Volume 36, Number 1 · February 2, 1989
The Devil and the Flesh
By W.H.C. Frend
The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity
by Peter Brown
Columbia University Press, 504 pp., $45.00
In March 1971, the newly established Center for Byzantine Studies at Birmingham University held a seminar on the subject of the role of the ascetic in the early Byzantine world. At the end came what was apparently a second draft (the first having been read at Oxford) of a paper, 'The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity' by Peter Brown. We had expected something good from the author of Augustine of Hippo: A Biography, and here it was. Those present felt they had been given in the space of three quarters of an hour a new perspective on Syria and the Roman East in the fifth century AD, and how the 'unlikely figure of the lone hermit' had come to exercise so much social and religious authority. Now, after eighteen years and the appearance of two fine collections of essays, Religion and Society in the Age of Saint Augustine (1972) and Society and the Holy in Late Antiquity (1982), we have a full-length study in which holy men figure in one of the most complex yet historically most significant aspects of the early Christian world: sexual renunciation and the factors that lay behind this. How does it succeed?
Review, 4594 words
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