Abstract
This article examines how ancient and medieval Christians invoked ideas about ‘hermaphrodites’ to work out fundamental questions about who we are as humans. What was the original or ideal state of humanity? Was the division of sex into male and female an inherent part of human nature? Certain Christian theologians, beginning in antiquity, claimed that Adam – the first human, according to the biblical book of Genesis – was an ‘androgyne’ or ‘hermaphrodite,’ that is, a combination of male and female sex. Similarly, some medieval theologians speculated that all post-resurrection bodies were androgynous. In conversations about both the creation and the resurrection, questions about sexual difference thus surfaced repeatedly, revealing key assumptions about the sexed body and its place in the narrative of Christian history. This article suggests that such debates were key to ancient and medieval efforts to determine which sexes were legitimate sexes, and therefore which lives were redeemably human.
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Notes
A note on the terms: with respect to Genesis commentary, some scholars have firmly distinguished between ‘hermaphroditism’ and ‘androgyny,’ defining the former as an undesirable bodily state, and the latter as a desirable spiritual state. In contrast, I reject any strict separation of the two terms for the medieval period: Augustine used Hermaphroditi and Androgyni interchangeably in his City of God (Augustine, 1972, 663); later commentators on Genesis, such as Andrew of St. Victor and Peter the Chanter, used hermaphroditus and androgynus as synonyms; and other authors defined hermaphroditism as ‘both’ male and female and ‘neither’ male nor female. I see no reason to impose a linguistic distinction that does not appear to have existed definitively for the Middle Ages.
Philo of Alexandria, for instance, imagined a two-fold creation: one spiritual, another corporeal. Some Midrashic texts, however, imagined the first human as a fused physical body of recognizably male and female forms, with two faces or two sets of genitals. Similar ideas about androgyny also appeared in Greek writings, most famously in Plato’s Symposium. Scholars have suggested that Greek and rabbinic ideas about sexual difference are related to a widespread mythology of primal gender that also appeared in Zoroastrian, Sidonian, and other traditions, and that imagined masculo-feminine entities that could self-procreate. For further analyses of the diverse and complicated connections between Greek, rabbinic, Gnostic and other Christian traditions, see Meeks, 1974; Macdonald, 1988; Boyarin, 1993, 35–46; Ajootian, 1997, 226–7; Secunda, 2012, 60–86.
A group of ninth-century Carolingian bibles produced in Tours portrayed Adam and Eve as nearly identical in size and gesture, without apparent differentiation in sexual anatomy; similar examples also appear in the thirteenth century. See Cohen and Derbes, 2001, 21–2; Mills, 2015, 32. For images of Adam and Eve as conjoined or hermaphroditic, see, e.g., Ambrose, Hexaemeron, Amiens, Bibl. mun., MS Lescalopier 030, fol. 10v; Livre des merveilles (Mandeville’s Travels), Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS Français 2810, fol. 195v. Murdoch identifies these latter figures (who also appear on fol. 193r) as Adam and Eve; see Murdoch, 2009, 248–9.
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DeVun, L. Heavenly hermaphrodites: sexual difference at the beginning and end of time. Postmedieval 9, 132–146 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-018-0080-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-018-0080-8