Owning Our Bodies? The Politics of Self-Possession and the Body of Christ (Hobbes,Locke and Paul)

Rival Anthropologies of Embodiment

A deep ideological rift underlies the cultural and moral wars raging in Western liberal societies on sexuality, the beginning and end of life, and other matters that concern the bodily aspect of human existence. Two doctrines of embodiment rival each other: the idea of a proprietary relationship to one’s body as the grounding of human sociality on the one hand, and, on the other, an account of non-proprietary possession of our bodies. Each of these anthropological claims has its corresponding generative (and supportive) form of life: the idea of (body-)proprietorship is foundational to the capitalist system, critically sustaining its rationality and operative power; meanwhile, the account of non-proprietary possession of our bodies grounds those forms of life that reflect the Christian narrative of creation, redemption and perfection.

As we shall try to demonstrate, a theological characterisation of the difference between these rival accounts is given in the opposition of porneia and chastity as we find it outlined in Paul’s correspondence with the Corinthians. Unfortunately, ‘chastity vs. porneia’ has been staged in much of the Christian tradition as a matter of moral decorum instead of foundationally different anthropologies. In playing the discourse this way, the Christian tradition has contributed its own share to the emergence of the current cultural warfare on ‘sexuality’, which distracts from the substantial doctrinal controversy on human embodiment which has not yet really begun.

A good number of topical discourses, such as concern organ transplantation, abortion, transgender identity, or a wide range of sexual expressions, would, we suggest, be best understood as a compound of practical apology for this one-same anthropology of self-possession which sustains the capitalist system. Or, to use Walter Benjamin’s words, these discourses serve as practical apologies of the secret doctrine of ‘Capitalism as Religion’. ¹ By ‘practical apology’, we refer to the actual function of a nexus of discourses as well as of political and cultural patterns that subcutaneously work together to bolster a foundational claim—a claim without which these practices would be meaningless and incoherent. These discourses and practices form an ‘apology’ of this underlying claim insofar as their ubiquity renders any conceivable alternative inconceivable; and this apology is ‘practical’ insofar as the claim that it defends does not feature (as a matter of discussion) in these discourses but is propagated through the way in which the discourses are set up and work practically.

To speak of a secret doctrine follows Benjamin’s suggestion in this famous fragment, in which he characterised capitalism as a ‘religion of pure cult’, ² that is, a religion ‘without theology’ ³ and so without an accompanying discourse to scrutinise its doctrines. Benjamin’s notion of ‘pure cult’, as we understand it, does not suggest denying the existence of certain ideas that serve as foundational truth claims for this novel religion. To say that capitalism does without a ‘specific body of dogma’, ⁴ as Benjamin puts it, rather points to the implicit or ‘practical’ nature of these doctrines. The doctrine that sustains the capitalist system is hardly ever really explained or even accounted for, but is all the more powerful in functioning as the engine of the mechanism’s compound of practices and attitudes. Indeed, the claim that we are proprietors of our bodies literally ‘goes without saying’ for those enculturated into the system. As we progress, we shall see how this type of self-referentiality has characterised the idea of self-possessed bodies from the outset, when it made its first powerful appearance in the modern age, most closely linked with the work of John Locke.

We might be tempted to draw the conclusion that reference to Benjamin’s critique sets the two systems on unequal footing, emphasising that the Christian dogma has been accompanied by theology, whereas the capitalist dogma has not. While there is truth to this claim, we should not infer from it that the ‘practical’ doctrine resides on the capitalist side only. The Christian dogma also has a practical side, and it is perhaps no less challenging to bring this to the fore than it is to illuminate the hidden theoretical foundations of the practical dogma of capitalism.

‘Having a Body’: The Task of Owning

Before exploring the abyss between the two rival anthropologies of embodiment, I suggest a reflection of a more phenomenological kind: what does it mean to ‘have’ a body? There was a time around the 1970s when it became fashionable to denounce the language of ‘having’ ⁵ as it was felt to underplay, among other things, the psychosomatic unity that human beings are. ‘I do not have a body, but rather am my body’, so the slogan went. While this swipe was well taken, the slogan in turn tended to obstruct a truth that the language, which it meant to overcome, had sustained: as rational animals we are bodily beings precisely in that we ‘have’ bodies. ⁶ We live in our bodies, but not to complete absorption, always negotiating a certain distance with them. This stance is reflected in our language when we speak, for example, of ‘carrying ourselves’. One of the elemental tasks of human life is to come to grips with the claim our bodies have on us as something to respond to, understood as purposeful action, instead of merely reacting to physical urges and drives as in a trigger-response scheme.

What does it mean, then, to be responsive to our bodily nature? It means learning to own the body I have been given in such a way as to really make it my own, being integrated with it as opposed to simply ‘inhabiting’ a body as we would a vessel. Modern forms of objectifying the body as just another instance of the res extensae that the cognisant ‘self’ faces in the world out there have been criticised for good reasons. But we also need to understand that the predicament, which we might call the Cartesian body, points back to an elemental task that remains true to our human existence. A member of homo sapiens cannot be as naturally at home in her body as we presume other animals are in knowing far more instinctively how to use their bodies. The point in this comparison is not, of course, to suggest that the task of making our bodies our own is exhausted by the need to develop physical skills and make our limbs do what we want. Owning our bodies is a complex and at times dramatic task that cannot be called anything less than spiritual: to accept, embrace and love this one body we have—the body that we see when critically gazing in the mirror, intensely feel like from distance when beset by illness, or experience with an alarmingly totalising sense of becoming ‘all body’ in sexual climax.

The fact that we experience our bodies at times as alien, as though they were mere objects out there that stare at us uncomfortably and incomprehensively, teaches us that the task of owning the body is as central to our existence of embodied souls as it is difficult—a perennial challenge that we can fail to meet, as we all do to various degrees at certain times. Just think of the countless tragedies played out in the lives of teenage girls who experience puberty as a deformation of their appearance that can only be fended off by starvation or self-mutilation. Such battles represent a war raging in those for whom dwelling in their own bodies is experienced as spiritual homelessness. The promise of surgical relief is often held out to those who suffer from such displacement, most radically in the form of transgender operations, but also including the mundane experiences of that great majority who find themselves repelled by the ageing of their own bodies. The biblical statement that ‘[n]o one hates his own body, but nourishes and cherishes it’ (Eph. 5.29) is thus not a simple description of the empiric realities of life in the world, but rather a statement of how created life was originally meant to be. The widespread tendency in our technological civilisation to offer readymade operations as shortcuts or even surrogate solutions of this complex task of learning to embrace our bodies may well be seen as tragic; but this should not make us overlook the equally tragic development that underlies these scenarios: the conflation of the actual lifelong challenge to make our bodies our own with the idea of proprietorship, the exclusive right to define and/or use our bodies according to our respective individual wills. ⁷ The Cartesian body is a truthful acknowledgement of the natural fact that we ‘have’ bodies—minus the acknowledgement of the claim it has on us.

The modern account that we refer to under the label ‘Cartesian’ is, of course, not original but an inherited and transposed dualism from Greek philosophies, in which the answer to the task of making the body one’s own tended to be given in the language of control: we own our body to precisely the degree in which we master it. We should, however, not too quickly associate the language of control or mastering with that ontological dualism of mind over matter, which Christian thinkers have rejected from the outset, such as when Augustine famously affirmed the simultaneity of form and matter in divine creation. ⁸ The discipline of holding physical impulses, needs and drives in check, and subjugating them to reason through will, positively corresponds with the bodily nature of our existence. Overeating, for example, is not a matter of giving in to a simple physical impulse. We overeat not when we ‘listen to our body’—indicating a lack of reasonable control—but rather when we fail to listen properly, say by circumventing the physical saturation point in eating too quickly, or too much sugary fare. To speak of the need of subjecting our body to the ‘control’ of reason, a commonplace in the classical tradition, does not have to demean the physical nature of our existence, but can be aimed at something like a healthy balance within the totus homo, acknowledging that such a balance will always have to be actively found and managed in an organism that does not automatically generate it, as plants do through osmotic diffusion of pressure.

These observations should have prepared us for a core conceptual question: Is it possible to conceive of a non-Cartesian account of having a body, a mode of owning that does not presuppose a prior objectification of what is owned? Can we imagine a non-proprietary way of owning the body that is capable of transcending the framework of master-and-slave-relation, within which the objectified body is trapped in both the Greek version of subjugating the body under the ‘higher’ human faculties, and in the inverted form (a secularised Hebrew version as exemplified in Freud ⁹ ) in which the person as a whole is portrayed as subject to commanding needs and drives?

The Cartesian Body: Instrumental, Private, Antagonistic

One of the shortcomings of the Cartesian model is that it underplays the communicative nature and purpose of the body. In that it conceives of it as thing out there, the body can at best be a means through which the self turns to others, instead of being a medium in which we communicate with others. We do not even have to turn to the ample scientific evidence to know that bodily reactions to communicative situations often occur prior to (if not independent of) our awareness of them. We blink, have our pupils enlarged, the surface colour of our skin changes, and all these ‘immediate’ physical reactions can just as immediately be responded to by corresponding physical reactions of our partner in a communicative situation. In other words, we do not have a reaction ‘in mind’ first, which we then ‘transfer’ onto the bodily plane in order to communicate, but inevitably communicate with others in bodily fashion.

Only the objectified body can be owned according to the idea of private property, viz. something that is ‘mine’ first and exclusively, and ‘yours’ or ‘ours’ only in an optional secondary sense, as a result of preceding negotiations. This body is private in principle, and any claim somebody else might wish to have on it—whether another person or an institution—will have to be channelled through the proprietor’s private will. Correspondingly, the private body is conceived in principled antagonistic terms: the space that each body occupies is defined by a line of separation from any other person’s sphere and as such constitutes a right of non-intrusion. Conceived as a physical claim for space, each body always rivals other bodies with which it competes for that same space. This is why for Hobbes, as for Locke and the liberal political tradition, bodily existence is practically coterminous with the right to self-defense. ¹⁰ This corresponds with the legitimate pursuit of every person to increase his or her personal space and influence—a right bound to conflict with that same right in other persons and thus in need of being moderated by political power. The justification of modern accounts of state power is, at its most basic level, not the need of conflict resolution or prevention, as it is most often assumed, and not even the underlying concept of private property, as it is sometimes conceded; at its most foundational level, the modern justification of state power lies in a particular account of embodiment that assumes a private proprietary relationship as the most basic relationship. The fact that bodies by virtue of their ‘air displacement’ naturally compete in space and so represent ‘limits’ to each other, does, of course, have to be acknowledged. But the question is as to whether this fact can and should be immediately transposed to the political realm by way of assuming a primal situation of conflicting rights that these self-possessed bodies represent to each other.

Interlude: Bonhoeffer on ‘Loving the Limit’

Dietrich Bonhoeffer offers an exciting theological alternative to this protology of liberal politics in his theological exposition of the book of Genesis titled Creation and Fall. ¹¹ In this work he portrays the biblical myth as dealing with the problem of competing spatial bodies by way of introducing to the first human being the first fellow human being precisely as a limit that can be loved. ¹² Creaturely life, according to Bonhoeffer, is defined as the challenge of learning to embrace the limit that this form of existence bears, instead of rebelling against it by taking a flight into fantasy images of a life without boundaries.

In an aptly titled chapter ‘The Power of the Other’, Bonhoeffer explains the way in which Eve is introduced as a ‘helper who is a partner’ (Gen. 2.20) for Adam as precisely ‘in bearing the limit imposed upon him’. ¹³ As a body ‘who stands beside’, Eve constitutes a limit for Adam, but the sexual attraction that the creator invested in the original set-up of human difference invites Adam to love and become ‘one flesh’ with the person that represents this limit for him. ‘The other person is the limit that God sets for me, the limit that I love and that I will not transgress because of my love.’ ¹⁴ While as a creature Adam lived his life from the beginning within boundaries, without a partner, he could not have accepted this life in its boundedness, since ‘this free life as a creature can be borne within its limit only if it is loved, and out of unfathomable mercy the Creator creates the helper who … had to be at once the embodiment of Adam’s limit and the object of Adam’s love’. ¹⁵

Although Bonhoeffer did not draw out this line himself, we can detect in his account a powerful rival to the protology of political liberalism. The very same original condition—human bodyliness—is characterised in each case as resulting in diametrically opposed patterns of human sociality. For the early liberal thinkers, the body in its spatial claims was understood as establishing the notion of human sociality among self-proprietors as a matter of principled competition, whereas for Bonhoeffer, human bodyliness in sexual differentiation was conceived as bearing the germ for human sociality, understood as primal unity rather than division. In his reading of Genesis, separation in space (distance) occurred in order for the two to become one flesh, not to regulate a competitive arena.

Bodies between Private and Public Claims

We characterised our attention to Bonhoeffer’s rival construal of the limit that humans represent to each other by virtue of their bodily nature as an ‘interlude’—a challenging and promising interruption of the contractarian myth. Historically, though, Bonhoeffer’s account sailed largely under the radar, unable to be even identified for its potential to challenge this myth. And conceptually, his account can be said to have refused competing with this rival, insofar as Bonhoeffer resisted drawing immediate political conclusions from the ‘clash of bodies’. Instead he followed the dramatic sequence of the biblical narrative in drawing attention to the power of (erotic and familial) love that unites bodies before they get to negotiate their differences on the political plane. It would be tempting to develop the train of thought of this interlude into a fresh discussion of the wisdom of Aristotle’s concept of the family as the germ of the polis, as it was adopted and theologically modified in the theology of the Magisterial reformers. ¹⁶ We cannot do this here, however, as we need to resume our analysis of the liberal tradition and its ‘secret’ doctrinal basis in the idea of self-proprietorship as the dominant interpretation of what it means to have a body.

Irrespective of the pervasive character of this idea in liberal societies, there is a remnant of experiences and institutional settings that reflect a different reality—cases in which trans-individual, if not public, claims on bodies are acknowledged in valid legal or cultural codes. Even ‘consenting adults’ in the permissive societies of the Western world are not completely ad libidum at what they do with their bodies. We only need to think of cases such as incest, selling of one’s own body parts, consent to be eaten by a cannibal, or (depending on the legal situation in different countries) assisted suicide. There is a wider net of legal prohibitions that tend to be less well known. For example, although there are shades of grey in the handling of English law as it pertains to serious sadomasochistic practices, it is clear that these are (still) outlawed in principle. As ‘Operation Spanner’ has brought to wider public awareness, for sexual practices that might result in more than trifling marks or injuries to the body, consent does not constitute a valid legal defence. ¹⁷

Besides such cases in which the individual’s right to do with her body as she pleases is legally or culturally restricted, there are legitimate scenarios in which things are done to bodies that reflect trans-individual, familial, or even public claims, such as ritual circumcision in specific religious or cultural arrangements. The fact that some of the principles that underlie these examples have come under fire in present times, such as in the questioning of the moral basis of existing incest laws in an age of contraception, or most recently when a German court first ruled that the circumcision of male children was illegal for infringing on the individual’s right to bodily integrity, ¹⁸ demonstrates how all pervasive the idea of private proprietorship of the body has become. Indeed, it increasingly emerges as the one meta-right that trumps any other conceivable right.

The proprietary relationship a person assumes to have with her own body is understood not only as the primal but also the closest conceivable relationship there is: nothing and no one is entitled to intervene or come in between, not even one’s own child. Eileen McDonagh’s controversial argument in favour of abortion, ¹⁹ which portrayed the fetus as an intruder, has been often discredited as rather crass, even by other pro-choice advocates. But in the light of the revolutionary anthropological tradition we are describing, it appears to only underline our point.

To speak of the ‘closest’ possible relationship in this context should not make us overlook, though, the inequality between the ‘partners’—body and ‘self’—as it becomes evident, for example, in the vastly contrasting public responses to the phenomena of transgenderism and ex-gayness. While ‘conversion therapies’ for those who declare their wish to overcome homophile desire tend to be denounced as discriminatory, manipulative or even criminal, sex reassignment surgery (SRS), on the other hand, is increasingly accepted as a legitimate means to rectify a ‘wrong of nature’. Without wishing to discuss either of these cases and their respective merits and problems, what is instructive for our purpose here is merely to note the underlying Gnosticism, according to which the adaption of matter to mind appears completely sound, while the inverse, a transformation of desire to accommodate the physical sex, would seem tyrannical.

Another observation in this context is the ease with which the radically privatised can be absorbed into novel public claims. Think of organ donation and the moral climate in which it is increasingly deemed ‘irresponsible’ to drive without a valid personal organ donation pass. Even after the life of the original proprietor ceases, the body, it seems, must still retain the status of a property, now in the form of a public pool of organs as potential spare parts for transplantation surgery. In this scenario, then, we see the idea of proprietorship of the body come full circle: from a radical individualist account in defiance of all social claims to a potentially tyrannical collectivised account that must be presumed to bolster inflated future claims on successfully objectified, isolated and inherently meaningless body ‘tissue’.

Before we can discuss the alternative account of a non-Cartesian form of ownership of the body, as Paul developed it in his correspondence with the Corinthians, we need to investigate the reasons why the idea of body-proprietorship has come to be so pervasive in capitalist societies. To this effect, we trace the idea in its foremost modern propagators, Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. ²⁰

Insatiable Desire and the Competitive Body (Hobbes)

The core credo of capitalism is not the free market, which is but an instrument; the core credo is an anthropological one: human existence is at heart a proprietor’s relationship, and the closest relationship under the sun—that between the owning self and the owned body—forms the basis of all other relationships that a human being is capable of forming. This idea was most influentially formulated in John Locke’s political thought, but its triumph would not have been possible without another revolutionary move that preceded it in the work of Thomas Hobbes: the idea that human life is defined by insatiable desire which is capable of being directed and redirected towards an infinite number of possible objects. Only the combination of the idea of a principled insatiable appetitus with the idea of self-proprietorship as rooted in the relationship to one’s own body could have generated the matrix from which the new political economy that we call capitalism could spring. ²¹

Before taking a closer look at how Hobbes and Locke arrived at these claims respectively, we need to grasp the enormous reach of this new anthropological compound: in conjunction with the assumption of infinite desire, the idea of a proprietary relationship as the most basic to human life proved definitive not only for a new economy sold to the imperative of permanent growth; the same claim also legitimated a new political order, geared at the protection of private property, as well as a new politics and economy of human sexuality based on understanding the body as asset. Although the idea of ‘owning my body’ does not necessarily privilege the erotic body, it is unsurprising to find this particular corollary of the proprietorship relation so fiercely defended in debates over sexual practices. Whether we mean to pamper our body or ruin it, whether we torture it or turn it into a pleasure machine: all that is deemed morally irrelevant as long as it reflects the original relation of property to proprietor. No authority that could intervene here; no order, whether natural, religious or political, could be assumed to precede this relation and therefore be seen as entitled to prescribe or prohibit certain sexual relations or expressions in principle.

Hobbes was acutely aware of the revolutionary thrust of his claim that human desire is principally insatiable, which wiped away with one stroke the anthropological basis of the teleological tradition. According to the teleological worldview every movement was meant to find its point of saturation and (literally) its ‘end’ in the telos to which it is directed, while the telos of the whole creation was the return to its originator. Over against this tradition, Hobbes states that ‘there is no (such) finis ultimus (utmost aim,) nor summum bonum, (greatest good,) as is spoken of in the books of the old moral philosophers. Nor can a man anymore live whose desires are at an end…’ ²² Hence, for Hobbes, the driving principle of human life consists in the ‘continual progress of the desire, from one object to another; the attaining of the former, being still but the way to the latter’. ²³

Hobbes finds the reason for this continual progress not so much in the desire to accumulate ever more goods but rather in a basic fear of loss, as people constantly fear to lose their life-resources if they are not multiplied. ²⁴ It is obvious that the liberal market economy, as it developed in the centuries after Hobbes, is modelled around this bold reversal of the venerable teleological tradition, busily providing credibility to this anthropology of insatiable desire that springs from fear. But how is this related to the claim of a proprietary relation to the body that we suggested we could find at the cradle of the modern political tradition?

While this claim is more explicitly developed in Locke than in Hobbes, the connection is anything but absent from the ‘Leviathan’ either. Hobbes begins his famous chapter ‘Of the Natural Condition of Mankind as Concerning Their Felicity, and Misery’ with a consideration of ‘the faculties of the body’ (and then of the mind), in which he finds that nature has equipped all human beings (roughly) equally. While, on first glance, this equality might suggest a basis for peaceful coexistence, Hobbes prepares the reader for what is to come by explaining the point of equal distribution of bodily powers with this illustration: ‘For as to the strength of the body, the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest, either by secret machination, or by confederacy with others, that are in the same danger with himself.’ ²⁵ Hobbes finds ‘in the nature of man’ causes that predestine him for a life in which ‘every man is enemy to every man’, and prime among them is ‘competition’. This condition of the natural state is due to the fact that out of the equality of physical powers arises an equality of hope in attaining individual ends. ‘And therefore if any two men desire the same thing, which nevertheless they cannot both enjoy, they become enemies.’ ²⁶ For the sake of our discussion it is worth pointing out that the ‘natural’ condition from which Hobbes derives his political ontology is one in which the physical nature of human life, its defined power and spatial extension, is assumed to ground sociality in a state of primal competitiveness. This presupposes, as Hobbes clarifies, a primal right to the body (one’s own body and its powers to use them at will ²⁷ ), which constitutes a principled right of the body towards other bodies (the right of self-preservation over against invaders into that space), ²⁸ which, in turn, can result in a circumstantial right to other bodies ²⁹ (in the state of war, once actualised).

The Invested Body: From Property to Property (Locke)

While Hobbes discussed the significance of the powers of the body with an immediate slant towards the agonistic potential he presumed existing in the state of nature, the context in which Locke reflects on the body-relation is the argument he presents as a justification for private property. Thus reads the famous passage in his ‘Second Treatise’:

Though the Earth, and all inferior Creatures be common to all Men, yet every Man has a Property in this own Person. This no Body has any Right to but himself. The Labour of his Body, and the Work of his Hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the State that Nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his Labour with, and joyned to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his Property … For this Labour being the unquestionable Property of the Labourer, no Man but he can have a right to what that is once joyned to, at least where there is enough, and as good left in common for others. ³⁰

In Locke’s theory, the body appears in the first instance as the means of appropriation. It is the body’s power that constitutes the labour, which is invested, and which, in turn, legitimates proprietary claims when, for example, an apple is plucked from an apple tree from the commons. But the body possesses this capacity of ‘creating value’ for the one that invests labour only insofar as the body is itself presumed to be owned by the respective person. It is also obvious from the quote that Locke conceives of this proprietorship in the exclusive terms of private property: ‘This no Body has any Right to but himself.’ It must be said, though, that Locke is by no means envisioning politico-economical circumstances of the type that we would associate with unfettered capitalism. He distances himself explicitly from what he must have felt others might wish to conclude from his account of the origin and right of property: that the proprietor would be completely free to use and increase it according to whatever she likes. Here Locke confines the scope of anyone’s private property as in ‘keeping within the bounds, set by reason of what might serve for his use’. ³¹

It also needs to be said that nowhere in this passage (or anywhere else in the Treatises, as far as we can see) does Locke explicitly bespeak the body as property; he rather speaks of having a property in one’s own ‘person’. But he continues his explanations of this point by immediately referring to bodily functions (work of hand, labour of body), so that the focus is firmly on the body in detailing what self-proprietorship means. While Locke appeared still somewhat hesitant to put the matter in terms of a blunt dualism (of an inner ‘self’ owning the outer body), the tradition of thought and practice that followed his ideas would soon fill out what Locke had left under-defined.

Marx, for example, located the historical kairos of the idea of body-proprietorship precisely in that moment when the self-possessed person turns (or is forced to turn) her labour into a commodity to be acquired by the capitalist. Free-market exchange necessitates a degree of objectification of the body and its powers that cannot be concealed under the woolly language of the self-possessed ‘person’. In order to be able to acquire the labour of someone’s body, one must first conceive of a dinglich (objective) ‘relationship’ of that person with her body. ³²

It is particularly interesting to observe how Locke presents the claim of human self-proprietorship as something completely self-evident or ‘unquestionable’, as he puts it. This constitutes a most telling parallel with Hobbes, who, when presenting his novel anthropological claim of principally insatiable desire, simply and explicitly took it for granted, without even the slightest effort to present an argument for it: ‘in the first place I put for a general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power that ceaseth only in death’. ³³ In Locke’s case, the equally straightforward assumption of human self-possession as a kind of self-evident truth is all the more puzzling given his theologically informed understanding of humanity as the workmanship of the God who alone is the ‘Author and Giver of Life’. ³⁴ What has kept commentators puzzled is, on closer reading, not quite so incoherent or self-contradictory, though.

In the First Treatise, Locke challenges his opponent Filmer’s patriarchal political ontology by objecting to the claim that (absolute) paternal authority (as the germ of all political authority) can be derived from the fact of begetting, in which parents are presumed to ‘produce’ their offspring. In a straightforward theological argument Locke rejects this claim by pointing to the qualitative difference that separates begetting from designing and giving life to that which has yet no being. ‘But is there any one so bold, that dares thus far Arrogate to himself the Incomprehensible Works of the Almighty?’ ³⁵

The revealing part comes, however, in a second train of thought, in which Locke intends to emphasise this point even further. ‘What Father of a Thousand, when he begets a Child, thinks further than the satisfying his [sic] present Appetite?’ ³⁶ In order to downplay the degree in which procreation can be understood an ‘investment of labour’ and hence found any legitimate claims to proprietorship as according to his own theory, Locke has to relegate procreation to the world of sheer leisure and pleasure, presenting it as a mere ‘occasioning’ by the parents of the being of their children. It is as though Locke felt the need, lest he retract his own account of the origin of property, to completely recalibrate the proportion between what nature and human labour respectively account for in the creation of value, when it comes to procreating. Whereas he had assigned this proportion as 1:100 (nature to labour) ³⁷ in his general account of property ‘gestation’, in the case of sexual gestation, the proportion would be closer to 100:1. No small irony that in order to refute political patriarchism, Locke presents a thoroughly chauvinistic argument, when he confines the ‘investment of labour’ of procreation to the act of begetting, completely oblivious of the woman’s enormous investment of bearing with a pregnancy and literally ‘going into labour’ when the time is due. ‘This is the danger we incur’, remarks Luce Irigaray, as if she was directly responding to Locke, ‘when we forget what we have received from the body, our debt toward that which gives and renews life. When we forget our gratitude toward the living being that man is at every instant.’ ³⁸

We can infer from the rather ‘laboured’ character of Locke’s argument in this context that he must have been aware of the theologically explosive nature of his basic claim of human self-proprietorship. When presenting a theological counter-argument to Filmer in the context of discussing the origin of parental authority, it seemed that Locke needed to take extra caution to avoid contact with the famous biblical counter-claim: ‘You are not your own’ (1 Cor. 6.19), which would have considerably complicated his case for the anthropological basis of private property. To Paul’s rival account of human embodiment we now turn.

Exousia and hos me: Paul’s Account of Non-Proprietary Possession of the Body

In tracing Paul’s correspondence with the Corinthians ³⁹ for a theology of the body, the first aspect that stands out is that the apostle flat-out rejects the Corinthian’s declaration of bodily matters (eating habits or sexual conduct such as incest or going to prostitutes) as their ‘private business’. For the apostle, it matters for the social body what individual members do with their bodies, since the Church’s witness to the word is at stake in all those apparently ‘mundane’ issues. For the idea of non-proprietary possession in Paul, we focus on his discussion of marriage and marital intercourse in 1 Corinthians 7 and suggest reading backwards in this chapter from his eschatological account of Christian existence as characterised by the qualifier hos me, commonly translated ‘as though’, towards his pastoral advice for spouses to not withdraw from regular intercourse due to the authority over each spouse’s body as lying with the other, not the self.

I mean, brothers and sisters, the appointed time has grown short; from now on, let even those who have wives be as though they had none, and those who mourn as though they were not mourning, and those who rejoice as though they were not rejoicing, and those who buy as though they had no possessions, and those who deal with the world as though they had no dealings with it. For the present form of this world is passing away. I want you to be free from anxieties (1 Cor. 7.29-32, NRSV).

It would be inadequate to understand the hos me according to an ‘as if’ logic—as though Paul was saying, ‘while doing X or Y, make sure that you don’t really do X or Y; don’t invest yourself in what you do, whether emotionally, sexually, economically or politically’. With such an affirmation, what would be the value of the effort the apostle has spent counselling those who live in these orders, paradigmatically that of marriage? If the brevity of time (conceived as a limited chronological progression) was the determining factor for Paul’s pastoral efforts, it would be difficult to explain why believers should invest in long-term commitments such as marriage or educating children, since such activities could never reach fruition.

When the apostle speaks of ‘having wives’, then, he speaks of actually having them as spouses, including sexual intimacy. The key to understanding the hos me as eschatological qualifier of this ‘having’, we suggest, is found in the one example in the list of activities (v. 30c), in which the finite verb set differs from that used in the participial construction that precedes it: ‘those who buy as though they had no possessions’ [hos me katechontes]. The translation ‘not hold possessions’ would be more to the point, as ‘holding’ characterises the difference between simple exchange and proprietary clinging, with its attendant interest in securing the item purchased. We take Paul’s linguistic emphasis on the categorical difference between the two modes of dealing with the goods of the world (buying vs. possessing) to indicate the grammar that unlocks a proper appreciation of his emphasis in the other examples.

‘Those who have wives’ are, then, not simply ‘the married ones’ but the married ones insofar as they really practise a mode of having one another as spouses. In line with the grammar outlined above, we understand the formulation here as a shorthand expression of the more elaborate theology of chastity that runs through the chapter as a whole: Own each other as spouses as though you were not possessors but those who are to again and again receive one another as gifts.

‘For the wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does; likewise the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does’ (1 Cor. 7.4). Only an owned body can be given, yet only a body held non-possessively can be given in a form that distinguishes it from prostitution. For Paul to claim that ‘the wife does not have authority over her own body’ is not to establish the right of husbands to demand the use of their wives’ bodies at will, which would entail at its furthest reaches a sinister licence for marital rape. In summoning both wife and husband not to assume exclusive property rights over their own bodies, the apostle simultaneously bars spouses from any claims of property rights over the other’s body. The NRSV’s misleading translation of opheile (‘what is owed’) as ‘conjugal rights’ instead of ‘duties’ pushes Paul into the unfortunate corner of proprietary accounts of ‘having’ a body—the very stance that he eschews. A right can be claimed from another, but a duty to another can only be honoured. ⁴⁰

Unsurprisingly, Paul’s language of debt or duty with regard to the pleasurable activity of sexual intercourse has attracted rather bad press. Moreover, the paradigm shift brought about by Enlightenment philosophies of marriage, from that of covenant to that of contract, made the language of rights seem more appropriate, rendering Paul’s notion of duty all the more unfashionable. ⁴¹ The language of exousia that Paul uses to characterise non-proprietary possession in this context is worth a moment of reflection, though. As the exceptional character of marital intimacy indicates, in which the authority over one’s own body is suspended in the hands of the other spouse, the notion of exousia can appropriately be employed to describe the sort of power that comes with ownership of one’s own body in principle. Just as the exousia that is given to Jesus’ disciples in proclaiming the gospel is an extension of their master’s authority, so it is with the exousia over our bodies: it is not a function of self-proprietorship, but precisely of another’s proprietary claim that secures and ennobles our own. As ek-ousia, literally ‘out of its very being’, the authority over our body remains bound up with its created purpose, to glorify God ⁴² through its varied expressions (communicative, procreative, and so forth).

The statement ‘learning to own our own body in a non-proprietary fashion that allows for the exousia of the spouse over it’ is our expanded gloss on what the Christian tradition has labelled ‘chastity’. In Gal. 5.25 Paul lists enkrateia as a core dimension of the fruit of the Spirit, and in so doing characterises it as an inextricably social virtue that means far more than sexual abstention. The various themes of human sexuality Paul addresses in this chapter are best understood as his outworking of a principled dichotomy between chastity and porneia. In keeping with this juxtaposition, the latter would then denote any form of dealing in a proprietary fashion with our own bodies that renders them a mere object or instrument in the service of an inner self that determines at will what is done with and to the body.

On the other hand, Paul’s account of ‘chaste’, that is, non-proprietary, sex, frees couples from treating the bedroom as a sphere of power play in which the ‘partners’ utilise their ‘assets’ for maximum tactical advantage. The most liberating aspect of Paul’s portrayal we therefore find is the licence he gives Christian couples to understand the erotic body as something other than an arena for the war of the sexes, and marriage as something more than a sheer agon in which only one can triumph and the other must be vanquished. It is precisely the practice of chastity, the non-proprietary way of owning one’s body and, then, that of the spouse, which has the capacity to transform the war of the sexes into that peace to which God has called them (1 Cor. 7.15b).

‘Coming into Our Own:’ Spirit and Eucharist

When Paul speaks of the body as a ‘temple of the Holy Spirit’ (1 Cor. 6.19), we are once again reminded that the claims of the body need to be mediated, cultivated by an external agency that does not, however, remain external. ‘Temple’ in this context does not specify a mere ‘locus’ or vessel for the spirit, but serves as a metaphor for political submission, of en-souled bodies ‘ruled by the spirit’ (Gal. 5.18). The spirit’s rule comes to stand conceptually in exactly the same place that the mind-over-matter idea occupied in classical Greek anthropologies.

It is necessary to speak of the Holy Spirit in conjunction with non-proprietary possession of our bodies, as this account of human embodiment is no more self-evidently true than its modern rival. They are both reflective of and supported by a net of corresponding beliefs and practices.

Acts of porneia have trained people in various systems of self-proprietorship through the ages, and its reign seems solidified today through the expanded reach of alluring images. In contrast, chastity has its own training grounds, in which a rival anthropology has been infused into believers’ lives. Primary among these counter-practices is the Eucharist, by which we experience in a sensual way (manducatio oralis) that we are externally owned (‘you are Christ’s’), and yet only ‘come into our own’ by relating to other bodies in a non-competitive way, such as in the kiss of peace. This rival anthropology of embracing our bodily nature unlike ‘a theft’ (Phil. 2.6) is not inculcated solely or primarily by reason or rote, but is possible to embrace within another, social body: the body of Christ, under the reign of the Spirit.