Generation and Degeneration: Tropes of Reproduction in Literature and History from Antiquity through Early Modern Europe - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0822326558 ISBN 13: 9780822326557

Publisher: Duke University Press, 2001

Synopsis

This distinctive collection explores the construction of genealogies—in both the biological sense of procreation and the metaphorical sense of heritage and cultural patrimony. Focusing specifically on the discourses that inform such genealogies, Generation and Degeneration moves from Greco-Roman times to the recent past to retrace generational fantasies and discords in a variety of related contexts, from the medical to the theological, and from the literary to the historical.
The discourses on reproduction, biology, degeneration, legacy, and lineage that this book broaches not only bring to the forefront concepts of sexual identity and gender politics but also show how they were culturally constructed and reconstructed through the centuries by medicine, philosophy, the visual arts, law, religion, and literature. The contributors reflect on a wide range of topics—from what makes men “manly” to the identity of Christ’s father, from what kinds of erotic practices went on among women in sixteenth-century seraglios to how men’s hemorrhoids can be variously labeled. Essays scrutinize stories of menstruating males and early writings on the presumed inferiority of female bodily functions. Others investigate a psychomorphology of the clitoris that challenges Freud’s account of lesbianism as an infantile stage of sexual development and such topics as the geographical origins of medicine and the materialization of genealogy in the presence of Renaissance theatrical ghosts.
This collection will engage those in English, comparative, Italian, Spanish, and French studies, as well as in history, history of medicine, and ancient and early modern religious studies.

Contributors. Kevin Brownlee, Marina Scordilis Brownlee, Elizabeth Clark, Valeria Finucci, Dale Martin, Gianna Pomata, Maureen Quilligan, Nancy Siraisi, Peter Stallybrass,Valerie Traub

About this title

About the Author

Valeria Finucci is Associate Professor of Italian at Duke University. She is the editor of Renaissance Transactions: Ariosto and Tasso, also published by Duke University Press and the author of The Lady Vanishes.

Kevin Brownlee is Professor of French and Italian at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of Poetic Identity in Guillaume de Machau.

From the Back Cover

"[This book's] ensemble of motifs is not simply cast in currently fashionable psychoanalytical language. It displays a wide array of critical perspectives yet a homogeneity of viewpoints and ideological bents occur through its disparate contributions. A truly unified piece of scholarship."-- Giuseppe F. Mazzotta, author of "The Worlds of Petrarch"

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Generation and Degeneration CL

By Valeria Finucci

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2001 Valeria Finucci
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780822326557

Chapter One

THEORIES OF REPRODUCTION

Generation, Degeneration, Regeneration: Original Sin and the Conception of Jesus in the Polemic between Augustine and Julian of Eclanum ELIZABETH A. CLARK * * *

While he was still speaking to the people, behold, his mother and his brothers stood outside, asking to speak to him. But he replied to the man who told him, "Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?" And stretching out his hand toward his disciples, he said, "Here are my mother and my brothers! For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother, and sister, and mother." -Matt. 12:46-50

... the father of Joseph, the husband of Mary, of whom Jesus was born, who is called Christ.-Matt. 1:16 Jesus, when he began his ministry, was about thirty years of age, being the son (as was supposed) of Joseph.-Luke 3:23

Who can declare his generation?-Isaiah 53:8

I

Who, indeed, were Jesus' father and mother? Most early Catholic Christians answered "God" and "Mary," the latter deemed a virgin at the time she conceived Jesus, but whose sexual and marital status after Jesus' birth was a matter of considerable debate. The decade-long polemic between Augustine of Hippo and his Pelagian opponent, Julian of Eclanum, in the early fifth century proved important in defining for the later Latin West why Jesus' "father" was divine and his mother, human but virginal. Although Elizabeth Cady Stanton (and doubtless many other moderns) have expressed dissatisfaction with the incoherence of the Gospel accounts of Jesus' genealogy and birth ("If a Heavenly Father was necessary, why not a Heavenly Mother? If an earthly Mother was admirable, why not an earthly Father? ... These Biblical mysteries and inconsistencies are a great strain on the credulity of the ordinary mind."), the Christian confession of divine paternity and human maternity was in Augustine's view not only founded on scriptural revelation but was also in accord with ideas concerning human generation and degeneration implied in his theory of original sin.

The earliest Christian writings we possess-Paul's letters-testify to the author's preoccupation with sin and its origin. Particularly in his letter to the Romans, Paul noted the seeming universality of sinfulness, the "war in the members" that pits the "flesh" against the "spirit" of all humans. In Romans 5, Paul wrote that "sin came into the world through one man and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all men sinned"-words that could be interpreted to mean that all men followed Adam in sinning and brought death upon themselves as a punishment for their sins. Yet Paul used the phrases "if many died through one man's trespass" and "if, because of one man's trespass, death reigned through that one man"-words that could be interpreted to mean that there was a causal effect between Adam's sin and that of later humans (Rom. 5:12, 15, 17). The latter interpretation was bolstered by an early Latin translation implying that death came to all not "because" or "in that" all humans sinned, but because of the sin of him "in whom" we all sinned (i.e., Adam). Although Paul does not so much highlight the responsibility of Adam for all future human sin in contrast to the divine gift of forgiveness with human waywardness, his authoritative words set the stage for discussions by various church fathers that connected our sinfulness and our deaths, somewhat vaguely, with Adam's. Within the Latin patristic tradition, Cyprian and Ambrose stand as two precursors whose reflections on the topic were to influence Augustine, yet neither theologian tightly tied the notion of original sin to a biological process. This task was left to Augustine, whose developed theory was refined in the process of debate with Pelagius and his followers after 412 c.e.

This essay details the development of the polemic between Augustine and the "second-generation" Pelagian bishop, Julian of Eclanum, against the background of religious and ethical issues of the late fourth and early fifth century-issues that could prompt accusations of heresy. In the course of the debate over original sin and its implications for the evaluation of marriage and reproduction, questions of anthropology, late ancient biology, and the status of Jesus were raised and contested. Although these debates are little known outside the rather narrow circle of scholars who study late ancient Christianity, they were formative for all later Christian teaching on sexuality, reproduction, and the confession of Jesus' sinlessness.

II

Long before Augustine encountered Pelagius, however, he had done battle with a form of Manicheanism that flourished among small circles of the intellectual elite in the Latin West. Augustine's early, postconversion years as a Christian were marked by his opposition to Manichean determinism. Himself a former Manichean, Augustine wished as a Catholic to distance himself from the Manichean assignment of human wrongdoing to the power of darkness that allegedly overtook the human person: thus the Manichean "I" was not responsible. Augustine's first writings as a Catholic Christian, by contrast, stressed the power of human free will and individual responsibility for one's actions: his early treatise that proclaimed this message, On Free Will, would in later decades be thrown in his face by his Pelagian opponents who cited it to oppose his mature predestinarian theory. In the mid-390s, however, Augustine began to study the Pauline writings more closely. Once he had appropriated Paul's notion of universal human sinfulness, he was on his way to constructing a theory of predestination that emerged in fully developed form only in the second decade of the fifth century.

The first stage of Augustine's conflict with Pelagians centered on the interpretation of God's goodness and justice in relation to human sin, on "free will" and "grace," for short. Nonetheless, even in Augustine's first anti-Pelagian treatise, On the Merits and Remission of Sins, dated to 412 c.e., the themes of his later debate with Julian of Eclanum-sexuality, marriage, and generation-are present. Augustine here claims that original sin is manifested in the "disobedient excitation of the members" that ensures all children will be born with "concupiscence," that an "injury" is transferred to infants through the "sinful flesh" of those who produce them. We infer from this treatise that already by 412, Pelagians had posed the questions with which Augustine would wrestle in his debate with Julian: Why do regenerated Christians not produce regenerated children? Why do humans still die (on Augustine's theory, a punishment for original sin) if we have remission of sins through Christ? Is the soul propagated with the body or not-and if not, how is sin, which pertains to the soul, transmitted?

During the next few years, Augustine had much opportunity to reflect on the sin committed in the Garden of Eden. His most famous statement of the matter from this period is found in book 14 of the City of God. Here, Augustine posits that if Adam and Eve had not sinned, no unruly just would have disturbed their peace and clouded their mental functions. The couple would have engaged in sexual intercourse in Eden to produce children, but they would not have been disturbed by the tussle between spirit and flesh. The genital organs of Adam and Eve would have moved at the bidding of the will, just as do our other bodily parts. Defloration and labor pains would have remained unknown, since no injury could mar the happiness of Eden. Our unruly sexual members and our feeling of shame at nakedness and at sexual intercourse, Augustine posits, are among the latter-day signs that the sin of Adam and Eve affected all later generations.

Although Augustine stands as a theologian, not as a scientist, the images he uses to describe Edenic and post-Edenic sex slide him toward the realms of biology and "genetics." One such image he borrowed from Virgil's Georgics: Adam in a sinless Eden, preparing to engage in a reproductive sexual act, might be compared to a farmer who prepares his mares for the seed to be sown "on the field of generation." Indeed, fructifying and "genetic" allusions play an increasing role in Augustine's discussion during these years. By 417, he had found his preferred metaphor to describe the transmission of sin: from the cultivated olive tree are produced only wild olive trees, not cultivated ones. This dendrological example bolsters the principle that regenerated (i.e., baptized Christian) parents do not transmit to their children the state of their "rebirth," but their old "carnal" natures. Thus Augustine began to explain the "biology" of original sin by 419, the year in which Julian most likely composed his first attack upon him.

In 418, Julian and other Pelagian bishops were condemned by both religious and imperial authorities. In response, Julian and his confreres apparently solicited support in Rome for their cause. Julian also wrote to a certain Count Valerius at the imperial court, alleging that the views of Augustine and his supporters were Manichean, that is, that they denigrated God's good creation, including the reproductive process. Julian himself had been married (we have the epithalamium composed by Paulinus of Nola upon the occasion of his wedding), and he approached Valerius, also married, to signal the danger that Augustine's overly ascetic theories posed. Valerius was, as Peter Brown has put it, "just the man" for Julian, someone calculated to be sympathetic to the allegedly heretical threat emanating from Hippo Regius. In 419, Augustine composed the first book of his treatise On Marriage and Concupiscence, and sent it to Count Valerius, no doubt hoping to convince him that it was Pelagians like Julian, not Augustine himself, who constituted the real threat to Christian ethical teaching. Probably Augustine did not know the full details of Julian's attack upon him when he wrote the first book of this treatise, for he poses no arguments beyond those he had previously elaborated. Rising to the bait, Julian composed a response in the form of a treatise To Turbantius, gave a copy to Valerius, who in turn sent it to Augustine; Augustine responded with book 2 of On Marriage and Concupiscence. In the next years, Augustine and Julian engaged in a protracted literary debate. Near the time of his death in 430, Augustine was still at work on his huge Contra secundam Juliani responsionem opus imperfectum.

Once attacked by Julian, Augustine could no longer rest his entire case on appeals to Scripture and Christian tradition: Julian argued that Augustine's theory of original sin was based on a highly dubious biological substructure. Julian intended to raise up these underpinnings for public inspection, to force Augustine's response to the charge against him of Manicheanism, that is, that Augustine's theory implied that human sinfulness was predetermined and innate. Augustine doubtless would have preferred to argue on theological grounds, but the terms of the debate were set for him by his opponent. Julian wished to make Augustine's views seem unscientific, ridiculous-and deeply unchristian. From book 2 of On Marriage and Concupiscence, through the Against Julian, to the Opus imperfectum, Augustine labored to answer Julian, attempting to shift the grounds of argument from biology to theology. He was not, I shall suggest, entirely successful.

III

Julian was nothing if not pointed in his objections to Augustine's views. Just what is it about marriage, he asks, that the devil can claim its offspring as his own? It can't be the difference between the sexes, for God so made us. It can't be the union of male and female, for God blessed this union in Genesis 1:28 and 2:24. It can't be human fecundity, for reproduction was the reason why marriage was originally instituted. Augustine's response-"None of the above, but carnal concupiscence"-spurs Julian to argue that Augustine's understanding of concupiscence is not properly scientific.

Indeed, although Augustine had previously claimed that there could be a lust or concupiscence for vengeance, money, victory, and domination, his most common use of the word was in a sexual (and negative) sense. Throughout the debate, Augustine expressed annoyance that Julian substituted phrases such as "the natural appetite" or "the vigor of the members" for "concupiscence," in an attempt to shift the word's meaning away from the realm of moral and religious discourse and toward that of "science." Julian's handling of several scriptural passages indeed reveals this interest. When, for example, Genesis 4:25 states that Seth was the seed God raised up from Adam, Julian interprets the verse to mean that God stirred up sexual desire in Adam, through which the seed was "raised" in order to be "poured" into Eve's womb: following medical theory of his day, Julian believed that the seed was "formed" through sexual desire. Using another agricultural metaphor, Julian reminds Augustine that the crop is not affected if the seeds are "stolen": that is, children produced by an adulterous relationship are no different from those born in legitimate marriage. Seed is simply a biological phenomenon, whatever the morality of human agents.

As the debate proceeded-and as we perceive it from Augustine's Contra Julianum and his Opus imperfectum-seeds became an increasingly important topic. Augustine agrees with Julian that God makes all humans from seed, but (unlike Julian) he believes that the seed is already condemned and vitiated through Adam's sin. Moreover, Augustine argues that the seed is created by God directly and does not receive its formation (as Julian thought) from lust-for to admit the latter would both remove procreation from divine agency and allow sin, of which lust is a manifestation, to be responsible for human generation. Since Augustine did not, at this early stage of the debate, concede that lust could have been present in the Garden of Eden, how could Adam and Eve have procreated, if (as on Julian's-and medical-theory) lust were necessary for the creation of the generative seed? On Augustine's theory, the seed was in essence good, but the devil had "sowed the tares" of evil in it.

For Julian, in contrast, lust-or natural appetite-is simply one of the bodily senses that we are given as part of our human endowment; hence, we cannot believe that it originated from human sinfulness. Against Augustine's view that all human nature was ever after changed by Adam's sin, Julian argues that human nature (including sexual appetite) does not change, since God bestows our essential human constitution and neither sin nor grace has the power to alter it. Augustine's list of the penalties for sin derived from Genesis 3-labor pains, sweat, work, the submission of women to men-are, in Julian's view, all part of the natural order and thus unchangeable. Although Julian believes that an "excess" of lust leading humans to intemperate fornication is blameworthy, sexual desire of a "moderate" sort is one of God's good creations.

Continues...

Excerpted from Generation and Degeneration CLby Valeria Finucci Copyright © 2001 by Valeria Finucci. Excerpted by permission.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0822326558
• ISBN 13: 9780822326557
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336
• Editor: Finucci Valeria, Brownlee Kevin