BERNADETTE BROOTEN
Early Christianity emerged in a world in which people from various walks of life acknowledged that women could have sexual contact with women. Close textual analysis of several early Christian writers demonstrates that they knew more about sexual relations between women than previous scholars have assumed, which accords with a heightened awareness of female homoeroticism within the cultural environment of early Christianity. Whereas pre-Roman-period Greek and Latin literature contains very few references to female homoeroticism, the awareness of sexual relations between women increases dramatically in the Roman period, as a detailed study of astrological texts, Greek love spells, Greek medical writings, ancient dream interpretation, and other sources reveals.
Because a strict distinction between active and passive sexual roles governed the prevailing cultural conceptualizations of sexual relations in the Roman world, it shaped the way that people viewed female homoeroticism.* The distinction between active and passive shaped Roman-period definitions of natural and unnatural: free, adult male citizens ought never be passive, and women should never be active. Should they transgress these boundaries, society deemed their behavior "contrary to nature" (para physin). This concept of "unnatural" and its dependence on the active/passive distinction aids us in understanding early Christian condemnations of male homoeroticism and usage of the phrase para physin. If early Christians had not condemned sexual relations between women within a gendered framework of active and passive, natural and unnatural, then they would have been unique in the Roman world in so doing.
Roman-period writers presented as normative those sexual relations that present a human social hierarchy. They saw every sexual pairing as including one active and one passive partner, regardless of gender, although culturally they correlated gender with these categories: masculine as active and feminine as passive. The most fundamental category for expressing this hierarchy was active/passive-a category even more fundamental than gender for these writers. They often defined "passive," that is, penetrated, females as effeminate. Males could be either active or passive (such as when they were boys or slaves), whereas females were always supposed to be passive. The division between active and passive was, therefore, not biological.
Drawing upon a broad range of sources from the Roman world, I illustrate in my forthcoming book that early Christian views of female homoeroticism closely resembled those of their non-Christian contemporaries. Some prior researchers have tended to take an apologetic pro-Christian stance and to see early Christian sexual values as of a higher moral level than those of their environment. Other researchers have viewed early Christians as proto-Puritanical and repressive in contrast to the more sex-positive pagans around them. My research is more in line with those researchers who see a continuity between non-Christian and Christian understandings of the body.x A focus on female homoeroticism makes this continuity clearer than would a focus on male homoeroticism, since nearly all extant sources on sexual relations between women condemn such relations, whereas some Roman-period, non-Christian sources express tolerance toward male-male sexual relations, which masks the similarity between Christian and non-Christian understandings of masculinity. Because the reasons for condemning female homoeroticism run deeper than the reasons for promoting marriage or celibacy (on which there was much debate in the Roman world), there is a cultural continuity of views of female homoeroticism.
Although ancient Christian writers resembled their non-Christian contemporaries in their views on erotic love between women, both groups differed from our own culture in their overall understanding of erotic orientation. Whereas we often dualistically define sexual orientation as either homosexual or heterosexual, they saw a plethora of orientations. (When we in the late 20th century think about it, we also recognize bisexuals and transsexuals, leading us to speak of a spectrum, rather than a bifurcation.) Their matrix of erotic orientations included whether a person took an active or a passive sexual role, as well as the gender, age, nationality, and the economic, legal (slave or free), and social status of the partner. For example, for the second-century astrologer Ptolemy, the configuration of the stars at one's birth determines a person's lifelong erotic orientation. A man born under one configuration is oriented toward females alone; under a second configuration, he desires to play a passive role toward males (i.e., to be penetrated); under a third, he desires to penetrate children; and under a fourth, he will desire males of any age. But the list does not end there. Other configurations give rise to men who desire low-status women, slave-women, or foreigners. In this schema, female homoeroticism constitutes one erotic orientation out of many, rather than a subcategory of two orientations (heterosexual and homosexual). Ptolemy and other authors reveal a gender bias in that they present far more differentiated pictures of the male erotic life than of the female one, even attributing more orientations to men than to women. By keeping in mind the larger picture of ancient classification systems for erotic orientation, the reader will better understand the specific discussions of female homoeroticism that I analyze in my book.
My research in this area contributes to women's history by documenting the existence of woman-woman marriage, of the brutal surgical procedure of selective clitoridectomy for women who displayed "masculine desires," and of women seeking out magical practitioners to help them attract other women. It contributes to the history of sexuality by analyzing the differences between the cultural conceptualizations of female and male homoeroticism in antiquity, by documenting the concept of a long-term or lifelong erotic orientation in ancient astrology and ancient medicine, by demonstrating that 19th-century medical writers were not the first to classify homoerotic behavior as diseased, by analyzing the interplay between ancient religious views and understandings of sexual behavior, and by delineating the gendered character of Roman-period understandings of the erotic. It contributes to theology and New Testament studies by explicating the meaning of "unnatural" in Paul of Tarsus and in Clement of Alexandria, by showing Paul's use of natural law theory and of the Jewish law to undergird his teachings about sexual relations and about gender, by clarifying how homoeroticism was an issue of gender in the early church, and by providing a historical-exegetical basis for contemporary church discussions concerning same-sex love. Finally, this project contributes to ancient history generally through the sheer number of sources presented in it. Prior to this study, these sources have never been collected in one place, and some have never been translated.
Notes
* In some cultures today, the categories active and passive still shape the way people view male same-sex love. See., e.g., Ana Maria Alonso and Maria Teresa Korek, "Silences: 'Hispanics,' AIDS, and Sexual Practices," Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 1:1 (1989) 101-24; reprinted in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, ed. Henry Abelove, Michele Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin (New York: Routledge, 1993) 110-26, esp. 115-20; and Tomas Almaguer, "Chicano Men: A Cartography of Homosexual Identity and Behavior," Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 3:2 (1991) 75-100; reprinted in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, 255-73.
In the earlier part of the twentieth century, the categories active and passive played a greater role in defining gay male identity in the United States than they do today. See George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994); and George Chauncey, "Christian Brotherhood or Sexual Perversion? Homosexual Identities and the Construction of Sexual Boundaries in the World War I Era," Journal of Social History, 19 (1985) 189-212; reprinted in Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, ed. Martin Bauml Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey (New York: New American Library, 1989) 294-317.
** E.g., Aline Rousselle, Porneia: On Desire and the Body in Antiquity, trans. Felicia Pheasant (French original, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1983; London: Basil Blackwell, 1993).
Adapted from the Introduction to the forthcoming Love Between Women: Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism (University of Chicago Press, December, 1996).
Bernadette J. Brooten PhD '82 is professor of Christian Studies at Brandeis University, and is also the author of Women Leaders in the Ancient Synagogue.