Preaching Bondage by de Wet Chris L

Author:de Wet, Chris L.
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780520286214
Publisher: University of California Press

For even if a child is born, it also brings disgrace on you, and because of you an injustice has been done to it in being born illegitimate and of low status. And even if you leave it a large sum of money, there is still disgrace at home, disgrace in the city, disgrace in a court of law, and it is still the offspring of a prostitute and a slave. You will also stand disgraced, while you are alive, and when you have died. For even when you have passed away, the memorials of your shame remain. Why then bring disgrace in all these ways? Why sow where the soil purposefully destroys the fruit? Where there are many efforts to ensure contraception? Where there is murder [i.e., abortion] before the birth? For even the prostitute no longer remains a prostitute, but you also make her a murderess. Do you see how drunkenness leads to fornication, fornication to adultery, adultery to murder; or to something even worse than murder? For I do not know what to call it, since it does not remove the pregnancy, but even prevents birth. Why then do you violate the gift of God, and fight with his laws, and seek what is a curse as if it is a blessing, and turn the chamber of procreation into a chamber of murder, and prepare the woman that was given for childbearing for murder? For in order to make more money by being pleasing and desirable to her lovers, she will not even hesitate to do this, in so doing heaping a great pile of coals on your head. For even if the shameless act is of her choosing, its cause is still yours. This also results in idolatry. For many people who wish to become attractive conjure spells, and libations, and love-charms, and a myriad other devices. But still after such disgrace, after murders, after idolatries, many consider it to be a matter of indifference, and many that have wives too. And so the mélange of evil is even greater. For witchcraft is further applied, not to the womb that is prostituted, but to the injured wife, and there are numerous schemes and invocations of demons, and necromancies, and daily fights, and unresolved arguments, and familial jealousy.132

Chrysostom considers prostitution one link in a chain of serious vices, all set on destroying the most important social unit in Roman society—the household. Although Roman law did not do much initially to curb the sexual exploitation of slave women, it did face the problem of illegitimate children. Excluding some exceptional cases involving adrogation, generally, men were not allowed to adopt their illegitimate children.133 In this way the patrimony belonging to legitimate heirs remained secure. Mixed-status reproduction was therefore something juridically regulated, yet it remained complex and problematic.134 Chrysostom is very clear about this: having illegitimate children with slaves and prostitutes introduces an all-encompassing disgrace (atimia) for the male; there is disgrace in the household, in the city, and in the courts.

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