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ОглавлениеTHE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO THE FORESKIN
And on the next day, whilst they were going on their journey, and drawing nigh to the city, Peter went up to the higher parts of the house to pray, about the sixth hour. And being hungry, he was desirous to taste somewhat. And as they were preparing, there came upon him an ecstasy of mind. And he saw the heaven opened, and a certain vessel descending, as it were a great linen sheet let down by the four corners from heaven to the earth: Wherein were all manner of fourfooted beasts, and creeping things of the earth, and fowls of the air. And there came a voice to him: Arise, Peter; kill and eat. But Peter said: Far be it from me; for I never did eat any thing that is common and unclean. And the voice spoke to him again the second time: That which God hath cleansed, do not thou call common. And this was done thrice; and presently the vessel was taken up into heaven. Now, whilst Peter was doubting within himself, what the vision that he had seen should mean, behold the men who were sent from Cornelius, inquiring for Simon’s house, stood at the gate. And when they had called, they asked, if Simon, who is surnamed Peter, were lodged there. And as Peter was thinking of the vision, the Spirit said to him: Behold three men seek thee. Arise, therefore, get thee down and go with them, doubting nothing: for I have sent them. . . . And when Peter was come up to Jerusalem, they that were of the circumcision contended with him, saying: Why didst thou go in to men uncircumcised, and didst eat with them? But Peter began and declared to them the matter in order, saying: I was in the city of Joppa praying, and I saw in an ecstasy of mind a vision . . . a great sheet let down from heaven . . .
—Acts 10:9–20, 11:2–5
When the early Christians began to spread the Good News, they often addressed very different audiences, who held very different opinions about circumcision. Some Christians were themselves circumcised Jews. Or they preached to Jews. But some Christians were Gentiles. Or they preached to Gentiles. The New Testament almost always refers to these communities with genital metonyms. In other words, the foreskin was the very mark of distinction between these groups. Saint Paul wrote, for example, “to me was committed the gospel of the uncircumcision, as to Peter was that of the circumcision” (Gal. 2:7). Paul preached, in other words, the evangelium praeputii, the Gospel of the Prepuce.1
This chapter considers how Paul’s ideas about circumcision created a theoretical framework for my school of narratology. I examine Paul’s writings on circumcision contextually, showing how Paul responds to Jewish and Greco-Roman attitudes toward the foreskin. And I discuss early, diverging interpretations of Paul. I suggest that the foreskin—its contradictory meanings in Paul’s sources, its ambiguous meaning in Paul’s letters, and its constructedness as ambivalently homoerotic—energizes the praeputium as a tool for conceptualizing literary style.
Then, zooming in on the story of Peter and the Sheet Let Down from Heaven (quoted in the epigraph), I propose that, in this story from the Acts of the Apostles, Paul’s theory of circumcision seems already to be starting to take narratological shape in the form of an early circumlogical narrative. For a detailed roadmap of the chapter’s argument, you may finish reading this section, or skip ahead, and ascend with me to Paul’s Third Heaven.
First, I argue that Paul wrote in response to two distinct traditions, the Hellenistic and the Judaic, each of which had inflected the foreskin with considerable meaning.2 Both cultures rendered the prepuce (or its lack) as a quintessential symbol of that culture’s aesthetic and spiritual ideals. Paul synthesized these traditions by crafting a compromise between, on the one hand, those early Christians who advocated for circumcision and, on the other hand, those who sought to forgo the rite. By Paul’s time, these traditions had already started to come together, with contemporaries like Philo of Alexandria interpreting circumcision in Greek terms (reading the ritual as an allegory and as a mode of ethical discipline). Paul’s hermeneutics of circumcision built on these ideas, allegorizing circumcision and cutting off the ritual from its literal referent, with his new interpretation retaining elements of both cultures, torquing his construction of the praeputium with dissonance.
Next, I examine how this hermeneutics ambiguously interrelates the “spirit” and the “letter.” I detail how contemporary critics as well as early Christian disciples of Paul have disagreed about how Pauline allegoresis operates. I suggest that this critical controversy ultimately stems from the ambiguity of Paul’s letters themselves.
Finally, I will retell the story from Acts, already quoted in the epigram, in which Peter beholds an allegorical vision that allows him to commune with the uncircumcised, a narrative that puts into practice the Pauline allegoresis of circumcision.
JEWISH CIRCUMCISION OF THE HEART
In Genesis—after Abram has been called by God, journeyed through Canaan, received several covenantal promises, and propagated one son through his concubine—in chapter 17, God promises Abram a son by his elderly wife, Sarai, and, in this chapter, announces the covenant of circumcision. First, “the Lord appeared to him” (Gen. 17:1). Then God tells Abram, “neither shall thy name be called any more Abram, but thou shalt be called Abraham” (Gen. 17:5). Next, God foretells his “perpetual covenant” (Gen. 17:7). And God marks Abraham genitally: “You shall circumcise the flesh of your foreskin, that it may be for a sign of the covenant between me and you” (Gen. 17:11). In this famous scene, preputiotomy seems almost to manifest a circum-visionary-linguistic complex, a conflation of circumcision with visionary experience with literary stylization.
Circumcision has to do with narrative. The single word is itself a narrative—with characters performing the act, enacting an ancient and perpetual, divine commandment.3 And this narrative is set within the narrative of Genesis.
And circumcision resonates with prophecy. The Hebrew Bible associates penile pruning with divine visions and depicts the foreskin as a veil that prohibits spiritual understanding. Some rabbinic commentaries even codify circumcision as a prerequisite for access to knowledge of God’s word—an idea that anticipates later uses of the foreskin-as-language metaphor.
Connected, perhaps, are the cutting, the renaming, and the prophetic vision of the covenantal promise. Circumcision is theo-onomastic, a rewriting of the sign into a sanctified nomen (from Abram to Abraham) that conforms to the divine order. As though posthectomy inflects language with prophecy—as though circumcision cuts time—the covenant is a promise.
And circumcision is akin to interpretation. According to some rabbinic commentators, Abraham’s genital initiation allowed him to behold God.4 Kabbalists have assumed that a circumcised penis grants access to the sacred. The medieval Kabbalist Zohar notes that “before Abraham was circumcised [God] spoke with him only by means of the ‘vision,’” whereas “when one is circumcised one enters the name and is united to it.”5 According to the zoharic teaching, posthectomy places a man into a visual relationship with God. Circumcision, in this regard, would allow a circumcised man to understand the Bible, because circumcision exposes the concealed glans and analogously exposes the concealed meaning of the Bible’s true teachings.6 Maybe the opening opens the text.
Or, circumcision seems metaphorical. The Hebrew Bible frequently employs circumcision as a sign for spiritual insight. In Leviticus, at Sinai God explains the punishments for violations of the law, admonishing sinners for having an “uncircumcised mind” (26:41). The uncut flesh figures mental impurity, where circumcision figures true understanding. Body, soul, and text interrelate by way of circumcision. In Deuteronomy, Moses pronounces that “the Lord thy God will circumcise thy heart, and the heart of thy seed: that then mayst love the Lord thy God” (30:6). Likewise in Jeremiah, God gives the commandment to “be circumcised to the Lord, and take away the foreskins of your hearts, ye men of Juda” (4:4). The ethical-spiritual self is here imagined in phallic terms. And in Ezekiel, the prophet relays the Lord’s fury that the Israelites had “brought in strangers uncircumcised in heart, and uncircumcised in flesh, to be in my sanctuary” (44:7). The metaphor—not at all a dead one—acknowledges actual amputation, emphasizing how the more abstract foreskin (of mind or heart), as a metaphor depends upon the literal foreskin.
THE PLATONIC FORM OF THE FORESKIN
In his play Salomé, Oscar Wilde explores the implications of the metaphor as a marker of distinct cultural sensibilities. Wilde puts into the mouth of a Jewish character the observation that Greek philosophers “are not even circumcised”:
A THIRD JEW: God is at no time hidden. He showeth Himself at all times and in everything. God is in what is evil, even as He is in what is good.
A FOURTH JEW: That must not be said. It is a very dangerous doctrine. It is a doctrine that cometh from the schools at Alexandria, where men teach the philosophy of the Greeks. And the Greeks are Gentiles. They are not even circumcised.7
The joke, in my understanding, is that the foreskin—a Hellenistic attachment to uncut boys—is its very own ontology, incompatible with the God of Abraham.8
It is almost as if, to the Greeks, the prepuce embodied the very philosophical ideals of self-control and male beauty. If Greek philosophy privileged temperance, then cutting seems to have impeded this virtue. An erection, in a way, indicates that a man has lost control of his body and become possessed by sexual desire, and the Greeks seem to have associated an exposed glans with just such a state of shame.9 By this logic, a circumcised penis looked just as unphilosophical as an erect one. A visible glans (whether bare through arousal or circumcision) outed a man as passive to his passions.10
The penis, in the Greek context, might be a political creature, because the Greeks practiced a fair amount of public nudity. In civil life, the Greeks regarded an exposed tête as vulgar nakedness. In order to avoid a preputial faux pas, competitors during the Olympic festivities—otherwise completely unclothed—would wear a string (called the kynodesme, or dog leash) in order to fasten their foreskins shut.11
The Romans, too, guarded the glans, sometimes by wearing a ring called the fibula (hence, “infibulation”). Nonathletes also wore such devices, indicating that the leash and the ring both functioned more symbolically than practically.12 Plato specifically praises the sexual restraint of athletes, and the kynodesme symbolized a philosophical commitment to moderation. Preputial occultation realizes a Hellenistic commitment to a sound mind in a sound body. Uncircumcision muzzles the unphilosophical dog.
The Greeks used two terms for cut members—psolos (an adjective) and apepsolemenos (a participle)—both meaning “with the glans exposed.” Several times, Aristophanes refers disparagingly to psolos men.13 Meanwhile, the Latin verpus (a noun) means the erect penis, while verpa (an adjective) means “circumcised.”14 The close association between circumcision and arousal follows from the view that the glans is the crown of unphilosophical crudeness.
The Greeks and Romans projected engorged brutishness onto Dionysian beasts and foreign apepsolemenoi. Greek art employs the glans as a source of coarse humor. On vase paintings, the penis’s nut appears only on images of satyrs, apepsolemenoi whose onion-domed pricks attest to their animality. The glans also rears its head in representations of foreign-born slaves (typically depicted as barbarously tumescent).15
The Romans, likewise, represented the uncouth Priapus—the god of rustic fertility and sexual assault—as comically well endowed, with his acorn showing. Yet Greek art always shows the idealized male body with a dainty member, bedecked with an exaggerated foreskin, perhaps grown long from frequent leashing (an indication of temperance).16
At least some of the Greeks believed that nature had designed the prepuce as a filigree in order to decorate the body. Herodotus called the foreskin “seemly.”17 Ancient anatomists described the foreskin as a protector of “decorum” and argued that nature had created the foreskin as a beautifying “ornament.”18
If the foreskin itself is not exactly the good, the beautiful, and the true, it could embody this ethos. Socrates in the Phaedrus had explained that beautiful human bodies can inspire the kind of philosophizing that directs the soul back toward the Forms.19 By extension, the beauty of the foreskin might encourage meditation on Truth. In this way, the Greeks, no less than the Jews, claimed for the praeputium a mystical power—but in contrary terms. The foreskin is a tool of philosophy.
But as I will explain, for Paul, Christ has so fully fulfilled the law (and its commandment to circumcise) that neither physical presence nor absence any longer have determining force; neither the sensual nor the formless necessarily matter in relation to a higher “circumcision.”
ANTITHESIS AND SYNTHESIS
Greco-Roman culture abhorred Jewish circumcision. Note that Roman writers like Horace, Petronius, and Sidonius all wrote unflatteringly of Jewish circumcision.20 And Tacitus had proposed that Jews practiced circumcision out of an innate depravity.21 During the second century BC, the Greek king Antiochus IV may have precipitated the Maccabean Revolt by banning the practice of circumcision.22 And under the emperor Hadrian the Jews “began a war, because they were prohibited from mutilating their genitals” (according to the Augustan History, an admittedly unreliable source).23
But Jews also assimilated to uncircumcision. Responding to Antiochus IV, some Hellenized Jews regrew their foreskins (1 Mac. 1:15–16). The physicians Galen and Celsus advocated for plastic surgeries, while an outpatient method (the Iudaeus pondus) also regenerated the lost tissue.
Just to get a sense of how this conflict might play out in literary practice, take a look at this poem by the Roman poet Martial. Epigrammatist of the bathhouses, Martial mocked Jews for using the pondus and for wearing sheaths on their penises.24 In this poem, Martial attacked a Jewish literary rival as “circumcised.” Martial and his literary competitor crossed swords:
That you are green with jealousy and run down my little books wherever you go, I forgive: circumcised poet, you show your sense. This too leaves me indifferent, that you plunder my poems while you carp at them: circumcised poet, herein also you show your sense. What does upset me is that born in Jerusalem itself you sodomize my boy, circumcised poet. So! You deny it, you swear to me by the Temple of the Thunderer: I don’t believe you. Swear, circumcised one, by Anchilaus.25
The poem—a self-conscious reflection upon poetic personae—links the foreskin with literary craft. The refraining appellation “circumcised poet” is applied four times throughout the poem like an incantatory taunt. Peritomy engenders intimacy between the two poets, who share not only books and verses but also a beloved ephebe.
Martial’s manly mantle greases this friction, yet ultimately the two poets belong to alternate linguistic universes. The prophets saw circumcision as the shibboleth of prophetic language, but Martial jokes that circumcision inhibits civil speech. Martial brags that he—as the proud possessor of a prepuce—will certainly win in this literary-erotic contest. In other words, penile ablation marks the Gentile’s antagonist as verbally foreign, so that the Roman cannot trust an oath issued by the circumcised poet. Martial suggests that, in a sense, circumcision marks the border between linguistic universes or opens up into a realm where words mean differently.
Gradually, however, Greek philosophy colonized the Jewish penis, so that ideals of circumcision came to be understood on Greco-Roman terms. Greek thinkers like Plato invented the idea that textuality resembles a body, and by the beginning of the Christian era, Hellenized Jewish thinkers suggested that the textual body held a soul.26 The body/soul dualism inflected a Hellenized view of Jewish circumcision: Jews began to interpret the “body” of the law of circumcision as though it signified a higher, allegorical, spiritual content. Circumcision, thus understood, functioned as a spiritual discipline, an ascesis that regulated not only the body but also the mind.
Writing in the first century, the Hellenized Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria subscribed to a Middle Platonist belief that nonrational desire corrupts the soul. And for Philo, the foreskin represented the excesses of corrupting, unregulated passion.27 Philo, throughout his commentaries on Scripture, reads circumcision as “the figure of the excision of superfluous pleasure.”28 Expounding upon the biblical injunction to “circumcise the hardness of your hearts,” Philo said that circumcision means to “prune away from the ruling mind the superfluous overgrowths sown and raised by the immoderate appetites of the passions.”29 Writing also on the text of Genesis, Philo repeated the point: “Circumcision of the skin is a symbol, as if to show that it is proper to amputate off superfluous desires.”30 In other words, a Platonic tendency to allegorize led to the conclusion that circumcision enacts and represents a philosophical ideal.
By reading circumcision allegorically, Philo used the excised foreskin to unite literal and metaphorical, physical and spiritual, body and soul. When Philo provided a rationale for circumcision, he claimed that the ritual constructs a homology between the mind and the penis (which are equivalent, since both are procreative organs):
For as both are framed to serve generation, thought being generated by the spirit force in the heart, living creatures by the reproductive organ, the earliest men held that the unseen and superior element to which the concepts of the mind owe their existence should have assimilated to it the visible and apparent, the natural parent of the things perceived by sense.31
For Philo, the one-to-one correspondence between mind and penis makes literal circumcision a means to accomplish spiritual circumcision. Philo argued that actual circumcision accomplishes symbolic circumcision because of the fact that “the bodily organ of generation . . . resembl[es] thought, which is the most generative force of the heart,” and he suggested that the foreskin persuasively signifies the passions because of its sensual nature.32
Philo’s allegoresis of circumcision did not fully transcend the ritual, however. That is, Philo did not take the symbol to such an extreme that he would renounce actual circumcision, keeping only its symbolic meaning. Philo insisted, on the contrary, that the interpretation of the “inner meaning” of symbols must not neglect the outer:
It is true that receiving circumcision does indeed portray the excision of pleasure and all passions, and the putting away of the impious conceit, under which the mind supposed that it was capable of begetting by its own power: but let us not on this account repeal the law laid down for circumcising.33
Philo imagined literal and symbolic circumcision as inseparable. So, Philo not only recuperated circumcision as an ideal of Greek philosophy; he also mapped the body/mind dualism onto the literal/figurative dualism—an overlap condensed upon the member, whose inner/outer layers (once disciplined) neatly produce a new poetics of the prepuce. Through his allegoresis of circumcision, Philo syncretized Jewish and Greek preputial ideals. Paul, writing around the same time as Philo, undertook the same project but took the allegoresis of circumcision one step further.
THE GOSPEL OF THE FORESKIN
The construction of language as foreskin-like, I have suggested, germinates in the Greek and Jewish traditions, perhaps even with these two cultures embodied by diverging preputial aesthetics. Along with other Hellenized Jews, who had begun to syncretize these traditions, Paul developed a reconstruction of the foreskin. In so doing, he elaborated the foreskin as a symbol of textuality.
You could say that Paul exploded the terms of the debate. Despite his mission as Apostle to the Uncut, Paul described himself as “circumcised the eighth day” (Phil. 3:5). And Paul also personally circumcised Saint Timothy (Acts 16:3). Yet Paul—opposing Peter—rejected the necessity of physical circumcision. Paul, in arguing that status is not determinative of one’s identity as a Christian, proclaimed that “circumcision is nothing, and uncircumcision is nothing” (1 Cor. 7:19). Although Paul seems to have written circumstantially—addressing letters to particular audiences—he seems generally to have understood circumcision as a meaningless question.
Paul shifted the terms of the discussion by redefining circumcision. In his letter to the Romans, the Apostle develops a theory of how Christians should understand circumcision. Paul’s rereading of the prepuce advances a method of reading generally, so that the foreskin becomes a key term in Christian literary theory. After Paul, the foreskin became a symbol of symbology itself. While receptions of Paul have differed wildly, Christian readers have still consistently regarded Paul’s understanding of the praeputium as a crucial method for the interpretation of Scripture.
Paul and the other Apostles argued about whether Christians needed to undergo circumcision. This conflict nearly tore the new church apart. But Paul created a complicated, imaginative solution. He sided neither with the procircumcision nor with the anticircumcision factions, believing instead that Christians needed to undergo a spiritual kind of “circumcision.”
Beyond physical circumcision, Paul prioritized a kind of universal circumcision—an excision that occurred on a higher plane, which Paul called a “circumcision of the heart.” Paul put forth his radical theory of circumcision in his letter to the Romans. Although the circumstances are not entirely available, Paul seems to have composed this epistle maybe between 53 and 59 and had addressed the letter to a congregation of Roman believers in Christ (probably including at least some Jews), seemingly in preparation for a journey by Paul to Rome.34 The second chapter deals with questions relating to the nature of the law and the righteousness of God’s judgment, putting forth an influential interpretation of the law:
For he is not a Jew, who is so outwardly: nor is that circumcision which is outwardly in the flesh. But he is a Jew that is one inwardly and the circumcision is that of the heart, in the spirit not in the letter: whose praise is not of men, but of God. (Rom. 2:28–29)
As Paul understands “circumcision,” the rite is a spiritual process. Whatever the state of the body—circumcised or uncircumcised—Paul makes clear that the circumcised heart is paramount. (Note that the proposition defines circumcision as possible in at least four distinct permutations: circumcised body/uncircumcised heart, uncircumcised body/uncircumcised heart, circumcised body/circumcised heart, uncircumcised body/circumcised heart.)
What I want to draw attention to is that—even as Paul privileges the circumcision of the heart and abnegates any bodily circumcision—the chain of signifiers inevitably slips back to the foreskin as the main sign for thinking about meaning. Even if circumcision is pointless, foreskin or no, the metaphor still attaches to the foreskin. And the foreskin is universally determinative of the human heart, regardless of ethnocentric law or even sex and gender.
Paul inserted himself into a tradition of thinking with the foreskin. Clearly, Paul agreed with scriptural precedents and with his contemporary interlocutors: The Hebrew Bible had established circumcision as a symbol and as a mental and spiritual construct. And in this way, Paul is not groundbreaking. Also, contemporaries (like Philo) had understood literal circumcision as speaking to a metaphorical meaning and even enacting a spiritual discipline.35 (Other first-century Jews also sometimes had even doubted the necessity of actual circumcision in certain, specific cases.)36
But, despite previous allegorizations of circumcision, Paul performed a rather more radical cut: He denied totally the significance of literal circumcision, prioritizing metaphorical and spiritual circumcision. Whereas Philo had preserved circumcision as a literal practice that provided a reference for the metaphor, and whereas Philo tended to take concrete circumcision as the basis for his readings of circumcision as a philosophically motivated practice, Paul abstracted circumcision entirely, regarding it purely as a spiritual process.37 These are small differences, but circumcision is, perhaps, a question of small differences.38
Paul read the law “in the spirit not in the letter.” Note that Paul’s rereading of circumcision implies a hermeneutics (a way of reading). Paul’s own interpretation of circumcision presupposes a method of interpretation, of deciding that the spirit and the letter may be opposed. By transposing the meaning of circumcision into a figurative dimension, Paul discerned a meaning for the body and also for the textual body (that is, the letter of the law). In eschewing outer marks upon the body, Paul eschewed the letter of the law. Paul championed the spirit and vacated the body, yet allowing that the body may be marked—it just doesn’t matter.
This theory of exegesis uses the praeputium as a metaphor for conceptualizing textual layers, distinguishing between textual spirit and textual letter, and later this will become a narratological principle. But however transcended, the literal foreskin remains an important frame of reference for Paul and his readers. Paul’s use of the penis to think about allegory involved, after all, a living and not a dead metaphor: Paul himself possessed a circumcised penis, and he himself had performed the ritual. In a Greco-Roman context—and, frankly, in any context wherein men possess foreskins or see them at bathhouses—Paul’s readers would understand his discussion of “inner” and “outer” in relation to an intuition that the foreskin exists as an “outer” cover upon the “inner” glans. Through Paul, the flesh became word: “Circumcision” came to mean the spirit as opposed to the letter of a transvaluated praeputium.
RECEPTIONS OF PAUL
Paul’s experience is hard to pin down. Although he had apparently beheld the Third Heaven, Paul himself, in relating this vision, did not know “whether in the body, I know not, or out of the body, I know not,” (2 Cor. 12:2). No wonder, then, that Paul’s theology of the body has resulted in considerable controversy. Scholars have read Paul’s stance on preputiotomy in diverging ways. I want to parse out some of these interpretative questions not in order to answer them but in order to suggest that they point to a fundamental tension within Paul’s sense of circumcision, a tension that has perhaps helped propel the trope’s use.
Critics have not developed any consensus about the precise meaning of Pauline circumcision as it pertains to allegory. Instead, Paul’s views on circumcision have generated an interpretative crux, so that Paul’s allegoresis of circumcision fuels a multitude of allegorical approaches. The foreskin—an ambiguous figure—has served as a flashpoint in debates about the nature of Christian exegesis.
Postmodern thinkers have argued that Paul severed sign from referent. For these readers, Paul announced a fully allegorizing hermeneutics in which arbitrary signs point toward a transcendent meaning that denigrates the sign itself. In other words, Paul’s promotion of the spirit belittles the letter—with anti-Jewish implications: The maligning of the “old” law of circumcision has justified, as well, the maligning of Judaism. Thus some readers imagine that Paul made the figures of “circumcision” and “uncircumcision” into pure symbols, cut off from the literal foreskin—a stark divide between, on the one hand, an embodied literalism and, on the other, a disincarnate spiritualism.39 Perhaps Paul’s circumcision creates a spiritualizing dualism that obliterates cultural difference in the name of universalism, but ethically, this implies an inhumane rejection of the body (with the “Jew” and “letter” marked as “body”), a spiritual universalism predicated upon vicious racism.
One further prooftext for this reading of Paul, from a discussion of the law in the letter to the Galatians:
There is neither Jew nor Greek [i.e., no distinction between the circumcised and the uncircumcised]: there is neither bond nor free: there is neither male nor female. For you are all one in Christ Jesus. (Gal. 3:28)
Perhaps Paul abnegates all human identity. Except, of course, that Jesus Christ was a very particular human being—a strong personality with a playful sense of humor and a hot temper, who played favorites with his friends, loved his mother, and was, of course, a circumcised Jew. In other words, the very point at which humans would, in Paul’s scheme, escape distinction is also the very point that returns us to the distinct human person. But I editorialize.
In any case, Paul’s theory of circumcision may also structure a problematic understanding of temporality. By rereading circumcision, Paul demarcated between the “Old” and the “New,” between an earlier, literal law (given to the Jews before Christ) and a later, spiritual Gospel (revealed and fulfilled to Christians after Christ). In this way, allegorical reading distinguishes between “then” and “now,” so that a present, allegorical spirit has presumed to retroactively reread or supersede a previous, literal letter.40 In other words, Paul’s circumcision not only cuts between literal and figurative, but “circumcision” slashes time. This will become important later on in my book, when I discuss stories that unfold through temporal structures that are defined by circumcision.
In any case, some of Paul’s early readers understood him as proposing, through circumcision, a stark dualism. In the first century, the Epistle of Barnabas employed the figure of circumcision in an anti-Semitic discussion of allegory. The Pseudo-Barnabas demarcated between pagan (literal) uncircumcision and Jewish (spiritual) uncircumcision. Citing Jeremiah 9:25, the Pseudo-Barnabas condemned Jews because they supposedly do not read allegorically. “All the heathen are uncircumcised in the foreskin,” the Pseudo-Barnabas wrote, “but this people is uncircumcised in heart.”41 Thinking about allegory in terms of circumcision, the Pseudo-Barnabas set up a divide between carnal, Jewish reading and spiritual, Christian reader.
But such interpretations of Paul have not found complete acceptance.42 Indeed, the letter to the Romans did not necessarily imply a dualistic contrast between the “spirit” and the “letter.”43 Just because Paul saw the spirit and the letter as distinct, that does not therefore mean that Paul saw the spirit and the letter as opposed.44 Perhaps Paul did not, in fact, offer an interpretation of circumcision; instead, maybe Paul provided a new definition of circumcision’s location. The notion of a “circumcision of the heart” may not entail an allegorization of fleshly circumcision. Rather, Paul may have been proposing that there is just one kind of circumcision, on the heart.45 This is not, then, a reconfiguration or interpretation of actual circumcision but a different identification of circumcision altogether. Perhaps, then, Paul understood physical circumcision as an interpretation of spiritual circumcision and not the other way around. This reading of Paul would regard the figure of circumcision as proposing an interrelationship between spirit and letter, instead of an opposition. And it regards the spirit as informing the letter, rather than the letter embodying the spirit.46
And, indeed, some of Paul’s early readers understood him in this way. Augustine, for example, explained in his Confessions that he learned about Christian allegory partly through Ambrose, who regularly repeated Paul’s dictum that “the letter kills.” Augustine developed a theory of allegory more in line with Paul’s hermeneutics than with the theologians between the two thinkers.47 Whereas writers like Origen and Justin had rejected Jews and Judaism outright, Augustine saw the Old Testament and the New Testament in a relation of continuity.48 Augustine’s exegetical methods allowed for a more positive assessment of Jewish law and for an understanding of the fleshly body as the natural home of the soul.49 Augustine did not sever literal and figurative: He sees the figurative simply as the fulfillment of the literal—so that Jewish circumcision and Christian uncircumcision interrelate not dualistically but dialectically.
SPECULATION
In a moment I will read the story of Peter and the Sheet. But first let me make some conjectures. The foreskin, I want to suggest, is enigmatic and anatomically ambiguous. Where it begins and ends and whether and how it exists seem more easily defined through its excision, really, than through its actual presence. And so, the uncircumcised foreskin has an almost virtual existence (it withdraws, dissolves, disappears). As some of the loosest skin on the male body, it can figure for human embodiment—even as its ambiguity makes it useful for imagining the “spiritual” layer between the bodily and the supernatural. Perhaps this ambiguity even calls into question the penis as a sign of male gender. I might even call the foreskin “queer.”50
More complicated still, Paul’s paradoxical understanding of uncircumcision makes sensible for Christians the ambiguous, mysterious, multivalent. The foreskin shuttles between the “phallus” and “meaning,” contesting a monolithic “phallologocentrism.” Giving meaning to the notion of a metaphysical “foreskin of the heart,” circumcision is very literally the lack upon which Paul’s praeputium is based.
Or, let’s think for a moment about the foreskin by analogy to the distinction between sex and gender. Some might hold that a biological indicator of sex (say, the penis) also correlates with one’s gender identity (say, maleness), whereas some might propose a more radical break between sex and gender, with the genitals in no way indicative of one’s gender identity. In a similar way, some might hold that the penis (specifically its foreskin) correlates with one’s ethno-religious identity (say, Jewishness), whereas some (such as Paul) might propose a more radical break between this sex, as it were, and one’s relationship with identity categories.
It is not a coincidence that the “sex” question condenses upon the genitals, for Paul would obliterate not just the Jew/Gentile distinction but also (as if coextensively) the male/female distinction. If “circumcision of the heart” aims to rewrite the circumcision/uncircumcision binary, this hermeneutics of circumcision dovetails with Paul’s rereading of other identity binaries (as in, “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female”; Gal. 3:28). Again, maybe Paul proposed a transcendence of identity categories altogether, yet ironically Paul’s master term for theorizing this transcendence is ethnically coded and, of course, gendered, caught up in the circumcision/uncircumcision binary that it would transcend.
If phallocentric, this hermeneutics draws its power not from the penis per se but from the penis’s superfluity. It could be that the foreskin is a way of sidestepping the penis, of decentering the phallus, a workaround. But then again, the praeputium is one mechanism by which patriarchy subsumes femininity into itself. With phallic tissue as the means to radically deconstruct binary oppositions of identity, the phallus assumes the status of the master signifier, for the phallus appropriates to itself even the power to abrogate its own binary logic. In other words, the male genitals, in assuming the prerogative to transcend those categories of identity that are constructed in relation to the male genitals, thereby command an even greater authority. Once projected into the spiritual realm and turned into an overarching symbol for all humanity (whose particular genitals, circumcised or uncircumcised, male or female, are now inconsequential), this praeputium serves to phallicize, though androgynously, all people. A foreskin covers or uncovers anyone’s heart.51 This is, I might argue, one temptation created by the notion of picturing God as an incarnate, circumcised man.
In later chapters, this book will explore how (after Paul) medieval writers often think of the “veil” of allegory as a prepuce. Preputial tropes, employed to describe rhetoric, attest to the capacity of the male anatomy to function as means for experiencing the plasticity and multiplicity of literary meaning.
I don’t want to go too far into social psychology mode, but preoccupation with circumcision suggests a homoerotic ambivalence. Texts may thus seem to be male gendered, as though created in a patriarchal lineage whereby men create textual “foreskins” for other men to read, gloss, misread, appropriate—manipulate, cut, stretch, graft—in a literary tradition of male/male genital contact (thus Pound’s wicked, mythical birthing of The Waste Land).52
Meanwhile, figures of circumcision inflect this homosociality with erotic violence. As a kind of disciplinary technology, circumcision—whatever its covenantal importance—registers male/male genital contact in terms of bloody sacrifice, at once embracing and disavowing homoerotic pleasure. Thus Pound cut apart the textual body of The Waste Land, cutting off its feminine excesses in order to circumcise, and masculinize, the text.53
As symbolic covering, uncircumcision wraps together disparate thinkers; as cutting, circumcision marks distinctions between those thinkers; and, constructed as gender-neutral or even queer, the foreskin enables procreation within a male-dominated literary culture. These metaphors of circumcision speak, also, to the anxiety of male/male literary influence.
The tension of this circumcision/uncircumcision dialectic motorizes the tradition. I have suggested that, when Abraham receives the commandment to circumcision, Genesis proposes a circum-visionary-linguistic complex. In light of Paul’s more full-throated theory of circumcision-as-allegory, circumcision also becomes a structuring principle for the narratives that I will discuss in my next three chapters. But before the “tradition,” I can already discern Paul’s theory being put into literary practice within the New Testament, in the story about Saint Peter eating dinner with a bunch of uncircumcised men.
PETER AND THE SHEET LET DOWN FROM HEAVEN
If Paul defines allegoresis through spiritual circumcision, the story of Peter and the Sheet Let Down from Heaven implicitly operates according to Paul’s theory, unfolding as a lesson in allegorical reading and with pronounced themes of circumcision. In Acts, Peter beholds a wondrous vision of a “great linen sheet,” a giant veil-like film that descends from heaven loaded with unclean animals (10:11).
After Peter witnesses the sheet, he proceeds to eat dinner with “men uncircumcised” (11:3). Peter’s meal with these Gentiles scandalizes the other Apostles, who ask him for an explanation. And Peter responds by rehearsing his encounter with the sheet, which he has taken as a sign that Christians can disregard kashrut and associate with the uncircumcised (11:6–18). Though the story also concerns food laws, scholars have established that the vision bears more upon the taboo of contact with Gentiles (known in the text as the “uncircumcised”) than on food.54 The story therefore pertains to the Circumcision Controversy, resolved later in the same book (Acts 15).
The Sheet Let Down from Heaven operates as an allegory: Peter reads the vision as a fabulous sign of supersession, of a new order that has reinterpreted the old law. The thematic of circumcision corroborates, as I see it, the preputiality of the amplified narrative’s allegorical veil. That is, the veil of the allegory entwines with the prepuce (both the literal praeputia of Peter’s dining companions and the praeputium of Pauline exegesis, which Peter’s vision accomplishes through allegorical interpretation). In other words, the story narrativizes the Pauline association of the foreskin with the allegorical veil and spiritual circumcision as allegoresis. Or, it puts into narrative practice Paul’s theory of circumcision.
Moreover, the sheet vision evinces how Pauline circumcision structures a particular approach to the ordering of narrative time. The story uses what narratologists might call a repeating narrative: It narrates twice an event that happened once (Peter experiences the vision once, and after the author of Acts relates this experience, as well as the Apostles’ reactions, Peter retells what has happened to him).55 I wager that Luke employs this technique in order to embody, through narrative, the circumcising allegoresis that enables Paul’s mission to the Gentiles.
As cited in the epigram to this chapter, Acts 10:9–16 narrates Peter’s experience of the vision, and then, in Acts 11:1–18, the narrative repeats: Peter narrates his vision again, using the same details but adding an exegetical commentary that explains how the vision answers the Apostles’ concerns about the Old Law (“But Peter began and declared to them the matter in order”; Acts 11:4). Peter’s narration constitutes not only a repeating narrative but also a metanarration (a narrative that is told from within the main narrative).56
The shift in narrative level (to a metanarrative) also entails a shift in perspective. The author of Acts had first told the story from a vantage seemingly outside of the story (an extradiegetic narration, in nerdy narratological terms). But then Peter, from inside of the narrative, recapitulates the story (an intradiegetic narration, if you want to be technical). In other words, the repetition of the story entails a transition between points of view, from a third-person narrator to an internal focalization.
By repeating in the first person, the narration accentuates how the allegorical experience promotes interiority: Peter, formerly the object of discourse, now becomes the subject of discourse, as though the vision, once understood in its allegorical aspect, has served as a switchpoint by which Peter learns the Pauline dictum: “He is a Jew, that is one inwardly; and the circumcision is that of the heart, in the spirit, not in the letter” (Rom. 29:2). Now that Peter has allegorized the law, the story exists within a new frame.
As Peter relates, his encounter with the allegorical vision transformed him from an outwardly circumcised practitioner of the Old Law into an inwardly circumcised Pauline Christian (Acts 11:5–10). Through narratological amplification, the inner content of the vision-allegory finally becomes accessible—just as, for Paul, the allegorical meaning of Scripture becomes fully realized after the Incarnation, or as the Gospels become disseminated through the Pentecost. The retrospective, intradiegetic repetition embodies this inward shift: Peter’s metarepeating narrative performs, in miniature, the typological reinterpretation of history. The story puts into practice a circumlogical narratology.
Relatedly, an understanding of the human body can control the kinds of spaces into which narrative may enter.57 Here, the sheet story evinces how a Pauline construction of the body inflects the narratological deployment of space: The circumlogical vision, by rereading the law, enables the figure of Peter to enter into the homes of Gentiles (Acts 10:28).58 Through the spiritual circumcision of allegoresis, Peter eschews the law of fleshly circumcision and enters into the homes of the uncircumcised. Allegory transforms Peter’s bodily experience from circumcised to “circumcised.” A space that had been narratologically off-limits has now become available as a setting accessible to the character and, overall, to narration.
Meanwhile, by projecting Peter into a second-degree narrative, the story formally enacts the Pauline division between spirit and letter. The metanarration adds a second layer to the narrative—and it deploys this second layer in order to retell and to interpret the events narrated by the first layer—in order to establish narratologically the spirit and the letter as distinct yet interconnected and (hierarchically) ordered. The metarepeating narration adds a layer to the narrative, creating, as it were, a “sheet” in which to envelop the story.
This thickening of the narrative body, further, motivates the forthcoming revelation. Peter’s allegorical reading of the sheet, also an allegorical reading of the law, is an entry into an uncircumcised territory. The thickening—the developing of narrative layers—seems almost to facilitate the turn to allegoresis that advances a Pauline practice of spiritual circumcision. The body must stretch out in order to be cut.
If different literary genres operate according to different understandings of temporality, and if, as scholars have already suggested, Pauline typology implies a particular temporal sense, then perhaps the structure of Peter’s vision crafts a particularly Pauline time-sense.59 By thickening time through a repeating metanarrative, and by thickening space through the allegorical vision’s assertion of spiritual law’s involution of the material world, Acts narratologically enacts an emerging form of Pauline allegoresis.
Peter’s vision emphatically combines an amplified metanarration with a repeating narrative to an exegetical end.60 The repeating narrative reinterprets the vision, installing the typological temporality of Pauline history into the narrative framework. The repetition in Acts may also differ from the repetition that commonly occurs in the Old Testament, where repetition often happens at a rhetorical level but less often at a narrative level.61 Joseph, of course, reveals himself to his brothers and recalls their treatment of him, and God narrates n times that he has brought the Israelites out of Egypt, and the book of Judges tells history as a cyclical pattern of errancy, punishment, and deliverance. But the narrative repetition in Peter’s vision, by seeking to install Paul’s hermeneutics, explicitly operates as a disavowal—or fulfillment—of such precedents, insisting upon the particularly “spiritual” method of its autointerpretation.
Insofar as the metarepeating narrative succeeds in asserting Paul’s circumcised hermeneutics, the narrative’s structure offers a recapitulation, in miniature, of Pauline circumcised history. By repeating the visionary experience, the story rereads the past from an allegorical perspective, precisely as Pauline circumcision rereads the Old Law.62 The narrative structure argues for the Pauline reading practice that structures its very method of organizing time and space.
This story occurs at a pivotal moment in Acts, as the book strives to install Paul as the principal Apostle. In the book’s opening chapters, Peter cites Old Testament prophecies as proof of Christ’s coming, and Peter’s words often cut the hearts of his listeners (e.g., 2:37, 5:33, 7:54). In other words, Peter circumcises hearts through the interpretation of Scripture. These early chapters thus prepare for Paul’s appearance by depicting Peter as a practitioner of a Pauline exegetical method.63
Chapters 10 and 11 of Acts tell the story of the sheet as part of a project of promoting the spiritual over the fleshly. The allegorical tale leverages Peter’s position among the Apostles in order to confirm the validity of spiritual visions generally and to advance Paul’s vision in particular, and, thereby, the vision of the sheet promotes both Paul’s approach to the question of the Law and Paul’s apostleship itself. At the Council of Jerusalem—recounted in Acts 15—Paul’s approach to the Law wins out over James’s objection that circumcision should remain valid.
CIRCUMLOGICAL HERMENEUTICS
Paul’s ideas about the praeputium, I have said, draw upon the allegorizations of circumcision articulated by Paul’s contemporaries, even as these ideas respond to Greco-Roman attitudes toward posthectomy. The apparent contradictions within Pauline circumcision mean that, as later writers attempt to develop Paul’s metaphor of circumcision into a larger conceit that explains Christian allegory, these different writers produce quite divergent theories.
Paul’s distinction between the “spirit” and the “letter” of circumcision generated debate about whether this distinction necessitates an opposition between these two levels of meaning. Paul’s understanding of circumcision licenses, for some of his Christian readers, modes of reading that connect the literal and the allegorical, and it licenses, for some of his other Christian readers, modes of reading that undermine the literal.64 In both cases, metaphors of circumcision reign over the spirit and the letter.
Peter’s vision, I think, puts Paul’s theory into narratological practice. In Peter’s vision, the vision and its explication bookend the narrative: The story begins with a kind of preface (Peter sees the sheet), then it continues through some amplification (Peter undertakes a short journey and goes to dinner), and finally it culminates in exegesis (Peter explicates his original vision through allegoresis). Through themes of circumcision, Peter’s vision allegorizes the prepuce, and it preputializes allegorical narrative. The structure of this story—told through vision, narrative, explication—develops from the circumlogical hermeneutics that propose biblical history as an interpretive process of old literal law and new spiritual rereading.
By “circumlogical,” I mean that such a theory of narrative follows from the allegorical method defined by Paul in terms of the praeputium, which uses circumcision to delineate between the literal shell and the inner allegorical kernel. I propose that medieval readers, at least in certain cases, apprehended the veil of the allegorical narrative as a “foreskin” and apprehended the process of allegoresis as a “circumcision.” Peter’s vision displays a story-telling strategy used in later medieval narratives, a narratology of circumcision.
Having established a framework for conceptualizing literary form through the foreskin, the remainder of this book applies and amplifies this framework as a narratology. Using the Pauline praeputium as a literary-theoretical heuristic, I analyze three medieval tales. For each of these tales, I develop new readings that elucidate how these works employ a hermeneutics of circumcision as a structuring principle that shapes character, plot, and narrative temporality. But I stress that, as these tales attempt to apply Paul’s praeputium as a model for crafting narrative, they do so experimentally—and my readings, therefore, will highlight the ways that the stories themselves are narrativizing the problematics of the prepuce.
