The Body and Desire

Gregory of Nyssa's Ascetical Theology

Raphael A. Cadenhead

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780520970106
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Ancient Religion

Although the reception of the Eastern Father Gregory of Nyssa has varied over the centuries, the past few decades have witnessed a profound awakening of interest in his thought. The Body and Desire sets out to retrieve the full range of Gregory'sthinking on the challenges of the ascetic life by examining within the context of his theological commitments his evolving attitudes on what we now call gender, sex, and sexuality. Exploring Gregory's understanding of the importance of bodily and spiritual maturation for the practices of contemplation and virtue, Raphael A. Cadenhead recovers the vital relevance of this vision of transformation for contemporary ethical discourse.

PART ONE

The Early Phase, 371–September 378

The Integrative Significance of the Body in the Life of Virtue

OUR DISCUSSIONS OF THE EARLY PHASE of Gregory’s literary career will be focused, for the main part, on the much-contested meanings of marriage and virginity in Gregory’s very first writing, the De virginitate. This is partly because of the De virginitate’s uniqueness within the pagan and Christian worlds, and partly because it represents the theological touchstone, for Gregory, of a distinctive set of reflections on the body and desire. After I have headed off significant misinterpretations of the De virginitate, I find myself returning to this early treatise when discussing other ascetic themes, otherwise not ostensibly related to that of erotic transformation. As will become clear, our discussion of the body and desire would be incomplete if we focused exclusively on sexual renunciation. Doing so would close us off to the richness of Gregory’s integrationist ethic, in which the various bodily disciplines of the ascetic life are reciprocally interdependent.

Part One will be structured in the following way. First, I shall discuss the De virginitate and its teaching on marriage and virginity, and explain why, for Gregory, the life of virginity is intended to supersede the chaste pederasty elaborated in Plato’s writings. Second, I shall situate Gregory’s attitudes toward sexual desire within the wider context of his reflections on bodily vices and virtues. Third, as a postscript to Part One and a transition to Part Two, I shall adumbrate Gregory’s emerging theory of desire in counterpoint with these foregoing areas of reflection.

1

Marriage, Celibacy, and Pederasty

MARRIAGE AND CELIBACY

Why Is Marriage Problematic?

The comparative worth of marriage and virginity in Gregory’s De virginitate is a highly contested area of discussion.¹ Mark Hart’s thesis that Gregory’s descriptions of the trials of marriage are ironic has been particularly influential. For Hart, “marriage” and “virginity” must not be taken literally. The former signifies a life of “passionate attachment” to material pleasures, whereas the latter represents a life of “nonattachment” and thus undivided devotion to God.² As such, physical marriage is compatible with the life of contemplation as long as spouses have virginal desires for God. Hart goes so far as claiming that the conjugal life can bear a “greater resemblance to divine life than celibacy in its role as benefactor and provider for the community and its willingness to assume bodily burdens.”³

Without reproducing all the arguments that inveigh against Hart’s reading of the De virginitate, I wish here to make two exegetical observations that call his thesis into question. First, Gregory’s remarks at the start of chapter XVIII—“Therefore, let what has been said here by the Lord [‘Be wise as serpents and guileless as doves’ (Matthew 10:16; Luke 10:3)] be the conviction in the life of everyone, especially among those who are approaching God through virginity” (De virginitate XVIII:1:1–3; emphasis mine)⁴—indicate that there is a specific subset of Christians who have embraced physical virginity. Virginity is not, therefore, so capacious in its application that it includes anyone who practices detachment from material pleasure. Second, I believe Hart misreads a crucial passage from the De virginitate (IV:1:8–17) to support his thesis that marriage is a “metaphor for passionate attachment in general,” just as virginity supposedly refers to “a general attitude of nonattachment possible also in marriage.”⁵ A close reading of the text reveals that Gregory is not identifying marriage with “human evils . . . greed, envy, anger, hatred, the desire for empty fame, and all such things,” but placing marriage alongside these other forms of worldliness.

The mistake Hart makes is to overstate Gregory’s insistence on the wider demands of moral purity in the life of virginity. Hart is not wrong to emphasize the importance of this theme for Gregory. Even if “eagerness for virginity” is “the foundation for the life of virtue,” the ultimate goal is to ensure that “all the products of virtue” are built upon it (De virginitate XVIII:1:27–29; emphasis mine).⁶ Physical virginity is not, in other words, an end in itself, but the means of accruing the virtues in toto: “it is fitting for the one aiming at the great goal of virginity to be uniformly virtuous and for purity to be evident in every aspect of his life” (De virginitate XVIII:5:9–12).⁷ For Gregory, moral purity is more than just bodily continence—but this is not to say, as Hart does, that virginity no longer refers to lifelong sexual abstinence and can be applied to married Christians. To claim, as Hart does, that virginity and marriage are metaphors undermines the specific demands and difficulties associated separately with marriage and celibacy in the De virginitate. This is an area of discussion to which I now turn.

The Moral Challenges of Marriage

As noted in the prelude, Gregory admits to not having fulfilled the goals of virginity in its classic sense. No sooner does he mention his inadequacy in this regard than he discusses the sundry calamities that assail marriage. So what is problematic about marriage? Whereas Peter Brown thinks that Gregory’s concerns are primarily linked to his preoccupation with death,⁸ I think that this is one concern among many. It is equally false to claim that Gregory’s espousal of virginity is an avoidance of family life, in which there is “one darn thing after another” and thus no time or space for “contemplative quiet.”⁹ In this section, I shall enumerate the full range of moral and spiritual challenges of marriage and then show that for Gregory, these challenges are not totally insurmountable.

One of Gregory’s worries about the conjugal life relates to the transience of human life, which constantly threatens the companionship of spouses. Unlike Clement of Alexandria,¹⁰ Gregory sees companionship, not procreation, as the principal purpose of marriage: “Truly, what is chiefly [to kephalaion] sought after in marriage is the joy of living with someone [symbiōsis]” (De virginitate III:2:7–9).¹¹ It was Musonius Rufus (ca. 30–62 C.E.), the Roman Stoic philosopher of the first century, who argued that “perfect companionship [symbiōsis] and mutual love of husband and wife” are the primary goals of marriage. He reasoned that children could be born from “any other sexual union, just as in the case of animals” (Discourses XIIIa).¹² However for Gregory, whilst symbiōsis is a source of joy in marriage, it is also problematic. Whoever seeks security and stability in human symbiōsis, rather than the “incorruptible Bridegroom” (De virginitate III:8:19),¹³ will be disappointed. A man’s wife may die, resulting in turmoil and discontent (De virginitate III:6:19–8:13).¹⁴ If one simply concedes the possibility of such misfortune, one cannot even look at the face of one’s spouse without feeling dread for the future (De virginitate III:3:24–41).¹⁵ Children may also die in tragic circumstances (De virginitate III:5:3–28).¹⁶ Confronted with the transience of life, Gregory believes that one’s only hope is in the life hereafter. At least there, the torments of the body will be overcome, and widowhood (chēreia) and orphanhood (orphania) will be no more (De mortuis, GNO IX/1 37:5–6). The life of virginity, by contrast, is immune to all these tragedies (De virginitate III:8:17–25).¹⁷

The second difficulty with marriage is that it competes with God for one’s time and energy. At one point, Gregory asks, “How is it possible for anyone passionately in love [prospathein] with anything in this life finally to achieve what he longs for [pothein]?” (De virginitate IV:7:12–13).¹⁸ Later he asserts, “we should not squander our power of desire [epithymia] on any of the things that distract us and are considered beautiful” (De virginitate XI:3:2–4).¹⁹ The problem is that everything but God is mutable (De virginitate IV:8:1–4),²⁰ including one’s spouse. The desire for mutable things takes our attentions away from loving God. When one’s concerns for mutable things gain precedence in one’s life, “the measure of desire”—as Gregory later remarks in the In Basilium fratrem—is “reduced from God to material things” (11:23–25).

Michel Aubineau argues that Gregory’s discussion of the tragedies of marriage is a sophistic rhetorical strategy. But Michel René Barn...