Fathers know best? Christian families in the age of asceticism

Journal of Early Christian Studies

Volumn 11, Issue 3, 2003, Pages 257-263

  Jacobs, Andrew S ^a   Krawiec, Rebecca ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 60949767166     PISSN: 10676341     EISSN: 10863184     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/earl.2003.0047     Document Type: Article

References (51)

1. See, for instance, story of the Family, 2 vols., ed. André Burguière et al. (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1996),
2. esp. Aline Rouselle's essay "The Family Under the Roman Empire: Signs and Gestures," 1:269-310;
3. and more recently Jack Goody, The European Family: An Historico-Anthropological Essay, The Making of Europ ndon: Blackwell, 2000), 27-44.
4. Family studies have notably drawn the attention of historians interested in the history of children, women, slaves, and gays. A few recent examples: Gillian Clark, Women in Late Antiquity: Pagan and Christian Life-Styles (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993);
5. eadem, "The Fathers and the Children," in The Church and Childhood, ed. Diana Wood (London: Blackwell, 1994), 1-27;
6. Chris Frilingos, "'For My Child, Onesimus': Paul and Domestic Power in Philemon," JBL 119 (2000): 91-104;
7. Bernadette Brooten, Love Between Women: Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996);
8. John Boswell, Same- Sex Unions in Premodern Europe (New York: Villard Books, 1994).
9. Famously posed by Ramsay MacMullen, "What Difference Did Christianity Make?" Hist 35 (1986): 322-43, who answers that the major difference lies in ethics and sexual morality.
10. As noted by Halvor Moxnes, "What is a Family? Problems in Constructing Early Christian Families," in Constructing Early Christian Families: Family as Social Reality and Metaphor, ed. Halvor Moxnes (London: Routledge, 1997), 1, in a series of studies focused mainly on the New Testament and subapostolic periods.
11. On the role of the Roman family in the Christianization of the Empire, see Anne Yarbrough, "Christianization in the Fourth Century: The Example of Roman Women," CH 45 (1976): 149-65
12. and Michele R. Salzman, "Aristocratic Women: Conductors of Christianity in the Fourth Century," Helios 16 (1989): 207-20.
13. At times Roman historians show the effect of the boundaries of academic disciplines, as they deftly treat "classical" sources but misstep in their handling of Christian sources, as, for instance, the otherwise thorough work of Geoffrey Nathan, The Family in Late Antiquity: The Rise of Christianity and the Endurance of Tradition (London: R outledge, 2000), at 40-43 (using Ephesians a Timothy as "authentically Pauline" writings), 44 (calling Tertullian "a lawyer by trade"), and 221 n. 206 (attributing the Historia monachorum in Aegypto to Palladius).
14. The continued work of Beryl Rawson and Suzanne Dixon, among many others, epitomizes the excellent ongoing work in Roman families: Childhood, Class, and Kin in the Roman World, ed. Suzanne Dixon (London: Routledge, 2001);
15. eadem, The Roman Family (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997);
16. eadem, The Roman Mother (London: Routledge, 1990);
17. The Roman Family in Italy: Status, Sentiment, Space, ed. Beryl Rawson and Paul Weaver, Canberra: Humanities Research Centre (Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1999);
18. Marriage, Divorce, and Children in Ancient Rome, ed. Beryl Rawson, Canberra: Humanities Research Centre (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991);
19. The Family in Ancient Rome: New Perspectives, ed. Beryl Rawson (London: Routledge, 1992).
20. See also Andrew S. Jacobs, "A Family Affair: Marriage, Class, and Ethics in the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles," JECS 7 (1999): 105-38.
21. Nevertheless, not all studies of the family recognize the advent of Christianity until it has already transformed western Roman society into the middle ages: see David I. Kertzer and Richard P. Saller, The Family in Italy from Antiquity to the Present (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991) for a collection of articles jumping from antiquity to the middle ages (it is notable that the editors are, respectively, a modernist/anthropologist and a classicist).
22. Christians did not adapt such classical formats as Xenophon's Oikonomikos until well into the medieval period: see Sarah Pomeroy, Xenophon Oeconomicus: A Social and Historical Commentary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 68-90.
23. Arguably, the only such theoretical framing of family and households by early Christians appears in the "household codes" (Haustafeln) of Colossians and Ephesians: see John M. G. Barclay, "The Family as the Bearer of Religion in Judaism and Early Christianity," in Moxnes, Constructing Early Christian Families, 66-80, esp. 75-80.
24. See the comments of Dixon, Roman Family, 12-19
25. as well as Sarah Pomeroy, Families in Classical and Hellenistic Greece: Representations and Realities (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 1-16, where both scholars discuss methods in family studies and the pitfalls of ancient sources.
26. The dearth of statistical data has not stopped historians of the later Roman Empire from attempting Annales-style histories, based mostly on funerary inscriptions and Egyptian papyri: see, for instance, B. D. Shaw, "Latin Funerary Epigraphy and Family Life in the Later Roman Empire," Hist 33 (1984): 457-97,
27. expanding the methodology used by Shaw and R. P. Saller, "Tombstones and Roman Family Relations in the Principate: Civilians, Soldiers, and Slaves," JRS 74 (1984): 124-56
28. (the conclusions of which have been critiqued by Dale B. Martin, "The Construction of the Ancient Family: Methodological Considerations," JRS 86 [1996]: 40-60).
29. Shaw correlates the statistical tombstone reading of his earlier articles with an analysis of Augustine's writings (of sufficient breadth and size to provide a "valuable corpus of data") in "The Family in Late Antiquity: The Experience of Augustine," Past and Present 115 (1987): 3-51.
30. So that it has been noted more than once that some of our best sources for ideas and even social practices in Christian marriage, for instance, come from treatises de virginitate: see Carol Ha n, "The Silent Majority: The Family in Patristic Thought," in The Family in Theological Perspective, ed. Stephen C. Barton (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1996), 87-105.
31. Nathan, Family in Late Antiquity, 93-96, attempts to glean details on Roman and Christian ideals of marriage from the Vita Melaniae Iunioris, remarking that "Pinian and Melania in some ways had a typical aristocratic marriage, with the exception of their joint celibacy" (93).
32. John Chrysostom, De virginitate (SC 125:126): "The angels do not marry nor are they given in marriage; nor does the virgin. Always are they waiting on and serving God: this too does the virgin."
33. See Jerome, ep. 3.4.1-2 (CSEL 54:15):
34. "Bonosus bears his cross, he thinks not about tomorrow nor does he look back. . . . That young man, educated in the world with us in the liberal arts, who had sufficient wealth, first place of honor among his peers, now has spurned his mother, his sisters, and a brother very dear to him." See Elizabeth A. Clark, "Antifamilial Tendencies in Ancient Christianity," Journal of the History of Sexuality 5 (1995): 356-80,
35. but see also Susan Ashbrook Harvey, "Sacred Bonding: Mothers and Daughters in Early Syriac Hagiography," JECS 4 (1996): 27-56, who argues in part that "[t]he distinct ascetic tradition of Syriac Christianity, however, allowed a convergence of familial bonds and ascetic vocation in ways that may have proved especially significant for women" (28).
36. See Kate Cooper, The Virgin and the Bride: Idealized Womanhood in Late Antiquity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), on the ways in which even sixth-century "household manuals" served to "accommodate the experience of matronae within Christian moral language in light of the ascetic takeover" (111).
37. Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity, Lectures on the History of Religions, n.s. 13 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), esp. 428-47: "By studying their precise social and religious context, the scholar can give back to these ideas a little of the human weight that they once carried in their own time. When such an offering is made, the chill shades may speak to us again. . . ." (447, in a wonderfully Brownian Homeric simile).
38. Shaw, "Family in Late Antiquity."
39. Blake Leyerle, "Appealing to Children," JECS 5 (1997): 243-70.
40. John Chrysostom, Hom. 19 in 1 cor. 2 (PG 61:153), citing here 1 Cor 7.9:
41. John Chrysostom, Propter fornicationes 3 (PG 51:213):
42. "For there are two reasons why marriage (γάμ ος) had been introduced: so that we might be chaste (σωφρονωcombining inverted breveμεν) and so that we might become fathers. Of these two the pretext for chastity (σωφροσ; ́νης) is primary. For when desire came, so marriage came along to excise excess, and to persuade men to take but one wife. For by no means do es marriage make one have children (τὰς παιδοποιίας ), but rather it was the command spoken by God: 'Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the earth.' And they bear witness to this who married but did not become fathers. Therefore its primary cause is the reason of chastity, especially now, when the whole world has been filled with our children." See Elizabeth A. Clark, Reading Renunciation: Asceticism and Scripture in Early Christianity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 195-96, 266, 272.
43. eyerle, "Appealing to Children," 244.
44. Recent examples include Denise Kimber Buell, Making Christians: Clement of Alexandria and the Rhetoric of Legitimacy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999)
45. who theorizes a link between notions of Christian orthodoxy and metapho rs of kinship and legitimacy; Theodore S. de Bruyn, "Flogging a Son: The Emergence of the paler flagellans in Latin Christian Discourse," JECS 7 (1999): 249-89, who traces the language of paternal punishment in Latin theological writings;
46. Virginia Burrus, "Begotten Not Made": Conceiving Manhood in Late Antiquity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), who examines the familial language of Trinitarian treatises in order to discuss notions of gender and masculinity in the period;
47. and Michael Penn, "Performing Family: Ritual Kissing and the Construction of Early Christian Kinship," JECS 10 (2002): 151-74, who uses the familial ritual of kissing to trace Christian community construction.
48. See, for instance, Averil Cameron, Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire: The Development of Christian Discourse, Sather Classical Lectures 55 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991);
49. Peter Brown, Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity: Towards a Christian Empire, The Curti Lectures (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992);
50. and Richard Lim, Public Disputation, Power, and Social Order in Late Antiquity, Transformation of the Classical Heritage 23 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).
51. Ania Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism, The New Critical Idiom (London: Routledge, 1998), 37