PAUL AND THE RHETORIC OF REVERSAL: KERYGMATIC ...

that develops a view of the soul as tripartite, consisting of rational, spirited, and appetitive
parts:
Plato, Republic 4.439d
We shall think that these things are twofold and different to one another: the one that
reasons in the soul we call rationality, and the other that loves and hungers and thirsts,
and concerning the other desires feels disturbance, we call the irrational and
appetitive, companion of various fulfilments and pleasures.
Socrates, Plato and Aristotle disapproved of unrestrained desire for the pleasures of sex and
food, seeing such slavery to appetite as unfitting for the virtuous; and these emphases were
influential on rival Hellenistic claimants to their legacy. 84 Demosthenes’ assumptions about
virtue and pleasure are illustrative of broader convention:
Demosthenes, 60.2 “Funeral Speech”
With good men, the needs of acquisitions and the enjoyments of the pleasures of life
are looked down upon, but rather their whole desire is for virtue and praises.
84 Of course, Hellenistic ethics were not uniform. In general, however, philosophers and
moralists alike viewed the unrestrained or luxurious feeding of bodily appetites as a
fundamental cause of disturbance and corruption. Even Epicurus, whose positive evaluation of
bodily functions seems to challenge Plato’s schema above, distrusted erotic love, luxury, and
greed, holding that false beliefs about such things must be corrected by philosophy. Nussbaum
paraphrases Epicurus’ thought in this regard: “Cravings for unlimited quantities of food and
drink, for meat, for gastronomic novelties, for exquisite preparations – cravings all not natural
but based on false beliefs about our needs – obscure the desire’s built-in limit…. Again, the
longings associated with erotic love are held to result from a belief-based corruption of sexual
desire, which itself is easily satisfied”. Nussbaum, Therapy, 112-113. Kathy L. Gaca argues
that Paul’s charge to “flee fornication” is a call for avoidance of Gentile-idol-fertility sexuality,
by aiming to keep sex within Christian marriage. It is thus a “sharp divide” with Greco-
Roman sexual ethics because it restricts appropriate sexual activity to certain relationships
within the boundary of only one religion. However, I am not persuaded that this is a fair
representation of the evidence. Roman moralists of the first century, in particular, appear just
as ready to denounce “fornication” as Paul; and Paul’s denunciation does not appear to be so
clearly related to alleged idolatrous practices as Gaca implies. See Kathy L. Gaca, Making of
Fornication: Eros, Ethics, and Political Reform in Greek Philosophy and Early Christianity
(Ewing, N.J.: University of California Press, 2003), 293.
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