When you hear the name Michel Foucault, what do you think of?
For many younger denizens of our contemporary culture wars — especially if they have been influenced by Jordan Peterson — Foucault is largely to blame for the triumphs in the last few decades of the progressive faction(s) of Western culture, especially in the ascendancy of identity politics.
The familiar refrain, peddled by Peterson, is that, circa the late 1960s, when Western consciousness began to assimilate the horrors both of Maoist China and — thanks to the publication in 1968 of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago — of Stalinist Russia, Foucault and company conspired to coopt Marxist thought for a new kind of political revolution, in which the rivalry between rich and poor would be replaced by the oppressor versus the oppressed.
And yet, as various writers have pointed out, this mythology fails to hold up.
One need look no further than volume one of The History of Sexuality to grasp that it is precisely the standard tropes of sexual power dynamics — finding their heyday in the sexual revolution of the 1960s, but no less dominant today — that Foucault seeks to problematize, in this case the hackneyed trope of Victorian-driven sexual repression. As Jarryd Bartle writes:
In The History of Sexuality, Foucault challenged the “repressive hypothesis” that Western society, beginning in the 17th century right up until the mid-20th century, gradually became more prudish and repressed. Instead, Foucault’s work demonstrates that all societies have had elaborate taboos on sexuality and that they stem from differing understandings of the self. Moreover, the so-called “prudish Victorians” actually led to the proliferation of thought regarding sexual habits that created, rather than repressed, new ways of viewing one’s desires. Because of those prudes, the modern “homosexual” was born.
In volume one, Foucault was not attacking the Victorians; he was attacking the attackers of the Victorians, excoriating them for failing to see their own uncritical complicity in reinforcing dominant modes of sexual ideology. (If one does not grasp this basic point, it is hard to believe that one has read the book.)
Yet it is not volume one that I want to discuss in this piece; it is volume four, which was posthumously published in French in 2018, 34 years after Foucault’s death in 1984.
Those who label Foucault as some kind of prescient mastermind of contemporary wokeism will once again be sorely disappointed if they read this book, for Foucault takes a Christian turn, focusing his attention on (among other issues) the history of sexual renunciation and religious celibacy in the second through fourth centuries of the Christian era.
The bottom line, echoing Foucault’s instincts in volume one, is that the motivations for Christian virginity have nothing to do with the presumed anti-sexual mores of Christianity, nothing to do with a religious antipathy for the human body. Rather, what motivated the ancient Christian virgins — from St. Thecla (legendary companion of St. Paul), through Origen and the Cappadocian Fathers, up through John Cassian — was a theological passion for God. Far more than saying no to anything, they were saying yes to their deepest longings for God.
Many readers of Covenant will have been influenced by the magisterial work of Peter Brown, whose 1968 Augustine of Hippo and 1988 The Body in Society have proved massively influential. What might be less known is that — as demonstrated by an online lecture by Brown — Foucault’s work in volume four dovetails with Brown’s 1988 work almost completely.
One reason for this overlap is that the two thinkers — who had a riveting conversation at a pub in Berkeley, narrated in Brown’s online lecture in October of 1980 — were reading the same texts and translations of ancient writers, chief among them John Cassian, published by the Jesuit ressourcement theologians Jean Danielou, Claude Mondésert, and Henri de Lubac, in the series Sources Chrétiennes.
Says Brown:
We both looked back to a golden age of French patristic scholarship associated with the liberal French Catholicism of the years before and after Vatican II. A collection of sources, which we both used, were the products of that culture. There were the Sources Chrétiennes [volumes]. This series made ancient Christian authors fully available in reliable editions, accompanied on the facing right page, with fine French translations, and with the introductions and commentaries which were often complete essays in themselves. Founded in Lyon in dire times in 1942, Sources Chrétiennes became both the symbol and the spearhead of Ressourcement, the turn to the early Christian sources, from which it was hoped that a new, more open, less medieval Catholicism would spring. Though we both came at it from very different angles, Foucault and I were the beneficiaries of that remarkable moment of hope.
Foucault and Brown agree (as evidenced by their respective works): these radical virgins, in the main, were intensely countercultural: they resisted and rejected the established, civilizational instinct to stave off death through the propagation of offspring (what Brown in chapter one of The Body in Society styles “a rampart for the city”); they imagined that they were embodying a return to paradise, when humanity lived a life beyond sexual/gender difference (like the angels); they were living in the kingdom of Heaven in the wake of Christ’s resurrection, which shook the earth in expectation of his return in glory.
Their existence was a lived affirmation of a purity that, like freedom itself, is more than merely negative. Their lives were an embodied affirmation of “a positive connection with God: a way of dedicating oneself to him” (Foucault, History of Sexuality, 4:128).
Of particular note is that Foucault agrees with Brown — whose 1988 The Body in Society tells a strikingly similar narrative — that, while the early Christian conception of virginity was unprecedented and novel within its ancient milieu, Christians’ sexual ethics of marriage was (in the main) simply “copied & pasted” from certain swaths of pagan (mainly Stoic) thought (of which the most prominent representative, for both Foucault and Brown, following 20th-century classicist Paul Veyne, is Marcus Aurelius).
According to Foucault — and here I must register the surreal experience (highly recommended) of learning church history from one of the 20th century’s most (allegedly) infamous despisers of the Christian faith — St. Ambrose asked rhetorically, “Is pagan virtue any better than prostitution?” (History of Sexuality, 4:136). Chrysostom channels a similar thought, insisting that pagan virginity is not inspired by the love of God and that those complying with such an order, restriction, or law “cannot hope for any privilege” (History of Sexuality, 4:137).
In a particularly definitive statement, Foucault writes that
the monastic institution [of virginity] was a locus, or at least an occasion, for reflection on this triple aspect of virginity: a state radically different from that of marriage, integrated into the life of the world, and demanding a practice, an art, a particular technique in order to produce its positive effects; an object of a free individual choice that no precept could impose, either on everyone in the form of law, or on some in the form of a commandment; a form of life in which the undertaking of individual salvation is deeply involved with the economy of human redemption. (History of Sexuality, 4:143)
Further, Foucault and Brown agree on one final point: the position of Augustine that gained dominance in the West was idiosyncratic and novel at the time, a seismic rupture with the preceding thought, especially in the Greek-speaking East, regarding sexuality. It is not that Augustine rejected the legitimacy of virginity. Rather, he evinces a new Christian concern “in the organization, management, control, and regulation of society” through the means of sexual regulation (History of Sexuality, 4:195) Citing his reliance on Jean Daniélou, Foucault argues that at this juncture in history we witness a mutual reinforcement of “ecclesiastical institutions and state structures” (History of Sexuality, 4:195), the very thing that previous generations of celibates had rejected.
As both Foucault and Brown would agree, this renewed attempt of Augustine to “stave away death” and to shore up the stability of secular foundations is surely part and parcel with his eschatology. Rejecting the urgent chiliasm of Origen and the urgent expectation of other pre-Constantinian figures like Macrina or Methodius, for him the post-Ascension world, the city of man, was a mundus senescens, a realm and epoch in which all that is human is growing old and decrepit, like the atrophying muscle of an old man (Augustine, City of God 20.6-17).[10] Augustine was a man deeply preoccupied with the role of the Catholic Church in Roman society, both Foucault and Brown emphasize; hence his determination, in the same vein as the pagan authorities against which previous generations of virgins had revolted, to “stave off death” by procreation.
It is Augustine, then, who parts company with the dominant patristic view, expressed paradigmatically in the work of Gregory of Nyssa, that our first human parents were akin to the angels in terms of their physiology and sexual activity: sexless beings for whom biological procreation was completely unnecessary, there being no death in Eden needing to be staved off. One more step, in the thought of these pre-Augustinian Christians: if such was the state of affairs at the beginning, then it is this situation to which history will return, will culminate in its end. Here their thought resonates with Christ’s teaching that in heaven “there will be no giving or receiving in marriage, for we will be like the angels” (Matt. 22:30) and Paul’s eschatological anthropology in which we will have (something like?) angelic bodies in our resurrection existence (1 Cor. 15:35-49).
It is Augustine’s anomalous view, of course, that gains prominence in the West. Is it a coincidence that the Church Father who places sexually active human bodies in Eden is the same one who libidinizes sex for centuries in the West?
Although Foucault and Brown both think so, I will now demur.
My task in this little essay — to highlight Foucault’s posthumously published, patristic work on sexuality and his surprising Christian turn in volume four, and how they overlap with the scholarship of Peter Brown — is now complete.
The Rev. Dr. Matt Boulter is the rector of St. George’s Episcopal Church in east central Austin, Texas. A former Presbyterian minister with a Ph.D. in philosophy, Matt’s great love is reaching the city with the love, the good news, of Jesus Christ.
