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Chapter Two

Bodies in Fragments

One aspect of the material turn in late antiquity was the development of an aesthetics that emphasized the visual and tactile immediacy of the part—a piece of bone, a single mosaic tile, a word in a poem—at the expense of the whole. In literature and art, compositional techniques such as juxtaposition and repetition were used precisely to highlight fragments rather than wholes. By virtue of these techniques, such fragments became “things” in the sense conveyed by Bill Brown’s “thing theory,” in which objects took on surplus value and stood out against their contexts as magnets of attraction.¹ When aesthetically wrought, these fragments took on force as presences both sensuous and metaphysical, and they both induced changes in the human subject’s habitual perception and effected a virtual re-education of the senses. In this chapter, a wide spectrum of ancient arts—sculpture, poetry, ekphrasis, collective hagiography—will be surveyed in order to characterize the aesthetics of the fragment, which will be explored in more detail with regard to relics in the chapter that follows.

In his “thing theory,” Brown does not discuss linguistic “things,” but I think his argument concerning the metamorphosis of mere object into meaningful thing can illuminate the visionary power of verbal images as well as of actual physical objects. Images, too, can assert themselves as “things.” Indeed, the affective appeal of figurative language was one of the forces that helped shape the tangible piety of the material turn. Hence the “things” in this chapter have a double referent, indicating not only concrete things like relics and holy men but also their linguistic images and the kind of narratives in which they were embedded. In terms of the aesthetics of the fragment, such image-things are both fragments of the whole and emblematic of the whole, where the whole is both a literary structure as well as what I call a narrative line.

An amusing example of the idea of a narrative line comes from Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium. Calvino wrote in a chapter in this work entitled “Quickness” that he “would like to edit a collection of tales consisting of one sentence only, or even a single line.” He narrates a story by the Guatemalan writer Augusto Monterroso as one that he would include in this collection of narrative lines. Here is that story in its entirety: “When I woke up, the dinosaur was still there.”² Like Calvino, I too am interested in narrative structures of a particular type, like his collection of one-liners, in which the genre of the collection is just as important as what it contains. Part of my interest in this chapter is in narrative “lines”—strategies of narration—that operate on the basis of two functional criteria: one, they leave out unnecessary details, and two, they emphasize repetition.³ By omitting unnecessary details, such narratives foreground the objects—the fragments of the whole—around which they are structured. These objects are “charged with a special force” and become “like the pole of a magnetic field, a knot in the network of invisible relationships.”⁴ However, by emphasizing repetition, they enable a recognition of, and a certain pleasure in, the structure of the form itself, as when a child finds pleasure in fairy tales precisely because of the expectation that certain situations and formulas will be repeated in new-but-familiar ways. Narrative lines like this are effective, writes Calvino, because they are “series of events that echo each other as rhymes do in a poem.”⁵

Dissonant Echoing

“Dissonant echoing” is the phrase that I am going to use to characterize a certain aesthetic of the narrative line which is found not only in literature but also in the art and ritual practice of the fourth and early fifth centuries of the late ancient era. Originally I was going to name this dissonant character of narrative lines as an “aesthetics of discontinuity” until I discovered that I had been anticipated in this by Michael Roberts’s study of poetics in late antiquity, The Jeweled Style: Poetry and Poetics in Late Antiquity. Briefly, Roberts characterizes the aesthetics of discontinuity as a taste for the densely textured play of repetition and variation.⁶ There is a preference for effects of visual immediacy, achieved by an emphasis on the part at the expense of elaborations of organic wholes.⁷ Furthermore, the relationships among such parts operate at an abstract level and must be reconstituted or imagined by the reader or the observer.⁸ Thus parataxis, juxtaposition, and patterning are among the formal principles that both govern and reveal the disjunctive composition of these “narrative lines.” As Roberts remarks with an appropriately linear metaphor, “the seams not only show, they are positively advertised.”⁹

The tendency of this aesthetics toward fragmentation can be seen linguistically in poetry, where words are handled as though they possessed “a physical presence of their own, distinct from any considerations of sense or syntax.”¹⁰ In fact, Roberts argues, “in late antiquity … the referential function of language [and] art lost some of its preeminence; signifier asserts itself at the expense of signified.”¹¹ This “liberated” signifier then takes on the brilliance, dazzle, and value suggested by the “jeweled style” of Roberts’s title.¹²

Figure 1. Arch of Constantine, detail. Rome, Italy. Photo Credit: Alinari/Art Resource, NY.

A brief look at certain stylistic features of the art of this period will add an important visual component to the aesthetic disposition that is my focus. While it may be an exaggeration to follow Ernst Kitzinger in characterizing developments in the art of the late Roman era as “a great stylistic upheaval,” nonetheless there were striking changes in artistic representation in this era that have enabled historians of art to discern the emergence of a coherent stylistic tendency.¹³ Although my focus will be on the sculpting of human figures, particularly on sarcophagi, similar stylistic trends have been discerned in the mosaic and painterly arts of the period.¹⁴

One of the basic changes is graphically represented in the contrast between the second-century roundels (literally “liberated” from monuments to Trajan, Hadrian, and Marcus Aurelius) and the early fourth-century frieze of the Arch of Constantine (fig. 1). As Kitzinger observes, the actions and gestures of the figures in the roundels are “restrained but organically generated by the body as a whole,” and the group is held together by a “rhythmic interplay of stances and movements freely adopted by the individual figures,” whereas the figures in the frieze are “so tightly packed within the frame as to lack all freedom of movement” and they cohere as a group by virtue of “an abstract geometric pattern imposed from outside and based on repetition of nearly identical units on either side of a central axis.”¹⁵

Figure 2. Marble sarcophagus with the Triumph of Dionysus and the Seasons, ca. A.D. 260–270. Phrygian marble. Overall: 34 × 85 × 36¼ in. (86.4 × 215.9 × 92.1 cm). Purchase, Joseph Pulitzer Bequest, 1955 (55.11.5). Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource, NY.

A similar change can be seen in sculptures on sarcophagi from the fourth century in comparison to those from the third century; an “insistence on formal properties” replaces “representational integrity,” and “patterns of repetition and variation run counter to scenic coherence.”¹⁶ Sarcophagi characterized by presentation of scenes that “form a single sequence with obvious narrative unity”¹⁷—as in an early third-century depiction of a Dionysiac procession (fig. 2), and a Christian sarcophagus from the late third century that depicts the story of Jonah (fig. 3)—give way to “frieze sarcophagi” such as the so-called “Dogmatic” sarcophagus (C.E. 320–330) (fig. 4), in which scenic coherence is replaced by juxtaposed groups of two to three figures which depict scenes from the Old and New Testaments as well as from the life of Saint Peter. These groups of figures are not tied together organically; rather they are unified by the theological message to which all of them point: in Kitzinger’s striking formulation, such a frieze is “like a line of writing which required the viewer’s active participation” to discern the unifying narrative that the discrete sculptural groups exemplify again and again.¹⁸ At this point I would introduce a modification to Roberts’ argument concerning the disappearance of scenic coherence and representational integrity in this form of art by observing that frieze sarcophagi evince an alternative form of representational integrity that is not linear or narrative in the conventional sense. Such a view preserves precisely the aesthetic integrity of discontinuity insofar as it is rooted in the production of meaning by fragmentation.

Figure 3. Early Christian sarcophagus with Jonah and the Whale; Resurrection of Lazarus, and other scenes. Museo Lateranense, Vatican Museums, Vatican State. Photo: Alinari/Art Resource, NY.

“The predilection of late antique art for row formation” is certainly pronounced in double-frieze sarcophagi like the one shown in Fig. 4. Packed with “shorthand pictographs,”¹⁹ its “effect can be bewildering for the observer attempting to sort out the profusion of figures, and as the fourth century progressed further differentiation [was] introduced” by the use of “framing devices—columns or trees—used to separate the individual episodes, thereby creating self-contained compositional units and drawing attention to the episodic quality of the work as a whole.”²⁰

Figure 4. Large sarcophagus, including Creation of Adam and Eve, Adoration of the Magi. Early Christian. Museo Pio Cristiano, Vatican Museums, Vatican State. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY.

Column sarcophagi such as that of Junius Bassus, dated to C.E. 359 (fig. 5), not only display the taste for fragmentation and for ornamentation of the part characteristic of this form of late ancient aesthetics; they also suggest that a remarkably paratactic imagination was at work, requiring the viewer to construct narratives of theological meaning that arise from the juxtaposition of images rather than from straightforward linear development. In artworks such as these fourth-century sarcophagi, each individual image is a sensuous presense, a sculpted human body, but taken together they constitute a metaphysical presence, a set of spiritual narratives relating to salvation history. Because of the excess of meanings that the juxtapositions of images on the sarcophagi generate, the sarcophagi can be termed “things” that “exceed their mere materialization as objects” by becoming religious values.²¹ Perhaps it might also be said that the “dazzle of the part” functioned simultaneously both to defer meaning precisely due to excess and to foreground, through difference, what Calvino called networks of invisible relationships. In any case, an ability to “move easily across the divide between representation and abstraction” seems characteristic of the aesthetic under consideration.²²

Figure 5. Sarcophagus of Junius Bassus, Roman prefect. Museum of the Treasury, St. Peter’s Basilica, Vatican State. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY.

Just as the stylistic features of the aesthetics of discontinuity cut across differences of human expression, whether artistic or literary, so also they were not unique to any particular religious affiliation.²³ In conversation with Roberts and other theorists, my contribution to the exploration of these stylistic affinities will be to suggest ways in which certain features of late ancient Christianity cohere with or enact this cultural aesthetics. Specifically, my focus will be on two phenomena of the fourth and early fifth centuries that I think are related, aesthetically as well as theologically: these phenomena are, on the one hand, the ritual, literary and artistic practices associated with the veneration of relics, and, on the other, a genre of literature that I call “collective hagiography”—for example, the Historia monachorum and related collections like Theodoret’s Historia religiosa and Palladius’s Lausiac History—a literary genre that burgeoned with the establishment of desert asceticism. My aim is to provide ways of addressing the following question: how can these two phenomena of late ancient Christianity be seen as “narrative lines” marked by the effects of an aesthetics of dissonant echoing?

Exemplifying the Aesthetics of Discontinuity

Before delving more deeply into the formal properties of this aesthetic disposition, however, some concrete examples will be useful. These examples center on the practices of three people, two of whom were near-contemporaries at the beginning of this time period, and one who lived toward its end. First, a Spanish noblewoman who lived in Carthage, dubbed “the famous Lucilla” by Hippolyte Delehaye: she possessed a bone from the body of a martyr and had adopted the ritual practice of kissing the bone prior to engaging in another ritual practice, taking the Eucharist.²⁴ Meanwhile, Optatian Porfyry, a poet and Lucilla’s near-contemporary, sat down and wrote poems that can be read forwards or backwards either as wholes or line by line, such that “each poem contains a number of inherent permutations of itself.”²⁵ He called his poems “chains” and “difficult bits.”²⁶ Finally, toward the end of the fourth century, there was Ausonius, rhetorician and poet: he was a lover of catalogues and enumeration and at least twice he wrote six versions of the same joke.²⁷ He was also a master of the ekphrasis, a narrative description of a material artifact. However, his ekphrastic practice led him to see more than was there; as his friend Symmachus playfully remarked about one such ekphrastic passage, the famous catalogue of fish in his poem “Mosella,” he had never seen these textual fish on any literal table!²⁸

What do these three have in common? I will address them one by one, attempting to weave them together toward a more formal statement of the aesthetic that is my topic.

Recall that Lucilla, a venerator of relics, kissed a martyr’s bone before taking the Eucharist. Here are two ritual actions that echo each other, but dissonantly: ritual ingestion of elements considered to represent a whole body is preceded by ritual veneration of an element of a body that was once whole. Further, in each case the fragmentary elements are considered to be suffused with wholeness despite the literal absence to which they attest.²⁹ This structure of not-quite-congruent repetition, together with the focus on the part or the fragment, which is itself an uncanny repetition, are two of the components of the aesthetic that I wish to explore.

Despite the rebuke of her deacon,³⁰ Lucilla with her bone stood poised on the threshold of the dramatic expansion of the so-called “cult” of relics in the course of the fourth century, a “cult” better described as an aesthetic in which division—the parceling out of the bones, ashes, and other remains of martyrs’ bodies—was paradoxically also multiplication, as in the analogous case of the holy cross in Jerusalem, which remained miraculously whole despite being constantly broken up into fragments, themselves considered to be “whole.”³¹ This was an aesthetic in which the tension between the demands of expansion and limit was made explicit; and also one in which the relationship between objects occupying space and abstract form was explored, particularly in forcing human body parts beyond the limits of the physical to new forms of aesthetic expression. I shall return to the topic of the aestheticizing of relics.

The knotty linear relationship between objects occupying space and abstract form was explored in a textual way by Optatian Porfyry, a sometime-poet in the court of Constantine the Great, exiled around C.E. 315 and recalled to imperial favor early in 325.³² His poetic practice provides an intriguing literary parallel to Lucilla’s ritual practice regarding relics. Described by one interpreter as representative of a tendency in fourth-century poetry toward “a kind of abstract literary extremism,” Optatian’s creations are pattern poems that “occupy space in two different dimensions.”³³ Few would disagree with the estimation that Optatian’s poems as poems are virtually unreadable; even a sympathetic reader has declared that “Optatian is not a good poet; he is not even a bad poet. His poems are prodigies, monsters in the literal sense.”³⁴ A brief sampling of these poetic monsters will suffice to indicate the aesthetic at work in them.

Two types of poems are prominent in Optatian’s poetic output, most of which honors Constantine.³⁵ First, there are the figurative poems in which red ink was used to highlight certain letters in particular words so as to form a picture or a geometrical pattern, and the highlighted letters themselves make syntactical and semantic sense when read as a sequence, forming a poem-within-the poem. Perhaps the most astounding of these is his Poem 19, in which the highlighted letters form the shape of an oared ship whose mast is the XP, the symbolic Christogram used here to recognize Constantine as victor. Further, the highlighted Latin letters of the Christogram “change their linguistic orientation and must be considered Greek, the Roman H becoming Greek eta, Roman C sigma, and so on,” as indeed they do in other poems as well.³⁶ In Poem 19, the letters forming the Christogram begin an elegiac couplet in Greek that moves down the mast to encompass part of the ship, at which point a series of Latin hexameters takes over.³⁷

Of course the poem as a whole, if read as a sequence of innocent linear lines, also makes sense in terms of a conventional semantic flow. However, “the impulse to verbal mimesis is conspicuously weak,” consisting in the main of “stale praises of the emperor” like most of the other poems.³⁸ Further, the alphabetic line of narrative is interrupted by the pictographic line, and “the reader is pushed over the threshold of one order of experience—reading a text—into another—seeing a picture.”³⁹ In terms of the aesthetic under consideration, what is striking is the poem’s refusal to be continuous in the face of being continuous or whole nonetheless. Such pattern poems are fitting, if exaggerated, examples of the ocular dimension of the material turn and its aesthetic style. They enact a visual poetics as well as a poetics of materiality: as Susan Stewart has observed, pattern poets create “a poetry that is objectlike or artifactual,” due to the assertion of the part over against the whole.⁴⁰

This interest in wholes whose “parts [make] their appeal constantly and all at the same time”⁴¹ is also characteristic of the phenomenon of relics which, like Optatian’s poetic artifacts, not only occupied space in two registers (heaven and earth, in the case of relics) but were also the subject of intense speculation about the relation between disjunction and continuity: as Victricius of Rouen explained, “Nothing in relics is not full [in reliquiis nihil esse non plenum] … Division must not be inserted into fullness, but in the division that lies before our eyes the truth of fullness should be adored.”⁴² As with poetry, so with relics: the impulse toward mimesis was weak, the relics referring not so much backwards to a literal body once alive as forward to the postmortem effectiveness that constitutes its real life.⁴³ If this were not the case, that is, if the impulse toward mimesis in the cult of relics had not been weak, it would have been idolatrous, and someone such as Jerome could not have viewed “loose ashes tied up in silk or a golden vessel” as though they contained the living presence of a prophet.⁴⁴

This late ancient habit of relieving material and linguistic artifacts of conventional referential or mimetic impulses—that is, the habit of manipulating a little to get a lot—is characteristic of the other type of poem that Optatian wrote, the technopaegnia, poems with reversible verses and other linguistic tricks that advertise the linguisticality of the poetic works and function on an abstract level as explorations of the possibilities of language itself. Some of these poems are very complex in their demand for “re-combinatory” reading; they “progress,” so to speak, but only by a series of disjunctions or dislocations.

As one interpreter has shown in great detail, “there are more verses in Optatian’s poetry than a mere line-count will reveal: each poem also contains a number of inherent permutations of itself, a number of potential dispositions.”⁴⁵ This is getting a lot from a little with a vengeance! Further, “writing no longer functions primarily as the record of speech but as the medium of a linguistic artifact whose interest lies in an aspect of language extrinsic to its reference, usually a sensory aspect.”⁴⁶ When words take on this kind of physicality, poetry becomes “sensory” or tactile. As with pattern poems, so also here one finds the “thingly” aspects of language as poetic images assume a material presence.

This aspect of the aesthetics of late Latin poetry has an exact analogy in the cult of relics, where a dead body (like language) no longer functioned primarily as a record of human living (like speech) but rather as a material artifact whose referent lay outside itself in a spirituality that demanded sensory expression for its abstract belief in conduits of divine presence. Although I agree with Robert Wilken that “tactile piety, worship with the lips and the fingertips” was an important dimension of the cult of relics,⁴⁷ I would note that a relic is a curiously abstract piece of matter that signifies the many potential dispositions of the body of a martyr or saint: like a poem by Optatian, the martyr’s body contained a number of inherent permutations of itself, as bones and ashes were “translated” to various points around the Mediterranean world. As Victricius of Rouen explained, each relic was a link in a “chain of eternity” (vinculo aeternitatis) that bound the martyrs together.⁴⁸ The fragments, that is, become properly intelligible when they are viewed as knots in an abstract “narrative line,” the eternal chain of Victricius’s theological imagination.

Relics as well as Optatian’s poems were successful in one sense because of the visual immediacy they achieved by emphasizing the part at the expense of elaborations of organic wholes, as I pointed out earlier. In late ancient poetry, such visual immediacy could be evoked by using the techniques of the technopaegnion, but another technique was the use of ekphrases, which turned readers into active pictorial imaginers. Similarly, the literature that developed around relics aestheticized those objects by its insistent appeal to art and sensuous metaphors to describe them, often using ekphrastic techniques.

The technique of ekphrasis is the final component of the aesthetics of discontinuity that I will introduce by way of an exemplary figure, the late fourth-century poet Ausonius, probably best known in the context of late ancient Christianity as the teacher of Paulinus of Nola. In his literary output one finds an attitude toward poetic narrative and composition similar to that of Optatian in terms of experiments with words that depend for their aesthetic value on an abstract level of appreciation for the play of language itself. Thus among Ausonius’s poems are the “Griphus Ternarii Numeri,” a “Riddle on the Number Three” (an attempt to list all of the things that come in threes), and the “Technopaegnion,” a poem that he describes as consisting of “verses begun with monosyllables and ended with monosyllables” that are “linked up so that the monosyllable which was the ending of one verse might also become the beginning of the line following.”⁴⁹ His overall description of this little work is revealing of his aesthetic mindset: “It is small,” he says, “yet it brings a sense of surfeit; it is disjointed yet tangled [inconexa est et implicatur]”—a succinct statement of the late ancient aesthetic embrace of narrative forms that convey intimate relatedness precisely by advertising disjunction.⁵⁰

This much, however, has already been reviewed, but in his preface to this poem Ausonius adds one other significant ingredient. Referring to the monosyllabic words as puncta, “punctures” or “stopping points,” he writes that “they merely hold together like the individual links in a chain.” He says to the recipient of his poem: “You will endow them with a certain value, for without you they will be just monosyllables.”⁵¹ In other words, without the active participation of the reader, his poem will not be complete, its meaning left unconstrued. It is noteworthy that Ausonius’s puncta—words that have become “things,” magnets of attraction in Brown’s sense—constitute the nodal points on which the meaning of the poem turns. In his book of meditations on photography, Roland Barthes used the term punctum to characterize the detail in a photograph that has the power of expansion: “While remaining a detail, it fills the whole picture.”⁵² For Ausonius as well as for his latter-day counterpart, the punctum is the fragment that draws the reader or viewer into an imaginative construal of a whole.

This petitioning of active imaginative engagement by readers or spectators was part of the aesthetics of discontinuity, and one of the literary techniques for eliciting this kind of active reading was the ekphrasis. In an ekphrasis, effects of visual and sensory immediacy come together as the writer attempts to bring a painting or other material object (whether real or imagined) alive in words.⁵³ As literary theorist W. J. T. Mitchell describes it, “the basic project of ekphrastic hope” is “the transformation of the dead, passive image into a living creature.”⁵⁴ Ekphrastic writing was not invented in late antiquity,⁵⁵ but its handling by authors such as Ausonius was less linear, more dependent on dissonant parallels, and when embedded in longer narratives, late ancient ekphrases were “less open to [their] contexts” than earlier ekphrases were and tended to function as “self-contained and self-defining units.”⁵⁶ Here once again is the aesthetic preference for “juxtaposition and contrast [over] logical relationship; contiguity no longer required continuity.”⁵⁷

The catalogue of fish in Ausonius’s poem Mosella is actually an ekphrasis within an ekphrasis, since the poem as a whole purports to be a description of a river. There are two features of this catalogue that I want to highlight. One is the hyper-realism or pictorial theatricality of his descriptions, which creates a “reality-effect”—an illusion of reality—and suggests that such forms of representation are poetic effects rather than straightforward description.⁵⁸ As Georgia Nugent has explained, writing like this draws upon a kind of “synaesthetic response” in the reader, who must sense something that cannot strictly or literally be seen.⁵⁹

The second feature of the catalogue that adds to an understanding of Ausonian ekphrasis is its context, a poem about a river that constantly alludes to the optical illusions created by the reflective qualities of water. Frequently employing metaphors of mirroring to describe the unreliability of these watery visions, the poem is preoccupied with the deceptive nature of images both verbal and visual.⁶⁰ With its use of terms like absens, derisus, decepta, figura, and simulacrum, the poem issues a caveat to its reader that “the ekphrastic encounter in language is purely figurative,” as Mitchell has observed.⁶¹ The catalogue of fish is only one of the ways in which the poet underscores what he writes in line 239 of “The Moselle”: “pleasure is taken in sights which are ambiguously true and false.” As Nugent remarks, “Ausonius is a poet very much aware of the ambiguities, deceptions, and substitutions inherent in representation,” and by his ekphrastic technique he “invites the reader to enter into the game of imaginative visualization based on what is fundamentally a verbal artefact.”⁶²

While there is no doubt that the writer of ekphrases was attempting to transform the reader into a spectator and that sight was a privileged sense in ekphrastic representation, it is also true that “ekphrastic rhetorical exercises often strove precisely to exceed the visual by evoking tactile, kinetic, aural and olfactory sensations as well.”⁶³ For example, Ausonius’s poem “Cupido Cruciatus” purports to describe a painting of the descent of the god Amor into the underworld, there to be tortured by a series of lovelorn goddesses. It is an ekphrasis filled with images that are difficult to visualize, and its “reality-effect” succeeds only by petitioning senses other than sight. In one passage of this poem, the underworld is depicted as a place “where [Cupid’s] wings move sluggishly in the close darkness.” As Nugent describes it, “the impression is that Cupid is experiencing difficulty in plying his wings, because of the thickness of the night. But what sense, precisely, does this make? While we intuitively grasp its meaning, the image is not actually visual; rather, it seems to draw upon a kind of synaesthetic response—the weight of night and darkness is something that we may sense, but cannot (strictly speaking) see.”⁶⁴

This kind of ekphrastic engagement of the reader’s imaginative senses is a defining characteristic of the literature, poetic as well as narrative, that grew up around the phenomenon of relics in the course of the fourth century and can in some ways be credited with the creation of the meaning of relics. If it is true, as Victor Saxer has argued, that the holy dead were truly materialized only when they were fragmented and dispersed,⁶⁵ it is also true that those material bits came alive in the literary and artistic appeals that were made to the sensuous imaginations of participants in this form of Christian ritual. These appeals aimed at a virtual re-education of the human senses, teaching viewers to see that a material object might have spiritual life.

Relics and Figuration

The phenomenon of relics was characterized by an insistent impulse toward figuration, both verbal and artistic. Damasus, bishop of Rome from C.E. 366–384, for example, appears to have had a hearty appreciation for the function of the trace as a condition of meaning: as he went around Rome establishing shrines at tombs of martyrs, he made the city into a network of traces that was at once geographically tangible and verbally material, since at each shrine he left lines of poetry, the epigrams for which he is famous.⁶⁶ In one of these poems, addressed to the martyr Felix, Damasus made puns on the martyr’s name, engaging in the sort of etymological wordplay that became a standard feature of encomia to martyrs—Augustine, for example, punned on the names of Vincent and Agnes, and Prudentius on the names of Agnes, Hippolytus, and Cyprian.⁶⁷ Again the impulse to bring out the full aesthetic virtuosity of the fragment on two levels is evident. The linguistic filiations spun out of a martyr’s name match the filiations of spiritual power that inhere in a fragment of his or her body. Relics became verbal as well as material artifacts.

The creative mimesis involved in the sort of dissonant echoing effected when poetry and relic were juxtaposed was also characteristic of late ancient ekphrases that described the art decorating the martyria. Gregory of Nyssa’s encomium on Saint Theodore contains an ekphrasis on the paintings in Theodore’s memoria. Gregory begins by privileging the metaphor of sight, describing the visual splendor of the building and its contents:

When one comes into a place like this one in which we are assembled today, where the memorial and holy relic of the righteous one are, one is first struck by the magnificence of what there is to see: a building as befits God’s temple, splendidly wrought in terms of its great size and beautiful decoration and in which the woodworker has carved the wood into the shapes of animals and the stonemason has polished the marble slabs to the smoothness of silver. The painter has also colored the walls with the flowers of his art in images representing the martyr’s brave actions, his resistance, his suffering, the brutal appearance of the rulers, the insults, that fiery furnace, the athlete’s most blessed death, and the sketch of Christ, the judge of contests, in human form.⁶⁸

In the passage that follows, however, sensibilities other than sight are brought into play: “All of this he fashioned by means of colors as though it were a book speaking. He depicted the martyr’s struggles clearly and ornamented the church like a magnificent meadow, for painting, while silent, can speak from the wall and offer the greatest benefit.”⁶⁹

This ekphrastic passage contains a densely textured play of repetition and variation, as the reader is carried through a series of contiguously related parallels: from the relic that is the occasion of this spectacle, to the painted images, to the linguistic metaphor of the “speech of colors from the wall” that inversely echoes the passage of writing that gives expression to all this—an echoing, that is, of art and words that was also recognized by Asterius of Amaseia when, in a description of a painting of the martyrdom of Saint Euphemia, he says that “we writers [lit. “servants of the Muses”] possess ‘colors’ no worse than those of painters.”⁷⁰

Although Gregory and Asterius seem to be defending the congruity of art and words, the fact is that the art they describe exists as figurations in their texts, and both of them force the reader’s imaginative participation to shift between two experiences, reading a text and seeing a picture. And there is more: how is one to imagine the visually difficult suggestion that a painting of scenes from a gruesome martyrdom blooms like a meadow? This is an ekphrastic “reality-effect” that borders on the surreal, akin to Ausonius’s Cupid with sluggish wings or—to cite another ekphrasis connected with relics—akin to Paulinus of Nola’s description of a mosaic in the apse of one of the basilicas dedicated to Saint Felix, a scene that according to Paulinus showed “the Father’s voice thundering forth from heaven.”⁷¹ How might one picture a voice in the moment of its thundering? This image of Paulinus’s certainly depends as much on auditory as on visual imagination for its aesthetic effect; it is an image that, in terms of the late ancient Christian corporeal imagination, helped the viewer achieve a transfigured eye.

Hyper-real images such as that of Paulinus were common in the ekphrastic literature that embedded relics in an aesthetics of discontinuity. The praesentia⁷² or fullness of spiritual power thought to be present in a relic was an abstraction that could only be evoked by effects of visual and sensuous immediacy, as conveyed by Gregory of Nyssa in his well-known description of venerators of Theodore’s relics: “Those who behold them embrace them as though the very body were living and flowering, and they bring all the senses—eyes, mouth, ears—into play; then they shed tears for his piety and suffering and bring forward their prayers of intercession to the martyr as though he were present and whole.”⁷³ Passages such as this signal the late ancient mindset that valued the fragment for the narrative lines it was capable of eliciting. Like words in late ancient poetry, relics were “liberated signifiers” that took on a certain aesthetic dazzle far exceeding the referential function of a dead body part; as Victricius of Rouen noted, relics are “spiritual jewels” that “flower more and more in beauty.”⁷⁴

The mutual inherence of art, poetry, and relics in a tangled signifying network is nowhere better illustrated than in the Peristephanon of Prudentius. Since the techniques of Prudentius’s visionary storytelling in his hagiographic poems are featured in a later chapter in this book (“Bodies and Spectacles”), I would only note here the pictorial theatricality of his notorious fascination with the bloody gore of martyr-stories, as well as his participation in an aesthetics of writing where “images, intertextual allusions, and etymological wordplay convey more meaning than plot and narrative.”⁷⁵ “As impressive as the poems are as finished products, they are irresistibly more impressive as activities”—an estimation of the poetry of Optatian that is just as true of Prudentius’s work.⁷⁶ The individual units of his collection are marked by the effects of uncanny repetition, in which the metonymic relations among words, wounds, art, and relics are constantly advertised; for example, looking at a painting of the martyr Cassian in his shrine, Prudentius describes him as “a page wet with red ink.”⁷⁷ This is a stark example of the image as “thing” whose blunt affective appeal provokes a change in habitual perception, both of the martyr and of the written page that contains his story.

Jill Ross has argued persuasively that Prudentius’s poems are “mimetic reenactments and representations of martyred bodies” and that they are “an attempt to gain the salvation he so desires.”⁷⁸ I would add to this the observation that their shared poetic structure makes each of these poems into mimetic reenactments of the others in a narrative chain of puncta analogous to the structure of a column sarcophagus.⁷⁹ In order to “read” the Peristephanon properly as a whole, the reader must grasp the abstract theme that unifies the collection, Prudentius’s theological belief in the “redemptive power of the written word” that functions as a conduit of spiritual presence and healing.⁸⁰

Prudentius’s collection exemplifies a particular aesthetic attitude toward the organization of narrative. Viewed as a collection, it has a “narrative line” formally structured on a principle of repetition that produces a series of things—in this case, martyrs—that are eye-catching when viewed as discrete units, but somewhat monotonous when viewed from the perspective of the collection as a whole. In this way his collection is less like a column sarcophagus, whose discrete parts contain different images, and more like a form of sarcophagus-art represented here by a sarcophagus from the end of the fourth century in which the framing devices have disappeared (fig. 6). In such “processional” sarcophagi, difference is still present in details of dress, posture, and gesture in such a way that the mimetic relationships continue to be dissonant, but difference is subordinated to the overall presentation of the individuals as members of a group.

Collective Biography and Dissonance

Certain features of the collective biographies of desert ascetics composed at the end of the fourth and early in the fifth centuries cohere with the aesthetic style of the processional sarcophagi as well as Prudentius’s collection. The aesthetics of discontinuity is at work in such collections in their organization by enumerative sequence, which draws attention to a certain abstract commonality that the reader, once past the prologues of these works, must infer, since there are no narrative connections supplied to link the parts in an organic or conventionally emplotted way. Further, each individual ascetic is differentiated by “a handful of individualizing features”—what they eat, how they pray, their ritual activities and performances of miracles—“that qualify the generic similarity of the figures and provide a subdued tension between synonymy and antithesis.”⁸¹ The individualizing details invite the reader to linger—but not for long, since the real interest in such collections is in the network of relationships that represent the theological vision of the collection as a whole. Here the positive relation of materiality and meaning that characterized the material turn is advertised: the parade of ascetic bodies shows how the sensible world can be a medium for the disclosure of the divine in human life.

Figure 6. Sarcophagus with Christ and the Twelve Apostles. Early Christian, 2nd half of fourth century C.E. Museo Pio Cristiano, Vatican Museums, Vatican State. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY.

Just as Ausonius characteristically wrote prologues to his poems, giving the reader hints about how to participate in constructing their meaning, so also the authors of collective biographies of desert ascetics wrote prefatory pages that encouraged readers to read in specific kinds of ways. For example, the author of the Historia monachorum describes his preference for narrative disjunction, that is, the preference for juxtaposition over continuity, by informing the reader of the virtual impossibility of writing an exhaustive narrative account of the lives of his holy ascetics: since their number is so large as to be virtually uncountable, as he explains, he has adopted enumerative selectivity as his principle of representation, a few standing in for the many.⁸² Theodoret says the same, and even indicates how the reader should negotiate the divide between abstraction and particularity: “We shall not write a single eulogy for all together, for different graces were given them from God—to one through the Spirit a word of wisdom, to another gifts of healing, to yet another workings of powers—but all these are worked by one and the same Spirit.”⁸³ Each ascetic “fragment” is crucial because together they make tangible the spiritual theme of the collection itself. Thus there is difference, but the activities of each individual are all variations on an abstract theological line, an understanding of how human life can be suffused with spiritual presence. A particular form of religious anthropology, then, is the “narrative line” that is brought to the fore by the repetitive format that makes collective biographies read like processions of verbal icons.

The discrete parts of these collections are not full biographies but ekphrastic sketches that picture a “way of life” (πολιτεία) that the authors hope will be paradigmatic, as the reader is invited to participate in imagining those activities that embody the so-called “angelic life.”⁸⁴ Imagination is paramount here, since each compositional unit is itself only a series of disjointed fragments; often only two or three anecdotes suffice to convey the paradox of fragmentary fullness that was also characteristic of relics. Representational integrity, in other words, is carried by the fragment.

Similarly, the visual immediacy of these literary “jewels” is emphasized: the authors of these collections constantly privilege metaphors of looking by calling attention to the fact that they had gazed at these ascetics, and this, together with their use of metaphors of light to describe the shining faces of many of these near-angels, calls attention to the permeability of the texts’ boundaries as readers are drawn into the visual experience that the texts evoke.⁸⁵ As we have seen when considering the ekphrastic art of other texts, they often achieve their “reality-effect” by petitioning senses that exceed the visual. This is true of these collections as well. What reader of the Historia monachorum, for example, could resist the sensuous allure of an anecdote such as the one that pictures Macarius entering an eerie garden in the middle of the desert, conversing with and embracing the two holy men who lived there, and eating the marvelously large and colorful paradisal fruit that they provide?⁸⁶

Like relics, the subjects of these collections have been aestheticized and function as verbal artifacts. Theodoret, in fact, was overt about his compositional goal of constructing word-pictures.⁸⁷ In his prologue, he explains that he is “honoring in writing” ascetics who are “living images and statues” (τινας εἰϰόνας ἐμψύχους ϰαί στήλας), but his descriptions, he is quick to note, are not sculptures in bas-relief (τὰ τούτων ἐϰτυπώματα); that is, his ekphrases are not mimetic to mere appearances. Rather, what he has done is “to sketch the forms of invisible souls” (τῶν ἀοϱάτων ψνχῶν τάς ἰδέας σϰιογϱαϕουμεν),⁸⁸ a statement whose verb connotes the artist’s practice of “painting with shadows” in order to achieve an effect of solidity. Theodoret, like Gregory of Nyssa and others, draws attention to the figural status of his verbal representations by suggesting their mutual inherence with painting; thus his collection occupies two registers at once, just as his subjects do, being simultaneously angel and human. As “things,” Theodoret’s subjects are these word-pictures, images that are both sensuous (human) and metaphysical (angelic). They signify both as fragments of the whole and emblems of the theology of the whole.

Finally, Theodoret’s claim that his sketches do not reproduce mere appearance is a succinct characterization of what I see as one of the most significant aspects of the aesthetics of discontinuity, its creative understanding of mimesis. When Gregory of Nazianzus wrote the funeral oration for his friend Basil of Caesarea, he noted that many of Basil’s contemporaries, acting on a kind of misplaced admiration for the man, had imitated his habits and person (his gait, the shape of his beard, his way of eating) and even his physical defects (his paleness and hesitant manner of speaking), so that “you might see many Basils as far as what appears to the eye, [but these are] just statues in the shadows,” like an “echoing of a sound.” In contrast to what he calls “ill-conceived imitation,” Gregory commends the kind of mimesis engaged in by Basil: he imitated, not “Peter,” but the “zeal of Peter”; not “Paul,” but “the energy of Paul.”⁸⁹ Gregory’s comment is in the spirit of the material turn, in which the human model remains crucial but its “substance,” as it were, is appropriated not literally but rather for its use-value in a meaningful life.

This understanding of imaginative referentiality gives the late ancient aesthetic explored in this chapter an immense appeal because of its refusal of fetishism and of what some construed to be an idolatrous identification of matter and spirit. Vigilantius, for example, was chided by Jerome for his too-literal conception of the kind of mimesis operative in the cult of relics.⁹⁰ As Jerome reported it, Vigilantius had accused venerators of relics of being “idolaters who pay homage to dead men’s bones,” mistaking the substance itself for the holy. Jerome in turn accused Vigilantius of “following the letter that kills and not the spirit that gives life” for misunderstanding relic-veneration as idolatry.⁹¹

To side with Vigilantius for a moment, it is true that the material turn harbored the possibility of an exuberant attachment to matter. A stunning example of this exuberance is captured in the following anecdote from the early fifth century regarding Megetia, a Carthaginian noblewoman who visited the shrine of Saint Stephen hoping for a cure of her dislocated jaw: “While she prayed at the place of the holy relic shrine, she beat against it, not only with the longings of her heart, but with her whole body so that the little grille in front of the relic opened at the impact; and she, taking the Kingdom of Heaven by storm, pushed her head inside and laid it on the holy relics resting there, drenching them with her tears.”⁹² From the perspective of a critic like Vigilantius, Megetia’s association of materiality and meaning was too complete, leading to an idolatrous embrace of matter, in this case the relic. Even Evodius, who reported Megetia’s act, put a somewhat negative spin on it with his reference to her “taking the Kingdom of Heaven by storm.” From the perspective of relic-enthusiasts like Jerome, however, Megetia’s act was witness to the wonder of a spirit-filled world, aptly characterized by Virginia Burrus as a “material cosmos exploding with its own self-exceeding transcendence.”⁹³

While Megetia, in the extremes of her despair, certainly seems to have lacked the dissonant sensibility explored in this chapter, a sensibility that was crucial to the material turn in terms of avoiding “taking the Kingdom of Heaven by storm,” other Christians developed this sensibility in rich detail. In the following chapter, the role of the jeweled style’s dissonant echoing in the fashioning of body parts as relics will be explored further, with particular emphasis on the aesthetic sensibility of those relic-minded Christians whose sensuous rhetoric made possible a non-idolatrous, because paradoxical, apprehension of spiritual substance.