The Burden of the Flesh: Fasting and Sexuality in Early Christianity by Teresa M. Shaw (review)

The Burden of the Flesh: Fasting and Sexuality in Early Christianity. By Teresa M. Shaw. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press. 1998. Pp. x, 298. $27.00 paperback.) Teresa Shaw explores a topic not always approached with either sympathy or style, and she offers both in abundance. The book is beautifully written, clear in its detail, and soundly structured. It is marked at every turn by shrewdness and respect. Neither her interest nor her approach is entirely novel. She has followed consciously and explicitly in the steps of Aline Rousselle, for example, and Peter Brown. What she adds to the debate, however, is more than polish. Her own words signal her breadth of reference: "Arguments concerning the effects of diet on the condition of the body and the soul interweave with eschatological images . . ., with instructions for the daily practice of female chastity and with the theological interpretation of creation, embodiment and gender" (p. 2). The insistent awareness, in particular, of human origins and final destiny colored every facet of early Christian experience. As the author puts it, in perhaps the best part of her book, "Ascetic discipline looks back to the garden and forward to the kingdom" (p. 163). It is such a gathering of threads from practical (particularly medical) endeavor, from the formulae of faith, and from scriptural exegesis that gives the book its distinctive authority. While the focus is on fasting, one is reminded constantly of implications elsewhere. The range of Dr. Shaw's allusions (which reach back to Hesiod) is harnessed always to a clear-sighted understanding of enduring human anxieties. Herein lies her sympathy. Her patient and illuminating analysis of texts depends always on taking seriously the motives of those who wrote them. She has no wish to impose a modern sense of outrage or 'correctness' on ancient practice. While explanations remain strange to us, the urgent response to experience is instantly recognizable. Above all, Dr. Shaw rejects the glib assumption that we witness in this period the dethroning of classical rationalism. To appeal, however, to Hesiod, Plutarch, Galen, or Porphyry is not to deny that Christians gave a specific twist to long-standing traditions. Their apparent preoccupation with sex has absorbed scholars for some time; but here we have a firmer step forward in explaining that focus. The question can be posed, whether Christian virginity represented a refinement of tradition, making explicit a latent concern, or whether, nervous about sexuality on other grounds, Christians visited upon an inherited tradition an extraneous fascination. Dr. Shaw would argue that neither question quite hits the mark. The biblical myth of the Fall echoes, without merely aping, a sense of loss already abroad in the ancient world. Christianity did not originate people's willingness to blame on that primal disappointment whatever they found unnerving or distasteful in their current experience. What is remarkable about the Christian version, as Dr. Shaw shows, is the optimism inspired by the body: a gendered enveloping of the flesh entirely capable of untainted union in the lost paradise, and destined to regain that poise and harmony in the final days. 'Gender' is all, for men were as involved as women in those losses and redemptions. Unfortunately, as we now know well, it is hard to discover what women thought about such matters. Neither their pain nor their wisdom is easily accessible. The accounts provided by men, however, stylized and insensitive though they may be, did subvert a traditional way of looking at women's lives. They may also tell us something about men. 'Sexuality' in this book does mean women's sexuality; and one might ask whether this privileging of the female arena has not skewed the picture, has not obscured what women shared with men in ascetic culture. The imperfection of the female body, the intricacies of its warm, wet structure, certainly fed the urge to fast; but men fasted also, and was that not, for all their contrasting `normality something to do with their passion, their bodies, their sex? …