On July 1 of last year, my mom's old friend Aletha Knopp invited me to a lecture on a Christian view of sexuality and gender by Matt Zrust. I arrived late, just as the Q&A was beginning, in which Matt mentioned the book Paul and the Person by Susan Grove Eastman. I bought the book, and found that Eastman cites The Mind of the Spirit by Craig Keener. I bought that book too. Keener cites Emotion and Peace of Mind by Richard Sorabji. (You know what I did then.) I jumped from book to footnote to book to footnote like a frog on a flyscraping mission.
Meanwhile, by someone on the internet, I was advised to check out Jared Moore's writings on concupiscence as related to the Celibate Gay Christian movement. I skimmed through Moore's dissertation and his book The Lust of the Flesh, enjoyed some of his online articles, listened to some of his podcast interviews and those of his friends Jeff Wright and Ben Woodring (Backwoods Belief), and for a couple months I became constantly angry following his Twitter feed before finally swearing off Twitter altogether.
Moore was bashing Sam Allberry, Preston Sprinkle, and anyone else who takes a gentler approach to the issue mentioned above, and teamed up with Rosaria Butterfield (I thought she was a friend in her former books), who had her own harsh words to say about Sprinkle.
Moore's dissertation camped on Augustine's use of the idea of concupiscence against Pelagius and Julian of Eclanum, attempting to prove that any latent tendency toward sin, such as same-sex attraction, should be considered morally culpable sin, even if not mentally surrendered to or acted on. From there Moore traced Augustine's influence on the Reformers and their heirs. Not liking his conclusion or his harshness, I purposed to find something before Augustine to hang my hat on. After all, at the end of his dissertation (p.238), Moore recommends that future researchers investigate what Jerome and other church fathers had to say on the topic.
In a debate with James White, Greg Coles mentioned the possibility of a pre-lust condition that could be morally blameless. I researched this idea and found the Greek concept of propatheia (pre-passion), which originated with Seneca and other Stoics, and then was carried forward by the Christian thinker Origen and his followers, such as Didymus the Blind, Evagrius of Pontus, and even Jerome.
Sorabji chides Augustine for mangling the concept, but Peter Brown in an article reviewing Sorabji's book says that Sorabji missed a parallel concept that was core to moral philosophy in Judaism and early Christianity, namely single-mindedness (or single-souledness), as opposed to double-mindedness or double-souledness (dipsychia), similar to the Stoic idea of apatheia, but rebranded by John Cassian in biblical language as purity of heart (which, as Kierkegaard tells us, is "to will one thing"). Brown goes on to say that John Cassian's Conferences were always read alongside Augustine's writings in medieval monastic circles to temper their extremes.
Also while reeling from Moore's Twitter onslaughts, I took refuge in Matthew Lee Anderson's lengthy blog defenses of Side B and the Revoice conference (1, 2, 3, 4), as well that of Philip Cary. This led me to Anderson's Substack, which led me to Myles Werntz's Substack -- both Anderson and Werntz are Christian ethicists -- and in one of Werntz's blog posts, he says he's reading John Cassian's Conferences, and that just sealed the deal for me. (The story Werntz cited is a beautiful analogy attributed to Abba Moses, where our thoughts are an ever-flowing river, our minds are a grist mill on that river, and the grain to grind if we so choose is the Scripture passages we put into our minds.)
So now I'm halfway through Peter Brown's Augustine of Hippo, on a vow not to buy any more books until this one is complete, and with the intention to read John Cassian as soon as I finish.
It seems all roads lead to the desert (the desert fathers and mothers, that is, of the early monastic movement whom Evagrius led and John Cassian interviewed in the late 300s). Thank you, Mrs. Knopp, Matt Zrust, and everyone else on this merry chain, even dear Jared Moore. I started to realize that his Twitter vituperance was an evil mask for a kinder soul when I watched his New Year sermon, where he encouraged the singles in his Crossville, Tennessee congregation to glorify God in their singleness (43:36-46:14), rather than implying, as he did to the poor singles on Twitter, that "therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and be united to his wife" (Genesis 2:24) is not just an explanation but a command for everyone who possibly can get married to a permissible person, to get married unless they have a biblical reason not to, via a special gift of singleness. Now I know better, and I value you, my friends in real life, even more for your patience in our conversations over tea and over the phone as I learn these things with you through this hard experiment called life.
*I wrote about this search a few months ago in a post about metaphors in recovery, but after some maturing of my thought and some encouraging back and forth with Laurie Krieg and Marshall Kramer, I decided to trace the lines again as far as they've been drawn up to "today tonight", as they say in Rawang.
