The Pastoral Ministry, Ancient and Modern

Reflections on Michel Foucault'sLes aveux de la chair [Paris, Gallimard, 2018]

It wasn't until 34 years after Foucault's death in 1984 that what would have been the last (fourth) volume of his History of Sexuality was definitively reconstructed. In Confessions of the Flesh (2018), Frédéric Gros pulls from Foucault's original and edited manuscripts to give us this long awaited volume. Here we have the place where Foucault weighs in on pre-medieval Christian conceptions of sexuality.

It should be recalled that, unlike so many historians today, Foucault in his History only marginally dealt with sexual customs in the Western world. He was not seeking to reconstruct how the general population behaved in bed, who they married, etc.; he was occupied with a theoretical elaboration—by philosophers, moralists, theologians—regarding sexuality. Rather than History of Sexuality, it might have more appropriately been called History of Discourses on Sexuality. Basically, Foucault is aristocratic: what counts is what "philosophers" in a broad sense have elaborated on in the relation between the subject and sexual drives. Foucault's decision seems like the historiographical equivalent of the Jesuits' missionary strategy: the Jesuits did not waste time converting the general population, but rather their prince. Foucault takes for granted then that even sexual practices throughout various epochs sooner or later conform to the meditative art on the argument.

Foucault makes it clear that the austerity of the "Christian pastoral of daily life" is not a Christian invention, but essentially continues the philosophical morals of pagan authors, in particular those of the stoics like Plutarch, Musonius, Seneca, and Epictetus. I would add, however, that the difference is that while pagan ascetic ethics were indeed reserved for a very cultured class, for somehow superior beings, Christian ethics were intended to be a directive for all Christians, and thus prospectively for all human beings. Ancient Christian ethics popularized, I would say even democratized, an ascesis that in paganism was not intended to educate the masses.

Foucault's thesis is that Christianity's difference with respect to other ethics intended to control one's own and others' sensuality, is that it is carried out by means of a confession (and this even before the practice of confession was institutionalized as a sacrament). By confessing, an individual truth is manifested. "Confess your faults in order to destroy your faults," St. John Chrysostom said. The explicit enunciation to the other of one's own sin, and thus of one's own guilty desire, is a fundamental operant in Christianity. For example, according to St. Ambrose, God punishes Cain not so much for the fratricide he committed, but for his impudence—for having lied to God, for having not admitted his crime before Him. And the confession (aveu) is not simply the communication to the other of something the subject already knows about himself, but rather the inner discovery of one's own guilt. It is our discovery of ourselves as sinners, and our acknowledgement of this before an other, or Other (God). "Thus the sin, at the very moment that it infringes on God's truth or His law," Foucault writes, "incurs an obligation of truth […] At the heart of the economy of guilt, Christianity has placed the duty to tell the truth." "In Christianity, this 'telling the truth' about our blame occupies a far more important place—and in any place plays a far more complex role—than in the majority of other religions […] that require the confession of sins" (para 8710). The sinner is condemned not for his sin, but for not having admitted and confessed it. "The duty of truth, like belief and confession, is at the center of Christianity" (para 8731).¹ Foucault may not mention it explicitly in this text, but it is evident what he is thinking: that the ethics of psychoanalysis today—to succeed in sharing one's own unconscious, admitting one's unspeakable phantasies (what Lacan will call "full speech")—derives in some way precisely from this Christian specificity that links faith to a practice of speaking the truth. Psychoanalysis may have Jewish roots in...