Sacred Sex: A Most Divine Love

Many scholars of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages will resist the idea of a queer erotics of Christian hagiography, and of sanctity and ascesis as queer erotic arts. But consider Severin, one of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's main characters in his 1870 novel Venus in Furs, who is regularly aroused reading The Lives of the Martyrs. Sacher-Masoch himself once recounted of his childhood, "I would sit in a dark, secluded corner of my great-aunt's house, devouring the legends of the Saints; I was plunged into a state of feverish excitement on reading about the torments suffered by the martyrs."¹ Far from reading these Lives perversely (or perverting their more "proper" reading within a repressive morality of sexuality), it could be argued that the young Sacher-Masoch was simply recognizing what Virginia Burrus calls their "exuberant eroticism" (1) —an eroticism, moreover, very much predicated on what Karmen Mackendrick has termed the "counter-pleasures" of sadism, masochism, and ascesis.² Very much under the influence of Georges Bataille's notion that erotic experience might be closer to sanctity (and therefore, also, to theology) than to anything else, and lured by the mesmerism of Jean Baudrillard's idea of seduction as a nonteleological and infinite suspension (156 – 59), Burrus's book offers transgressive (and frankly passionate) readings of ancient Mediterranean saints' lives in order to show how these Lives reveal a sacred and sublime countereroticism that was (and perhaps still is) subversive of "the constraining and often violently oppressive structures of familial, civic, and imperial domination" (161).

Although Burrus's book does not take up an explicitly Foucauldian analysis, she does avow that her delineation of an ancient hagiographical erotics is partly an attempt to grapple with Michel Foucault's treatment of Christianity in his multi-volume History of Sexuality. In part a contestation of Foucault's understanding that the rise of Roman Christianity helped consolidate a disciplinary heterosexist ethics, Burrus proposes that "there arises within Christianity a distinctive ars erotica that does not so much predate as effectively resist and evade the scientia sexualis that likewise emerges (derivatively) in late antiquity and eventually culminates in the production of a modern, western regime of 'sexuality' " (3). But Burrus also acknowledges that Foucault himself was ambivalent about early Christian asceticism, seeing in it both the matrix of disciplinary, modern sexuality, as well as "an emergent strategy for escaping sexuality's disciplinary power" (3) through various techniques of cultivating a self that would ultimately transcend itself in order to invent, in Foucault's own words, "a manner of being that is still improbable."³ Indeed, I see Burrus's book as a very timely contribution on behalf of premodern studies into discourses on ascesis in contemporary queer studies —discourses, moreover, that are partly troubling, in my mind, for their attachment to romanticized and nostalgic narratives of ancient, medieval, and early modern Christian practices of abjection, self-disavowal, and martyrdom to God. I am thinking here, especially, of Leo Bersani's recent comparison between barebacking and the "perfect passivity toward God's will" of Le pur amour ("pure love") practiced by seventeenth-century Catholic mystics who believed in the " 'impossible supposition': if God were to annihilate the souls of the just at the moment of death, or if He were to banish their souls to hell for all eternity, those whose love for God were pure would continue to serve Him with an absolute disinterested love."⁴ I am also thinking of David Halperin's recent proposal of a queerly "upbeat and sentimental" abjection that helps "capture and make sense of the antisocial, transgressive appeal of risky sex" without recourse to the language of pathology or the death drive, and which relies for some of its force on medieval Christianity's contemptus mundi.⁵ But I run ahead of myself, for what, perhaps, troubles me does not trouble Burrus, for whom the intersection of eroticism, risk-taking, and theology is "crucial" (17).

For Burrus, in...