PDF《Jimmy Y. Yu》

4 Peter Brown examines the variety of attitudes toward the body and sexuality in light of theology, culture, and the relationship between individual and society. See Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 222-223, 235-237. It appears that Brown'

s study of Christianity was in turn influenced by the work of such scholars as Aline Rousselle and Michel Foucault on topics of sexuality, desire, and gender in Greco-Roman antiquity. See Aline Rousselle, Porneia: On Desire and the Body in Antiquity, tr. Felicia Pheasant (Oxford, UK;

New York, NY: Basil Blackwell, 1988);

Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, vol. 1;

The Use of Pleasure, vol. 2;

The Care of the Self, vol. 3, tr. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1988-1990);

see also Elizabeth Clark, Foucault,

3 to plumb and realize all the possibilities of the flesh ;

it was a way of manipulating and controlling the self and the environment by ideologically fusing with and emulating a Christ whose suffering saves the world.5 In theorizing asceticism, scholars have also complicated our understanding of the body and have avoided the Cartesian fallacy of polarizing it against an exclusive category of mind, even though within the Western academy there are few resources for describing such a concept of the body that does not succumb to a version of the body-mind dichotomy.6 Yet, despite their effort to complicate our understanding of asceticism and the body, their work is still bound to its construction found in medieval sources, and there is an excess of textual evidence by medieval ascetics themselves that accentuates the suppression of sexual passions and bodily pleasures.7 There is, of course, evidence to support similar discourses in China on disciplining the body and suppressing sexual desire for higher spiritual realizations, but such evidence occurs mostly in prescriptive canonical sources and limited contexts. Few Chinese ascetics the Fathers, and Sex, JAAR

56 (1988): 619-641.

5 See Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: the Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 208-218. Other research on Christian and non-Christian asceticism has emphasized the interrelationship between physical representation and manipulating of the body and theology, meaning, politics, and social relations. See John G. Gager, Body-Symbols and Social Reality: Resurrection, Incarnation and Asceticism in Early Christianity, Religion

12 (1982): 345-363;

Vincent L. Wimbush, Richard Valantasis, eds., Asceticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995);

William E. Deal, Ascetics, Aristocrats, and the Lotus Sūtra: The Construction of the Buddhist Universe in Eleventh Century Japan, PhD dissertation. Harvard University, 1988. These scholars are reacting to older models of asceticism best represented by E. R. Dodds, Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety (Cambridge;

New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

6 Explicitly rejecting earlier characterizations of asceticism as body-hating and dualistic, Brown argues that early Christian asceticism by its nature included matter and the body in spiritual process. See Brown, The Body and Society, 222-223, 235-237.

7 Brown argues that the ascetic desert fathers engaged in the utmost privations not because of hatred of the body, but for the sake of a future glory for their bodies on the day of Resurrection. See Brown, The Body and Society, pp. 220-222. However, the concern for suppressing hunger and sexual drives through fasting, a practiced based on the understanding that the original sin of Adam and Eve was of ravenous greed, is overwhelming. See ibid., pp. 220, 230. Bynum argues for women'