The Argument
The fig leaf covers sexual shame. Empire covers political shame. For Augustine, both cover the dangerous and absurd impotence lurking beneath Rome’s glories. Everything about the Roman imperial superstructure, from the customs of household intimacies to the glories of Roman honor, served the figure of the elite Roman man. Though mostly unspoken, this figure haunts Augustine’s corpus, for the social and political system Augustine critiqued was designed to protect his fragile identity. On the cross, Christ’s naked body exposes its incoherence.
This book examines Augustine’s political theology and sexual ethics as a critique of the elite male identity at the heart of Roman public and private life. Augustine portrays Jesus as a different kind of man, who redefines masculine empowerment (potestas) around the Roman virtue of humility (humilitas). As a result, attention to Jesus helped Augustine write an alternative to the available sexual and political scripts of his time. As a version of the public/private distinction, the distinction between household (domus) and politics (civitas) is one way to describe dominant late-antique social structures, domestic arrangements, and political ideologies. When the elite Roman man is analyzed through this distinction, the political and sexual implications of Augustine’s thought bleed into one another; Augustine’s criticisms of Roman pretensions to glory entangle with his notoriously negative portrayal of sex.
In addition to providing a novel interpretion of Augustine, engaging the political/domestic distinction in Augustine’s theology sheds light on a set of suggestive and influential scholarly narratives in which Augustine “invents” the individual, privatized subject presupposed by both liberal democracy and global capitalism. Each of these narratives attributes to Augustine’s influence a version of the modern public/private distinction that makes the separations necessary for the emergence of the secular liberal state: inside from outside, personal from public, individual from social, economic from political, and male from female. Many who tell this story find the implications of these divisions problematic. Few engage Augustine constructively to resist them. The specialists in religious ethics who do constructively interpret Augustine rarely acknowledge how entangled his thought about sex and politics must be if a single political-sexual lexicon regulated late antique discourse. Isolating one from the other distorts the interpretation of both.
The particular but not parochial scholarly debates about Augustine’s thought therefore frame this book’s revisionist interpretation in order to highlight its broader relevance. The argument makes five distinct scholarly contributions.
- It offers a novel, sustained interpretation Augustine’s theology through the distinction between domus and civitas.
- It identifies a previously unthematized topic of scholarly interest by organizing the narratives about Augustine’s role in the invention of modern subjects explicitly around the public/private distinction. It then uses this theme to reorient recent work in political and sexual ethics.
- By explicating how Augustine’s thought relates to the public/private distinction on its own terms, the book extends, deepens, clarifies, and sometimes refutes the scholarly narratives about his influence on the emergence of modern subjects and states.
- The proposal that Augustine’s thought can be read as a critique of elite Roman masculinity intervenes in debates about Christian political engagement and sexual norms that typically render the distinction between domus and civitas Focusing on the entanglement of sex and politics opens up new approaches to both subjects in religious ethics and Catholic social thought.
- The core of the book is an account of Augustine’s thought that takes for granted the political significance of personal, sexed bodies. On such an interpretation, personal relationships are always already “political,” inside and outside constitute one another, and the individual learns who she is from the group that makes her. In order to emphasize the importance of shame for interpreting Augustine’s politics, the argument draws on a variety of literatures, including psychology, classics, ancient history, cultural anthropology, and queer studies. This constructive account sheds a new and counterintuitive light on the ethical and historical significance of Augustine’s thought for politics, sex, and modern subjectivity.
Contents
Preface and Introduction:
The introduction sets the book’s argument about Augustine’s theology within two scholarly fields. After outlining an influential, broadly interdisciplinary story about emergence of the public/private distinction and its social, political, religious, and cultural implications, it relates conversations about Augustinian political and sexual ethics to this story.
Chapter 1: Naked and Sexed: The Outer Household
This chapter Augustine’s doctrine of creation depends lexically and metaphorically on the distinction between domus and civitas. Augustine models the human race after a late-antique Roman household (domus). In the domus, the paterfamilias, the household head, exercises power (potestas) to ensure harmony (concordia) at the household’s various levels: he maintains a relationship of affinity (adfinitas) with his wife, secures the obedience and piety (obedentia and pietas) of his children and his slaves, and ensures the economic productivity of his estates. Augustine rewrites the story of the household from the beginning in order to ground a normative account of future sexual and political relationships. In that narrative, God the creator, the heavenly paterfamilias, innovates by placing Adam, the father of the human family, at the head of a single fleshly hierarchy in order to further display God the Father’s supreme political and domestic competence, ensuring the political harmony of the human community. Because all people descend from a single couple, human conjugal relations signify more than the extension of the human species in time and space. Sexual difference inscribes the social and political intimacy of the human household onto our flesh.
Chapter 2: Naked and Sexed: The Inner Household
This chapter argues that the theological anthropology in On the Trinity and City of God extends a Ciceronian metaphor that layers the logic of the hierarchical domus onto the “interior” of each individual. Each reasonable soul (anima) is its own mini-household, consisting of a male mind (mens) which contemplates God and a female soul (animus) which reasons about practical matters. The interior couple’s concordia produces good works when the practical reason (knowledge; scientia) submits to the contemplative reason (wisdom; sapientia) and the contemplative reason submits to God. Potestas manifests itself outwardly in household harmony and inwardly in reasoned self-mastery. Inner self-mastery makes outer competence possible, and outer competence displays a character that values justice. This metaphorical extension of the household logic cements the bond between domestic and political relationships. In the massive and decentralized Roman Empire, the stability of civic life depended on the personal trustworthiness of those with public responsibilities. A good paterfamilias who displayed inner strength through outer competence showed himself strong enough to choose the common good over his private advantage. Household mismanagement, alternatively, displayed lack of self-control and thus personal instability.
Chapter 3: Naked and Ashamed
This chapter argues that On the Trinity and City of God portray Adam’s fall as his incompetent headship of the human family. Adam’s sin is his disobedient choice of private goods (potestas) over the common good (justitia). The inner paterfamilias, the rational mind, lost self-control (im-potestas) and was enslaved to the passions. The outer paterfamilias lost control over the symbol and source of his manhood. The shame of this impotence claims as its icon the unruly male member. What were once genitalia, the seed-producing images of God the Father’s fertility, have become pudenda, the shame (pudor) of men, moving when when men don’t try to move them and, worse, failing to move in accordance with desire. The socio-political implications of this impotence are vast, for it produced internal, domestic, and political discord for all subsequent generations. Adam became obsessed with hiding all signs of his impotence, constructing a social order meant to cover male impotence with outward signs of dominance and glory. Only a deep and enduring insecurity, a fear of shame’s exposure that cannot tolerate the vulnerability of humilitas, can motivate the weaving of such an order. The shame made Adam a bully, guaranteeing that he would relate discordantly to himself, coercively to his subordinates, and violently to his wife. This point about Adam’s genitals is the neglected interpretive key to interpreting the nature of Augustine’s political imperfectionism. The social logic of all subsequent earthly cities, which repeat the original pathology by trying and ultimately failing to cover the limp and unpredictable with strength and impenetrability.
Chapter 4: Crucified Naked
This chapter argues that Augustine’s account of salvation directly critiques Roman masculinity by extending and revising the distinction between household and city. Jesus and the devil stand for two rival, ideal types of Roman men vying to demonstrate their competence to unite the human household in a single political entity. The devil is the ideal type of the bullying domination that animated the Roman social-political system. Blindly insecure, he knows nothing but the compulsion to compensate for what he lacks. From that weakness, he pursues his own advantage to the detriment of justice in order to extend his deceitful dominion. Augustine’s doctrine of God’s omni-potestas enables him to contrast the devil’s conventional and insecure “manhood,” which pursued potestas above all, to Christ’s new sort of manhood, in which potestas depends on vulnerability (humilitas) in pursuit of justitia. For loving, merciful compassion (caritas) animates reality and makes a just vulnerability or a vulnerable justice a sign of courage and empowerment. By theologically re-narrating the Roman virtue humilitas, Augustine imagines Christ as the man who enacts a vulnerability so complete from an empowerment so sufficient that only an immediate, continuous flow of divine strength could make it intelligible. Christ’s seamless performance of the humility of God restored Adam’s headship and our humanity by pursuing the common good with the single-minded obedience and piety of a son. The devil’s almost comical need to maintain control above all made him unable to recognize Christ’s divine competence—and the vulnerability of its offer. Because patient and humble pursuit of justice, not coercive domination, would evidence divine strength, Jesus could ironically trick the Devil into confusing his naked vulnerability for a show of weakness. The bully’s victory secured his defeat, for killing Jesus offset and exposed the impotence and insecurity of the Devil’s conventional and insecure dominance. Jesus played the nonstrategic fool whose justice made him competent to manage the human household.
Chapter 5: Rethinking Sex and Politics
This chapter shows how Augustine’s critique of elite Roman masculinity frames his intervention into intra-Christian debates about marriage. The failure of the Devil’s mode of dominance undermined all its imitators, especially the version of the elite Roman masculine ideal that the alternative Christian interpretations of the socio-political superstructure on offer took for granted. By pulling together the conversations about sex and politics, this chapter sheds light on both and shows why constructive scholarship should not neglect one for the other. The “civic” and “separatist” positions on offer in the marriage debates served as proxies for two broader views about the relationship between church and society in the post-Constantinian Roman Empire. Jovinian’s “civic” theology represented the light baptism of the Roman household. It tinkered with the imperial project of masculine subject-formation, but ultimately left the shame at its core intact. Jerome’s “separatist” theology contentiously re-asserted the ideal image of the prideful, impenetrable Roman man, but this time as the prideful, impenetrable ascetic. Augustine thought the Jovinianist position an unacceptable accommodation to the status quo, and he associated Jerome’s view with the superbia that underwrites the imperial project. Ultimately, they take the Roman masculine ideal too seriously. They are too modest—just tinkering with a system that needed to be deconstructed and saved. The civic position tries too earnestly to appeal to cultural elites, but it makes no sense to try to wash the devil’s clothing with baptismal water. Simple separatist renunciation mirrors the civic position. Such ascetic flesh cannot quite bring itself to stand completely naked: it adorns itself with the pride it tries to renounce. Because of this, both separatist and civic positions underestimate the effect of Christ’s work.
Chapter 6: Naked and Unashamed
This chapter explores how Augustine’s account of human agency charts an alternative to the separatist and civic positions on marriage. Augustine neither renounces nor baptizes Roman masculinity, but instead relativizes the Roman man and any account of sexual difference that presumes anything like it. His account of human agency cannot therefore be simply contrasted to the others. Christ’s defeat of the devil revises the logic of the human household by complicating (with varying degrees of success) the account of human agency the social-political system took for granted. Augustine uses two, complementary images to depict the restored political-sexual agency effected by Jesus. First, he pictures transparent but still-gendered bodies—bodies that are naked and unashamed. Human bodies can only be transparent when they are maximally active. But without the need for procreation or marriage, no relationship of husband-wife adfinitas is imaginable. Without the structure of the household, it is impossible to understand what it would mean for sexual difference to be hierarchically ordered among maximally empowered human bodies. This eternal transparency Augustine imagines depends on a force of the Spirit’s empowerment that remains inaccessible to us. As opposed to the narratives that make Augustine the source of the inner private self, the upshot of this image is that the inner self must be primarily public. Second, Augustine suggests that the Holy Virgins and the martyrs most closely approximate Christ’s alternative form of elite masculinity and therefore most clearly anticipate the Spirit-empowered future. The Virgin Mary, the culmination of Virgins and Martyrs, most clearly exemplifies the mischievous, subversive, witty vulnerability of Christ. Her nakedness ridicules sin’s absurdity and proleptically embodies the new possibilities for bodies that will one day be naked. Because she is so close to Christ’s work, however, she tells us little about gender, for her style of being like Jesus is vanishingly excellent. David Halperin’s account of “camp” helps to interpret the playfulness that the virgins manifest. From a complementary perspective, broad-based community organizing helps make sense of the mischievous and even playful vulnerability possible for bodies that will one day be naked and unashamed.
Conclusion: With Augustine, Against Augustine
Nothing that Augustine wrote about gender escaped the fundamentally hierarchical framework of the ancient interpretation he adopted. No reading of his thought can make it consistent with feminism, even if he was a “patristic feminist.” To critique or to save Augustine misses the point. Instead, because the account of human politics that emerges takes the imperfectability of sexual and political relationships for granted, it cannot be simply contrasted to either separatist or civic positions on marriage. The cumulative effect of this argument therefore makes it very difficult to take Augustine’s account of Christ seriously without also adopting his agnosticism about both politics and sex. Theologically, it makes more sense to follow this agnosticism, which with sex may even become apophaticism, not his view that slavery is inevitable, that contraception is immoral, that torture, execution, or war are “necessities,” or that women are subordinate to men. This decenters normative interpretations of Augustine and proposes this agnosticism or apophatic interpretation of gender and politics as the constructive starting point for thinking through both. There is probably no constructive Augustinian view of gender or sex, and there is no more timeless, Augustinian Christian political system than there is a timeless, Augustinian vision of the family, masculinity, or femininity. Despite the agnosticism of Augustine’s sexual imperfectionism, it is still possible to make judgments about better and worse ways of living and loving that depend on other aspects of his thought (his views of nature and angelic agency, his Christology, or his Mariology).
Sean C. Larsen 