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The Making of Fornication - Eros, Ethics, and Political Reform in Greek Philosophy and Early Christianity (Paperback)
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The Making of Fornication - Eros, Ethics, and Political Reform in Greek Philosophy and Early Christianity (Paperback)
Series: Hellenistic Culture and Society, 40
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This provocative work provides a radical reassessment of the
emergence and nature of Christian sexual morality, the dominant
moral paradigm in Western society since late antiquity. While many
scholars, including Michel Foucault, have found the basis of early
Christian sexual restrictions in Greek ethics and political
philosophy, Kathy L. Gaca demonstrates on compelling new grounds
that it is misguided to regard Greek ethics and political
theory--with their proposed reforms of eroticism, the family, and
civic order--as the foundation of Christian sexual austerity.
Rather, in this thoroughly informed and wide-ranging study, Gaca
shows that early Christian goals to eradicate fornication were
derived from the sexual rules and poetic norms of the Septuagint,
or Greek Bible, and that early Christian writers adapted these
rules and norms in ways that reveal fascinating insights into the
distinctive and largely non-philosophical character of Christian
sexual morality. Writing with an authoritative command of both
Greek philosophy and early Christian writings, Gaca investigates
Plato, the Stoics, the Pythagoreans, Philo of Alexandria, the
apostle Paul, and the patristic Christians Clement of Alexandria,
Tatian, and Epiphanes, freshly elucidating their ideas on sexual
reform with precision, depth, and originality. Early Christian
writers, she demonstrates, transformed all that they borrowed from
Greek ethics and political philosophy to launch innovative programs
against fornication that were inimical to Greek cultural mores,
popular and philosophical alike. The Septuagint's mandate to
worship the Lord alone among all gods led to a Christian program to
revolutionize Gentile sexual practices, only for early Christians
to find this virtually impossible to carry out without going to
extremes of sexual renunciation. Knowledgeable and wide-ranging,
this work of intellectual history and ethics cogently demonstrates
why early Christian sexual restrictions took such repressive
ascetic forms, and casts sobering light on what Christian sexual
morality has meant for religious pluralism in Western culture,
especially among women as its bearers.
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