The Body And Society - Men Women And Sexual Renunciation In Early Christianity

Peter Brown’s The Body and Society is one of those formidable scholarly works that quietly sits on shelves looking respectable while containing several hundred pages about sex, celibacy, temptation, self-denial, theological anxiety, and the early Christian obsession with what exactly people ought to be doing with their bodies. Which, it turns out, was apparently one of the great intellectual questions of Late Antiquity.

This is not a sensationalist history of scandalous monks doing strange things in deserts, though there are certainly deserts and monks and quite a lot of strange things. Instead, Brown examines how early Christianity gradually developed ideas about sexuality, abstinence and the body itself, tracing the arguments from Saint Paul through the Church Fathers and into the increasingly elaborate spiritual machinery of the early Church. The result is a book that manages to be deeply academic while also revealing that much of Western civilisation was partially constructed by exhausted theologians arguing about desire in extremely hot climates.

Brown is one of the great historians of Late Antiquity and writes with the confidence of someone who can casually reference fourth-century bishops as though everybody already knows them personally. Yet despite the intimidating intellectual credentials, the book is surprisingly readable. Beneath the scholarship lies an enormous human drama involving ambition, holiness, power, guilt, gender, social status and the eternal struggle between bodily urges and the desire to appear spiritually superior to one’s neighbours.

One of the book’s quiet achievements is showing that celibacy was not merely a private moral decision but a revolutionary social idea. Entire assumptions about marriage, inheritance, family life and authority became tangled up in debates over renunciation. The body itself became contested territory. Modern readers may occasionally find themselves blinking in amazement at the sheer amount of energy expended by ancient writers trying to regulate thoughts, appetites and physical behaviour with microscopic precision.

Published by Faber in 1990, this edition has the unmistakable aura of a Serious Book. The sort of volume one imagines being carried around university campuses in tote bags by people capable of using phrases like “ascetic discourse” in ordinary conversation. It also has the marvellous ability to make almost any reader feel simultaneously fascinated and undereducated.

Condition is Good, meaning this copy has survived decades of theological scrutiny, postgraduate highlighting, and perhaps the occasional crisis of faith. A wonderfully dense and oddly compelling work from Crappy Old Books, where obscure religious history, railway manuals and books about medieval taxation all coexist in a kind of accidental intellectual monastery.

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