gender after the end of the world

Three years ago, in the final term of my third year at university, I sat in the sun-lit library reading room and opened a copy of John Boswell’s Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality. The topics I’d chosen to revise for my historiography exam were religion and gender. It was the thirty-fifth anniversary edition, and, attentive to its historiographical importance, I read the foreword by Mark D. Jordan carefully. Jordan remembers the first copy he owned of Boswell’s book, inherited from a retiring colleague:

‘On the flyleaf, my colleague had long ago inscribed his name beside that of his partner. Also the date: "Christmas 1980." Had he bought the copy as a gift for the two of them? Had one lover given it to the other as a book to be held in common? Boswell's book has been fated to play many roles. It remains a scholarly archive and an argument about Christianity in history. Its copies also record any number of loves.’¹

Boswell was a daily mass Catholic, having crossed the Tiber at fifteen and devoted his life, through his academic work, to the Church. He was also gay and, upon his death, was buried with his partner of twenty years.

In the years since the publication of Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality (subtitled Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century), its approach and conclusions have been significantly challenged. It was a landmark of what might be called gay history, but his disciplinary descendants, working more in the vein of queer and gender history, have revisited his sources, finding more complicated experiences of gender and sexuality. Ruth Mazo Karras, whose doctoral thesis was supervised by Boswell, revisits the life of Ronaldina Ronchai, previously interpreted as that of a gay man, finding now an experience more akin to transfemininity. In talking about premodern experiences, I tend to avoid using modern labels of gender and sexuality, which I find more misleading than useful in their anachronism. The best contemporary scholarship roots its analysis in the premodern mentalities which made up individuals’ understanding of their bodies and desires. In the history of Western Europe, of course, these mentalities were deeply grounded in the Christian tradition.

When I began catechesis last spring, in my tentative first exploration of Catholicism, I avoided the subject of my sexuality. Going to mass had awakened my spirituality after a long period of distance and drought: for the first time in perhaps a year and a half, I was able to pray and to hear a response to my prayer. Coming out of the church afterwards, I turned to the man I’d just started seeing and said, ‘fuck, I think I have to become a Catholic.’ I knew this impulse to conversion was fragile. It could be easily snuffed out, easily buried for years. G.K. Chesterton once wrote that criticism from a non-Catholic will never deter a potential convert, but one wrong word from a Catholic might be fatal. The first few meetings were thrilling — we went through the Creed, discussing Augustine and the Trinity, the difference between dogma and doctrine, the role of tradition, the treasury of merit. And then, fatally, we got onto gender. I mentioned late antique genderfluid saints and, in my defence, cited St Paul’s ‘neither male nor female’. We failed to schedule another meeting.

And, so, I went to work for a liberal, inclusive Anglican church in London, where the priests wrote their own Eucharistic prayers and used the church mainly as a concert venue. I found myself sneaking off to Latin mass in my lunchbreak at Corpus Christi Maiden Lane, finding an appropriate irony in its being built as an act of reparation for abuses against the Blessed Sacrament. Sitting in a pew, I saw, on a small label affixed to the wood, the name Radclyffe Hall. And next to it: Lady Troubridge, Hall’s partner for twenty-eight years.

Catholicism is now firmly associated with the ‘traditional’ heterosexual, procreative family—all my recommended reels on Instagram are tradwives in mantillas, ‘contemplative housewives’ with infographics on prayerful household management and submission to one’s husband. This would have, I think, surprised St Paul, whose first letter to the Corinthians recommends marriage only as an alternative to uncontrollable lust. ‘The present form of the world is passing away,’ he writes, and ‘the unmarried man is anxious about the affairs of the Lord, how to please the Lord; but the married man is anxious about the affairs of the world, how to please his wife, and his interests are divided.’ Marriage is a concession to the weak, but the ideal state is continence, the gift of your whole life and attention to God.

The emergence of Christianity, as Peter Brown argues, wrenched sexuality out of society, dealing ‘the death-blow to the ancient notion of the city as arbiter of the body.’² Ascetics preaching radical renunciation of the body and its desires lured women out of the Roman family, rejecting the patria potestas of the father, rejecting the household—the building block of the city—in favour of the desert. The present age was ending; not only did reproduction cease to matter in this context, but for Christians who believed in their responsibility to bring about the parousia as co-creators of the world to come, the cessation of reproduction was a revolutionary apocalyptic tool. Christianity was—and is—a death cult; its telos is the death and resurrection of the body, the end of the world and the life of the world to come.

The lives and passions of the saints show us what this rejection looked like in practice. When Perpetua, nursing her newborn child in third-century Roman North Africa, refused to participate in the pagan sacrifices required of her as a Roman citizen, she was rejecting all the earthly society she knew—family, city and empire—in favour of the heavenly city promised to her by faith. Her father, visiting her in prison, begged her, ‘Spare your father's grey hairs; spare the infancy of the boy. Make sacrifice for the Emperor’s prosperity.’ In her own words, she records: ‘And I answered: I am a Christian.’ Her rejection of her role as a mother, her position in the family, coincided with a vision of her approaching martyrdom, where she sees herself entering the gladiatorial arena: ‘And I was stripped naked, and I became a man.’ The Christian challenge to late antique reproductive sexual practices, rooted in the social structure of the family and the city, was accompanied, necessarily, by a transformation of gender.

In the forms of monastic life that developed from the third century, first in the solitude of the desert and later in the communal life of the monastery, Christians developed entirely new forms of social life—an alternative to the reproductive life of the family. In the monastery, gender could detach from sex and could float more freely, signifying a devotional stance rather than a fixed, biological position. So Bernard of Clairvaux could write to a fellow monk, ‘you too were torn from my breast, cut from my womb—my heart cannot forget you.’ Just as Perpetua could take on masculinity for the martyrial arena, so monks took on femininity as a devotional practice, demonstrating their lowliness, weakness and humility before God. There remains a debate over whether monasticism offered a ‘third gender’—an angelic, desexed state between male and female—or merely alternative models of masculinity and femininity, not necessarily inferior but certainly opposed to secular ideals of gender.³ The most significant point, however, is that in removing the reproductive element of relationship, monasticism inaugurated an entirely new kind of society—which, in its renunciation of the world and commitment to love of one's neighbour—prefigured the world to come and found its echo, through the barrier of death, in the communion of saints.

God, too, could be addressed as mother, as in the words of a prayer by Marguerite of Oignt: ‘My sweet Lord, I gave up for you my father and my mother and my brothers and all the wealth of the world… For are you not my mother and more than my mother? Ah, my sweet and lovely Lord, with what love you laboured for me and bore me through your whole life. But when the time approached for you to be delivered, your labour pains were so great that your holy sweat was life great drops of blood that came out of your body and fell on the earth.’⁴ The blurring of roles is significant — Jesus is both delivered and deliverer, mother and Son. Monasticism rewrote the script of the late antique family, adopting its language to characterise a new kind of voluntary, horizontal community—the fatherhood of the abbot stripped of the authority of the pater familias, the obedience of the daughter freely offered rather than compelled, the bond of fraternity as a gift of love rather than an accident of biology.

The transformation of gender and sexual behaviour initiated by the early Christians finds its completion, eschatologically, in the transformation of the resurrected body. In the post-resurrection appearances of Christ, his body has something elusive about it: he’s unrecognisable until he calls Mary Magdalene by name or breaks bread with his disciples, he appears and disappears with the ease of a spirit and yet he’s manifestly flesh, offering Thomas his wounds to poke around in. Following Augustine, orthodox Christianity agreed that bodies would be resurrected with biological sex—the physical matter of a human being, unlike the purely spiritual body of the angels, is essential to our nature and the history of salvation, from crucifixion to fall to death and resurrection. The particularity of the body is essential to its identity. But beyond that, regarding the significance of sex and gender after the resurrection, theologians were divided. The world to come is the perfection of created life, where humanity inhabits not its prelapsarian state in the Garden but the true end and purpose of its being, where free will has been brought into concordance with love. Once Christ has ‘destroyed all dominion, authority, and power,’ the association of gender with power and hierarchy ceases to make sense; the ‘enmity between man and woman’ which resulted from the Fall no longer governs relationships. Certainly, there will be no procreation, but there is little consensus about marriage and sexual intercourse. The resurrected body is a promise—an unimaginable, unpredictable realisation of the full potential of embodied life and embodied social relations.

Many theological issues can be solved by a consideration of eschatology; gender and sexuality are, I think, among them. In the sense that Christ’s death and resurrection inaugurates the world to come, making possible sanctity as a foretaste of perfected, resurrected life, then we should expect to see the same foretaste in temporal expressions of gender and sexual behaviour. These will, necessarily, be oriented against reproduction, against the family and all forms of power and domination—they will be, to adopt an appropriately provocative term, queer. This doesn’t mean leather bars in heaven—just as the sexual renunciation of the desert fathers resists modern typologies, so the life of the world to come will transcend anything we can currently recognise or describe. In non-normative—non-heterosexual—orientations, and in non-normative—trans—expressions of gender, it’s possible to see a social order that stands against the temporal powers of reproduction and death (which, as Bataille knew, are deeply interrelated.)

‘To renounce sexual intercourse was to throw a switch located in the human person; and, by throwing that precise switch, it was believed possible to cut the current that sustained the sinister perpetuum mobile of life in “the present age”.’⁵ Through rejection of reproduction, early Christians committed to profound asceticism sought to bring about the world to come. If reproduction and death were brought into the world by the Fall, then Christ's sacrifice inaugurates the destruction not only of death, but also of reproductive life and, by extension, all forms of social life geared towards it: marriage, the family, the city. For Augustine, the monastery was a template of the City of God and, at the same time, an aspect of it—the now and not yet of inaugurated eschatology. Queer life can offer a similar glimpse into the future. ‘Those who had learned, through a constant effort the will, to maintain their “abnormal” state, as the possessors of an earthy body denied the sexual expression habitually associated with earthly beings, could stand between heaven and earth’ — for Peter Brown, the ascetic life of the saints, excepting them from the rhythms and impulses of earthly life, is what granted them their intercessory function, allowing Christians to see them as patrons:

From Origen to Methodius onward, the absence of sexuality in the chosen few provided the human race with new mediators. The shimmering, ethereal figures of daimones, of heroes and of the souls of the wise, that had linked heaven to earth, towering above the human race in the middle regions of the late Platonic universe, were eclipsed, in the Christian imagination, by the bodies the virgin young on earth.⁶

My faith makes little sense without a belief that social relations will ultimately be transformed—that a world without power or coercion, without death and suffering, is not only possible but inevitable. This gives shape to my understanding of politics and ethics, neither of which make sense in a secular context. Just as the conservative glorification of family life and strict gender roles seems profoundly heretical, so secular discourses of sexuality, gender and the family seem to lack something essential. I don’t think it’s possible to imagine ‘the common good’ without theology, much less to actually build a society around it.

Of course, this isn’t hugely useful in the culture wars. When I came out of church to an anti-trans protestor handing out leaflets that called queer and trans people groomers, I couldn’t exactly start talking about transness as a prefiguration of the eschaton or queerness as close to sanctity. Justice and compassion for the marginalised require a more practical, less academic response, which means engaging in the terms of the debate. But in regard to one’s own faith and one’s own relationship with the Church, I think it’s helpful to set out a defence of trans and queer life within the theological and historical tradition of Christianity. As John Boswell, Radclyffe Hall and innumerable other Catholics can testify, queerness doesn’t mean submitting to the hegemonic narrative of a homophobic, exclusionary Church (even if it does mean confronting that narrative on a fairly regular basis.) Their work and lives, along with the lives of the saints, witness to the fullness of love’s potential and the promise of a new creation.

1. Mark D. Jordan, 'Foreword', in John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century (Chicago, 2015), xv-xvi.

2. Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (London, 1989), p. 437.

3. R. Swanson, ‘Angels Incarnate: Clergy and Masculinity from Gregorian Reform to Reformation’, 7 in D.M. Hadley, ed., Masculinity in Medieval Europe (New York, 1999), pp. 160-77; cf. D. Neal, ‘What Can Historians Do with Clerical Masculinity? Lessons from Medieval Europe’, in J.D. Thibodeaux, ed., Negotiating Clerical Identities: Priests, Monks and Masculinity in the Middle Ages (Basingstoke, 2010). The idea that profession, socal status and religious vocation demand different expressions of ideal masculinity is central to R. Karras, From Boys to Men: Formations of Masculinity in Late Medieval Europe (Philadelphia, 2003).

4. These quotations are from Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York), p.162. Her work, including Holy Feast and Holy Fast and her volume of essays on the resurrection of the body, have been essential to my thinking.

5. Brown, p. 85.

6. Brown, pp. 187-8.