconstruction of masculinity. This was perhaps a more painful experience for men than the corresponding deconstruction of femininity was for women. Women could be seen, and could think of themselves, as transcending something intrinsically shameful: physical femaleness and the weakness and subordination which it implied. Men were required to renounce power, or at best to reinterpret it as power over hostile spirits. They had to acknowledge physical maleness, which had been a manifestation of dominance and superiority, as the most persistent witness to their distance from God: the conflict between flesh and spirit was most sharply apparent in the bodies of men.
1 Castelli 1990, 1992; for a wide-ranging account of spiritual women, see Cloke 1995.
2 This is the most accessible Greek text, but the edition by Harl 1960 should be used for detailed work.
3 Paedagogus 3.11, PG 8.635; for more beards which make a statement, see Gleason 1986.
4 Brown 1992; Gleason 1986, 1990, 1995; Barton 1994 for diagnosis by physiognomy.
5 Gen. Man. 1.17.27, PL 34.186. In Confessions 3.7.12 (CCL 27.33) the challenge refers to ‘hair and nails’, which are subject to growth and loss.
6 So, too optimistically, Clark 1993: 122.
7 Homily 8 on Genesis 1 10, PG 53.74. Hill 1985: 13 documents Chrysostom’s use of anthropos.
8 Harrison 1990; but see Rousseau 1994: 3–26 for caution about deductions from Basil’s family.
9 I have discussed this further in Clark, forthcoming.
10 Clark 1993: 72–3; add to the references there Galen On the Use of Parts 14 (ed. G. Helmreich, 1907) and On the Seed book 2 (CMG V 3.1); see also Harlow, Chapter 12 in this volume.
11 Homilies on Genesis 16.13 (PG 53.130), 17.18 (PG 53.180). Hill 1985 renders the first as ‘indifference’ and the second as ‘inadvertence’.
12 Clark 1986b: 358–3; on this late fourth-century debate, see further Hunter 1987, 1989, 1993; Castelli 1995.
13 I have discussed this further in Clark 1996b; see also van Eijk 1972.
14 Against men who cohabit with virgins 11, PG 47.10. See Clark 1979: 25, n. 37, for more evidence of John Chrysostom’s anxiety about ‘becoming a woman’; and, for the viciousness of invective against the unmanly, Long 1996: 107–34.
15 Julian of Eclanum, according to Augustine, Unfinished Work against Julian 6.27, made the point that male labour is variable.
16 On Basil of Ancyra, see Elm 1994: 113–24. On the effect of fasting on the body see also Harlow, Chapter 12 in this volume.
17 On transformed perceptions of the ascetic body, see Miller 1994.
18 For the ‘one-sex’ and ‘two-sex’ models, see Laqueur 1990 and Harlow, Chapter 12 in this volume; for late antique texts, see Clark 1993: 72.
19 Galen On the Temperaments 2.6 (ed. G. Helmreich, 1907). On the male voice as an effect of pneuma, see Gleason 1995: 82–102.
20 Cassian, Collations 12.15, CSEL 13.2 p.358. More recent testimony to the rapid effect of fasting: ‘experience had demonstrated alarmingly that after just two weeks on starvation rations, sexual desire vanished’. This was the experience of Norman Fruman, prisoner of war in Stalag 7A, who was then aged 20 (TLS 5 May 1995: 6).
21 See Festugierc 1959: 197–210 for this (sometimes) acknowledged problem.
22 Optalus, Against the Donatists 5.1, CSEL 26.119–20.1 hope to explore ‘spiritual circumcision’ in another paper.
23 See further, on desire and virginity, Cameron 1994; and for Ambrose on virginity, see Clark 1996a.
24 Jerome, Letter 22.7.3, CSEL 54.153; I am indebted to Miller 1993.
25 Life of Malchus 6 (PL 23.58–9). I owe the reference to Trout 1994: 68. For battle-imagery used as sexual imagery, see further Clark 1996a.