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

Did Christianity make a difference in the history of sexuality? Indeed, it did, argues Kathy Gaca. Gaca's Making of Fornication traces traditions of Platonic, Stoic, and Pythagorean philosophy to their point of intersection with biblical views of sexuality, finally highlighting three alternate second-century Christian understandings of sexuality and social reform, represented by the "encratite" Tatian, the "proto-ecclesiastical" Clement of Alexandria, and the "libertine" Epiphanes respectively. Without denying elements of continuity, Gaca marks the break of the biblically inflected Christian thought of Clement and Tatian with Greek philosophy. (It is in the hereticized Epiphanes that she finds the most resonance with Stoic, as well as Platonic, thought.) On Gaca's reckoning, the effect of Christianity on the history of sexual ethics is manifested in the conversion of sexuality to "fornication" and the foreclosure, in particular, of more positive early Stoic understandings of eros and community. Gaca's argument directly challenges the views of Michel Foucault and other scholars who have tended to emphasize cultural continuities between Christians and others, in large part (as she demonstrates) by overestimating the typicality of the procreationist Pythagorean ethic taken up by certain Roman Stoics and stridently reformulated in biblical terms by both the first-century Jews Philo and Paul and later Christians. Ironically perhaps, Gaca herself is in strong agreement with those very "Christian Fathers" whose views most disturb her—namely, Christians like Tatian who "knew" that Christianity was defined by its very refusal of "Greekness," above all Greek sexual theory and practice.

Readers of this journal are likely to find Gaca's analysis of Greek philosophical formulations of sexual ethics particularly illumining. Whereas Plato viewed sexual desire as inherently anti-rational and thus in need of strict social regulation, the early Stoics articulated a "pro-erotic" ethic based on the assumption that sexuality serves the ends of friendship and concord in a society of free men and women. The Stoic view was embedded in a materialist, non-dualistic understanding of "nature"—including the sexual nature of humans—as inherently rational and good. The Pythagoreans, in contrast, developed an ethic of strict procreationism that was grounded in a distinctive understanding of human reproduction as the mortal embodiment of an immortal soul, linked further to assumptions of soul/body dualism and the finely-tuned "harmonics" of the soul.

Gaca demonstrates the influence of the Pythagorean doctrine on the later procreationist Roman Stoics Seneca and Musonius—who appear not to be very "Stoic" after all, at least in their doctrines of sexuality. The Jewish writer Philo, in turn, combines the procreationist philosophical tradition mediated by an eclectic "Middle Platonism" with a biblical understanding of transgressive sexual practice as the symptom or figure of religious apostasy. Philo's biblical procreationism directly influences the thought of Clement of Alexandria, on Gaca's reading, and thus fatefully enters the Christian tradition.

The Christian Tatian takes the interpretation of sexuality as "fornication" a step further. Resisting more popular Greek understandings of eros, particularly as these crystallize around the figure of Aphrodite, Tatian demands that all sexual activity (including even procreative sexuality) be eradicated in the rejec-tion of "demonic" influence, a position supported in part through strong reinter-pretations of Pauline biblicism. Ultimately, however, the distinction between Clement's "moderate" procreationism and Tatian's strict "encratism" is subtle at best, suggests Gaca, and both depend heavily on a biblical tradition that conflates "fornication" with "apostasy" or "idolatry." Correspondingly, the "pro-erotic" views of the early Stoics are hereticized by Christians as "libertinism."

Both the strength and the weakness of this book lie in its careful methodological adherence to the history of philosophical ideas. As a classicist, Gaca is well attuned to the importance of texts and their interpretation for the shaping of ethical (and thus political) theories and practices: the fact that the Septuagint takes a prominent place in the...