My work examines constructions of social identity by relating traditions of Christian belief and practice to work in theory, history, philosophy, and the social sciences. In what follows, I use my monograph, Naked and Unashamed: Rethinking Sex and Politics with Augustine, to describe five ways that my work interrogates the Christian theological construction of moral identities.
First, it contextualizes Christian beliefs and practices within the social, political, cultural, and scientific systems of their time. Naked and Unashamed reinterprets Augustine’s doctrines of God, sin, Christ, and salvation through the late-antique gendered assumptions inherent in the distinction between household (domus) and political sphere (civitas). Then, it juxtaposes the recast doctrines with Augustine’s career-spanning involvement in debates about the theological status of the household. In order to do this, it draws on ancient history, classics, feminist interpretations of late antiquity, political theory, queer theory, and cultural studies.
Second, contextualizing leads me to identify second-order theoretical assumptions that often go unnoticed. The gendered assumptions in the Roman household and political spheres expose the otherwise hidden figure of the elite Roman man, the “unmarked subject” whose dominating presence—implicit, pervasive, and therefore easy to miss—determined the logic of both domus and civitas. Augustine forged his influential views about sex and politics against and through this figure.
Third, historical and theoretical description facilitates more general interpretive judgments. In this case, Jesus critiques elite Roman masculinity; on the cross, Christ’s naked body exposes the incoherence of the Roman social and political system designed around an ideology of (fragile) masculinity. He also and serves as an alternative ideal of human agency, offering himself as an alternative to the available sexual and political identities of his time. For through his death and resurrection, he redefines empowerment (potestas) around courageous vulnerability (humilitas). Because of the Roman man’s place in the household, Augustine’s Christology unites his political theology and his sexual ethics, which are typically treated separately.
Fourth, my work relates reflexively and constructively to Christian traditions. The interpretive judgments create a productive gap in the discursive tradition: if the claim about Augustine’s Christology is true, then the traditions that depend on Augustine’s influence have missed something. They may have mistakenly interpreted a text—or a whole doctrine. Most ecclesial and theological debates about sexual ethics and political engagement in Augustine presume one must accept, reject, or modify Augustine’s views on sex, family, and politics. My interpretation of Augustine’s Christology deconstructs this approach by rendering implausible the notion of a timeless and universal Christian politics or ethics of the family or sex rooted in Augustine’s influence. Constructively, it can open new avenues of inquiry within the tradition: what are the contours, effects, and implications of Augustine’s response to elite Roman masculinity? What does our misinterpretation mean for how we think about sex? What possibilities might it open?
Fifth, I pursue the moral and theological questions that I raise. Some questions are internally theological; they have to do with the implications for debates about the relationship of Church teaching to society, politics, the family, and marriage. Others are public; they concern questions about privacy, personal identity, gender, race, and politics. Still others are academically interdisciplinary; my reading extends, deepens, clarifies, and sometimes refutes a set of suggestive and influential scholarly narratives in which Augustine “invents” the individual, private self that is presupposed by both liberal democracy and global capitalism.
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I have two books planned in the future, each of which builds on trajectory I set in Naked and Unashamed. Both follow similar methods.
First, I plan a monograph that probes the relationship between Christian doctrinal conceptions of “natural” and “normal,” with special attention to their rhetorical construction and deployment. This topic has become especially relevant to Christian communities in light of rapid, socio-political changes occurring globally. The recent Synod on Marriage and the Family serves as one example of how coming to terms with these changes reveals an ambiguity, present in nearly every significant aspect of Church social teaching, about the appropriate criteria for classifying one thing nature and another thing artifice. Christian communities have yet to reckon with the full range of the intellectual resources available to it from cultural and social anthropology, sociobiology, philosophy, history, and theory.
I use Augustine’s Christology to probe the relationship between Christian doctrinal conceptions of “natural” and “normal.” My method reflects the aspects of my approach that I have outlined above. The argument proceeds in two sections.
I pursue a theoretically informed, historical account of the theological-rhetorical constructions of normalizing power by critically analyzing two formative moments in the history of the Augustinian tradition: the medieval, Aristotelian reception of Augustine’s thought, and debates about the relationship between natural and supernatural were decisively important in the development of twentieth century Catholic theology. Despite the doctrinal importance of questions related to nature and grace or to natural and supernatural, the relationship between natural and normal has been doctrinally under-theorized. One significant family of moral arguments deploys a Thomistic concept of “nature” to establish moral claims. This family of approaches often enlarges the range of moral and scientific interlocutors possible for the tradition. In its official uses, however, it often discursively conflates natural and normal, reifying nature and closing down inquiry. Such uses function rhetorically, conceptually, and politically to effect what Pope Francis has called the modern “ideological colonization” that “normalizes” and controls human bodies. In light of on questions about race, gender, ethnicity, and cultural difference, I use recent works in biopolitics and anthropology and critiques of “normativity” in gender studies alongside the theology of Henri de Lubac and the writings of James Baldwin to reframe the medieval and modern claims about nature and grace through their relationship to Christianity’s contribution to “normalizing” trends.
Then, in light of these concerns, I pursue an alternative account of nature that begins with Augustine’s intriguing anthropological and Christological suggestion that one needs to have a definition of “homo” in order to understand the Gospels’ claim that Jesus was a man. Unlike its Thomistic counterparts, this account of nature does not require reference to the supernatural. It therefore avoids the problem of reification. It avoids normalizing because “nature” is intrinsically plastic, open to a divine influence that is always nearer to it than it is to itself. The relevant moral question is therefore not whether something violates “nature” by introducing something “unnatural” or “artificial,” but whether and how the exercise of power participates in divine humility. Augustine’s line of thought, is strikingly consistent with contemporary theologies that emphasize the importance of contextual and communal experiences, what James Cone calls, “an anthropocentric point of departure in theology.”[1] This allows me to restate and revise a “traditional” view of nature that takes seriously the contexts, experiences, and testimonies of the marginalized. Through it, I return with new eyes to the conflation of normative and descriptive at the crux of contemporary moral debates and chart alternative views of Christianity’s possible relationships to embodiment, technology, government, and power.
I have already done a significant amount of work toward this project and have engaged many of the questions I hope to bring together. These questions relate to interpretation of Augustine, engagement with twentieth century theologians about nature and grace, and methodological clarification in contemporary theology and ethics. They involve reference to a wide range of interdisciplinary and theological interlocutors. In addition to a detailed conceptual examination of Augustine’s use of “natura” in my doctoral dissertation, I have also published three articles related to the themes I will explore in top peer-reviewed journals. “Natural Law and the Sin against Nature,” published in the Journal of Religious Ethics, places Augustine, Aquinas, Judith Butler, Herbert McCabe, and ordinary language philosophy in dialogue with natural law theory and nuptial theology. It provides a theological account of Augustinian sexual “mediocrity” in light of natural law theory. In “The Politics of Desire,” published in Modern Theology, Anselm, Augustine, Aquinas, Barth, Balthasar, de Lubac, Milbank, Mignolo, and Huetter dispute the political and social implications of late twentieth century debates about nature and grace, especially in light of post-colonial critiques of empire. A complementary article, “Politics and the Supernatural: A Rational Reconstruction of de Lubac’s Augustinianism,” currently under revision, juxtaposes Henri de Lubac’s views on nature and grace with his early political writings. In two other articles, Hauerwas, MacIntyre, Barth, Aquinas, Wolterstorff, Wittgenstein, and neo-Augustinian theologians enter into conversation about the social implications of theological method. “How I Think Hauerwas Thinks about Theology,” published in the Scottish Journal of Theology, critically reassesses the philosophical sources that inform Hauerwas’s method. I have also revised and resubmitted my paper “Sorting the Augustinians,” in which I analyze questions of method in recent political appropriations of Augustine’s thought.
My most recent articles and presentations further contribute to this project by examining the theological implications of bio-psychological claims about emotions. For example, in my recent essay, “The Word Was Always Flesh,” published in Syndicate Theology this summer, compares James Baldwin, Augustine, Foucault, Aquinas, and Mark Jordan in order to explore how shame, compassion, and the emotions shape Christian claims about normal and natural.
Second, I have a contract to co-author a book on religion and biology with Angela Bauer, a reproductive endocrinologist, that integrates Christian theology, biology, and social and cultural anthropology to address moral and descriptive questions about sex, gender, and sexuality raised by research in sociobiology. We do so by approaching both theology and biology as media of social reproduction. Scientific description of sexual difference is already normatively loaded. Theologically-based norms make empirical assumptions. We relate three definitions of “nature” to traditional theological claims about the nature and meaning of sexual difference and then show how scientific and social-scientific observations related to intersex and transgender persons complicate the questions the traditions produce. James Baldwin saw in the construction of black or queer identity the adoption of an “American ideal of manhood” that feared self-confrontation. In response, it created intellectual categories and asked questions that helped it avoid the self-reckoning it feared. I think that theology has done something like this, and for similar reasons, and I think that empirical sciences can help theology engage in a necessary and salutary self-reckoning; they can provide a powerful, additional check on theological tendencies to avoid self-confrontation. By looking at the processes of typical sexual development and the various forms and frequencies of intersex condition, here, the sciences help us to step back and ask, “why would one find this problematic? What does it say about a theological framework that treats this as a problem to be solved?” Because empirical sciences help to demonstrate how traditional moral descriptions and the questions they raise illegitimately serve modern identity carrying and establishing functions, they help us to refuse the givenness of typical moral questions. The sciences can therefore help prod theologians to re-think their questions and the classification schemes that produce them.
[1] James H. Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, Twentieth Anniversary Edition (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1990), 18.
Sean C. Larsen 