The Making of Fornication: Eros, Ethics, and Political Reform in Greek Philosophy and Early Christianity (review)

The final two complete volumes of Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality fundamentally changed how many scholars of ancient sexuality do their work. They write against him, in spite of him, because of him, and even for him. Many pro- and anti-Foucauldian historians and classicists have taken Foucault to task for his selective histories, which focus on elite male writers and draw a historically limited—and sometimeseven inaccurate—portrayal of the sexual orientation of classical and late antique cultures. In The Making of Fornication: Eros, Ethics, and Political Reform in Greek Philosophy and Early Christianity Vanderbilt University classical studies scholar Kathy Gaca asks us to rethink what we believe we've learned from Foucault about Greek and Roman antiquity both historically and philosophically. Her project will be useful to researchers in the areas of classical and late antique sexualities as well as to those who, inspired by Foucault, draw from these areas of study in their work on the present. As Gaca herself argues, many of us still live in a society shaped by Christian-inflected sexual rules, and therefore a study of the differing sexual designs for social order offered by Greek philosophers as well as subsequent Christian thinkers is essential "in the interest of leading the examined life" (4).

Gaca rewrites the history of the shift from pagan to Christian ethics, drawing a far more discontinuous picture of this history than Foucault suggests. Philosophically, the author's insistence on the relationship between sexual renunciation and social organization places questions of ethics and politics within a larger social frame that can take into account the many "others" Foucault's studies ignore. Gaca's book offers us what she calls "a study in historically grounded ethics and political philosophy" (8), and it answers a question that has been left lingering even after the publication of a number of fine social histories of Christian sexual asceticism: What was the "rationale that informed the ardent Christian upsurge of widespread anti-sexual behavior" (9)? (I am thinking specifically of studies published in the wake of Foucault's histories by scholars such as Peter Brown, Elizabeth Clark, Kate Cooper, Susanna Elm, and Aline Rouselle.) Rather than seeing the stimulus for the antisexual zeal of early Christians as arising from a direct translation of classical philosophical values, Gaca's study explores the many rereadings of Greek philosophy and how those readings were informed by texts many scholars have overlooked, namely, the Septuagint, or Greek Bible.

Gaca divides her book into three sections: "Greek Philosophical Sexual Reforms," "Greek Biblical Sexual Rules and Their Reworking by Paul and Philo," and "Patristic Transformations of the Philosophical, Pauline, and Philonic Rules." That each section can be read as a distinct study is both a strength and a weakness of the work. While each section allows for a sustained and subtle meditation on the thought and historical importance of the author in question, the independent nature of the sections detracts somewhat from the author's main argument concerning the discontinuity between pagan and Christian thought on sexuality. It is much too easy to read the book as a linear progression or as the positing of Greek thesis with Septuagint antithesis, awaiting the synthesis offered by the patristic writers featured in the closing section. However, I do not mean this criticism of form to take away from the author's smart analysis of different philosophical, political, and literary schools of thought.

In part 1, "Greek Philosophical Sexual Reforms," Gaca explores the sexual ethics of Plato's later political works, The Republic and The Laws, Stoic eros, and the reproductive technology of the Pythagoreans. Most interesting here is Gaca's retrieval of early Stoic writers Zeno and Chrysippus and their "socially engaged sexual principles" (59). Gaca makes a strong case that the early Stoa cannot be collapsed into the work of the better-known, later Roman Stoics Seneca and...