Specters of Paul: Sexual Difference in Early Christian Thought

Chapter 1. The Many Become One: Theological Monism and the Problem of the Female Body

C h a p t e r 1 The Many Become One: Theological Monism and the Problem of the Female Body What Plato dreams of is a memory with no sign. That is, with no supplement . . . Why is the surrogate or supplement dangerous? . . . Its slidings slip it out of the simple alternative presence/absence. That is the danger. —Jacques Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy” In this chapter and throughout this section of the book, I take up the problem of “the Platonic woman”—that is, the ways early Christians who were informed (at least in part) by the tradition of Philo and other platonizing philosophers navigated the question of sexual difference and, in some cases, sought to locate it within a typological framework inherited from Paul’s theological anthropology. As discussed in the previous chapter, the dominant ideology of sexual difference in the Greco-Roman world was one that conceptualized this difference not in terms of an ontological and incommensurable binary, but rather on a single sliding scale fundamentally oriented toward maleness. The “myth of the primal androgyne” participated in this ideological formation in the writings of Philo and Paul. But as numerous scholars have argued, the androgyny myth had a long reach, impinging on a broad swath of early Christian positions on the status and meaning of sexual difference. These were positions that shared a common eschatological goal: the eventual overcoming of anthropological differences through the triumph of unity “in Christ.” Put another way, what we see in these various theologies is an entrenched and persistent preoccupation with the (always already) 32 Chapter 1 masculine One, a monistic orientation that was right at home in a broadly Platonic philosophical milieu. This chapter attempts to chart something of that preoccupation in the historical context of the late first, second, and third centuries c.e. It thus explores a variety of interpretive tactics that monistic Christians took up in order to situate sexual difference theologically and philosophically in light of an ardent passion for cosmological unity. As we will see, Galatians 3.28 was not the only instance of an early Christian saying that imagined an eschatological return to primal androgyny. In fact, variations on a saying to this effect (attributed to Jesus) circulated in multiple contexts in the earliest movement. Evidence for this wide circulation can be found in such sources as 2 Clement, the Gospel of the Egyptians, and the Gospel of Thomas, each of which inflects the saying differently to various ethical and theological ends. Nor was the fascination with androgyny expressed only in pithy aphorisms . Other Christians elaborated the idea by developing its implications within their theological systems as a whole—most notably Clement of Alexandria (the subject of the next chapter) and various Valentinian theologians. And it is in some of these more fully articulated systems that the haunting power of the Pauline anthropological dilemma begins to become visible. Sometimes it is just a hint, a subtle spectral trace of a not fully worked out tension—as we will see in the Valentinian text, the Tripartite Tractate. But in other Valentinian sources—such as the Excerpts from Theodotus and the Gospel of Philip—the problem of how to locate sexual difference within an Adam-Christ typology is full-blown. Further, I will argue, the respective solutions that these two texts attempt are not themselves sui generis. Rather, as we will see in later chapters, they reflect two paradigmatic early Christian strategies for negotiating this “specter of Paul.” Monism and Early Christianity The concept of “the One” is a central but nonetheless complicated notion in ancient thought, occupying multiple cultural and philosophical registers. In the second and third centuries, Roman political hegemony over the Mediterranean generated a political environment in which questions of unity, identity, and cultural multiplicity became increasingly acute. I have argued elsewhere that the collision between imperial power and an unruly array of civic and ethnoracial differences across the growing empire worked to call into question The Many Become One 33 the symbolic stability of a unitary Roman citizen-self.1 Rebecca Lyman characterizes this scene of cultural ambivalence in terms of “an indeterminacy of religion and culture in Roman Hellenism itself.”2 She rightly maintains that the cultural possibilities that this indeterminacy yielded should not be dismissed as mere “syncretism.” Rather, the proliferation of new (or newly reinvigorated and reworked...