Anti-Gnosticism: Pauline Sexual Ethics

I’ve been interested in Pauline theology for a while: first, for his emphasis on community organization against the norms of 1^st century Greco-Roman politeia; second, his relatively egalitarian and universal outlook on gender/sex and nationality (in as much as nationality could be said to exist at the time whether on the basis of ancestry, geography, or politeia); third, his self-understanding as a Pharisee and apostle of Jesus to the Gentiles, which was contrary—or at least orthogonal—to the aims of James’ isolationist assembly in Jerusalem. I also think that Paul’s authentic epistles encode the particular viewpoints of himself and of the first Christians more accurately than either the synoptic Gospels (including Acts) or the inauthentic epistles, which Eisenbaum characterizes as an effort to both discredit the Jerusalem assembly and frame Paul as a convert from Judaism to Christianity. So there’s a lot to glean from Paul and, whether or not we disagree with his conclusions, we should at least take him seriously and understand how he arrives at them.

Homosexuality

Why not tackle the big question: Paul on homosexuality? This is not just because it’s the most obvious point at which modern readers may disagree with Paul, at least given most typical interpretations of the passage (we’re going investigate Romans in particular), but also because there’s an interesting framing of the question by Paul which problematizes the obvious interpretation whether or not he intends it. I’m not particularly worried about pitting the intent versus the significance of a biblical passage since that’s the basis of even conservative exegesis who do crazier things interpretively speaking than I’m about to do. I’m going to quote the specific passage and its immediate context at length, extending from Romans 1:18 to 2:11 (NRSVUE) because I’ve always disliked how the division of the text into chapters and verses disturbs the text’s own continuity:

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and injustice of those who by their injustice suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. Ever since the creation of the world God’s eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been seen and understood through the things God has made. So they are without excuse, or though they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their senseless hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and they exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling a mortal human or birds or four-footed animals or reptiles.

Therefore God gave them over in the desires of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves. They exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.

Romans 1:18–25

Paul is usually characterized as a Stoic, but being more familiar with Epicurean literature (and perhaps—gasp!—identifying with Epicurean philosophy), I’m getting some Epicurean vibes from this first section. I’ve always found it a problematic notion that we can derive an understanding of God, of divine intent, or of the Logos as cosmic principle from a world which is understood to be corrupt. However, if we identify the corruption of the cosmos with the corruption of specifically human nature (this being something socially mediated, if we cross wires with Marx), perhaps we could humor Paul and suppose that the natural cosmos preserves some intended state of things, as opposed to the strictly human world. That’s something I could agree with: isn’t nature and its development beautiful, as well as something which civilization (derogatory) has always tried to escape? Shouldn’t it be an ethical aim to align our existence with nature, to take it as a blueprint for our continued development? Don’t humans act according to nature except when corruption intercedes, and isn’t that corruption definitive of humanity’s state contra nature?

For this reason God gave them over to dishonorable passions. Their females exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, and in the same way also the males, giving up natural intercourse with females, were consumed with their passionate desires for one another. Males committed shameless acts with males and received in their own persons the due penalty for their error.

Romans 1:26–27

I always joke that while the Bible is against male homosexuality, female homosexuality is totally kosher. That may be true for the Mosaic purity laws of Leviticus and Deuteronomy, but I’m going to read Paul here as being against homosexuality irrespective of gender/sex, because he’s operating on a different level than ritual purity (he doesn’t seem to have any opinions about shellfish or mixed fabrics, and I don’t think that’s a contradiction for which one should fault him as many readers do). Again, the category is “transgression of nature”, as a heuristic for whether someone has failed to act morally or ethically.

Let’s close out this passage, again reaching across the artificial chapter division:

And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them over to an unfit mind and to do things that should not be done. They were filled with every kind of injustice, evil, covetousness, malice. Full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, craftiness, they are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, rebellious toward parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. They know God’s decree, that those who practice such things deserve to die, yet they not only do them but even applaud others who practice them.

Therefore you are without excuse, whoever you are, when you judge others, for in passing judgment on another you condemn yourself, because you, the judge, are doing the very same things. We know that God’s judgment on those who do such things is in accordance with truth. Do you imagine, whoever you are, that when you judge those who do such things and yet do them yourself, you will escape the judgment of God? Or do you despise the riches of his kindness and forbearance and patience? Do you not realize that God’s kindness is meant to lead you to repentance? But by your hard and impenitent heart you are storing up wrath for yourself on the day of wrath, when God’s righteous judgment will be revealed. He will repay according to each one’s deeds: to those who by patiently doing good seek for glory and honor and immortality, he will give eternal life, while for those who are self-seeking and who obey not the truth but injustice, there will be wrath and fury. There will be affliction and distress for everyone who does evil, both the Jew first and the Greek, but glory and honor and peace for everyone who does good, both the Jew first and the Greek. For God shows no partiality.

Romans 1:28–2:11

That’s a nice segue, isn’t it? If you take for granted the split between the two paragraphs implied by the chapter division, you might think Paul is describing everyone who deserves to die before moving onto a totally different topic. Contextually, the tone (in my reading) changes: don’t we all deserve to die? Isn’t one being a little dishonest when they focus on how much others should deserve to die? Shouldn’t one’s goal be to repent, do good, and help others align with nature (in as much as doing so aligns oneself with the Logos)? With that being said, we should still understand what alignment and transgression look like, so let’s return to the topic of homosexuality.

Does Paul know that animals have gay sex? Or rather—to avoid anthropomorphic labels—that animals express homosexual behavior as well as what we might call inverse sexuality (of females mounting males)? Again, that’s a measurable fact for which readers often fault Paul for apparently displaying ignorance, similar to how he says in 1 Corinthians 1:14 that men by nature have short hair (this is more self-evidently silly, unless we assume that Paul is referring to some aggregate cultural absolutism—which we have no reason to assume is natural considering the sinful state of humans in general). We can’t blame corrupt nature on the animals’ part because we’ve already made the assumption that nature reflects or is an intact expression of the Logos. We also can’t just call the ‘gay animals’ stupid, that they know not what they do, because it’s precisely in and by human wisdom that transgression from nature occurs. We’re not gnostic, are we?

That’s not a trick question, but one that I think is key to this entire passage, as well as to Pauline theology in general. I’m not referring to any specific doctrine considered gnostic, since of course there’s no singular gnostic belief system, but in the general formula that physical creation is a corrupt prison in which our souls are trapped, and that the goal of reigion is to release our souls into a perfect immaterial realm where we’re free of material trappings and temptations. Paul submits the opposite: that we have deviated from nature and its creative-ordering principles, exchanging God’s glory for images of our own hands. Humanity is essentially the demiurge of a spiritual prison, in which we have trapped our bodies, our livelihoods, and our relationships to each other. From my previous post:

For Paul, the important thing is not idolatry as a factually or morally incorrect belief, but as a social force generative of sin (that is, taken literally, “transgressions”). Faith in God by Jesus, in contrast, generates good that combat wrongdoing both personal and societal. Paul’s theology is one that, in other words, allows gentiles to participate in tikkun olam rather than just being neutral bystanders or active obstacles.

What strikes me about Paul’s theology, at least as Eisenbaum describes it, is how it resembles a sort of proto-materialism. Sure, Greek philosophy had already been on the ball when it came to scientifically interpreting their world (and reading their myths as metaphors when they came into conflict with ‘reality’ as they understood it), and this tendency had already rubbed off on Hellenized Jews like Philo of Alexandria. But Paul makes society and individuals the object of this critique: idolatry is not reflective of reality, but is a manifestation of people’s desires projected onto reality. […] It’s all critique of fetishism, how one’s circumstances produce their beliefs.

Paul’s prohibition against homosexuality seems to have nothing to do with homosexuality as such but with idolatry: not necessarily in the sense of being practiced as worship like in certain near-eastern religions (or, again, not as such), but in the sense of embodying social relations of “injustice, evil, covetousness, malice.” This is beating a dead horse, but there’s an obvious association here with the Greco-Roman practice of pederasty-as-mentorship. Let’s think of Diddy, alleged human trafficker and pederast: wasn’t it maybe a little stupid that some people got caught up on him having gay sex, as opposed to allegedly trafficking and sexually assaulting minors? What’s the operative ‘transgression’ here? Both boys and girls were allegedly victims. Is one set of victims less moral, more perverse, than another? They’re both worse!

Marriage

Let’s cross-compare with Paul’s authentic views on marriage. Pseudo-Paul is fixated on the family and reproduction, of birthing and raising good little Christian children, and this obsession has lasted into the history of the Church ‘proper’ from Orthodoxy to American Evangelicalism. This tendency correlates with a revival of patriarchal norms, such as how pseudo-Paul prohibits women from positions of ecclesiastical authority despite real-Paul at the tail-end of Romans addressing a female deacon Phoebe, two female “coworkers in Christ”, and multiple other women (at least one confirmed female authority figure, and I’d wager that some of the other women addressed must also have some authority, or else he wouldn’t have addressed them directly). If real-Paul doesn’t seem interested in preserving patriarchal norms, how did he conceive of marriage? This is a fun passage:

Now for the matters you wrote about: “It is good for a man not to have sexual relations with a woman.” But since sexual immorality is occurring, each man should have sexual relations with his own wife, and each woman with her own husband. The husband should fulfill his marital duty to his wife, and likewise the wife to her husband. The wife does not have authority over her own body but yields it to her husband. In the same way, the husband does not have authority over his own body but yields it to his wife. Do not deprive each other except perhaps by mutual consent and for a time, so that you may devote yourselves to prayer. Then come together again so that Satan will not tempt you because of your lack of self-control. I say this as a concession, not as a command. I wish that all of you were as I am. But each of you has your own gift from God; one has this gift, another has that.

Now to the unmarried and the widows I say: It is good for them to stay unmarried, as I do. But if they cannot control themselves, they should marry, for it is better to marry than to burn with passion.

1 Corinthians 7:1–9

And let’s skip ahead a little:

Now about virgins: I have no command from the Lord [!], but I give a judgment as one who by the Lord’s mercy is trustworthy. Because of the present crisis, I think that it is good for a man to remain as he is. Are you pledged to a woman? Do not seek to be released. Are you free from such a commitment? Do not look for a wife. But if you do marry, you have not sinned; and if a virgin marries, she has not sinned. But those who marry will face many troubles in this life, and I want to spare you this.

What I mean, brothers and sisters, is that the time is short. From now on those who have wives should live as if they do not; those who mourn, as if they did not; those who are happy, as if they were not; those who buy something, as if it were not theirs to keep; those who use the things of the world, as if not engrossed in them. For this world in its present form is passing away.

I would like you to be free from concern. An unmarried man is concerned about the Lord’s affairs—how he can please the Lord. But a married man is concerned about the affairs of this world—how he can please his wife—and his interests are divided. An unmarried woman or virgin is concerned about the Lord’s affairs: Her aim is to be devoted to the Lord in both body and spirit. But a married woman is concerned about the affairs of this world—how she can please her husband. I am saying this for your own good, not to restrict you, but that you may live in a right way in undivided devotion to the Lord.

1 Corinthians 7:25–35

Where’s that command to be fruitful and multiply? Where’s the imposition to get married and have tons of babies and so on? Nowhere! Marriage functions as sexual quarantine for those who are too weak of spirit to not have sex—and this is not because sex is unnatural but because, pragmatically speaking, sex means distraction and drama from the assembly and its organizational mission. So, if you are so horny, get married and make sure to fulfill each other’s sexual urges to avoid compromising self-control; and otherwise, it’s better to not marry so you can fully dedicate yourself to the assembly. Aren’t these the instructions you’d expect during an apocalyptic or revolutionary situation? Haven’t you ever been in a Discord that imploded because someone kept trying to expand their polycule?

Of course, as the Church survived one generation and had to make active efforts towards surviving the next, it embraced patriarchal norms and marriage-for-reproduction (contrast with Paul’s overt recommendation of marriage-for-sexual-enjoyment). We see almost the same tendency in second generations of socialist countries, which as Maria Mies notes go from enlisting women in the revolution to domesticating them as housewives and baby-producers (notably, and interestingly, in countries which were previously peasant-based economies in which women worked alongside men). The oppression of women goes hand in hand with the repression of sexual minorities who refuse to participate in reproduction or are useless in any case, leading (for example) to the recriminalization of homosexuality in the USSR in 1933 less than 20 years after its decriminalization.

So, did early Christianity also decriminalize homosexuality—referring not to the modern notion of sexual orientation and whatever implications it has, but to homosexual behavior within the confines of what (counter)cultural norms had been established by the Church? Would it be ethically appropriate within the framework laid out by Paul for two persons of the same sex to quarantine their sexual urges with each other? The early Church was not a monolith, and the specifics as always are shrouded in literary embellishment (or may have even been obscured by the later Church, especially if we can expect such changes in attitude over the course of only a few decades), but my hunch is that what seemingly gay behavior we see from some early Christians such as the practice of “brother-making” both make sense within this framework and seem like obvious targets of repression in the later generations of the Church. Historicity aside (and why worry about historicity when stories nevertheless communicate socially contemporaneous attitudes about their topic, or when we’re talking about the Bible of all things), I think it’s telling that the martyrdom of Sergius and Bacchus sees them paraded by the Romans in female clothing before being executed, buried together, and later described as erastai (lovers). If this were a sign of degeneracy in the Church, wouldn’t we see an increase in homosexual norms rather than in scrutiny and outright mistreatment? On the other hand, aren't the changes in attitude towards sex and reproduction consistent with other attempted liberatory movements?

By extension, can we not criticize this institutionalization of modern heterosexual marriage as being unnatural, and an expression of patriarchal domination over women? And isn't it a gnostic tendency to identify heterosexual marriage as a heavenly ideal? Do correct notions of theory and practice come from above or from below, from the heavenly idea realm or from observations in nature? Are we eternal souls trapped in a material prison of a demiurge’s making, or are we bodies alienated from nature by idolatrous forces of our own hands? This question was seemingly as pertinent to the early Church as it is to us now.

Conclusion

Maybe I’m putting words in Paul’s mouth or extending him far past his particular context as a thinker. But I feel like this is an honest reading that takes Paul, his theology, and his ethical framework of social iconoclasm seriously without taking for granted any conclusions and while pursuing the same goal of identifying and criticizing social fetishism (i.e., idolatry). I'm also interested in continuing to investigate anti-gnosticism as a strategy to evaluate theory and practice, since it seems to anticipate critiques of idealism and metaphysics in modern contexts.