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C h a p t e r 4 Virgin Earth, Virgin Birth: Irenaeus of Lyons and the Predicaments of Recapitulation There is no such system, however elaborated or elevated it may be, in which there is not some point of impossibility, its other face which it endlessly seeks to refuse—what could be called the vanishing-point of its attempt to construct itself as a system. And in so far as the system closes over the moment of difference or impossibility, what gets set up in its place is essentially an image of the woman. . . . Set up as the guarantee of the system she comes to represent two things—what the man is not, that is, difference, and what he has to give up, that is excess. —Jacqueline Rose, “Woman as Symptom” In this section of the book, I turn to a second paradigmatic early Christian strategy for situating sexual difference in relation to Pauline typological categories : the move to build a more complicated framework than that which we see in Paul—one that includes not only Adam and Christ, but also Eve and Mary as typological representatives of sexually differentiated humanity. We have already seen a variant on this strategy in Chapter 1 in the Gospel of Philip. Here Philip deploys the trope of the undefiled, virginal female body (with reference to four different “virgins”: Mary, Sophia, the female Holy Spirit, and the pristine earth of the primordial creation) in order to invest the difference of the female/feminine with a typological legitimacy within the terms of the system as a whole. In this chapter and the one that follows , I will examine two related projects—each much more fully articulated 98 Chapter 4 than Philip’s—as seen in the thought of Irenaeus of Lyons and Tertullian of Carthage. Both Irenaeus and Tertullian mobilize the trope of virginity in relation to female and male flesh as the conceptual lynchpin to their respective theological anthropologies. Through this shared focus on the enduring value and significance of flesh, the authors examined in Part II thereby anticipate in important ways the shift that Patricia Cox Miller has identified as a “material turn” in late ancient Christianity (a turn she locates primarily in the fourth century).1 But their foregrounding of a material/fleshly register also underscores the inevitable slippage between the bodily and the discursive, a “conjunction of discourse, materiality, and meaning” in which these various registers are necessarily implicated in one another in complex and not fully separable ways.2 And it is from within this slippery conceptual space that each of these prominent early Christian thinkers makes a concerted attempt (but one, I will argue, that is only partially successful) to locate and domesticate sexual difference within typological terms. Irenaeus of Lyons is one of the earliest Christian writers to forge a typological connection between the figures of the Virgin Mary and Eve,3 and the first to develop a theology of recapitulation that makes significant use of the EveMary parallel. As such, he has received considerable attention from scholars of Mariology.4 But as M. C. Steenberg has pointed out, scholarly discussions of Irenaeus on this point tend to begin with assertions of the contrast between the two figures in the Irenaean corpus with little attention to the question of why the contrast is being asserted in the first place.5 In fact the question of “why” seems a crucial starting point, not only for working out the intricacies of the Eve-Mary typology itself, but also for locating it in relation to Irenaeus’s theology as a whole. Within this theology, the concept of recapitulation (Greek: anakephalaiōsis / Latin: recapitulatio) stands as a central tenet. Irenaeus faces Valentinian opponents who (at least in his estimation) assert a soteriological vision in which, within the heavenly pleroma, “the Savior, having come forth out of all things, is the All”6 —and they draw on the words of Ephesians 1.10 to do so (“in the economy of the fullness [pleroma] of time, all things are recapitulated in Christ” / eis oikonomian tou plērōmatos tōn kairōn anakephalaiōsasthai ta panta en tō Christō). In this Valentinian exegesis, according to J. T. Nielsen, “the word oikonomia [functions] with reference to the internal processes within the Pleroma, particularly the preserving of order which results in the coming of Christ.”7 [18.117.165.66] Project MUSE (2024-04...

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