Excerpts from The Making of Fornication: Eros, Ethics, and Political Reform in Greek Philosophy and Early Christianity by Kathy L. Gaca
From the Introduction, Loc 157 ... :
By the beginning of the second century c.e., patristic writers actively began to adapt ideas about regulating human sexual conduct from Plato, the Stoics, and the Pythagoreans as they developed their own teachings about permissible and impermissible sexual activity.[2] Tatian, Clement of Alexandria, and Epiphanes exemplify divergent early trajectories of this adaptation. Tatian was an ardent Christian advocate of complete sexual renunciation, also known as the “encratite”position, and Epiphanes was a Christian Platonist and a Gnostic supporter of more libertine sexual principles.
Tatian and Epiphanes drew on the Stoics for some of their teachings, and Epiphanes borrowed from Plato as well. Clement, also a Christian Platonist, censured both Tatian and Epiphanes for going to opposite extremes. He used Plato, the Stoics, and the Pythagoreans to develop putatively more moderate sexual guidelines. He is recognized today as a church father partly because he shaped a more workable set of Christian sexual regulations somewhere between the encratite and libertine positions. ...
Long before the emergence of Christianity, starting in the fourth century b.c.e., Plato, the Stoics, and the Pythagoreans produced sexually grounded political theories designed to create a more just and harmonious society. By their reasoning, human reproductive and other sexual mores are central to any endeavor to attain social order, justice, and well-being. ... For different reasons, Plato, the Stoics, and the Pythagoreans all found Greek society poorly constructed in its sexual foundations.[3] In response, they went to work like city-planning contractors and put in their utopian bids to construct sexual systems that would create new and improved societies.
... [Philosophers] had good reason to doubt, as Plato did near the end of his life, whether their ideal city plans would ever have any influence over human sexual behavior and society.[6] Aspects of the Platonic, Stoic, and Pythagorean plans eventually did become more influential through the nascent Christian church as it developed its own sexually grounded bid for a new social order. This development started in earnest by the second century, when the patristic writers began adapting various regulatory elements from the Greek philosophers, as well as from the Greek Bible (or Septuagint), the apostle Paul, and Philo of Alexandria. The proto-ecclesiastical bid eventually won imperial approval. Near the end of the fourth century, the Roman emperor Theodosius I in effect awarded the contract to the church when he made orthodox Christianity the sole permissible religion in the Roman Empire.[7] At this time the sexual and broader political reforms promoted by the church proceeded on a much more ambitious scale than they had hitherto. This especially holds true for the religious sphere of Christian sexual reform. ...
... A millennium later, [Gentile] Christian sexual morality set forth on an even more ambitious venture into the world, hand in hand with European colonialism.
Through this wide-ranging movement of Catholic and Protestant empire, the ecclesiastical sexual reforms that began to take shape by the second century c.e. [after 100 AD] have informed the sexual basis of Western culture.
We can thus see that the original Hebrew Bible's view that was pro-body, with the "good nephesh" (the fleshy body) and was pro-sex: God even endorsed wives and concubines. This was changed by pagan converts to early Messianic Judaism (pre-70 AD Christianity), wherein, after 70 AD non-Hebrew converts outnumbered Hebrew Christians. These non-Hebew converts were influenced by Platonism and other Greek ideas. So, using the Greek translatiin of the Bible rather than the Hebrew Bible, after 70 AD we see Christianity losing it more Hebew pro-body aspects. Most of the original Jewish Christians died in 70 AD, so the Gentile Christians smuggled in pagan ideas into the Churches.
Excerpts staring from Loc 202:
The inhabitants of Europe, the Americas, and various other regions live and make love in the domains of these religious sexual rules. This holds true even for the many persons, Christians and non-Christians alike, who resist [Empire-run] Christian sexual morality and its predominantly marital orientation. The Christian pattern of family values remains powerful in the United States and elsewhere, [6]. Plato in the Laws remains convinced that “no one will ever posit a more correct or better definition [of the ideal city] in its preeminence toward human virtue than one in which the private ownership of women, children, and all other goods is everywhere and by every means eliminated from human life,”739b8 –e[3]. Nonetheless, by this time Plato has come to believe that such reform is not workable given entrenched human possessiveness —my house, my family, my slaves. Only “gods or children of gods dwell happily in the fully communal city,” Laws 739d6 –e1.
... the sexual ethics of Plato and the Hellenistic philosophers, the Stoics in particular, provided early Christians with a prototype to adopt, with the result that Christian sexual morality followed rather fluidly from its philosophical predecessors. This view, if correct, would mean that the church fathers launched the philosophers’ sexual reforms on a scale that Plato, the Stoics, and the Pythagoreans never imagined —not a small town utopia here and there, but first the Roman Empire and later the New World as well. The differences separating the Hellenistic philosophers and church fathers would be relatively minor compared to their largely shared code of sexual morality. The former sing the Hymn to Zeus while the latter say the Lord’s Prayer, but the philosophers are honorary pre-Christian church fathers in their sexual restrictions and ascetic discipline.
... “Christianity has sometimes been considered . . . as playing the role of the oppressive mother superior...sexually liberated pagan culture of Greece and Rome. Most recent works on sexuality in the ancient world, however, have shown this to be an oversimplification, if not totally inaccurate.” [Foucault’s Care of the Self is first in Martin’s supporting citation, 289 n. 3.]. ...
COMPETING VIEWS: CLEMENT & AUGUSTINE'S VIEWS DOMINATED
... the relationship between Plato, early Stoicism, and so-called libertine Christianity, as exemplified by Epiphanes, is one of substantive and thoughtful continuity regarding sexual mores. Epiphanes regards the Platonic and early Stoic sexual principles as the right models for a Christian way of life. Clement, however, condemns Epiphanes for heresy because the ecclesiastical sexual mores that Clement champions cannot be reconciled with the Platonic and early Stoic sexual reforms. ....
PAUL IMPLEMENTED STOICISM & SO DID Epiphanes:
Stoic eros, in both its early communal form and its later marital guise, challenges the ingrained Greek conviction that eros is a divine force that capriciously subjugates mortals to its power. The Gnostic Christian Platonist Epiphanes adapts and promotes early Stoic eros in a communal Christian form.
SEX ONLY IN MARRIAGE CAME FROM CERTAIN GRECO FORMS OF PAGANISM:
... the dictate that people should make love strictly for reproduction and only within marriage...has a specifically Pythagorean provenance, and its central imperative is incompatible with Stoic sexual ethics, early and later alike. Given the prevalent but mistaken view that this sexual regulation was common currency in Hellenistic moral thought, its appearance in Philo and the church fathers seems a simple carryover of a widespread Greek philosophical view into the Christian sexual morality of the patristic period.
This impression is false. Like the infinitesimal triangles that shape the elements of Pythagorean reality,[21] the sexual dictate to marry and make love strictly for reproduction is a distinctive, even peculiar, artifact of Pythagorean thought, which transmutes and naturalizes into a biblically grounded church doctrine through the scriptural exegesis of Philo and Clement.
THE GREEK BIBLE:
To investigate the formation of Christian sexual morality without considering the Greek biblical norms [in the Septuagint] that inform it is like trying to understand Moby Dick while setting the whale aside. ...
