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Journal of Early Christian Studies 8.3 (2000) 477-478



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Book Review

Reading Renunciation: Asceticism and Scripture in Early Christianity


Elizabeth A. Clark . Reading Renunciation: Asceticism and Scripture in Early Christianity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. Pp. xiii + 420. $65.00 (cloth); $21.95 (paper).

Drawing on current scholarly discussions about texts, authors, and interpretation, Clark takes the reader of this volume on a fascinating journey through the early Christians' use of Scripture to promote their own agenda of sexual renunciation. Sexual renunciation is, in fact, the single ascetic theme treated in the book. The author aims neither to present the exegetical practices of particular patristic authors nor to differentiate between different classes or types of Christians, but rather "to dissect the interpretive devices that were employed to create ascetic meaning" (11).

The organization of the volume facilitates the reader's journey into this at times strange land of the hermeneutics of sexual renunciation. A brief introduction outlines the design and goals of the work and orients the reader to the questions of modern literary theory that inform the author's approach. The second chapter supplies an excellent introduction to early Christian asceticism and serves to anchor the following discussions of ascetic exegesis in a real world of ascetic performance.

The body of the work that follows is divided into three sections. The first section, Reading for Asceticism, introduces the reader to the place of books and reading in the early Christian world and then explores the various exegetical and rhetorical strategies used by Christian writers to generate scriptural support for sexual renunciation. Afterexploring the profits and perils of figurative exegesis, Clark enumerates, in what is perhaps the core of the volume, eleven modes of reading employed by Christian writers to produce ascetic meanings from the text. Categories such as "ascetic translation," "intertextual exegesis," "talking back," "textual implosion," and "the hierarchy of voice" add nuance to the current discussion of exegesis and reveal the diversity of techniques employed by early Christian writers to further their ascetic cause. A final chapter in this section applies the new categories "to show how the evaluation of marriage and asceticism by three patristic authors--John Chrysostom, Jerome, and Origen--relate to their respective modes of reading" (153).

In the following two sections of the book, Clark illustrates how the early Christian authors extracted ascetic meaning from Old and New Testament texts. In Rejection and Recuperation: The Old Dispensation and the New, she details the fathers' ascetic appropriation of non-ascetic Old Testament texts. Chapters within the section narrate ingenious readings that promote a hermeneutical shift from reproduction to defamilialization, that transform Hebrew ritual laws and practices into prescriptions for sexual renunciation, and that "manage" the diversity of texts relating to divorce. In the following section, "Reading Paul," Clark explores the exegesis of the Pauline epistles. A chapter on 1 Corinthians 7 proceeds through the text verse by verse, illustrating how the exegetical strategies applied by the interpreters allowed them "to express their varied ascetic [End Page 477] preferences while expounding a text that they considered immutable and eternally valid" (261). The following chapter, "From Paul to the Pastoral," traces the fathers' inventive efforts to bring the teachings of the later, less ascetic epistles into conformity with the message of 1 Corinthians 7 and their own more rigorous ascetic agenda.

Clark, in her usual detailed and masterful way, shows us how patristic writers decontextualized and relocated biblical texts to support their own ascetic project. Fascinating examples abound on every page. We learn that had the patriarchs been able to reproduce without sexual intercourse, they certainly would have (Augustine); that the acacia wood used in the building of the Hebrew temple (Exod 35.24) portended virginity since it is a "wood not subject to rot" (Origen); and that Paul's advice to married men, each to possess his vessel (wife) in honor (1 Thess 4.4), in another context counsels monks to possess their vessels (genitals) so as to avoid nocturnal emissions (Cassian). As Clark observes in her short Afterword: "Patristic commentators, to...

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