Children of Adoption - People Fas Harvard

Children of Adoption
together in a single residence in a family-like relationship. (The
Pseudo-Clementian epistles "To Virgins" [fourth century] refer to
Church members who lived in a "spiritual marriage" as brothers and
sisters.)l17 The Church equivalent of political authority, in the persons
of patriarchal critics like Eusebius of Emesa, viewed such practices
with alarm because they furthered "either radical asceticism or radical
libertinism." 'I8
To the sexual radicalism of the orders there corresponded a propertal
one. Just as the incest taboo can be related to the need to structure
property relations, so the monachal injunction to commit spiritual
incest often includes an injunction to end all merely human property
relations. Saint Jerome, for example, writes, "Since you have been
consecrated to perpetual virginity, your possessions are not your possessions
[tua non tua sunt], because they now belong to Christ," and
Saint Gregory praises his sister, Sister Macrina, who "found delight in
temperance" and "thought it affluence to own nothing."Il9 The fraternal
orders do not merely endorse poverty; in some sense, they raze all
property relations just as they raze all sexual relations. Saint John
Chrysostom says, in his essay on virginity, "Now is not the time for
matrimony and possessions; rather it is the time for penury and for
that unusual way of life that will be of value to us in the time to
come." Iz0 He succinctly expresses the politically threatening aspect of
this rejection of possessions by calling virginity isaggelos polztea, an extreme
homogenization at once communist and incestuo~s.'~' In its essential
form, monachal fraternity militates against any and all property
ownership. This attitude makes property potentially a germ of
conflict between monachal fraternity and patriarchal authority.
Elizabethans greatly feared political dissolution, which is implicit in
such a rejection of ordinary kinship structure (the parentarchy) and
ordinary economic structures (property), and they linked political dissolution
with sexual liberty.'22 Bishop Stephen Gardiner, for example,
relates the libertine position "all is for the flesh, women and meat with
liberty of hand and tongue" to the political "dissolution and dissipation
of all estates." Iz3 Apart from any connection between the monastic
orders and liberty either sexual or political (propertal), few in
Tudor England would have overlooked the connection between the
monastic orders and a more specific threat of political chaos-revolt.
In the general fear of Catholics and foreign Catholic infiltration,
Catholic recusants (possibly including Shakespeare's father) were subject
to arrest and severe punishment, and during Elizabeth's reign
about two hundred Catholic priests were executed.lZ4 Monks had fig-