8. “There Is No Male and Female”

Galatians and Gender Trouble

The Universal Spirit and the Body of Differences

Recently, feminist theory has provided us with extraordinarily subtle analyses of the ways that the mind/ body split is inextricably bound up with the western discourse of gender. The work of Judith Butler is of particular importance. She argues that the critique of dualism is in fact at the heart of the founding text of modern feminist theory, Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex:

Although Beauvoir is often understood to be calling for the right of women, in effect, to become existential subjects and hence, for inclusion within the terms of an abstract universality, her position also implies a fundamental critique of the very disembodiment of the abstract masculine epistemological subject. That subject is abstract to the extent that it disavows its socially marked embodiment and, further, projects that disavowed and disparaged embodiment on to the feminine sphere, effectively renaming the body as female. This association of the body with the female works along magical relations of reciprocity whereby the female sex becomes restricted to its body, and the male body, fully disavowed, becomes, paradoxically, the incorporeal instrument of an ostensibly radical freedom. Beauvoir's analysis implicitly poses the question: Through what act of negation and disavowal does the masculine pose as a disembodied universality and the feminine get constructed as a disavowed corporeality? (Butler 1990, 12)

I am tracing one of the historical trajectories along which this act of negation, disavowal, and construction takes place. In her book, The Man of Reason: “Male” and “Female” in Western Philosophy, Genevieve Lloyd has described the historical process within philosophy wherein the universal mind came to be identified as male, while the gendered body became female (1984, 7, 26). I am trying to do two things: to further specify the cultural mechanisms which rendered this gender ontology dominant in our formation and to show that and how “the Jew” has been constructed analogously to “Woman” within the culture and by a very similar historical vector.^[1] As I have argued in the first chapter, the specific historical occasion of the merger in Philo of Plato and Genesis 2 synergistically enhanced this ideological process in the world of Hellenistic Judaism and from hence to much of Christianity. In this chapter, I am going to concentrate on the question of gender through a close and contextualized reading of the crucial Pauline texts.

Paul's “Backsliding” Feminism

As I have been arguing throughout, Paul was motivated by a Hellenistic desire for the One, which among other things produced an ideal of a universal human essence, beyond difference and hierarchy. This universal humanity, however, was predicated (and still is) on the dualism of the flesh and the spirit, such that while the body is particular, marked through practice as Jew or Greek, and through anatomy as male or female, the spirit is universal. The strongest expression of this Pauline cultural criticism is Galatians and especially 3:28–29. 1 Corinthians, on the other hand, has been read and used within much Christian practice as a powerful defense of a cultural conservatism. Making 1 Corinthians the hermeneutical key to Paul has had fateful cultural consequences, although to be sure such a reading has also been the product of the very ideologies that it eventually underpinned. I have been claiming throughout that the major motivating force behind Paul's ministry was a profound vision of a humanity undivided by ethnos, class, and sex. If Paul took “no Jew or Greek” as seriously as all of Galatians attests that he clearly did, how could he possibly—unless he is incoherent or a hypocrite—not have taken “no male and female” with equal seriousness (Fiorenza 1983, 210)? The task of my reading here, among other things, is to articulate a coherent reading of Paul as a social and cultural critic, i.e., reading Galatians very seriously while also making sense of Corinthians (cp. Gager 1983, 226).

I am, of course, not the first critic to attempt this task. In her justly famous feminist reconstruction of Christian origins, In Memory of Her, Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza reproduces an “apocryphal” female epistle of Phoebe, written by one of Fiorenza's students. This document contains the following lines:

The second story is one I would like to discuss with Paul who lately seems so concerned with putting women back in “their proper places.” He is so taken up with giving a good impression to the pagans that he is reverting to his rabbinic prejudices I think. As if the proper place of woman was in the home bearing children—“woman is the glory of man” indeed! Surely with his background he would know where Genesis puts woman: “in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” What a strange man he is. In his letter to us he so firmly emphasized the equality of woman and man in marriage; in the same letter he raged on and on about hairstyles in the assembly.…And, even more pointed, are these words from his letter to our Galatian neighbours: “For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” I do fear that some people hear, not these words of Paul which so clearly reflect the attitude and teaching of Jesus our Wisdom but hear instead his returns to the past before he received the freedom of the Spirit. I shudder to think that some time in the future a leader of one of the churches will say, “Gentiles, slaves and women cannot become part of the ministry of the Word because Jesus did not entrust the apostolic charge to them.” When I said that to Paul, he laughed uproariously and exclaimed, “Phoebe you are a person with the strangest notions! If any of my letters do survive, only someone bewitched will fail to see the difference between my preaching of the Good News and my ramblings about cultural problems and situations. People from another age will easily disregard the cultural trappings and get to the heart of the message.” If only that distinction were as clear to the rest of us as it is to Paul! (Fiorenza 1983, 63–64)

Fiorenza, of course, quotes this discourse very approvingly. This student writing, according to her, “can highlight the educational and imaginative value of retelling and rewriting biblical androcentric texts from a feminist critical perspective.” What we have here, in fact, is a fairly typical move of certain Christian feminists. One aspect of Pauline discourse, indeed constituted by only one (crucial) verse in Galatians, is rendered the essential moment of his message about gender, while the rest is relegated to an incompletely exorcised demonized Jewish past. I submit here two propositions: The first is that such a reading of Paul will simply not stand up critically and, indeed, trivializes him beyond retrieval. Paul's so-called “ramblings” about cultural problems and situations are, indeed, at the heart of his ministry, as Fiorenza herself indicates (226). The second is that no feminist critical perspective will be progressive if it is dependent on false and prejudicial depictions of Judaism—the Rabbis presumably lacked the background that included reading “in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them”—or, for that matter, prejudicial representations of so-called paganism.^[2]

I have not cited Fiorenza here because she is in any way an egregious offender in these respects; if anything, she has made special efforts not to fall into such traps.^[3] For that reason, however, this lapse is all the more symptomatic. Her student has failed to produce an acceptable solution, but she certainly has exposed the problem. For there is a major issue here for Pauline studies. On the issue of gender, as on several other matters of equal significance, Paul seems to have produced a discourse which is so contradictory as to be almost incoherent. In Galatians, Paul seems indeed to be wiping out social differences and hierarchies between the genders, in addition to those that obtain between ethnic groups and socioeconomic classes, while in Corinthians he seems to be reifying and reemphasizing precisely those gendered hierarchical differences. Fiorenza's student's answer to this dilemma comprehends, in fact, two types of standard approaches to such problems in Pauline studies. One is that there is conflict within Paul between an unreconstructed Jewish past and his Christian present, and the other is that Paul was given to caving in under external “pagan” pressures, even on fundamental and critical points in his ideology.^[4] In a third approach to this and other similar problems, Paul is granted absolution, as it were, from the sin of inconsistency by being absolved of any desire for consistency to start with. According to this version of Paul, he was not a systematic thinker, and all of his pronouncements are oriented toward the local problems with which each of his epistles is dealing (Räisänen 1980; Räisänen 1985). Thus, while writing to the Galatians, Paul emphasized the social equality of the sexes in the new Christian reality, but when writing to the Corinthians, for whom such notions of equality had apparently become spiritually and socially dangerous, he backtracked or backslid and reinstated gender difference and hierarchies.

In my view, none of these ways of understanding Paul is adequate, and I wish to propose here a different way of reading him, one which is generated, no less than the reading produced by Fiorenza's student, by feminist reading practices, politics, and theory. Let me begin by restating the problem. First of all, there is the question of apparent contradiction between Galatians and Corinthians. This contradiction obtains on two levels. First, in the baptismal formula in Galatians 3:28, the phrase “There is no male and female” is included, while in the Corinthians (1 Cor. 12:12–13) version it is dropped. Second, much of the advice on marriage and general discussion of gender in Corinthians seems to imply that there very much is and ought to be male and female in the Christian communities and households, certainly insofar as marriage is to continue. Finally, even within Corinthians itself, there seems to be much tension between “egalitarian” notions of the status of the sexes and rigidly hierarchical ones.^[5] I am going to propose a partially new resolution of these contradictions within the context of my overall interpretation of Paul's thought, because these expressions and tensions function within the entire system. I will argue in the end that Paul is caught here on the horns of a dilemma not of his own making, as it were, and one on which we are impaled into post-modernity and (embryonic) post-patriarchy—the myth of the primal androgyne.

The construction I wish to build here is constituted on the following notion: The famous “myth of the primal androgyne,” together with the myth of Adam's rib, provides the ideological base of gender in our culture until this day. According to this myth, the first human being was an androgyne who was later split into the two sexes. However—and this is the catch—in the Hellenistic world and late antiquity, the primal androgyne was almost always imagined as disembodied, so that the androgyne was really no-body and dual-sex was no-sex.^[6] This myth, I suggest, encodes the dualist ideology whereby a spiritual androgyny is contrasted with the corporeal (and social) division into sexes.^[7]

Given this general understanding of the context of Pauline thought and expression, I can begin to set out my interpretation of the differences and apparent contradictions between Galatians and Corinthians on gender. To put it briefly and somewhat crudely: Galatians is, on my reading, a theology of the spirit and Corinthians a theology of the body.^[8] In Galatians Paul's major concern is to defend his doctrine of justification by faith as a means of including the gentiles in the Israel of God, and he violently rejects anything that threatens that notion and that inclusion. “For you are all children of God through faith in Christ Jesus. For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ: ‘There is neither Jew nor Greek; there is neither slave nor freeman; there is no male and female. For you are all one in Christ Jesus.’ If, however, you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham's offspring, heirs according to the promise” (Galatians 3:26–29).

But in Corinthians, Paul is fighting against pneumatics who seem both radically anti-body and radically antinomian.^[9] He thinks the whole Christian mission is in danger, having fallen into the peril that he anticipated at the end of Galatians of allowing the spirit to provide opportunity for the flesh, because the realities of the flesh and its demands have not been attended to. He produces, therefore, a theology of the body that balances and completes, but does not contradict, the theology of the spirit of Galatians.^[10] It is no wonder, then, that this is the text which is richest in “halakhic” prescriptions, and no wonder, as well, that it is this text which inscribes hierarchy between men and women in the marriage relationship. In the life of the spirit, in Paul as in Philo, there may be no male and female, but in the life of the body there certainly is. Next is the fact that in Corinthians there is an explicit and frequent appeal to both Jewish tradition and that of apostolic, Jewish Christianity. Several times in this letter Paul refers to his passing on of tradition (παράδοσις) that he had received, and all but one of his citations of traditions attributed explicitly to Jesus appear in this letter as well (Tomson 1990, 72–73), while according to Wire's interpretation all such citations are in Corinthians (Wire 1990, 272). All this is in direct contrast (not contradiction) to Galatians, in which Paul emphasizes that he is not authorized by tradition, by the teaching of Jesus in the flesh, that he is an apostle not from men but from God, authorized by his visionary experience of the spirit. It is no accident that the Pauline text that most thematizes the body is the one that also most manifests such fleshly concerns as rules and regulations, tradition, literal interpretations, and authority.^[11] I suggest that we best read Paul as a middle way between the insistence on literality and corporeality, perhaps even the monism of the Jerusalem Church, on the one hand, and the radical dualism of gnostics (and gnostic-like tendencies in the early Church), on the other.^[12] Paul's is a dualism that makes room for the body, however much the spirit is more highly valued. In this light I will reread Paul on gender.

“There is no Male and Female”

In short, what Socrates has shown is that gender is not a pertinent criterion for dividing the human race except in the realm of biology, where childbirth and engendering are distinct functions. In social life, where personal aptitudes are all that matters, sex cannot be the determining characteristic. Was Plato therefore an advocate of equal rights for women, a male who acknowledged the aptitudes and talents of females? Shall we allow ourselves to fall under the spell of his thinking? If we do, we incur the penalty of Plato's overestimation of the identity of all human beings, his denial of difference.

Crucial to an understanding of Paul on gender is a proper appreciation of the history of the phrase “There is no male and female” in Galatians 3:28. It has been recognized, at least since the publication of Wayne Meeks's landmark “The Image of the Androgyne,” that Paul is here citing Genesis 1:27: “And God created the earth-creature in His image; in the image of God, He created him; male and female He created them” (Meeks 1973). One of the proofs that the verse is being alluded to in the Pauline formula is linguistic: Paul shifts from nouns—Jew, Greek, slave, freeman—to adjectives, using ἄρσεν (male) and θῆλυ (female) instead of the expected ἀνήρ (man) and γυνή (woman). Second, the use of και (and) in place of the οὐδὲ (or) used in the other phrases gives this away. The “ungrammaticality” marks this as a site of intertextuality, sociolinguistic heterogeneity, dialogue in the Bakhtinian sense of the word.^[13]

Meeks and more recently Dennis Ronald Macdonald have demonstrated that in this baptismal formula is encapsulated a very early Christian mythic formation and its liturgical expression in the pre-Pauline church (Macdonald 1987 and 1988). What was the meaning of this “original” baptism? According to Meeks, this was a “performative” ritual utterance in which “a factual claim is being made, about an ‘objective’ change in reality which fundamentally modifies social roles” (Meeks 1973, 182). Whatever the “original meanings,” however, I think that the entire context of the passage in Galatians leads rather to the conclusion that what is being referred to is an ecstatic experience, in which are modified not social roles but ontological categories in the pneumatic moment of initiation. Paul's whole claim at this moment is based on an appeal to the Galatians' memory of their ecstatic experiences at baptism.^[14] This interpretation would tend, of course, to make Pauline baptism more similar to the initiatory rites of the Mysteries, in which, as Meeks himself argues, “the exchange of sexual roles, by ritual transvestism for example, was an important symbol for the disruption of ordinary life's categories in the experience of initiation. This disruption, however, did not ordinarily reach beyond the boundaries of the initiatory experience—except, of course, in the case of devotees who went on to become cult functionaries” (170).^[15] Following the researches of Dennis Ronald Macdonald we can further assume that the expression “no male and female” originally referred indeed to a complete erasure of sexual difference in some forms of earliest Christianity and is cited by Paul here from such contexts (Macdonald 1987).^[16] In such groups, the declaration that there is no male or female may very well have had radical social implications in a total breakdown of hierarchy and either celibacy or libertinism.^[17] The key to my interpretation of Paul here is that though he did intend a social meaning and function for baptism, namely, the creation of a new humanity in which indeed all difference would be effaced in the new creation in Christ, he did not—and this is crucial—he did not think that this new creation could be entirely achieved on the social level yet. Some of the program was already possible; some would have to wait. This interpretation will be further developed below. First, I must return for a while to Philo, whose ideas are much more explicit than Paul's, forming, I claim, an important partial analog to them.

Philo's Spiritual Androgyne

For Philo the first human—the male-and-female of Genesis 1—was in truth a spiritual androgyne. Thus both myths are comprised in his discourse: a primal androgyne of no-sex and a primal male/secondary female. Since the two texts, the one in Genesis 1 and the one in Genesis 2, refer to two entirely different species, he can claim that only the first one is called “in the image of God,” that is, only the singular, unbodied Adam-creature is referred to as being in God's likeness, and his male-and-femaleness must be understood spiritually. That is to say that the designation of this creature as male-and-female means really that it is neither male nor female.^[18] We find this explicitly in another passage of Philo:

After this he says that “God formed man by taking clay from the earth, and breathed into his face the breath of life” (Gen. ii. 7). By this also he shows very clearly that there is a vast difference between the man thus formed and the man that came into existence earlier after the image of God: for the man so formed is an object of sense-perception, partaking already of such or such quality, consisting of body and soul, man or woman, by nature mortal; while he that was after the Image was an idea or type or seal, an object of thought, incorporeal, neither male nor female, by nature incorruptible. (Philo 1929b, 107)

Philo's interpretation is not an individual idiosyncrasy. As Thomas Tobin has shown, he is referring to a tradition known to him from before (Tobin 1983, 32). The fundamental point which seems to be established is that for the Hellenistic Jews, the one-ness of pure spirit is ontologically privileged in the constitution of humanity. This platonic Jewish anthropology is elegantly summed up with respect to Philo by Steven Fraade: “Philo inherits from Plato a radically dualistic conception of the universe. In this view, the material world of sense perception is an imperfect reflection of the intelligible order which emanates from God. The human soul finds its fulfillment through separation from the world of material desires, a world that lacks true reality, and through participation in the life of the spirit and divine intellect; the soul finally reunites the true self with its divine source and thereby achieves immortality” (Fraade 1986, 263–64; emphasis added). Since, as we have seen, that primal state is one of spiritual androgyny, in which male-and-female means neither male nor female, this fulfillment would naturally be a return to that state of noncorporeal androgyny. This notion had, moreover, social consequences as well in the image of perfected human life which Philo presents.

In his On the Contemplative Life, Philo describes a Jewish sect, the Therapeutae, living in his time on the shores of Lake Mareotis near Alexandria (Kraemer 1989). It is clear from the tone of his entire depiction of this sect and its practice that he considers it an ideal religious community. The fellowship consists of celibate men and women who live in individual cells and spend their lives in prayer and contemplative study of allegorical interpretations of Scripture (such as the ones that Philo produced). Once a year (or once in seven weeks), the community comes together for a remarkable ritual celebration. Following a simple meal and a discourse, all of the members begin to sing hymns together. Initially, however, the men and the women remain separate from each other in two choruses. The extraordinary element is that as the celebration becomes more ecstatic, the men and the women join to form one chorus, “the treble of the women blending with the bass of the men.” I suggest that this model of an ecstatic joining of the male and the female in a mystical ritual recreates in social practice the image of the purely spiritual masculo-feminine first human of which Philo speaks in his commentary, indeed, that this ritual of the Therapeutae is a return to the originary Adam (Meeks 1973, 179; Macdonald 1988, 289).^[19] Although, obviously, the singing and dancing are performed by the body, the state of ecstasy (as its etymology implies) involves a symbolical and psychological condition of being disembodied and thus similar to the primal androgyne. The crux of my argument is that a distinction between androgyny as a mythic notion and one that has social consequences is a false distinction. The myth of the primal androgyne, with all of its inflections, always has social meaning and social significance, for Paul no less than for Philo, for Rabbis, and for Corinthian Christians.

Two points are crucial here as background for a reading of Paul on gender. First of all, the society and religious culture depicted by Philo do permit parity between men and women and religious, cultural creativity for women as for men. Second, this autonomy and creativity in the spiritual sphere are predicated on renunciation of both sexuality and maternity.^[20] Spiritual androgyny is attained only by abjuring the body and its difference. I think two factors have joined in the formation of this structure—which will be repeated over and over in the history of western religion, including at least one instance within early modern Judaism. On the materialist level, there is the real-world difference between a woman who is bound to the material conditions of marriage and child-bearing/rearing and a woman who is free of such restraints. Even more to the point, however, is the symbolic side of the issue. Just as in some contemporary feminist philosophy, the category “woman” is produced in the heterosexual relationship, so in Philo as well a female who escapes or avoids such relationships escapes from being a woman. (See also discussion of Tertullian's On the Veiling of Virgins, in D'Angelo forthcoming, where precisely the issue between Tertullian and his opponents is whether virgins are women or not!) This division in Philo is reproduced as well in his interpretations of the status of female figures in the Bible, who fall into two categories: women and virgins (Sly 1990, 71–90).^[21] Those biblical figures defined as virgins by Philo are not women and thus do not partake of the base status that he accords to women. Any parity between male and female subsists only in the realm of spiritual and ecstatic experience or in the symbolic spiritual myth of the primal androgyne. What about Paul? Paul never intended for a moment to promulgate a truly “gnostic” doctrine of escape from the body and rejection of it, with all of the social consequences thereby entailed. This is proven by Galatians 5:13–17—“For you were called to freedom, brothers, only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh”—i.e., Do not misuse your Christian freedom to allow yourself hedonistic pleasure. Nor did he ever imagine a social eradication of the hierarchical deployment of male and female bodies for married people.^[22] While it was possible for him to conceive of a total erasure of the difference between Jew and Greek on the level of the body—all he had to do was to eliminate circumcision, and Jews were just like Greeks; female Jews and Greeks having always been bodily alike—, he, no more than anyone else of his time, could not imagine that male and female bodies would be in any condition other than dominant and dominated when they were in sexual relationship with each other, that is, when they were living “according to the flesh” (Fiorenza 1983, 236). It is (hetero)sexuality, therefore, that produces gender, for Paul as for Philo and, we shall see, within crucially paradigmatic texts of the Christian cultural tradition.^[23]

There is thus no contradiction between Galatians and Corinthians on the question of gender. As I have suggested, Paul's preaching always intended a moderate pneumaticism—but not more, a spirit-flesh hierarchy in which spirit was, of course, higher than flesh but the flesh, that is, sexual morality, propriety, and ethics, was not thereby canceled (as the end of Galatians makes entirely clear). Assuming that Paul's original teaching of the Corinthians was similar to the doctrine of the first four chapters of Galatians, it is easy to see where they could have gotten their ideas: no male and female indeed! Galatians 5:25–6:10 shows how clearly Paul anticipated this danger, which seems to have been realized in Corinth.^[24] If Paul was not troubled in Galatians by the implications (misreadings, from his point of view) of the quoted ancient formula, it was because the “error” in the understanding of Christianity that concerned him there was in the direction of too much physicality, so the pneumatic, gnostic implications of “There is no male-and-female” were not a stumbling block. In Corinthians, however, where his problem is with Christians who have gone too far (from Paul's ideological standpoint) in the pneumatic direction and he must emphasize, therefore, the theology and ethics of the body, “no-male-and-female” would be exactly antithetical to the message he wishes to promote. And so it is dropped, because Paul perceived that it was open to serious misunderstanding as being applicable to life “according to the flesh” as well as “according to the spirit” (cf. Wire 1990, 137–38). There is thus no contradiction in Paul's thought at all. He held out the possibility of a momentary ecstatic androgyny but only that; on the corporeal level of human society, sex/gender difference was maintained. Paul on gender, it seems to me, represents then neither the more misogynistic trend of such thoroughly Hellenized Jews as Philo nor a breakthrough in the politics of gender as some Christian feminists would have it. His picture of the relations of married people seems most like that of Palestinian Judaism in general, a moderate, “benevolent” domination of women by men, or rather wives by husbands, one which neither permits cruelty to women nor entirely suppresses the subjectivity of women.^[25]

Paul's Ethic of the Body

What then is Paul's ethic of the body, his picture of the relations between married men and women, and how does it compare to the detailed rules for married life promulgated by the rabbinic Judaism of the second and following centuries? Careful study of 1 Corinthians 7 supports the conclusion drawn by Peter J. Tomson that Paul's ethic (“halakha”) of sexuality and marriage and “Paul's conception of women was not much different from his [Jewish] contemporaries.” Thus the famous pronouncement of verses 3–5: “Let the husband give the wife what is due to her, and let the wife likewise also give her husband his due” is identical to the provision of the Mishna which provides the same penalties to the husband who refuses sex to his wife and to the wife who refuses sex to her husband (Tomson 1990, 107).^[26] Rabbinic literature preserves, moreover, strong polemics against men who out of desire for holiness cease sleeping with their wives (D. Boyarin 1991 provides extensive documentation and critique on this issue). There is, however, one element in Paul's thought on sexuality which divides him sharply from the later rabbinic tradition and connects him rather with certain other trends in contemporary Judaism, and that is the question of celibacy, which, I argue, is crucial to solving the problem that I am about in this chapter.

Tomson has provided us with a suggestive analysis of the cultural context of Paul's discourse on celibacy in 1 Cor. 7 (Tomson 1990, 105–08). The apostle prefers celibacy both personally, practically, and religiously, but is quite unwilling to consider the married state forbidden, condemned, or even disparaged by God. Moreover, since as stated, in his ethic of the obligations of married people to each other, he is close if not identical to Jewish traditions of his day, those who are presently married must fulfill those obligations. The essential similarity between much of Paul's ethic here and other strains within first-century Judaism can be evoked (if not demonstrated) by the following quotation from the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs:

	The commandments of the Lord are double,
	and they are to be fulfilled with regularity.
	There is a time for having intercourse with one's wife,
	and a time to abstain for the purpose of prayer.

This practically demands comparison with Paul's pronouncement in 1 Corinthians 7:5: “Do not refuse one another except perhaps by agreement for a season, that you may devote yourselves to prayer.” There are some obvious differences of emphasis between these two dicta but clearly the idea of abstention from sex for prayer grows out of the same religious and cultural milieu.

Finally, insofar as Paul himself and Jesus, whom he follows here, seem to reflect a particular attested ancient Jewish tradition against divorce, those who are married ought not to divorce and neither can they separate from their partners to whom they are obligated.^[27] We can thus explain all of the details of 1 Corinthians 7 on the basis of the assumption that Paul maintains a two-tiered system of thought regarding sexuality: celibacy as the higher state but marriage as a fully honorable condition for the believing Christian.^[28] This is by and large identical to actually attested forms of Palestinian Judaism and not very far from Philo either, except that Philo's tone toward sexuality seems much more negative in affect, reflecting, I think, the greater Greek philosophical influences on him.^[29] However, it must be admitted that even Paul, whose dualism was so much less extreme, manifests quite a cold and ambivalent feeling about married sex, regarding it primarily as a defense against lust and fornication. As Peter Brown has written:

What was notably lacking, in Paul's letter, was the warm faith shown by contemporary pagans and Jews that the sexual urge, although disorderly, was capable of socialization and of ordered, even warm, expression within marriage. The dangers of porneia, of potential immorality brought about by sexual frustration, were allowed to hold the center of the stage. By this essentially negative, even alarmist, strategy, Paul left a fatal legacy to future ages. An argument against abandoning sexual intercourse within marriage and in favor of allowing the younger generation to continue to have children slid imperceptibly into an attitude that viewed marriage itself as not more than a defense against desire. In the future, a sense of the presence of “Satan,” in the form of a constant and ill-defined risk of lust, lay like a heavy shadow in the corner of every Christian church. (Brown 1988, 55)

Where I disagree with Brown is when he says, “At the time, however, fornication and its avoidance did not preoccupy Paul greatly. He was concerned to emphasize, rather, the continuing validity of all social bonds. The structure of the household as a whole was at stake. This included the institution of domestic slavery. On this, Paul was adamant: slaves, like wives, must remain in their place” (Brown 1988, 55). On my reading, the situation is exactly opposite. Paul called for freedom and the breaking down of all social bonds. Realizing, however, the unrealizability of that goal—for slaves because of the social unrest and suppression of Christianity that would result, for wives because of porneia—Paul settled for something else, something less than his vision called for, and thus the continuation of the domestic slavery of marriage for those not called to the celibate life (cf. Segal 1990, 172–74). Rabbinic Judaism ultimately went in another direction entirely, increasingly rejecting not only the preferability of celibacy but ultimately even its permissibility. With that rejection, the one avenue of escape into autonomy for women was closed but a much richer and warmer appreciation of sexuality developed (Boyarin 1993).

This interpretation of Paul is coherent with the interpretation of his anthropology in general offered in this book. If celibacy corresponds to “the spirit” and marriage to “the flesh,” then the axiological relationship between these two states fits perfectly, for as I have argued throughout, the flesh, while lower than the spirit in Paul's thought, is by no means rejected or despised by him. The analogy with celibacy versus marriage is exact. Marriage is a lower state than celibacy—He who marries a virgin does well and he who does not marry does better (verse 38)—but not by any means forbidden or despised.^[30] However, and this is the crux, any possibility of an eradication of male and female and the corresponding social hierarchy is possible only on the level of the spirit, either in ecstasy at baptism or perhaps permanently for the celibate. In other words, I surmise that although Paul does not cite the myth of the primal androgyne, his gender discourse seems just as likely to be an outgrowth of that ideological structure as is that of Philo—no male and female—in the spirit, but in the flesh, yes indeed.

“The man is the head of the woman”

The crucial text for strengthening this interpretation, or at least for rendering it plausible, is arguably 1 Corinthians 11:1–16—“in the same letter he raged on and on about hairstyles in the assembly.” ^[31] In this passage, on my reading, Paul makes practically explicit the ratio between the politics of the spirit and the politics of the body. The crucial verses are 3, 7–9, and 11–12:

I would have you know, however, that every man's head is Christ, but a woman's head is the man, and Christ's head is God. (11:3)

For a man must not veil his head, since he is the image and reflection of God but a woman is the reflection of man.^[32] For man did not originate from woman, but woman from man. Neither was man created for woman's sake, but woman for man's. (11:7–9)

Of course, in the Lord there is neither woman without man nor man without woman. For just as woman originated from man, so, too, man exists through woman. But everything comes from God. (11:11–12)

These verses have been much discussed from many points of view. It is far beyond the scope of the present chapter to analyze either the theological or hermeneutic issues involved in the text, but however we interpret them, it is clear that Paul explicitly thematizes two (partially opposed) forms of conceptualizing gender, one in which there is an explicit hierarchy and one in which there is none.^[33] Paul himself marks this difference (the gap between the hierarchy of verses 7–9 and the “there is neither woman without man nor man without woman” of verse 11) as the situation of “in the Lord” (ἐν κυρίῳ). I do not think it is going too far—nor is it unprecedented in Pauline interpretation—to connect this “in the Lord” with the “in Christ” of Galatians 3:28 and read both passages as a representation of an androgyny that exists on the level of the spirit, however much hierarchy subsists and needs to subsist in the flesh, in the life of society even in Christian communities. These two levels might well correspond, indeed, to the two myths of the origins of the sexes as found in Genesis 1 and 2. The no-male-or-female, which is “in the Lord,” or “in Christ,” would represent the androgyne of chapter 1, understood, as in Philo, as neither male nor female, while the “since he is the image and reflection of God, but a woman is the reflection of man. For man did not originate from woman, but woman from man,” which Paul cites here, would be a reference to the story as found in chapter 2!^[34] “In the Lord” might even be seen then as an allusion to “in the image of God,” and the latter human of chapter 2 would be “in the flesh” in contrast. This perhaps speculative interpretation is dramatically strengthened if Josef Kürzinger's suggestion is accepted that verse 11 means, “In the Lord woman is not different from man nor man from woman” (Kürzinger 1978). Ultimately, as Karen King suggests, the two myths of gender “are quite compatible in that both imagine the ideal to be a unitary self, whether male or androgynous, whose nature is grounded in an ontology of transcendence and an epistemology of origins.” ^[35]

These verses demonstrate that Paul had not changed his mind or backslid from Galatians; they also explain, given the context of the Corinthian correspondence, why he chose to omit “There is no male and female” in the Corinthian version of the baptism.^[36] I suggest, therefore, that for Paul just as much as for the Corinthians, a state of androgyny, a cancellation of gender and sexuality, would have been the ideal. The difference between them lies in the application of the principle.^[37] The Corinthians believe that they have already achieved a state of perfection that permits the acting out of the cancellation of gender difference, whereas Paul is skeptical of their achievements (cf. 4:8). This does not, however, imply that for Paul the ideal of androgyny has no social consequences.

There are in fact three (not mutually exclusive) options for a social enactment of the myth of the primal androgyne. Some gnostics (and perhaps the Corinthians) seem to have held that once having attained the spirit, humans transcended gender entirely and forever whether in celibacy or libertinage.^[38] Philo, on the other hand, restricts such transcending redemption from gender to celibates, and then only to special ritualized moments of ecstasy. Paul's strictures against women with short hair and the speaking out of women prophets (14:37–38)—if the latter is genuinely Pauline—seem to suggest a third option: For all (not only celibates) there is no male and female, but only momentarily in the ritualized ecstasy of baptism. It is only then, in this life, that people attain the status of life in the spirit, in Christ or in the Lord, in which there is no male and female. Another way of saying this is that Paul holds that ontologically—according to the spirit—there is a permanent change in the status of gender at baptism, but insofar as people are still living in their unredeemed bodies, gender transcendence is not yet fully realized on the social level—according to the flesh. Perhaps, we might say, that final realization awaits the Parousia. I am thus inclined to agree with Tertullian's view that the notion of Paul giving celibate women the power to teach, preach, and baptize that is functional, social equivalence to men seems hard to credit.^[39] On the other hand, it may not be gainsaid that he had women associates in his ministry, nor that he implied that virgins could achieve spiritual states unavailable to the married (7:32–35). All three of these possibilities are equally dependent, however, on a notion that gender difference exists only at one ontological level, the outer or physical, the corporeal, but that at the level of true existence, the spiritual, there is no gender, that is, they depend on dualism. Much of the immediate post-Pauline tradition seems to have adopted a version of the first option—namely, that celibate women could attain a permanent state of the erasure of gender, a development that has had profound effects on the later discourse of gender in European culture.

Thekla and Perpetua; or, How Women Can Become Men

The myth of the primal androgyne—that is, an anthropology whereby souls are engendered and only the fallen body is divided into sexes—is thus a dominant structuring metaphor of gender for the early church and for the Christian West as a whole. There are many different versions of the application of this myth. In some versions of early Christianity, all Christians must remain celibate, and in that spiritual existence a total eradication of gender difference becomes imaginable.^[40] In some communities such celibate men and women lived together in the same dwellings, arousing the suspicion and calumny of their pagan neighbors and the ire of more establishment Christian leaders. In other communities, more in tune with the Pauline and deutero-Pauline message, there was a two-tiered society: the celibate, in which some form of gender parity obtained, and the married, for which the hierarchical Haustafeln (tables of household practice found in the “deutero-Pauline” Colossians and Ephesians) were the definitive ethic. This could be accompanied by more or less approbation of the married state, more or less privilege for virginity/celibacy over marriage. In every case, however, virginity was privileged to greater or lesser extent over the sexual life, and, more to the point of the present argument, it was only in virginity, that is, only in a social acting out of a disembodied spiritual existence, that gender parity ever existed (Clark 1986). Female humans could escape being “women” by opting out of sexual intercourse. Just as in Philo, virgins were not women but androgynes, a representation, in the appearance of flesh, of the purely spiritual non-gendered, presocial essence of human being.^[41] For all of these forms of Christianity, as for Hellenistic Judaism, this dualism is the base of the anthropology: equality in the spirit, hierarchy in the flesh. As a second-century follower of Paul, Clement of Alexandria, expressed it, “As then there is sameness [with men and women] with respect to the soul, she will attain to the same virtue; but as there is difference with respect to the peculiar construction of the body, she is destined for child-bearing and house-keeping” (Clement 1989, 20). As this quotation suggests and Christian practice enacts, this version of primal androgyny provided two elements in the gender politics of the early Church. On the one hand it provided an image or vision of a spiritual equality for all women—which did not, however, have social consequences for the married;^[42] on the other hand, it provided for real autonomy and social parity for celibate women, for those who rejected “the peculiar construction of the body,” together with its pleasures and satisfactions.^[43] As Clement avers in another place, “For souls themselves by themselves are equal. Souls are neither male nor female when they no longer marry nor are given in marriage” (Stromateis 6.12.100, qu. in Macdonald 1988, 284).

Much of the paradigmatic literature of early Christianity involves this representation of gender and its possibilities. Elizabeth Castelli has described the situation with regard to one of the earliest and most explicit texts of this type, The Gospel of Thomas:

The double insistence attributed to Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas saying—that Mary should remain among the disciples at the same time as she must be made male—points to the paradoxical ideological conditions that helped to shape the lives of early Christian women. At once they are to have access to holiness, while they also can do so only through the manipulation of conventional gender categories. (Castelli 1991b, 33)^[44]

As I have suggested, however, these were not the paradoxical ideological conditions only of Christianity but similar indeed to paradoxes of contemporary Judaism as well. The Therapeutrides, too, have the same access to spirituality as their male counterparts—for all of them, however, at the expense of conventional gender categories.^[45] One of the most striking representations of such manipulation of gender is the story of the martyr Perpetua, brilliantly analyzed recently by Castelli (1991b).^[46] This story enacts both sorts of gender erasure. On the social level, the marks of Perpetua's gendered status are indicated by her leaving of her family, renunciation of her husband (who is not even mentioned), and eventual giving up of her baby, together with a miraculous drying up of the milk in her breasts, that is, a sort of symbolic restoration of virginity. The crux of the story, however, and of Castelli's argument is that in Perpetua's dream in which she becomes a man and defeats her opponent in the gladiatorial ring, her victory is, in fact, paradoxically a representation of her death as a martyr, while defeat for her would have meant giving in to her father, renouncing her Christianity, and continuing to live (42).^[47] Life in the spirit represents death in the body and the converse, and the erasure of conventional gender is thus also an event in the spirit. This is, then, a drastic version of Paul's eradication of gender in Christ.

The best representation, however, of an androgynous status for Christian celibate women in late antiquity is the story of Thekla, also treated by Castelli. This apocryphal female companion to Paul refuses to marry, cuts her hair short like that of a man, dresses in men's clothing, and accompanies Paul on his apostolic missions. Castelli notes with regard to this and similar stories:

It is striking that in all of these narratives, the women who perform these outward gestures of stretching dominant cultural expectations related to gender are also embracing a form of piety (sexual renunciation and virginity) which resists dominant cultural expectations vis-à-vis social roles. (44)

If my reading of Philo and Paul and of the general cultural situation is compelling, however, this connection is not so much striking as absolutely necessary. Insofar as the myth of the primal, spiritual androgyne is the vital force for all of these representations, androgynous status is always dependent on a notion of a universal spiritual self which is above the differences of the body, and its attainment entails necessarily one or another (or more than one as in the case of Perpetua) of the practices of renouncing the body: ecstasy or virginity or physical death.^[48] We thus see that from Philo and Paul through late antiquity gender parity is founded on a dualist metaphysics and anthropology, in which freedom and equality are for pre-gendered, pre-social, disembodied souls, and is predicated on a devaluing and disavowing of the body, usually, but not necessarily, combined with a representation of the body itself as female.^[49] On my reading, then, Christian imaginings of gender bending/ blending do not really comprehend a “destabilization of gender identity.” Rather, insofar as they are completely immured in the dualism of the flesh and the spirit, they represent no change whatever in the status of gender (cf. Macdonald 1988, 285). All of these texts are mythic or ritual enactments of the “myth of the primal androgyne” and, as such, simply reinstate the metaphysics of substance, the split between Universal Mind and Disavowed Body. It is striking how closely they match Beauvoir's critique of “the very disembodiment of the abstract masculine epistemological subject,” as described by Butler:

That subject is abstract to the extent that it disavows its socially marked embodiment and, further, projects that disavowed and disparaged embodiment on to the feminine sphere, effectively renaming the body as female. This association of the body with the female works along magical relations of reciprocity whereby the female sex becomes restricted to its body, and the male body, fully disavowed, becomes, paradoxically, the incorporeal instrument of an ostensibly radical freedom.

This trap is, I claim, based in the material conditions of heterosexual marriage, if not—even more depressingly—in the material conditions of heterosexuality itself, and precisely to the extent that Paul was unwilling to disallow or disparage marriage, as some of his more radical followers were to do, something like the pronouncements of Corinthians 11 and the Haustafeln became almost a necessary superstructure. Rather than “resting on the assumed natural differences between the sexes institutionalized in patriarchal marriage,” as Fiorenza puts it, I would imprudently suggest that patriarchal marriage—that is, at least until now—produces such naturalized gender differences (Fiorenza 1983, 207). To be sure Christian women had possibilities for living lives of much greater autonomy and creativity than their rabbinic Jewish sisters, but always on the stringent condition and heavy price of bodily renunciation.^[50] Let me make myself absolutely clear: I am not allying myself with Christian conservatives who argue that Paul's pronouncements in Galatians 3:28 did not have social meaning. Paul's entire gospel is a stirring call to human freedom and universal autonomy (cf. Fuller 1985). I think that, within the limitations of Realpolitik, he would have wanted all slaves freed, and he certainly passionately desired the erasure of the boundary between Greek and Jew (Fiorenza 1983, 210).^[51] In arguing that “no male-and-female” did not and could not mean a fundamental change in the status of wives, I am not arguing that he was inconsistent (nor being inconsistent myself) in the name of the preservation of male privilege, but rather I am suggesting that Paul held that wives are/were slaves and that their liberation would have meant an end to marriage.^[52] Jews and Greeks need ultimately to cease being Jews and Greeks; slaves need to cease ultimately to be slaves, and the equivalent is that husbands and wives need ultimately to cease being husbands and wives, but Paul feels that the last is unrealistic for most people, even Christians: Because of immorality, let each man have his own wife and let each woman have her own husband (7:2).^[53] When Paul says, “the form of this world is passing away” (7:31), it seems to me that he is doing two things. On the one hand, he is emphasizing why it is not necessary to engage in radical, immediate social change, in order to achieve the genuine radical reformation of society that he calls for, and on the other hand, he is explaining why having children and families is no longer important. Procreation has no significance for Paul at all. From Paul on through late antiquity, the call to celibacy is a call to freedom (7:32–34). Virgins are not “women.” Rabbinic Judaism, which rejected such dualism and thus celibacy entirely, strongly valorized the body and sexuality but cut off nearly all options for women's lives other than maternity, trapping all women in the temperate and patronizing slavery of wifehood. This should not be read, however, as in any sense a condemnation of Christianity, nor, for that matter, of rabbinic Judaism, for I suspect that all it means is that people in late antiquity had not thought their way out of a dilemma which catches us on its horns even now—in very late antiquity.

Notes