A01=Kathy L. Gaca
apostle paul
asceticism
Author_Kathy L. Gaca
bible
Category=JBCC9
Category=NK
Category=QDTQ
Category=QRA
Category=QRAX
Category=QRM
Category=QRVG
christianity
christians clement
church history
desire
early church
epiphanes
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
erotics
ethics
feminist theory
fornication
gender
greek bible
greek culture
innocence
moral paradigm
passion
phill of alexandria
philo of alexandria
philosophy
plato
political philosophy
purity
religion
religious pluralism
septuagint
sexual austerity
sexual morality
sexual reform
sexual renunciation
sexual restrictions
sexuality
sin
stoics
tatian
theology
women
women and religion
Product details
- ISBN 9780520235991
- Weight: 680g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 04 Aug 2003
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
This provocative work provides a radical reassessment of the emergence and nature of Christian sexual morality, the dominant moral paradigm in Western society since late antiquity. While many scholars, including Michel Foucault, have found the basis of early Christian sexual restrictions in Greek ethics and political philosophy, Kathy L. Gaca demonstrates on compelling new grounds that it is misguided to regard Greek ethics and political theory--with their proposed reforms of eroticism, the family, and civic order--as the foundation of Christian sexual austerity. Rather, in this thoroughly informed and wide-ranging study, Gaca shows that early Christian goals to eradicate fornication were derived from the sexual rules and poetic norms of the Septuagint, or Greek Bible, and that early Christian writers adapted these rules and norms in ways that reveal fascinating insights into the distinctive and largely non-philosophical character of Christian sexual morality.
Writing with an authoritative command of both Greek philosophy and early Christian writings, Gaca investigates Plato, the Stoics, the Pythagoreans, Philo of Alexandria, the apostle Paul, and the patristic Christians Clement of Alexandria, Tatian, and Epiphanes, freshly elucidating their ideas on sexual reform with precision, depth, and originality. Early Christian writers, she demonstrates, transformed all that they borrowed from Greek ethics and political philosophy to launch innovative programs against fornication that were inimical to Greek cultural mores, popular and philosophical alike. The Septuagint's mandate to worship the Lord alone among all gods led to a Christian program to revolutionize Gentile sexual practices, only for early Christians to find this virtually impossible to carry out without going to extremes of sexual renunciation. Knowledgeable and wide-ranging, this work of intellectual history and ethics cogently demonstrates why early Christian sexual restrictions took such repressive ascetic forms, and casts sobering light on what Christian sexual morality has meant for religious pluralism in Western culture, especially among women as its bearers.
Kathy L. Gaca is Associate Professor of Classical Studies at Vanderbilt University.
