I have joked among friends that the best book I have read on being trans is Peter Brown’s The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity. Most of the joke here is that the majority of the books on being trans that people recommend are incredibly bad. But I also found that his accounts of how Christianity picked up, adapted, and rejected various Jewish and Greco-Roman conceptions of the body, and how this was almost always related to wider understandings of social relationships, incredibly compelling for thinking about my own life. I have wondered, for example, whether his nuanced and sympathetic discussion of Origen’s self-castration, towards attaining to something closer to the life of the age to come in his bodily form, could be written by a relatively conservative Christian scholar today, when transsexuality looms much larger in the public mind.
But what has remained with me most is the dialectical tension he portrays between the desert and the city in the emergence of Christian monasticism. It is not unusual to hear the proliferation of Christian monasticism in the early 4th century characterised as a response to complicity in the Roman Empire, a kind of Christian refusal of power in favour of faithfulness. It is less common to consider how the effort to ‘make the desert a city’ may equally have mediated such forms of power, insofar as the chains of relationship between urban bishops and desert monastics allowed those bishops to dirty their hands with imperial politics and retain their spiritual authority. The desert is not a refusal, but the spiritual boundary of empire, that only limits it insofar as it lends it definition. In this case, as it frequently is in Brown, the social body is also the individual, ascetic body. That the desert is the site where the legacies of Origenism are preserved, along with the (more or less literal) practices of bodily transformation that implies, has often given me pause for thought.[1]
A big change in my life over the past year or so has been a deliberate distancing of myself from conversations about ‘the Christian left’. I still consider myself a Christian, though more ambivalently than I once did, but that distancing isn’t so much about that. It is more about the kinds of self-justification that I found ‘Christian leftism’ led one into and what that did to my spiritual life. I won’t speak for other people, but for me, a lot of those conversations seemed to revolve around explaining why being a Christian didn’t necessitate identification with a hegemonic, reactionary form of Christianity. Though I myself played out such arguments, eventually, I decided that, at a personal level, attempting to deny one’s complicity in sin is bad spiritual practice, claiming for oneself a judgement that belongs to the last day, to God alone - more generally, it also hinders wider efforts to think about, and organise against, such hegemonic forms. I find myself returning, perhaps ironically, to formulas of monastic spirituality: Keep your mind in hell and despair not; Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.
There is an interview where Stanley Hauerwas, perhaps one of the most famous Christian critics of ‘empire’, claims that if Christians had been faithful, they would have occupied the social position that (Christian) europe instead ascribed to Judaism. What happens to Judaism in this analogy? If, for Hauerwas, Christian faithfulness is constituted in a refusal of power, it is also constituted in a claim to universalism - specifically, it turns out, a universalising fulfillment of Judaism - that historically created the forms of power he claims to refuse. How many of ‘us’ - white european Christians - are truly prepared for the political and spiritual displacement that it would take to become, once again, just one strand among a variety of Jewish traditions? Are we prepared for the kinds of organising - against Christian institutions and collective belonging - this would demand?[2]
To turn to the desert is not only to turn towards the boundaries of empire, but to return to complicity in it. The forms of practice found there are a promise and a ruin. More than yet another Christian theology of liberation, what may be needed is a contemplative and practical silence on “the Christian left”.[3]
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[1] My reading of Brown is undoubtedly influenced by what I managed to get through of Jacque Derrida’s The Gift of Death, which I read in Prague when I first began to work through my relationship to gender. There is also almost certainly a relationship between this first desert of empire, and the later ‘wilderness’ that justifies colonial expansion. The work of Edward Said and Sylvia Wynter may be useful here.
[2] This paragraph should indicate that I would not think as I do now about this if not for my relationship with Avery, and their Jewishness.
[3] I am indebted here to María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo’s articulation of ‘silence’ as a component of Zapatista discourse as oriented towards “a world where many worlds fit” - itself related to liberation theology, though at a remove. Cf. The Revolutionary Imagination in the Americas and the Age of Development.