Sexuality and the Christian Self: Michel Foucault’s Reading of the Church Fathers
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article discusses Michel Foucault’s “last” book, the recently published Les aveux de la chair. In the first part, an analysis is provided of Foucault’s understanding and treatment of the patristic texts he decides to mine for his theory of sexuality. Foucault finds in the church fathers a general view of sexuality not too different from that of contemporaneous philosophers. The novelty that Christianity brings does not, therefore, consist in a more restrictive sexual ethic. Foucault goes so far as to argue that even the Christian notion of virginity was unexceptionable from a Greek point of view. The novelty of Christianity, rather, was the way sexuality was related to the self. Therefore, as discussed in the article’s second part, Foucault includes in his presentation the baptismal catechesis and the institution of confession. The article concludes, however, that Foucault does not fully succeed in integrating patristic views of sexuality with the early history of church discipline. It is therefore proposed that this alignment was plausible to Foucault on account of his preconceived, teleological interpretation of patristic Christianity. Ultimately, he discovered in the church fathers the ideas his interpretation of early modern Catholicism led him to suspect there. The article’s final part inscribes Foucault’s newly available interpretation of the fathers into his broader thesis about the genealogy of the modern self and the role of Christianity in this history.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".