The Conversion of the Hellenistic World

Rod Dreher recommends Sarah Ruden for understanding St. Paul: St. Paul, in Historical Context.

This is Ruden's method: to use classical texts to illuminate the moral contours and practices of the Greco-Roman world, and to explain why Paul's point of view was actually deeply humane and liberating to the vast numbers of the oppressed -- a fact that, in her view, explains why Christianity took off in the ancient world. Her second chapter takes on Paul's condemnation of homosexuality, which infuriates so many contemporaries today. She explains at great length, with frequent citations from the writings of pagan Romans, the social context of homosexuality in that world. The Greco-Roman world, she explains, was a violent place in which virility meant everything. Women were treated like receptacles for male lust -- as were slave boys, poor boys, and any man who was not strong enough to defend himself against anal rape. There was no shame in being the active partner in anal sex -- in fact, she writes, the hypermasculine culture of the era considered the active partner to have absorbed the masculinity of the passive partner by the act. The picture she paints is of an entire culture operating according to the brutal laws of contemporary American prisons. Ruden explains that pederasts were everywhere, and were open about their attempts to seduce boys; parents had to be constantly on guard against this.

Once a male had been penetrated by a predator, she writes, he was worthless trash in the eyes of the ruling male class. Ruden writes with heartbreaking empathy about the lives of slave boys and other poor boys who were used up by men, and discarded like human waste.This was normative for that time and place -- and this is what Paul condemns. She explains how the Greek word that Paul uses distinguishes his condemnation from those of the Greeks and the Romans, who frequently mocked passive partners (or victims) of male-on-male sex as weak and despicable. By contrast, Paul says the practice disgraces all who participate in it, because it degrades their human dignity. She goes on to show, in a close reading of Paul's Greek, to show that his condemnation of homosexuality was in fact a ringing protest against the injustice of male-on-male sexual exploitation that was common in his culture -- and permitted to those men who held power, and who could do whatever they wanted to the sons of slaves and the poor. As Ruden says, you can well imagine why to men and women who had to endure this abuse at the hands of privileged men, and who had to see their sons ruined for the pleasures of the rich, Paul's teaching sounded like liberation.

Ruden concludes:

All this leads to a feeling of mountainous irony. Paul takes a bold and effective swipe at the power structure He challenges centuries of execrable practice in seeking a more just, more loving society. And he gets called a bigot.

I've not read more than the first two chapters, but the book really is intellectually thrilling to me, not only as someone who knows far, far less about Paul and his letters than I should, but also as someone who has an abiding suspicion of the blinders I and so many other contemporaries have about judging other societies, present and past. (This is why I've been so interested in Wade Davis's cultural anthropology). I present this to you here for your own consideration as a matter of intellectual curiosity, but not as an attempt to start an argument over contemporary views of homosexuality (indeed, Ruden, at least insofar as I have read in the book, does not make her personal views known, but she gives a hint when she says that given the overwhelming brutality of male sexuality in the Greco-Roman world, Paul almost certainly would not have been able to conceive of homoerotic physical and emotional affection in a non-exploitative context). Anyway, whatever one's views on the moral licitness of homosexuality, I think it's helpful to all of us to know the cultural context in which Paul stated his views. One can disagree with him, and even loathe what he had to say, but one should at least consider that his views did not come from blind prejudice. What strikes many contemporary listeners as cruel condemnation of people with same-sex desires would have struck listeners in Paul's day as a defense of the defenseless against institutionalized sexual abuse of their male children. That's worth thinking about. To issue a blanket condemnation of Paul for anti-gay bigotry is not unlike condemning abolitionists for encroaching on private property rights.

Is sodomy wrong and degrading because the act is intrinsically wrong? Or only because it isn't between consenting adults--someone is doing it against the will of the other person? I don't think St. Paul was a liberal in that respect.

Ten Questions for Sarah Ruden (on her translation of The Aeneid)