The Burden of the Flesh: Fasting and Sexuality in Early Christianity (review)

In this elegant and erudite book, Teresa Shaw explores the interrelation of fasting and sexual renunciation for ascetic Christians in late antiquity. Rich and satisfying in its focus on “the relationship between behavior and theory, the body and belief, and physical asceticism and theological speculation” (2), this study manifests an unswerving commitment to a complexity of analysis in which medical, social and theological elements all figure. In Shaw’s own words: “On the one hand, then, historians of antiquity cannot understand dietary asceticism without understanding the late ancient medical notions of diet, physiology, and the relationship of body and soul. On the other hand, we cannot appreciate the social ideological implications of physical behaviors and techniques without returning to the theological underpinnings of the ancient discussion” (24–25).

After a brief introduction laying out the scope of the work, chapter two provides the essential context of Greco-Roman medical material from late antiquity, especially the works of Galen, “concerning the relationship between diet, digestion, the humors, and sexual desire in male and female bodies” (24). Close readings of four Christian ascetic theorists follow. Basil of Ancyra, Gregory of Nyssa, Jerome, and John Cassian are all seen to have used physiological models to argue for the usefulness of fasting in maintaining sexual chastity. Any food that fostered “heat” in the body was to be avoided. While seasonings and other condiments were therefore suspect (87–88), meat was the primary focus of concern (105). A fascinating study in semi-starvation, conducted at the University of Minnesota from 1944–45, brings modern scientific support to Jerome’s contention that it is impossible to preserve chastity without fasting (99).

Chapter four investigates representations of gluttony. Whereas John Chrysostom, addressing a largely lay audience, emphasizes the gross physical effects of gluttony—the damage it causes the body as well as one’s public honor (134)—Evagrius of Pontus, speaking to ascetics, emphasizes the social dimensions of food. “For Evagrius, gluttony is not so much the gorging on huge amounts of fancy food as it is the nagging desire for variety, for satiety, for security, for fellowship, for health. It thus represents much more than just the desire for food; it is the desire for the former lifestyle and community that have been renounced by those in the desert” (144). Thus even in Evagrius, pratike can never be separated from gnostike (157).

Chapter five turns to consider the protological and eschatological arguments undergirding ascetic practice. Fasting and virginity were ways not only of recapturing the original human condition before the fall, but also of anticipating the life of paradise to come (163–64). The myths of Hesiod and Porphyry reveal how meat-eating was seen in particular as a tainted result of the fall.

The final chapter draws all the themes of the book together by focusing on representations of the female ascetic body. Here the physical effects of fasting—especially its drying and hardening tendencies—are understood to obliterate “female” nature, to realize a return to paradise, and to reverse the power of procreation and death. Precisely because eating is allied to sexual desire, sexual desire to the fall, and the fall to embodiment, gender differentiation and death, women can “become male” through fasting (223–24). Yet at the same time, the body of a female ascetic remains essentially female; not only does she continue to be a potential source of sexual temptation and sin to men, but she enjoys a relationship with Christ the bridegroom often described in startlingly erotic terms (248).

Shaw’s warm sympathy for texts that engage the most pressing human experiences of embodiment is palpable. Equally apparent is her humor. Both of these tendencies emerge in her description of the Cynics as not only the “bad boys” of the ancient city, but also “wandering teachers whose often provocative behavior and biting social criticism reveal profound, even prophetic, insight into the human condition” (40).

In a book that does...