Abstract
In his apologetic letter to Scapula, proconsul of Africa, Tertullian boasts that the emperor Caracalla himself was lacte Christiano educatus, ‘raised on Christian milk’ – that is, as John Penniman explains, nursed in his infancy by a Christian wet nurse, but also schooled in Christian things by his childminders in the imperial household. Penniman takes Tertullian’s phrase as a title for this fine book, in which he shows how the early Christians represented their paideia and catechesis in terms of food, and in particular breastmilk.
This was, Penniman shows, partly to do with a very old Greek and Roman tradition of representing education as nourishment (the subject of Penniman’s chapter 1), and a Jewish instance of this tradition that made a special symbol of mother’s milk (the subject of his chapter 2). Hence the logic behind the apostle Paul’s saying to his audience in Corinth, ‘I fed you with milk, not solid food, for you were not ready for it’ (1 Cor 3:2). In the second century CE and following, once Paul’s letters came to be read as Christian scripture, this verse itself became the other major part of the impetus behind the early Christian habit of representing formation as eating. Penniman writes about his book, ‘[t]his project can be understood as a kind of reception history of 1 Corinthians 3:1-3’ (p. 18). Which is not to say a mere catalogue of citations. ‘The apostle Paul is not the focal point of the entire book but rather a pivot point and a touchstone for later authors to sharpen their own use of nourishment’s symbolic power’ (p. 18). In this respect, Penniman’s study is an admirable model of a creative, synthetic approach to doing reception history.
The book’s main cast of characters – in rough chronological order – are Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria (both chapter 3), Origen (chapter 4), Gregory of Nyssa (chapter 5), and Augustine (chapter 6). In their respective contexts, these early Christian thinkers make very different uses of the symbolism of learning-as-milk-and-meat, but they are all deeply invested in the power of that symbol. As for what their various uses have in common, Penniman, in his conclusions, emphasises the feminist-critical point that these elite (and mostly celibate) male writers appropriated a function of women’s bodies – lactation – to add to their own authority. He writes, “The power ascribed to the female body in Roman family values was largely co-opted and displaced onto the abstract body of mother church and the ascetic bodies of male clerics” (204). And again, ‘Motherhood and nurturance have rarely been considered “mundane” by prevailing social ideologies, and. . . this subjection of women’s bodies to a reign of expertise has a long and violent lineage’ (p. 205).
This is surely true. And yet, Penniman himself wants to imagine the possibility of a non-pernicious use of the powerful symbolism of nourishment. ‘What is also needed is a better accounting of the ways in which nurturance is not “women’s work,” despite being affixed to women throughout history as though it were a biological fact’ (p. 210). But is this not something like what Paul, Origen, and Gregory – in their own glaringly ancient, hierarchical way – were trying to imagine in the texts discussed in this book? Penniman sees them as foot soldiers of the patriarchy, as – viewed from one angle – they most certainly were. But an interpreter like Beverly Gaventa, in her Our Mother Saint Paul, can look at the apostles and bishops from a quite different angle, as unlikely pioneers and allies in the project of queering Christian identity. It really is hermeneutics all the way down. Anyway, one can say of Penniman’s book what the ecclesiastical writers might have said of the letters of Paul: Take. Eat.