Augustine and Origen were t wo foundational thinkers in western chisttian history about sexuality and the body. They had other things to say, other opinons, and other desires, but those two elements provided a defining thread throughout the throughts and constructions of their reality. Though they were building work up, constructing from history and experience, synthesizing thought patterns from Israel, Greece, North Africa, Egypt and Rome, there theology of the body does not seem to be very constructive. It seems absent, pockmarked with lacunae, and foundationally absent.

This absence could be constructed as beginning from the body. The results of the corporeal body, and the later failures of the corporal body foreground their experiences as both men and as theologians. There are two concrete examples of this, Origen's self-castration and the problematic relationship that Augustine had with his son, and the son's unnamed mother. The castration was common enough to be counciled against at Nicea, and had a long enough psychic life to be mentioned symbolically or linguistically well into the medieval era. Augustine's son is mentioned in the Confessions. His conversion to mainstream Christianity provides an impediment to not only a full and complete relationship with the child, but with the mother (who was a concubine) and his wife.

These two events were part of the cultural context of the time. They were not isolated incidents. They had a long life outside of the church as well. Thesse two acts could be construed as narratives of absence, of neglect, of longing, and desire. They left the church scrambling for narratives of presence, completion, and satiation. Using Augustine's Confessions and City of God, plus Origen's sermons, the council documents of Nicea, 1^st century discussions of sexuality, and later commentaries/histories I hope to discuss this tension. There have been attempts to broker a peace between the longing and the desire for completetion, but the wound is so deep, and the brokenness so primal, that the tension orgininates in the core of Christan histoy itself. Keeping that in mind, I will spend the paper discussing these two men as sites of contention, a contention that perhaps should not be constructed as a set of problems to be solved, and more likely to be constructed as a delicate pas de deux where erotic presence and absence introduce desire that leaves feelings of profound loneliness.

To castrate oneself is to make the isolation from the body move from a symbolic act to one of the extreme literality. Though there were any number of symbolic castrations at this point, constructions of for example celibacy or renouncements of the flesh that functioned as speech acts with the same purpose as gelding, using a knife on the tender parts to our post-modern and western cultures seems an extreme. While not a common practice, there is a number of textual cites that suggest this behaviour was not rare in the cultural contexts of the 1^st and 2^nd centuries.

It was common enough, that it was frequently condemned. Even in letters and sermons at the end of his life, Origen worte about the violence as too much, as an act of excessive devotion. This renunciation of the practice has led some scholars to suggest that he never castrated himself, that the rum ours were an object of speculation, matching the excess of other early patrisitic discussions, especially since the castration was first mentioned in Eusebius's Ecclesiastical History. ¹

The English early church historian RPC Hanson's “A Note On Origen's Self Mutualition”, published in the Vilgiae Chritinae in 1966 was the first to majoirly outline exactly what the context and history was, going through deutro-cannonical contexts, through a number of sources, and histories—tracing the possbilities of castration as a devotional act, where he mentions not only the ubiquitious Matthew 19:2, but also the acts of John 53 and 54, Tertuillian, and others. The issue of castrating for any number of reasons, weighed heavily on the mind of the early church fathers as a serious moral and spirtial act.

In an extension of this essay, Daniel Baron writes about how these acts were considered a problem for early church history: “(Studies of this History) tend to marginalize self-castration as a rare act on the "lunatic fringe"6of early Christian asceticism.Their view needs modification. Though testimony is scanty, sources from the fourth century indicate that by then self-castrationhad become a real problem in the nascent Church. Basil, for example, excuses his discussions of it by asserting a need
to "check the many such eunuchs" who had "already grown prominent in the Church. A more general concern appears in the Nicaean Canons and the so-called Apostolic Constitutions which contain statutes against self-made eunuchs both among the laity and the clergy

It must be clear however that the desire against castration was more many people a move to avoid having sex with women. It was a way to elimainate the source of desire to never be forced to think about it again, never be dragged down into the swamps of lust. It became a kind of iatrogenic construction of desrire, where the source of vitrue (I.e having children, being married, and the like) ended up in the destroying the soul. Eliminating the source, meant eliminating lust all together.

Though that was the most common reason for castration, and it was the one that all of the sources that Hansen qoutes mention as the primary reason for this castration. There are two that must also be mentioned. Living in a roman context, Eunuchs provided a legitimate third gender. There was a rhetoric of proper roles and behavior for those who had their testicles removed. There were then a christians who were eunuchs as new converts. Not only that, but those in the Roman era who had there testicles removed were often slaves. In addition, at this point in time the penis was subservient in political and social power to other male genitals. In these contexts, Christians who chose to be castrated were those who continued to other themselves, to mark themselves as slaves, as those who were willing to engage in a “little” martyrdom and give up the most important thing that they could, aside from their lives.

This must have had some influence on Origen, who as a new convert was trying to find his place, his contexts and his desires. But all of these reason were sub-textual for the one that is the most clear, and becomes strangely, a kind of argument in favour of a whole church. Origen castrated himself in order to teach women. He became a third gender in order to interact with a second. The medieval historian John A Arnold makes this explicitly clear: “"the point of Origen's castration was to remove scandal rather then to remove desire. The latter, as ORigen said, it refused to do" The removing of scandal in order to include women in the contexts of the church is less interesting then this idea of desire never ending—that elimanting the source of desire fails to eliminate desire itself.

The desire to elimanate both this practice of castration and sexual desire, and by extension elimanting sexual otherness could be considered one of the goals of Nicea. Though there were not many explicit prohibitions against sexuality in these councils, one of there goals was to speak about what made them Christian and what separated them from their cultural context. The cultural context here, was one that encouraged castration as a mark of status, but also thought that the christans were engaging in a variety of sexual sins that were scandalous—including but not limited to orgies and incest (because the early followers called each other brother and sister).

In this context, there became a perverse catch 22. Castration could prove that they were incapable of lust and were not committing the acts that they were accused of but it also meant that they were engaging in a context that was explicitly hostile to who they were. Besides, eunuchs were often used as sexual escorts or members of relgious cults that were not christan at all, and the assumption was that choosing to eliminate testicles for reasons outside of this kind of religious fidelity were ambiguous and not well understood. Within this context, one can understand the need for the council of Nicea to sepereate themselves from both Romans who were engaging in this practice and larger christian communities.

The canon against this prohibition, does talk about a variety of exceptions—in it's finesse in texts of exclusion and conclusion it becomes a deft way of defining otherness, and allows for multiple examples of those who are still allowed to be castrated. In this capacity it is similar to the Roman rules that made castration illegal, but allowed for those who cut them off with their own hand to not be prooscusuted:”If any one in sickness has been subjected by physicians to a surgical operation, or if he has been castrated by barbarians, let him remain among the clergy; but, if any one in sound health has castrated himself, it behooves that such an one, if [already] enrolled among the clergy, should cease [from his ministry], and that from henceforth no such person should be promoted. But, as it is evident that this is said of those who wilfully do the thing and presume to castrate themselves, so if any have been made eunuchs by barbarians, or by their masters, and should otherwise be found worthy, such men the Canon admits to the clergy.”

Nicea allows for another possibility—it is the mark of a discourse that moves from the policing of literal, to the construction of the linguistic or rhetorical. In this context, the prohibitions will become ones that centre on behaviour, and intellectual contexts and not on explicit acts. We have then these calls to a pseduo-castration, or a castration of the heart, in a similar transformaiton to the epistles of Paul, where a circiumscion of the penis becomes a circumscion of the heart. In this context, a castration of the testicles becomes a castration of the sexual will—or to put it another way, a pyhiscial construction becomes a social and cultural construction.

This can be seen in the work of Origen, where talks movingly about the nature and glory of the word of God, where the word becomes material. The creation of language becomes a creation of flesh, and the controlling of language, becomes by extension a controlling of flesh. This was balance was to have occurred from the beginning of time, but was also supposed to be new, so we have this permanet tension between what is ancient and what is new, what was always there through the language of the divine, and what is constructed through the fallen flesh of humanity. This desire for language, and it's slippery interlation with the body is found throughout the church fathers. Origen castrating himself becomes a failure of language, and not a failure of self.

This lingustic transformation becomes a permanent thread throughout any number of discourses that surround christanity from the 3^rd century to the 21^st. Carolyn Dimshaw, the queer theorist and medievalist, mentions for example, several of the golden legends that talk about language bringing up, or reconstructing the failed body. Though this is between 800 and 1000 years after the death of Origen, it suggests that this anxiety about how language and the body interacts—and even attempts to control the body, or the construct the body as negativity, as a set of absences, as a set of prohbitions against what we can have and what we cannot have becomes vital. Two examples from Dimshaw's essay Eunuch Hermenutics, allow for both lingusitic and physical eunuchs to retain their place as a kind of third gender. The first one: “"Cesearius again: "a monk called called Bernard at Calavux was troubled by lust. He then dreamt that he was pursued by a man dressed as an executioner, carrying a long knife, accompined by a black dog. Eventually his persuer caught and castrated him, feeding his balls to the hound. The man found himself phyiscally intact but free from lust.”; the second: “ a pilgrim commits fornication and then is tempted by a demon in the guise of st james the apostle, to castrate himself, he is going to do this until st james himself saves his balls” (108).

These two, both dreams, both about the terror of sexual sin, and about how much easier it would be for God or the saints to remove all desire, so far after what was written by those who made themselves “eunchs for the kingdom of heaven” suggests that t he controlling of body thourh amorphus, absences, the attempting to make present through what is left, has a cultural memory. Origen's ignoble end, and his status as the church father who never made saint, because of his lack of the fiedilty to the word provides an interesting mirroring in Augustine—who began where Origen ended, and attempted to complete narratives that constisted of ragged threads and moth eaten garments.

Though there has been some discussion about the possiblity that Augustine read Origen in translation, and so some of this translation and the like could be constructed as literal, I do not mean in it such a capacity. I am talking about the psychic heritage that foregrounded the discussions of the language at this point. Qouting Dimshaw again “"There is in Augustine's writing a deep strain of belief in the natural relation of words and their referents. Die Diealectia includes a chapter on the origins of words...this fanscaiton with he infnats process of learning language in the confessions suggests a profound desire for verbal signs rooted in the physical, in the body, a lanugage understood by all humans...”

Augustine's lifework, in many ways was finding the language that allowed him to castrate himself without a knife. His internalization of language, of narratives of desire, of continence as it relates to the self, emerges as a centrality to mystic Christianity. This desire for continence emerges in four important ways—his history as a manciean and the use of contraception, the ambiguous and problematic connection he had with his son, one of attachment and detachment, loyalty and shame; how this relationship worked through a series of lacunae and absences, and how these worked as a way of sorting out what it meant to love God.

Augustine began his early life as a Manciean, an early sect that functioned as the largest rival to christianity. One of the things they believed strongly was the complete abasement of the body, and not only abasement of the body, but that the spirit must be forever divorced from the flesh. They thought that giving more children into the world was considered an evil. He became a Manciean just after taking a concubine in his late teens, and having a child with her. His concubine lasted 15 years after the birth of his son.

Margaret Miles explains this problem in her essay about the concubine—Not Nameless but Unnamed: “...Manicheans thought of the created world as the evil production of an evil Demiurgee, they sought to avoid perpetuating it by procreation. Read with a hermeneutic of generaoisty, Mancheans acute sensitivity to the suffering of all living beings led them to seek to prevent the possiblity of further suffering by infanticide or exposure by the long suffering of human existence.” ² His joining this sect becomes a way of finding his way out of the pleasure that foregrounded his life up to this point.

Augustine spends some time in his early Confessions talking about how much pleasure he had, especially sexual pleasure: “I could not be wholly content to confine sexual union to acts intended to produce children” or “sensual folly assumed domination over me and I gave myself totally to it in acts allowed by shameful humanity but under your laws illicit.” Both of those quotes suggest a double problem for Augustine's view of sexuality. The first is that he was trying to figure out exactly what the purpose of sexuality was. The second was about what activities were allowed and what were forbidden—these issues center around reproduction.

Fifteen years of sexual congress happened after the birth of his son. Fifteen years where he did not have any children, or at least any children were not talked about. That he kept, and helped raise his older son would suggest if a second child happened in those 15 years, then he would not have killed the child. It is also well known that the Mancihieans were heavily involved in the practice of contraception. This would suggest that he was integrally involved in sexual activity without reproducing. This becomes a mirroring of and in the views of a later Augustine a corruption of Origen's later desires. The presence of a son, and having sex for so long without children—for becoming a symbolic eunuch not for the kingdom of heaven but for pleasure would be a place of great sadness of his life.

He talks about his abandoning the mother of his child, and about the ambigious realtionship to his son in the 6th book of the confessions: “Meanwhile my sins were being multiplied, and my mistress being torn from my side as an impediment to my marriage, my heart, which clave to her, was racked, and wounded, and bleeding. And she went back to Africa, making a vow unto You never to another man, leaving with me my natural son by her. But I, unhappy one, who could not imitate a woman, impatient of delay, since it was not until two years' time I was to obtain her I sought—being not so much a lover of marriage as a slave to lust—procured another (not a wife, though), that so by the bondage of a lasting habit the disease of my soul might be nursed up, and kept up in its vigour, or even increased, into the kingdom of marriage. Nor was that wound of mine as yet cured which had been caused by the separation from my former mistress, but after inflammation and most acute anguish it mortified, and the pain became numbed, but more desperate.”

This controlling of lust, of viewing marriage as not a conjugal desire for love, and for the desires of companionship but an uncontrollable fire that must be determined to be quenched. The previous quenching mechanism, the previous mechanical castration in the form of contraception was a failure because it made the desires grow ever larger. That she left to go home, that he took over the raising of his son and that she never had sex after Augustine, suggests a number of problems. He loved the product of lust, but it reminded him of his fallen state. He loved both his wife and his concubine, but his faith required a total commitment to the lord, and that was impossible with these two women in his life—though the attachment to the wife was a bit more acceptable and socially. He was also mourning, not only for his sinful nature but

16, 8 1-3

2Found in Femminist Interpertations of Augustine.

That paragraph strikes one as horribly romantic, and the idea of a child who is raised, and then left, a father who returns to teach his son, and then leaves to go back home has a certain romantic sensibility that must be placed in a proper context. From the tail end of the 20th century, the confessions strike a reader as closer to Rousseau then Origen—but the construction of family was different, the expecations of fatherhood is almost unrecognizable now then it was in the ancient traditions. Reading through Augusine, in his confessions is to figure out what the ethic of his relationship with his body and the aftereffects of his body was. In her slim book on the confessions, Margaret Miles talks about the implications of that seeking of a narratology of bodily discipline: “The confessions is, among other things, a narrative deconstruction of what is ordinarily thought of as pleasurable, and a reconstruction of true pleasure. Augustine's criterion for the adequacy of various orientations and organizations of human life was which kind of life provides the most intense and lasting pleasure...”(20).
Reading about the infamous pears episode, in relation to how the text rarely talks about the son is an indication of where the absences work through. Augustine knew that he should have felt poorly about stealing the pears, that the pears did not provide anything functional, and that the pleasure was explicitly connected to waste. The youthful indiscretion of that incident was clear cut, confessions worked out what was wrong, as a didactic way of informing his nascent Christian listeners how to develop new identities and new histories—especially how to control the bodily pleasures in a way that they had not needed to before. He uses the stomach aches, the bodily displeasure, of the purloined fruit to lead to a bodily view of shame, and that shame allows for the discipline that he was previously absent.
The narrative of the son cannot be maintained in the same capacity. He had failed to control his body, he failed at the continence that was required of him. The indiscretion was of his adulthood, it resulted in finding out how to construct one of the more difficult requirements of Christianity. Though his son came from a realtionship where he was engaged with the body, and he did not disappear from the pleasure. The son that came from him in sin was not abandoned, the mother of that sinful child was still for much of his life, visited, and occasionally slept with, The separating from her was difficult, and the reminder of his relationship to his son was a constant reminder of how he failed to be a “eunuch for the kingdom of heaven”--Origen's physical castration did not, in the end, make him any more orthodox, and the symbolic castration that Augustine engaged in, only deepened his sense of shame.
Though he taught, and lived with the child when he moved from boyhood to adulthood, the abondoment of the mother, and the child continued from the beginning, suggested that though the confessions tied the narratives of Christianity to an emerging view of the body, the writing/reading on the body was not a complete act, but a set of gaps—both textually and inter-personally. He went through the Roman pagans, the mancihieans, conventional christianity; but he never forgot where he came from. He went from being married, to having a concubine, a son with that concubine, and though he recognized how the body, and the heresey worked together his processing out where never fully complete. His realtionship to bodies and to texts were never really stable, his attempts to maintain his body by will alone, was seperated by what he considered sin. In other words, the sins of the body intermingled into sins of texts, and became a singluar object, an aobject tht could not be carefully sliced off, could not be discarded.
In his cultural history of Castration, the pyschoanalyst Gary Taylor talks about how this cultural and social intermingling resulted in this cult of completetion, of wholeness. The failure of the body to function fully in metaphor becomes a failure of christanity itself. “Augustine and his fellow allegorists are therefore confident...(that) castration is a mere metaphor for sexual abstinece. It must be a metaphor because the literal reading is illogical. Of course, this strategy...subordinates God to logic; it belongs to a much larger program, epitomized by Augustine, to reconcile a Palestinian religion with Greek Philosophy....(192). Taylor goes on to discuss how this construction was not written on every member of the body of christ, and although there is a move forward to allelegorize the unstable body, the tension of that allegory rests on the making of men into a third gender—that it becomes impossible to play the same games, to construct the same narrratives, and to engage in the same kind of texts between men and women.
Origen castrating himself to teach women others himself, but the crude surgery does not magically transubstantiate himself into a woman. Augustine making himself celibate allegorizes the textual body, but the problem of women remains—and because of his expereinces with his mother, and the mother of his child means that he was much more nervous about the interaction with members of his community. In E Ann Matter's discssuion of Christ, God and Woman, he talks about this role in the community: “After his conversiona, and his decision to live a celibate life, Augustine mantianed a certain distance from wmoen. Augustine;s biographer Possidius says that as bishop of Hippo, he never let any women, even his sister, stay in his house for fear of scandal (Possidius, Vita Augustini 26) It has often been noted that Augustine never cultuivated intellectual reationships with learned ascetic women in the way Jerome became friends with Paula and Eustochium at Bethlehem”
I would argue that Augustine's worries about women's bodies relate to the instability of an allegorical text versus the permanence of violence against the body. To allegorize castration, to make the castrating act one not of physical permenance but of a lifestyle, of desire that can always overwhelm, means that an allegorical or lingustic construciton of negation is always therented. Because the object of this negation is the phallus/penis it pushes outwards on the bodies of women, who's mechincal operatives are better hidden, and who's calls to celeibacy are more ambigious. In this projecting onward, it becomes this game of tug-of-war, where the shame of the incomplete/allegorical castration of the unstable body topples into the the same of a womens body who because of her lack of voice, and really lack of body becomes an absorbing absence.
The penis and testes are so unstable, that they need to be controlled, first by intervetions in the physical sense—in isolating them from women, from mechincal interventions, and in the most severe cases, castration itself. When these texts move away from the physicality, at the same time and for similar reasons to Christianity itself, then the control moves from corporeal solutions and moves into linguistic constructions—these linguistic constructions, the speech acts of shame, of censoring and blocking of desire.
There is some discussion that augustine could read origien and translation, and did. But you can see how the interactions of his body mirrored the body of origen, and how Origen worked through the problems of Paul, who was attempting in his desires to figure out exactly what Christ wanted to say. The body of Christ works as an object of tacticle materiality, but also symbolic language. The language is never really settled—and the narratives that emerge are not linear. The testicles of Origen, work as testimony for the problems of a body that can never be properly reconciled.
This lack of reconciliation provides a originating text to the difficulties of Augustine—who was so afraid of his body, that he was never able to find out what it meant, what the natural consequences of his actions came from. Peter Brown, who wrote about the nature of masculinity and devotion in relation to Augustine, elucidated the difficulties of Augustine's penis: “Frustrated by his inability to rationally explicate this irrational moment of orgasm, Augustine produces more and more discourse and centers more theological debates around the problem of sexual excess in an unending spiral.”
The spiral here is one that we have been caught up in. The orgasm erupts/disrupts in the middle of the book, the body breaks apart, his semen spread and diseminanted through what he thinks and what he feels. Because the body, the penis, is found within the texts, and because the texts are foundtational to how we live with our bodies and our texts, means that those with out penises, without the ability to contain their sperms become violators of the reason that was so desperate for. The body is unruly, our thoughts about the body are unruly, our desire to control the body become an attempt to push back the chaos of sexualised desire.
In this sense, the literal castration of Origen, and the symbolic/lingustic castration of Augustine are two failed solutions at filling the gaps, ending the lacunae, embodying the requirements of previous thinkers, and to rule. The move from literal to symbolic does not change the essential goals of the double mirror, it posits a soultion so seductive that it has become the status quo, one that should be deconstructed or anaysled, to provide other releases for our bodies.