Beyond Michel Foucault, Beyond Peter Brown: What Did Early Christianity Destroy?

Abstract: This article argues that the focus on sexuality and the body in early Christianity, prompted by the seminal work of Peter Brown and Michel Foucault, has obscured a truly major and profound shift brought about by Christian thinking in late antiquity. This concerns the very construction and evaluation of the notion of nature and the natural world. It is well known that Greek and Roman thinking conceptualized man's place in the order of things through a tripartite systematization of man, beast, and god, and that consequently through rituals such as sacrifice, epics such as the Odyssey , or normative texts of husbandry such as agricultural manuals, self-understanding of humanity is triangulated through a care for nature and a recognition of the divine. Similar structures are evident in early Jewish writing too. But in early Christianity, there is a turn away from care for nature and seeing man's place as integrally embedded in an agricultural world. In contrast to the book of Jonah or the Talmud—where care for animals is expressly a source of divinely given regulation—St Paul can ask: "Surely God does not care for oxen?" There is a corollary absence of Christian agricultural manuals, and repeatedly Christian writing privileges the anchorite, the ascetic, the sage who, like the lily of the fields, do not work the land. Animals are present in parables and metaphors—but are absent from Christian care or regulation. This article considers how the normative discourses of nature are redrafted within Christianity and its subsequent impact on the ideas of ecology—and on the possibilities of eco-criticism for classics. Καὶ φύσις ἄψ ἐγέλασε, "And nature laughed again." Nonnus