Origen’s Revenge: The Greek and Hebrew Roots of Christian Thinking on Male and Female, Brian Patrick Mitchell (Pickwick, 2021). The following is an email exchange between the Psmiths, edited slightly for clarity. John: You know dear, we’ve been writing this book review Substack for six months now, ever since that crazy New Year’s resolution of ours, but we still haven’t done “the gender one.” And I feel like we have a real competitive advantage at this, since both side of the unbridgeable epistemic chasm are represented here. So let’s settle some of the eternal questions: Can men and women be friends? Who got the worse deal out of the curse in the Garden of Eden? And what’s up with your
I love that you all work so well together. I'm waiting for the book/tv show/movie which frames husband and wife as a team against the world, instead of a couple at odds with each other until the end of the story.
Been doing a bit of reading of late on adjacent subjects like Carl Truman's the Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self. You all might enjoy that work as it traces the modern view of self starting with the Greeks to the present.
As a husband and father, the most important lesson for me was to sacrifice my "needs" for the benefit of my wife and family. Well, that and deliberately structuring my house as a place that gives praise to our Savior and Creator. This fundamentally transforms the home for the better.
I think either you or the author you review discounts one other strain of anti-family/marriage thought in ancient Greece. The Greeks lionized the public at the expense of the private. The private was selfish; it was the world outside citizenship. It was, by definition, the realm of women, children, and slaves.
Greek myth is full of sons that eat fathers and mothers who murder children; <a href="https://antoniustetrax.substack.com/p/on-the-strangeness-of-the-greeks">it equates sex with violence and family with disorder.</a> The polis had no place for the family; honor, order, and law existed in and because of the public realm of the citizen. The Spartans take this logic to an extreme, but an extreme that was in turn idealized by other Greeks.
The first volume of Paul Rahe's REPUBLICS: ANCIENT AND MODERN is especially good on this, and can be read as a stand alone work: https://amzn.to/4dnWpFv
I tried to point at that a little bit in my discussion of the Oresteia, but I think you're entirely correct. The literal domestication of the Erinyes at the climax of The Eumenides is a big flashing "the success of the polis depends on shoving heredity and the women who make it possible out of public life" sign! But it's hard to disentangle that from the physis/nomos distinction, especially in Aeschylus -- the blood and childbirth imagery is really prominent in the Greek.
This may have been somewhere in the book, but a curious aspect of the Hebrew is God's name, YHWH. Apparently, (I do not know the Hebrew to check, but a rabbi I trust told me this) if you take the first two letters --- yud and hay --- and flip them around, you get the pronoun for men in ancient Hebrew and if you do the same with the latter two letters --- vav and hay --- then you get the pronoun for women in ancient Hebrew. So God's name is, backwards, he-she (or she-he, however you want to think of it).
Also I wanted to note that there is in Judaism as well a longstanding metaphor of Israel as a wife to God as a husband, similar to the Church-Christ relationship you describe here. The 'marriage contract' is supposed to have come at Mt. Sinai. I think there are other marriage-based metaphors as well in various theological relations, but I'm honestly pretty inexperienced when it comes to Jewish theology.
This was a really interesting review! I always enjoy the peeks into Christian theology and history I get here. Thanks.
Self-giving / thanks-giving sounds like a perfect description of serious (not just sex) BDSM relationships, except that it is weird that everybody of one gender should be one and everybody of the other gender should be of the other, when people's character and inclinations are obviously mixed here.
My take is that this stuff is basically coming from our past relationships with our parents, in our romantic relationships, we want to be either something like a parent or something like a child. But it really does not depend on gender.
Re: “Love your enemies and bless those that curse you”
This makes a lot of sense from an esoteric point of view as it is well-known that what you project on others is a reflection of yourself (cf Jungian shadow) and what you wish for others tends to reflect back on you (a well-known Druid’s raspberry jam principle) - so if you wish disaster/justice on others then your focus on disaster/justice will tend to also bring it upon yourself. Thus focussing on blessings and raising people up is psychologically good for you - something Christ understood well.
Regarding the opening texts of Paul, in Christianity there is a distinction between the bodily person and the eternal soul (also reflected in the give unto Caesar…) which is reflected in these texts - hence it is easy to argue that there is no inconsistency.
Awesome work. Thank you.
I love that you all work so well together. I'm waiting for the book/tv show/movie which frames husband and wife as a team against the world, instead of a couple at odds with each other until the end of the story.
Been doing a bit of reading of late on adjacent subjects like Carl Truman's the Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self. You all might enjoy that work as it traces the modern view of self starting with the Greeks to the present.
As a husband and father, the most important lesson for me was to sacrifice my "needs" for the benefit of my wife and family. Well, that and deliberately structuring my house as a place that gives praise to our Savior and Creator. This fundamentally transforms the home for the better.
Thanks again.
This is very interesting.
I think either you or the author you review discounts one other strain of anti-family/marriage thought in ancient Greece. The Greeks lionized the public at the expense of the private. The private was selfish; it was the world outside citizenship. It was, by definition, the realm of women, children, and slaves.
Greek myth is full of sons that eat fathers and mothers who murder children; <a href="https://antoniustetrax.substack.com/p/on-the-strangeness-of-the-greeks">it equates sex with violence and family with disorder.</a> The polis had no place for the family; honor, order, and law existed in and because of the public realm of the citizen. The Spartans take this logic to an extreme, but an extreme that was in turn idealized by other Greeks.
The first volume of Paul Rahe's REPUBLICS: ANCIENT AND MODERN is especially good on this, and can be read as a stand alone work: https://amzn.to/4dnWpFv
I tried to point at that a little bit in my discussion of the Oresteia, but I think you're entirely correct. The literal domestication of the Erinyes at the climax of The Eumenides is a big flashing "the success of the polis depends on shoving heredity and the women who make it possible out of public life" sign! But it's hard to disentangle that from the physis/nomos distinction, especially in Aeschylus -- the blood and childbirth imagery is really prominent in the Greek.
“between the sexes, the husband takes the archic role and the wife the eucharistic.” I think this nails it, in a blurry way 😂
You guys are book review rock stars. Have you considered writing for the annual ACX book review contest?
Yes, if they'd entered this year they'd have easily won.
This may have been somewhere in the book, but a curious aspect of the Hebrew is God's name, YHWH. Apparently, (I do not know the Hebrew to check, but a rabbi I trust told me this) if you take the first two letters --- yud and hay --- and flip them around, you get the pronoun for men in ancient Hebrew and if you do the same with the latter two letters --- vav and hay --- then you get the pronoun for women in ancient Hebrew. So God's name is, backwards, he-she (or she-he, however you want to think of it).
Also I wanted to note that there is in Judaism as well a longstanding metaphor of Israel as a wife to God as a husband, similar to the Church-Christ relationship you describe here. The 'marriage contract' is supposed to have come at Mt. Sinai. I think there are other marriage-based metaphors as well in various theological relations, but I'm honestly pretty inexperienced when it comes to Jewish theology.
This was a really interesting review! I always enjoy the peeks into Christian theology and history I get here. Thanks.
Self-giving / thanks-giving sounds like a perfect description of serious (not just sex) BDSM relationships, except that it is weird that everybody of one gender should be one and everybody of the other gender should be of the other, when people's character and inclinations are obviously mixed here.
My take is that this stuff is basically coming from our past relationships with our parents, in our romantic relationships, we want to be either something like a parent or something like a child. But it really does not depend on gender.
Re: “Love your enemies and bless those that curse you”
This makes a lot of sense from an esoteric point of view as it is well-known that what you project on others is a reflection of yourself (cf Jungian shadow) and what you wish for others tends to reflect back on you (a well-known Druid’s raspberry jam principle) - so if you wish disaster/justice on others then your focus on disaster/justice will tend to also bring it upon yourself. Thus focussing on blessings and raising people up is psychologically good for you - something Christ understood well.
Regarding the opening texts of Paul, in Christianity there is a distinction between the bodily person and the eternal soul (also reflected in the give unto Caesar…) which is reflected in these texts - hence it is easy to argue that there is no inconsistency.