John Carlisle Kilgo Professor Emerita of Religion and Professor of History at Duke University
May 20, 2021
Contextualizing Foucault’s Augustine
While Foucault’s early interest in Christianity had focused largely on asceticism, in his last years he attends to marriage teaching within early Christianity. Augustine, Foucault claimed, radically departed from the polarizing schemata of his predecessors and contemporaries, who organized their analyses around dichotomies of purity and impurity, virginity and marriage. These many rules of marriage frowned on « excess » sexual relation, i. e. , more than needed for procreation, yet marital « excess » was considered pardonable in light of the good « end » , reproduction. Yet « acts against nature » , Augustine taught, as well as adultery and fornication, however, were deemed very serious sins, barely deserving of forgiveness (AC, p. 319, 320, 355). With Augustine, Foucault claimed, western Christianity entered on a sexual morality focused on a juridical subject (AC, p. 358). Yet, I will argue, Foucault in Les Aveux de la chair overemphasizes the more “positive” aspects of Augustine’s teaching on marriage and downplays the more “negative” aspects.
Elizabeth A. Clark, the John Carlisle Kilgo Professor Emerita of Religion and Professor of History at Duke University, is an eminent scholar of Late Antiquity and early Christian history. Her work has been crucial to transforming the field formerly known as “patristics” — the study of the church fathers — into “early Christian studies,” an approach that applies cultural, social and feminist theory to the study of early Christianity. Her scholarship and service to the academy have made significant contributions to our understanding of the roles of women in antiquity and early Christianity, east and west; the study of gender and sexuality; and the history of Religious Studies in American higher education.
Professor Clark’s legacy extends far beyond her considerable contributions as a scholar, mentor, and teacher. She was a founding editor of the Journal for Early Christian Studies, now a premier journal in the field. Past president of the American Academy of Religion, the American Society of Church History, and the North American Patristics Society, she has also received honorary doctorates from the University of Uppsala (2003) and Yale University (2013). Over the course of her career, she has been awarded numerous fellowships, including from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Council of Learned Societies. In 2003, she received the Distinguished Career Award from the American Society of Church History and she earned the Distinguished Service Award of the North American Patristic Society in 2006. In 2010, she received the Dean’s Award for Excellence in Mentoring from the Duke University Graduate School. The Center for Late Ancient Studies, founded by Clark, was renamed in her honor by the Board of Trustees of Duke University in 2018.