Hell and the Human

Hell Hath No Fury: Gender, Disability, and the Invention of Damned Bodies in Early Christian Literature by Meghan Henning is a triumph, insofar as it takes a body of literature that has often been dismissed or ignored in so-called “serious” discussions of early Christian theological anthropology and compels us to take another look. What we find when we do so—with Henning as a surefooted guide through these hellscapes—is a stunningly vivid and visceral picture of how the Christian anthropological imagination actually worked during the formative centuries of the movement and extending into late antiquity. The research and historical analysis on which the book’s argument rests are unimpeachable. And thus, on one level, this makes offering a critical response a difficult assignment, insofar as I find myself completely convinced by the book’s central contention: that in these tour-of-hell texts, ancient standards for the ideal masculine body and its deviations—that is, female, disabled, and/or carceral bodies—cut across lines between the imagined and the real. One chilling effect of this interplay in ancient thinking between the imagined bodies of the damned and the non-normative bodies of (at least some of) the living is that “the effeminate and disabled bodies in hell not only offer carceral warnings to discipline earthly bodies [but] also reconstruct and intensify the stakes of bodily normativity, criminalizing the real bodies of women and of people with disabilities” (22).

Making this case—and especially with such erudition and historical breadth and depth—is, in and of itself, a considerable contribution. It is also tremendously suggestive in terms of both the theological implications and the potential for further historical conclusions. With respect to the former, I had this reinforced for me when I had the privilege of teaching this book in a graduate seminar. Like me, the students found themselves persuaded by the book’s main thesis and the historical work undergirding it. But insofar as we could characterize Henning’s historical approach as having the effect (whether intentional or not) of relentlessly deidealizing the tradition, this raised all sorts of constructive questions for the students. To invoke just a few of these: given the force of Henning’s argument, is there some sense here in which within the terms of this theological system—at least at a deep conceptual level—one literally cannot punish maleness, insofar as when the male body is wounded in hell, it is rendered more female (and, concomitantly, tortured female bodies also find themselves increasingly feminized)? If that is the case, while acknowledging the validity of the critiques of Thomas Laqueur’s thesis with which Henning aligns herself, in what sense exactly is a two-sex model of the body actually operative here?[1] And finally—and most unsettlingly—how do we begin to respond to Henning’s closing exhortation (“I propose we think carefully about how to avoid bringing that hell to earth,” 157) in ethically viable and politically effective ways, given that, as she shows throughout the book, the weaponization of bodily norms under discussion is very much already here on earth—and indelibly marks and haunts the fundamental theological logics that animate the tradition we inherit?[2]

These are difficult questions—and especially so for those whose constructive theological commitments rely on idealized, sanitized, or otherwise romanticized versions of the history in question. But I think that we do ourselves no favors by looking away from the ugly difficulties of this history; and thus, I am all the more grateful to Henning for writing this book. Here I would repurpose a point from the queer theorist Kadji Amin (one that he makes with respect to the idealizing tendencies of much queer scholarship): that we need to learn how—and to teach our students how—to “inhabit unease, rather than seeking to quickly rid [ourselves] of it to restore the mastery of the critic, the unassailability of her politics, and the legitimacy of her trained field expectations.”[3] Theological history of the unflinching sort that Henning offers us is one crucial site where we begin this work. Accordingly, in the process of teaching the book, I was encouraged by my students’ willingness to take up the challenge—and the gusto with which they articulated, based on their reading, what I think are very generative, if also challenging, questions.

I leave it to Prof. Henning whether she wishes to engage any of these lines of inquiry in response here. But for myself, I want to switch gears a bit and pose two questions that are less about constructive theological anthropology and more about the implications of this research for larger historical issues. The first has to do with the vexed methodological problem of how to talk about race prior to modernity (if we even can at all), given the category’s entanglement in the history of early modern European exploration and expansion, colonialism, and modern biologism. The term “ethnicity” also raises some related if somewhat different issues. I think the various arguments here are well-known. Some, such as the classicist Benjamin Isaac, have argued for a notion of “proto-racism” in the ancient world—a specific strain of prejudice grounded in shared characteristics that are believed to be “unalterable, based as they are on factors beyond human control.”[4] Often ancient thinkers understand these traits to be acquired through environmental factors but then to become subsequently both inheritable and unchangeable. Other scholars in ancient studies would eschew the terminology of race but are more comfortable with ethnicity. Yet as Denise Buell has pointed out, “neither term [ethnicity or race] has a one-to-one counterpart in antiquity” nor can they “be neatly distinguished even in modern parlance.”[5] In the footnotes of her book, Henning follows Buell in treading carefully with respect to the issue, while also acknowledging that insofar as “our contemporary understanding of race is indebted to history . . . it is imperative to think about race in antiquity” (222 fn.165). I agree with Henning here—and, to that end, have found helpful the work of contemporary scholars who theorize what we could call racialization, thereby setting us up to excavate a complicated and variegated “history of race thinking” that extends far beyond the so-called “scientific” racism of the nineteenth century.[6] In view then, in the words of classicist Denise McCoskey, is the need for a historicizing attentiveness to “the emergence of racial formations in the plural, and not simply [proposing] a standard meaning of race that remained constant across centuries and despite significant historical shifts.”[7] One of the crucial gains here is a conceptual apparatus that does not pivot on the question of skin color, even as it allows for careful analysis of sporadic ancient references to such within broader discussions of human difference. This work has begun in Early Christian Studies, but there is much more to do; and much of the focus thus far has been on ascetic literature and hagiography, especially on the trope of “the Ethiopian” as it relates to late ancient demonology. Yet, as Henning shows, there is also evidence that is strikingly relevant to this question in the Apocalypses of Peter and of Paul—and the fascinating, if invidious, slippage between black garments of mourning and black faces that signify “failure in ascetic practice and affliction by the demonic” (114). Thus, I would love to hear Henning reflect on how the textual evidence that her book examines might bear upon a history of “racial formations in the plural”—and especially on illuminating that history’s Christian theological roots.

My second question is similar but in a different register: that of the history of sexuality—and specifically the topic of homoeroticism. Henning makes a passing reference (and relatively gentle counterpoint) to the now well-known argument, associated primarily with Kyle Harper, that “from Paul onward, Christian sexual ideology collapsed all forms of same-sex contact, whether pederastic or companionate, into one category.”[8] As I have contended in other work, I think that, historically speaking, this argument is wrong. Yet it points to the need for careful, textured accounts of early Christian reflections on homoeroticism that eschew simple prooftexting and instead attend to the multiple cultural logics in play—and also to the ways in which Christians’ vehement condemnations are embedded in larger theological and anthropological logics that themselves require careful unpacking in historical context. To that end, I hope that Henning might be able to offer some initial thoughts on what she thinks this corpus of literature can contribute to that larger historical project.

As early as 1996, Bernadette Brooten noted several things that are distinctive about the Apocalypse of Peter with respect to this question:

1. the punishment for homoerotic activity of being repeatedly and eternally driven off a cliff by demons follows a logic that “just as these men and women reversed their proper roles during their lifetimes, so too must they now pursue a ceaseless process of going up and coming down . . . reversing their direction just as they reversed the gendered order of society.”

2. “Only passive male homoerotic participants occupy a place in hell, not their active male partners . . . however, both female partners, active and passive, apparently deserve this punishment, since both women count as sinners.”

3. “In addition to the portrayal of women as imitators of men, the Apocalypse of Peter’s theoretical significance lies in its linking of male and female homoeroticism, since the Apocalypse thereby bears witness to an early Christian category of homoeroticism.”[9]

Henning’s analysis both appreciates and builds upon Brooten’s in illuminating ways. That said, I am left with many questions of a fine-grained historical nature. What exactly do we think is going on here (and elsewhere in this tour of hell literature)—and how ought we to situate it within the shifting matrix of early Christian attitudes and/or theological frameworks regarding homoerotic desire and practice? In the late fourth century, when preaching a set of vituperative homilies on Romans 1, John Chrysostom condemns both male partners in the homoerotic encounter. But notably, he still has to undertake some enormously creative hermeneutical moves to provide scriptural and theo-cultural warrant for his condemnation of the insertive male partner in the equation, while the abject monstrosity of the receptive partner is effectively taken for granted.[10] This is, to my mind, a fascinating moment in the history of sexuality—one that is, admittedly, only a localized snapshot, but that also lets us see certain conceptual formations crystalizing even as others remain very much in flux. Yet how might the texts analyzed in Hell Hath No Fury bear upon the larger sweep of the history in question here? What of the insertive or so-called “active” male partner? And what cultural and theological logics might undergird the different treatment of female-female erotic pairings? Further, what is the conceptual significance of the specific connections these texts draw (but draw variably) to other categories of transgression, such as prostitution, idolatry, or the failure to honor one’s parents? Even if the texts only offer hints regarding these questions, those hints may be important ones—and historically tantalizing. Henning is surely correct that “Hell’s heterotopia demonizes the interruption of hierarchical order in other spaces, intensifying the existing sexual norms, and using the passive homoerotic body as a tool for policing a wide range of other bodies” (107). But the devil is in the details, so to speak. And here Henning has convinced me that scholars like me—who are concerned with the big question of what difference Christianity made to the place of same-sex eros within the history of sexuality—need to carefully consider this too easily sidelined body of extremely important early Christian literature in its textual specificities, its precise hermeneutical maneuvers, and its “smallest rhetorical shifts.”[11]

[1] See the classic statement of the so-called “one-sex body” argument in Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990).

[2] Thanks to all the students in my Fall 2022 seminar, “The Self in Early Christianity,” for engaging and provocative conversation—and especially, for these specific questions, to Fernanda García Ortiz, Laura Mucha, and Alex Woodward. 

[3] Kadji Amin, Disturbing Attachments: Genet, Modern Pederasty, and Queer History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 10, emphasis original. 

[4] Benjamin Isaac, The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 37.

[5] Denise Kimber Buell, Why This New Race: Ethnic Reasoning in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 21.

[6] V.Y. Mudimbe, “African Athena?” Transition 58 (1992): 121; see also, as representative, Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014); and, most recently, with respect to the ancient world, Sarah F. Derbew, Untangling Blackness in Greek Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022). 

[7] Denise Eileen McCoskey, Race: Antiquity and Its Legacy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 24-25.

[8] Kyle Harper, From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 99; see Henning, Hell, p.107; p.217 fn121.

[9] Bernadette J. Brooten, Love Between Women: Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 306-308, emphasis original.

[10] See discussion in Benjamin H. Dunning, “John Chrysostom and Same-Sex Eros in the History of Sexuality,” in Chris L. de Wet and Wendy Mayer, eds., Revisioning John Chrysostom: New Approaches, New Perspectives (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 638-669.

[11] On this point, see Samuel Delany’s instructive reflections: “The betraying signs that one discourse has displaced or transformed into another are often the smallest rhetorical shifts . . . I say ‘shifts,’ but these rhetorical pairings are much better looked at, on the level of discourse, as rhetorical collisions. The sign that a discursive collision has occurred is that the former meaning has been forgotten and the careless reader, not alert to the details of the changed social context, reads the older rhetorical figure as if it were the newer.” Samuel R. Delany, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 118-119.

Benjamin H. Dunning is Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity in the Divinity School and the Committee on the Study of Religion, Harvard University.