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Introduction

The relatively recent field of material culture studies has fostered scholarly analysis of the ways in which “things” claim a society’s attention as well as analysis of how perception of things varies from one society to another. In one society, for example, things will be perceived as inhabited and animated, while in another, things will be perceived as insensate utilitarian objects.¹ But whether they are viewed as animate or inanimate, things have increasingly commanded the attention of cultural analysts: whole books have been written on the pencil, the chair, potatoes, and bananas.²

The field in which the present study is situated, the study of late ancient and early Byzantine Christianity, has participated in this “renaissance of the thing” by producing a number of studies on such objects as amulets and ampullae, relics, statues, shrines, and mosaics, as well as practices such as pilgrimage that celebrate the tangible expressions of religious devotion.³ To this list of things I add the human body, which, as a “thing among things” in the phrase of philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, has been much studied as a locus of religious meaning in late antiquity.⁴

Thing Theory

The focus of this book is on saintly human bodies in their various “thingly” permutations in ancient Christianity—as relics, as animated icons, as literary performers of the holy in hagiography. To understand these variations on the body as “things” rather than as mere objects, I am relying on cultural critic Bill Brown’s differentiation between the two. In his elaboration of what he calls “thing theory,” Brown writes: “We begin to confront the thingness of objects when they stop working for us: when the drill breaks, when the car stalls, when the windows get filthy, when their flow within the circuits of production and distribution, consumption and exhibition, has been arrested, however momentarily.”⁵ In other words, an object becomes a “thing” when it can no longer be taken for granted as part of the everyday world of the naturalized environment in which objects such as clean windows are so familiar as not to be noticed. When the window is dirty, one can no longer “naturally” see through it; suddenly, it takes on the character of a presence. Brown continues: “the story of objects asserting themselves as things, then, is the story of a changed relation to the human subject and thus the story of how the thing really names less an object than a particular subject-object relation.”⁶ For example, take the case of relics in late antiquity. From the perspective of the natural attitude, a relic is simply an object, part of a dead person’s inanimate body. However, when a martyr’s dust, bone, or body becomes the center of cultic activity and reverence, it loses its character as a natural body and begins to function as a site of religious contact. No longer a mere object, it becomes a thing that does indeed signal a new subject-object relation, a relation of the human subject to the sanctifying potential of human physicality as locus and mediator of spiritual presence and power.

According to Brown’s thing theory, things, as compared with objects, stand out against their environment and, like magnets of attraction (or repulsion), announce a change in habitual perception. They also indicate a locus of surplus value. Brown explains the second part of his theory as follows: “You could imagine things, second, as what is excessive in objects, as what exceeds their mere materialization as objects or their mere utilization as objects—their force as a sensuous presence or as a metaphysical presence, the magic by which objects become values, fetishes, idols, and totems.”⁷ Excess is “what remains physically or metaphysically irreducible to objects.”⁸ As Brown argues, it is also important to bear in mind “the all-at-onceness, the simultaneity, of the object/thing dialectic and the fact that, all at once, the thing seems to name the object just as it is even as it names some thing else.”⁹ When it asserts itself as a thing, a relic is an overdetermined object, overdetermined because it is a finite object situated in an infinite field of meaning. To continue with the example of the relic: a bone becomes a relic when its surplus value is elicited aesthetically, in both art and rhetoric, and theologically, in terms of belief in saintly intercession. The term “relic” never ceases to name a body part of a dead person but, as Brown’s thing theory indicates, it simultaneously names something else, a thing that both instantiates and signifies a belief system.

A good example of both the promotion of and engagement with the excess that signals a bone-become-relic, a moment when materiality and meaning are configured positively, is in the following encomium, which Gregory of Nyssa delivered in the late fourth century on the martyr Saint Theodore in the building that served as a martyrium for the saint’s relics. Early on in his address, Gregory directed the gaze of his audience to the art on the building’s inner walls—images of animals, marble slabs so highly polished that they shimmered like silver, and colorful paintings of the martyr’s deeds and torture that Gregory describes (rather incongruously) as a flowery meadow.¹⁰ As Gregory presents it, the art functions as a lens through which to see and thus understand the significance of the martyr’s relics. Indeed, Gregory insists, by its sensuous appeal, the art is a lure: it delights the bodily senses, especially sight, and in so doing draws the venerator near to the martyr’s tomb.¹¹ Once at the tomb, several senses—“eyes, mouth, ears”—are engaged as venerators tearfully ask for the saint’s intercession and blessing “as though he were whole and present.”¹² And the artistic seduction that results in one’s proximity to the tomb might also yield a material payoff: “If anyone,” writes Gregory, “should take dust from the martyr’s resting place, that dust is understood as a gift, and the [bit of] earth stored up as a treasure.”¹³ Even more fortunate are those granted permission to touch the martyr’s relics, a boon of the highest value. The relic elicits a lavish sensory response, especially of sight and touch, that testifies to its magnetic religious power.

One might add that yet a further gift, for the modern reader, is Gregory’s alluring rhetoric, which, like the martyrium’s art, also functions as a lens through which to “see” the body parts of a corpse as spiritual objects. It is especially significant that Gregory seemingly felt compelled to enhance the artistic surround of the martyrium with his own rhetorical embellishments of it. Embellishing what was already embellished, he thus invokes the shimmer of the marble and the intrigue of the animal figures. Further, he presents the martyrium’s paintings as a clear representation of the martyr’s trials and death and also as a colorful, flowering meadow that functions “as if it were a book speaking” from the wall.¹⁴ The excess of his rhetoric both creates and reflects the surplus value of the bones that, as relics, his audience of fellow Christians longed to beseech and touch.¹⁵

The Material Turn

Gregory’s use of rhetoric as well as his appeal to the senses in order to convey the surplus value of a human body was part of a broader—and complicated—phenomenon in late ancient Christianity. In the first place, Gregory’s loving attention to the significance of a piece of “matter” is representative of what I call “the material turn” in the fourth century, in which the religious significance of the material world was revalued. The phrase “material turn” indicates a shift in the late ancient Christian sensibility regarding the signifying potential of the material world (including especially the human body), a shift that reconfigured the relation between materiality and meaning in a positive direction. As Susan Ashbrook Harvey has argued persuasively, the major reason for what she calls the “shift in physical sensibility that marked late antique as distinct from earlier Christianity” was the legalization of Christianity by co-emperors Constantine and Licinius in C.E. 313.¹⁶ Prior to legalization, Christians, while holding to the doctrine of God as creator of the world, “yet understood themselves to be living in a non-Christian world,” in fact a sometimes hostile world in which persecution was a recurring threat.¹⁷ As Harvey notes, “In the early Christian view, the model Christ had offered was to use the body as the instrument through which to seek eternal life; its purpose was not to focus on this temporary, ephemeral world.”¹⁸

Once the actual violence and social marginalization ended with legalization, the world began to seem less ephemeral and more welcoming. “As Christians gained political and social power in the world around them, the world gained positive valuation among Christians as their context for encountering, knowing, and living in relationship with the divine.”¹⁹ There was a movement from “sensory austerity” to “a tangible, palpable piety” as the sensible world came to be viewed as a medium for the disclosure of the divine.²⁰ Indeed, it was only after legalization that the concept of a “holy land” with its attendant ritual practice of pilgrimage developed; only after legalization could Pope Damasus “invent” a Christian Rome by creating a cityscape based on the tombs of the saints; and only after legalization did Christian liturgical pageantry, as well as art and architecture, begin to flourish.²¹ In this context, it was not only human sense-perception that became more important religiously; as Harvey points out, the human body itself “gained worth for Christians as a means for knowing God.”²² “Let no one tell you that this body of ours is a stranger to God,” as Cyril of Jerusalem exhorted his catechetical flock. More stunningly, Ephrem the Syrian characterized the Eucharist as “the Bread of Life that came down and was mingled with the senses,” a genuine sanctification of perceptual experience.²³

While it is certainly true that the human body and its sensorium became a locus for religious epistemology, this does not mean that, beginning in the fourth century, Christians embraced the body and its senses without reserve. Christological thinking in this period saw that “the incarnation of the divine in materiality and corporeality confers extraordinary significance on the body.”²⁴ But the rhetoric of the body that arose from the conjunction of the divine and the material had a double edge. On the one hand, and in a positive sense, the body could serve as a sign of the self in the process of being transfigured into its true status as image of God. One thinks of the profusion of hagiographical images, both literary and artistic, that present the bodies of the holy as suffused with light, whether in the angelic radiance flashing from the faces of desert ascetics or in mosaic portraits of saints whose visages glimmer against a background of gold tesserae.²⁵ On the other hand, negatively, human beings could not be fully transfigured in the present, since their very embodiment subjected them to the ravages of time, decay, spatial limitation, and ethical imperfection that were typically associated with corporeality.²⁶

The situation of human beings in the present was thus both a problem and an opportunity. Gregory of Nazianzus formulated the situation of human beings in cosmological terms: human nature was poised on a boundary line between visible and invisible worlds, the “intelligible” (νοητός) and the sensible (αίσθητός).²⁷ Although occupying such a position could be very positive in terms of access to intelligible reality, it could also result in the problem of a divided consciousness. This dilemma of the perch between two worlds could also be posed in terms of sensual perception, for just as on the cosmological plane, human nature straddled the earthly and heavenly worlds—“a new angel on the earth,” as Gregory of Nazianzus put it—so in anthropological terms each individual was just such a composite of the spiritual and the material, with the powers of perception (αἴσθησις) forming the mediating ground between the two, as Gregory of Nyssa argued.²⁸ The senses could serve to unite, rather than to divide, the two components of human beings.

However, there was also a double-edged dilemma concerning sensual perception. This was a dilemma that was expressed with remarkable consistency in late ancient Christian authors. In the mid-fifth century, for example, Theodoret of Cyrrhus wrote a compendium of mini-hagiographies of monks in Syria, the Historia religiosa. In this work, Theodoret declared that the exemplary holy men and women about whom he wrote had “barred up the senses with God’s laws as with bolts and bars and entrusted their keys to the mind.”²⁹ Once entrusted to “the mind,” that is, to spiritual guidance, however, those same senses became like strings in a musical instrument, producing “sound that was perfectly harmonious.”³⁰ Three-quarters of a century earlier, Gregory of Nyssa expressed the negative dimension of the dilemma in his commentary on Jeremiah 9:21 (“Death has climbed in through our windows”). “What Scripture calls ‘windows,’” Gregory wrote, “are the senses,” each of which could, “as the passage says, make an entrance for death.”³¹ Yet this is the same Gregory who thought that the senses could foster a spiritual experience of the highest degree, exclaiming, as we saw above, that worshippers at the shrine of Saint Theodore “embrace [the relics] as though they were alive, approaching them with eyes, mouths, ears—all the senses.”³²

The “material turn,” then, was complicated by the double valence of both matter and the senses. The task for those who participated in this turn was to redirect and re-educate the senses for, when the mediating senses were functioning properly, as at the shrine of Saint Theodore, they enabled a kind of apprehension that dissipated the merely material or corporeal without negating its function as sign of spiritual presence. As the chapters in this book demonstrate, the appeal to flesh and matter for meaning was not without its problematic aspects. Flirtation with idolatry, understood as reifying the holy in the human, was a constant problem. How was it possible to present human corporeality as a vehicle of transcendence without losing the mediating sense of “vehicle” and simply collapsing the material and the transcendent into each other?

The new enthusiasm for sensuous apprehension and instantiation of the divine in the everyday world required the development of interpretive finesse so that the excess, the surplus value, of things could be engaged and celebrated in non-idolatrous fashion. One of the interpretive gestures of this book is precisely to position the new embrace of the holy body as relic, saint, and icon vis-à-vis idolatry and, more particularly, vis-à-vis the iconoclastic controversy that erupted in the eighth century and roiled on into the ninth. Seen in hindsight—that is, reading backwards from the iconoclastic debates in which positions regarding idolatry and the role of images in Christian theology and ritual were argued openly—the theological poetics of material substance explored in this book can be understood as a strategy that in effect sidesteps an idolatrous impulse just as it anticipates the later celebration of material expressions of religion in the form of icons. I have used phrases such as dissonant sensibility, imaginative referentiality, ambiguous corporeality, ephemeral tangibility, and the uncanny doubling of saint and icon to characterize late ancient Christians’ constructions of holy bodies. I intend these phrases to indicate the complexities that were sustained in the discourse of the late ancient Christian material turn, and I argue that the ambiguities and ambivalences of that discourse betray a hesitation in view of the material turn, a hesitation or even a nervousness regarding the potential for confusing the material and the spiritual.

Long before the material turn, Christians had brought to conscious articulation the problem of idolatry as a theological mistake. In their attacks on the pagan religious practice of idol worship, authors such as Athenagoras pinpointed the error underlying that ritual practice. In his apology addressed to the emperor Marcus Aurelius around C.E. 176, Athenagoras wrote as follows: “We distinguish God from matter, and show that matter is one thing and God another, and that there is a vast difference between them. For the divine is uncreated and eternal, grasped only by pure mind and intelligence, while matter is created and perishable.”³³ As he says later in this treatise, the problem with idol worship is that “the populace cannot distinguish between matter and God or appreciate the chasm that that separates them.”³⁴ According to this kind of argument, the material world and the spiritual world are so different ontologically that they are categorically distinct by their very nature. Athenagoras’s referent for “idol” was, of course, a pagan statue of a god, which is not the same as a relic. Yet to the extent that a wooden statue and a human body part are both part of the material world, the formal ontological argument separating matter from divine holiness holds for the relic as well.

This marked degree of ontological separation between matter and spirit was precisely what the material turn diminished as, in David Frankfurter’s happy phrase, late ancient authors imaginatively transformed “a pious human being into sacred stuff.”³⁵ But the investment of human bodies with the holy was a new cultural practice, and it aroused anxiety, some of it vociferous, regarding how a material phenomenon like a human body can be a locus of spirituality without compromising the divine. In the fourth and early fifth centuries, there were both outright and implied charges of idolatry in regard to relics (as noted in the chapters that follow in reference to Vigilantius, Augustine, and Optatus of Milevis). And as for icons of the saints, Epiphanius roundly denounced them as false images, while Augustine, who preferred aniconic religion, lamented that the church had embraced such visual art in the first place and noted that pagans in Hippo had charged Christians with the very kind of idolatrous adoration of images of which Christians had accused them!³⁶

These detractors did not, of course, prevail against the heady conviction that objects such as relics and icons could give access to divine presence. As Robin Jensen has pointed out, Augustine’s argument that “it would be wiser to pray directly to the saint rather than to the image of that saint” would only seem sensible “to a congregation that was unattached to such visual and material aids to prayer.”³⁷ The polarizing positions that were later to be expressed in the iconoclastic controversies were not in place in late antiquity, but the fact that there were anxious rumblings suggests that negotiating the paradoxical relation between the infinite and the finite required a deft touch—hence the ambiguous corporeality of late ancient representations of holy bodies.

Corporeal Imagination

The phrase “corporeal imagination” can serve as an overall characterization of the techniques used by Christian authors to achieve the conjunction of discourse, materiality, and meaning that marked their turn toward the material. “Corporeal imagination” designates a kind of writing that blurs the distinction between reader and text by appealing to the reader’s sensory imagination. In such texts, things such as relics, the invisible bodies of the saints in hagiography, and the saints’ presence in icons take on visual and tactile presence. Achieving such a presence, they elicit either a corporeal response or else a synaesthetic response, requiring the reader to sense something that cannot strictly or literally be seen, namely, divine energy in action in the world. “Corporeal imagination” also designates textual images whose ocular and affective immediacy contributes to, or even creates, the religious significance of the thing that is their focus. As we have just seen, the body part of a dead human being only becomes a relic, a spiritual object, when aesthetically enhanced by this kind of writing. In short, this study analyzes pictorial strategies that draw on the power of discourse to materialize its effects in the world of the reader by attributing corporeal qualities to inscrutable objects (like the bodies of the saints) or by attributing spiritual qualities to corporeal objects (like relics, icons, or the dust at a stylite’s column).

This ancient Christian turn toward the thing, together with the elaboration of a theological poetics of material substance to embody that turn was, in my view, part of a broad phenomenon in Western history that literary and cultural theorist Daniel Tiffany has termed the intrinsic role of word-pictures in shaping Western knowledge of material substance.³⁸ Western thinking about the material realm has been “inherently figurative.”³⁹ Tiffany argues that “corporeality, and material substance itself,” are “mediums that are inescapably informed by the pictures that we compose of them.”⁴⁰ Focusing in part on the rise of atomic physics (natural philosophy) and microbiology in the seventeenth century, Tiffany rejects our modern habit of equating materialism with realism. The realism of modern physics, he says, relies on “a framework of vivid analogies and tropes”; thus “the foundation of material substance is intelligible to us, and therefore appears to be real, only if we credit the imaginary pictures we have composed of it.”⁴¹ That is, the only intuitive knowledge that we can possess of the inscrutable reality of material existence comes in the form of insubstantial pictures, or what Ian Hacking has called “the persistence of the image” in philosophical materialism.⁴² Following Hacking, Tiffany argues that realism is founded on the act of representation: “First there is representation, and then there is ‘real.’” What is considered to be “real” is a function of the pictorial imagination: “Without pictures, there can be no claim to reality.”⁴³

Such pictures constitute a “ poetics of material substance … which calls for materialization of the invisible world.”⁴⁴ Further, “when materiality is equated with invisibility, the invisible world becomes the province not only of atoms and [microscopic] animals but also, conceivably, of beings possessing the radiant body of an angel.”⁴⁵ This last comment suggests the particular relevance of Tiffany’s argument to what I have called the corporeal imagination of late ancient Christians, whose turn toward the material discovered precisely “radiant bodies”—holy men, relics, icons—that disclosed the reality of an invisible spiritual world. Ancient Christians were not, of course, philosophical materialists of the kind discussed by Tiffany. But, as I hope to show in this book, they elaborated a view of material substance, understood as the sainted human body, that relied heavily on a poetics of matter in order to redirect, indeed to form, sensuous apprehension of the presence of the spirit in the material world. Apart from such a poetics, flesh cannot be “real,” because it has not entered the order of representation.

According to one interpreter, the pictorial turn in ancient Christian writers can be explained by pointing to their propensity to look out at the material world—at ascetic bodies, bones, dust—and “see more than was there.”⁴⁶ Perhaps it might be more accurate to characterize such looking as “seeing the more that they believed was there,” since their techniques for picturing the conjunction of matter and spirit were premised on a conviction not only that the material world was suffused with divine presence, but also that matter could provide an intercessory conduit for human access to spiritual power. In order to illustrate the point of “seeing more than was there” as an essential part of the theological poetics of material substance that is my topic, I turn to a discussion of techniques for achieving the transfigured eye needed to “see” the coinherence of the visible and the invisible in late ancient Christianity.

Ekphrasis

One of the major techniques used by Christian authors for articulating the relation between matter and meaning was ekphrasis. We have in fact just experienced an ekphrastic moment in Gregory of Nyssa’s evocation of the artistic surround in Saint Theodore’s shrine. Ekphrasis was one of the exercises in composition for students of rhetoric; in the progymnasmata, the rhetorical handbooks used in the late ancient period, ekphrasis was defined as “a descriptive speech bringing the thing shown vividly before the eyes,” turning listeners into spectators.⁴⁷ The topics for ekphrases were varied—places, people, events, art, architecture—and their subjects could be purely imaginary. Thus when, as in the example to follow, a building, or a part thereof, is described in an ekphrasis, the reader should not expect a technical appraisal but rather a subjective, sometimes emotional, response to the topic at hand.⁴⁸

A good example of the penchant to see more than was there comes from the Gallic writer and bishop of Clermont, Sidonius Apollinaris. In a letter to a friend, Sidonius recorded an inscription that he had written around C.E. 470 for the dedication of a new cathedral in Lyons.⁴⁹ Inscribed on the far wall of the cathedral, Sidonius’s poem contained these verses: “Marble diversified with a varied gleam covers the floor, the vault and the windows; in a multi-colored design a verdant grassy encrustation leads a curving line of sapphire-colored stones across the leek-green grass … and the field in the middle is clothed with a stony forest of widely spaced columns.”⁵⁰ Sidonius could look at marble and see grass. As Onians observed, Sidonius “could look at something which was in twentieth-century [i.e., contemporary] terms purely abstract and find it representational.”⁵¹ The question is, representational of what?

Sidonius was not simply ornamenting a marble wall with a poetic figure. This becomes clear when one remembers that the wall was in a cathedral, and that the image of verdant, grassy expanses had a long history in ancient Christianity’s envisioning of paradise as a locus amoenus, an idyllic spot of delight and charm.⁵² Sidonius was petitioning the surplus value of the marble wall as “thing,” indicating in his ekphrasis that the inside of the cathedral was a paradisal spot. In this case, the excess of the object was theological; that is, the conjunction of matter and meaning produced a spiritualization of ecclesiastical space. A hundred years later, Paul the Silentiary could refer to the ambo in Hagia Sophia as adorned with “meadows of marble,” and the anonymous author of the Narratio de S. Sophia made the religious surplus value of marble unquestionable when, quoting the emperor Justinian, he referred to the marble strips on the church’s floor as “the four rivers that flow out of paradise.”⁵³

These ekphrastic images that present marble as organically alive and animated are not innocent poetic figures. Far from being “objective” descriptions of a building, they are in fact subjective judgments that establish and control perception of a church’s interior space, conditioning the human subject’s relation with that space in terms of its theological meaning. Further, such images defeat the binary opposition between the natural, the organic, and the representational, on the one hand, and the spiritual, abstract, and symbolic or nonmimetic on the other. In Sidonius’s case, for example, the ekphrastic poem was affixed to the very thing, the slab of marble, that it purports to bring before the eye, thus making the vividness of the optical truth that it petitions all the more arresting, in that the viewer/reader is being asked to suspend the difference between word, thing, and image, all the while being aware of their separation. Late ancient arts such as this actually worked to subdue potential dichotomies between body and spirit, earth and heaven, material and immaterial by setting in motion an aesthetic play between planes of reality, a play, that is, with boundaries that are only apparently discrete, such that the ambiguity of referentiality is highlighted. This will be as true of ekphrastic appropriations of the human body as of churchly marble, as the explorations of ekphrases of Asterius of Amaseia and Prudentius of Calahorra in subsequent chapters show.

Visceral Seeing

Ekphrasis was only one of the techniques of visualization that contributed to the theological poetics of material substance that is the focus of this book. Another is what I have termed “visceral seeing,” in which the older Christian tradition of the spiritual senses was revised such that the “eye of faith” had a tangible as well as a metaphorical dimension. The older tradition of the spiritual senses, developed most notably by Origen of Alexandria in the third century, divided human consciousness into an “outer man” whose perception was carnal and an “inner man” whose perception was spiritual, spiritual understanding being, of course, privileged.⁵⁴ Even though, as David Dawson has argued, the doctrine of the spiritual senses rests on “an intrinsic connection between the visible and the invisible,” it is difficult to argue that the man who famously (or infamously) stated that “in order to know God we need no body at all” truly appreciated the role of affect and materiality in discerning the presence of the divine in the ordinary world.⁵⁵

In the course of the fourth century, the senses were accorded cognitive status and the intellect was materially engaged. Spiritual seeing became more visceral due in part to the dignity accorded to the senses by a new understanding of the Incarnation. P. W. L. Walker’s observations on this development deserve to be quoted at length:

The fourth century was a time when the Church, now more settled “in the world,” began to reaffirm the proper value of the temporal. Not surprisingly this would lead to a greater appreciation of the Incarnation in the Church’s life and thought. If the Cross and the exaltation of Christ were always open to the danger of being interpreted in such a way as to cast a negative light upon the world, the Incarnation of Christ was the biblical principle par excellence that could effectively reverse that trend…. The Incarnation could allow a new attitude to physical matter, the very stuff of the world. It could be used to affirm not just the goodness of this world-order, of creation and humanity at a general level; it might also be used to inculcate a new approach to material objects and places, a new expectation that physical reality might in some way be important to the meeting between God and man…. The Incarnation was a true legitimation of the physical realm.⁵⁶

Following Walker, Georgia Frank has concluded that “the Incarnation, in theory, legitimated all forms of sense perception as a means for knowing God.”⁵⁷ In theory, and also in practice: Frank quotes Cyril, bishop of Jerusalem in the mid-fourth century, “boasting to catechumens that ‘others merely hear, but we see and touch,’” and she goes on to demonstrate ancient Christian appropriation of vision as touch, indeed of “eyes as hands.”⁵⁸

“Visceral seeing” is a way of naming one of the results of the (re)physicalizing of the senses in light of the view that the Incarnation had legitimized the material realm. In particular, it designates the affective appeal of figurative language about saintly bodies, especially in late ancient and early Byzantine hagiography. Hagiographical images of saintly bodies taught the reader how to bring together the “real” and the transcendent, the material and the spiritual, in a single image. As ephemeral and tangible at once, saints were presented in hagiography as visual paradoxes, and these paradoxical bodies were signs of transfiguration at work in the world. The ambiguous corporeality of the saints, and the way in which pictured bodies, by appealing to the sensory imagination, provoke thoughts of spiritual transformation, is discussed in several of the following chapters. Here I would like to address the phenomenon of the affective image in one of its most visceral (and theological) modes, in which partakers of the Eucharist see the elements of bread and wine turn to “real” flesh and blood before their very eyes.

These images of a bloody Eucharist, contained in texts from the fifth and sixth centuries, had as background the effect of the new emphasis on Incarnation on ideas about the Eucharist in the fourth century. Especially, though not only, in the eastern part of the empire, theologians began to emphasize not the sacrificial, memorial, or symbolic character of the Eucharist, but rather the conversion or materialist theory that regarded the bread and wine as really transformed into the body and blood of Christ. John Chrysostom, for example, exploited “the materialist implications of the conversion theory to the full,” speaking of “eating Christ, even of burying one’s teeth in his flesh,” though he admitted that the transformation could be apprehended not by the senses but only by the mind.⁵⁹ Ambrose expressed the perceptual conundrum straightforwardly: “Perhaps you may say: ‘I see something else; how do you tell me that I receive the Body of Christ?’”⁶⁰ Not only did the bread look ordinary, so did the wine: “Perhaps you say: ‘I do not see the appearance of blood.’”⁶¹ Clearly, visceral imbibing of the Eucharist of the sort advocated by Chrysostom was difficult; as Georgia Frank has remarked, “receiving the Eucharist required a stretch of the imagination.”⁶²

A central player in this stretching of the imagination was Cyril of Alexandria, for whom the Incarnation was central to an understanding of the Eucharist. As Charles Barber has noted, in his Eucharistic doctrine Cyril “shifted emphasis from the death of Christ to the Incarnation, seeing in the transformation of the elements a sign of the power of the Incarnation to transform man.”⁶³ By taking on flesh, the Word had made possible the transfiguration of human nature, guaranteeing the resurrection of the body.⁶⁴ Hence it was essential that the Eucharistic elements be truly the body and blood of Christ because, just as Christ represented a transformed humanity, so also the sacramental elements were the vehicle through which the process of deification occurred.⁶⁵ “He offers us as food the flesh that he assumed,” as Cyril argued.⁶⁶ The Eucharistic elements were material and divine at once; only thus could they effect metamorphosis.

Cyril’s view of the Eucharist was central to his opposition to Nestorius, whom he perceived to have separated the human and the divine in Christ, thus rendering the Eucharistic “body” a merely human one and so incapable of producing the spiritual and physical transformation of humankind. One legacy of Cyril’s theory of the Eucharist lay with the Monophysite monks of Gaza, who opposed the Council of Chalcedon’s Christological formula that distinguished—too sharply, they thought—the two natures of Christ and so in their view represented a revival of Nestorius’s thought.⁶⁷ One of those anti-Chalcedonian ascetics of Gaza, John Rufus (bishop of Maiouma, port city of Gaza, in the late fifth century), wrote a hagiographical account of his fellow Monophysite Peter the Iberian, in which he recorded the following scene: “And he [Peter] celebrated the entire [liturgy of the] Eucharist: when he came to the breaking of the almighty bread, with continuous weeping and disturbance of his heart and many fears, as it was custom to him, so much blood burst forth when he broke [the bread] that the entire holy altar was sprinkled [with blood]. [When he turned around he saw Christ next to him who told him:] “Bishop, break [it]! Don’t fear.”⁶⁸ In his treatise Plerophoria, a series of visions and prophecies that attempt to vindicate especially the Christology of the anti-Chalcedonian party, John Rufus recorded a similarly bloody event that occurred during Lent to a man in the church of St. Menas:

When the holy offering of the eucharist had taken place and everyone had received the terrifying mysteries, he, too, came forward, with tears, to partake. And when he opened his hand he saw, instead of bread, flesh soaked in blood, and his entire hand became blood-red. And trembling from the incredible wonder that had taken place, he said, “Woe is me, how is it possible that I have been found receiving meat when everyone else has received bread? How is it possible that I am partaking in flesh when this is a time of fasting?”⁶⁹

As Lorenzo Perrone noted, such anecdotes are “the projection in image of the monophysite Christological dogma.”⁷⁰ But what a projection! These images constitute visceral seeing at its starkest.

Like many of the hagiographical images treated in this book, these Eucharistic images are constituted by a carnal rhetoric that has an ocular and affective immediacy. In keeping with the technique of visceral seeing, they appeal to the sensory imagination, and they certainly demonstrate the role of word-pictures in shaping knowledge of material substance—in these cases, the sacramental elements. But, as with images of relics and their connection with the notion of intercession, the Eucharistic images appeal not just to the senses but also to the intellect, to the extent that they invite the reader to “see” a belief system. Visceral seeing, then, denotes a pictorial idiom in which the senses have cognitive status and the mind is materially engaged. Above all, this idiom teaches readers to “see” what is visually intractable—here, the fleshly presence of Christ in the Eucharist; in chapters that follow, the presence of divine power in a human body or the animate quality of a seemingly inanimate work of art.

Pictorial Theatricality

In these techniques of visualization, the secret of the image’s vitality is its spirited surplus as well as its pictorial theatricality. It is to this latter point that I will now turn in conclusion. The success of the material turn insofar as it was devoted to the paradox of spiritual bodies was due in large part to its cultivation of an inner visual imagination that was emotional and sensuously intense. Especially in the literature about martyrs that arose in connection with the cult of relics, the reader/hearer was situated as an active participant in the martyrial drama by the force of emotionally charged rhetoric. Augustine, for example, preached about the trials of Saint Cyprian by creating a form of spiritual theater of the mind: “Look, here am I, watching Cyprian; I’m crazy about Cyprian…. I’m watching him, I’m delighted by him, as far as I can I embrace him with the arms of my mind.”⁷¹ Who could remain unmoved by this dramatic inner spectacle that summons a past event excitedly into the present as though it were playing itself out before one’s very eyes?

This sensibility, based on the visionary power of images—seen in the chapters that follow in such authors as Prudentius, Victricius, Asterius, and Paulinus, in addition to Augustine—might be illuminated by comparison with what art historian Norman Bryson, discussing a text of Philostratus the Elder, has called “the Philostratean ‘Look!”’⁷² Philostratus’s Imagines, a series of ekphrases that summon forth a series of paintings in a (probably imaginary) gallery, is punctuated with moments when the author, in the midst of one of his descriptions, exclaims, “For look!”⁷³ With this exclamation, as Bryson observes, “the description at last reaches the moment of lift-off,” as “one of the principal desires of the descriptions in the Imagines” is fulfilled: “to cease being words on the page, to come alive in the form of an image, to pass from the opacity of words to the luminous scenes behind the words.” This is “a textual moment at which the description at last feels its own language to dissolve into the light of the scene it opens upon.”⁷⁴ Late ancient Christian authors too were eager to summon the luminous scenes behind the words, and many of them animated “the dead,” as it were, by using powerful imagery to make the invisible visible.

Enthusiasm for pictorial theatricality as a means for materializing the holy in the everyday world continued into the sixth and seventh centuries, particularly in hagiography. In the final chapters of this book, the focus is on hagiographies written in Greek in the eastern part of the former Roman empire. Although historians typically denote this geography and time period as “early Byzantine,” I am considering it an extension of late antiquity insofar as the concerns of the “material turn” were intensified as well as problematized. As I read them, these hagiographies are testaments to the success of the process of materializing the holy, and also to its dangers, especially the danger of idolatry. Two aspects of these hagiographies are highlighted: first, their emphasis on tangible saintly presence, mainly connected with miracle-working, and second, their presentation of icons as animated with saintly presence. Whether an incorporeal saint is shown hugging one of her devotees, as in the case of Saint Thekla, or whether saints are portrayed as zooming in and out of their icon, as in the case of Saints Cosmas and Damian, these hagiographical images temper the pictorial realism with hints that these bodies are not so corporeal as they might seem. As “things,” they are certainly excessive, but they are also ontologically unstable—“ephemerally solid,” as I argue, and so safe from the charge of investing the human body with too much divine power.

The Body in Theory

The overall focus of this book, then, is on the human body and its refraction through various images and rhetorics, and I am aware that anyone who now approaches the topic of the body must do so with some trepidation, given how problematic and complex it has become in a wide variety of disciplines. In an article in the collection entitled Fragments for a History of the Human Body, classicist Jean-Pierre Vernant summarized the situation succinctly: in contemporary theory “the body is no longer posited as a fact of nature, a constant and universal reality, but as an entirely problematic notion, a historical category, steeped in imagination, and one that must be deciphered within a particular culture by defining the functions it assumes and the forms it takes on within that culture.”⁷⁵ As a problematic phenomenon, the body has left the natural realm and entered the discursive domain. In light of—and indebted to—the work of Michel Foucault, contemporary social and philosophical theory has viewed the body in three basic ways, articulated as follows by Bryan Turner: (1) “as an effect of deep structural arrangements of power and knowledge”; (2) as “a symbolic system that produces a set of metaphors by which power is conceptualized”; and (3) as “a consequence of longterm historical changes in human society.”⁷⁶

As Turner observes, all three of these views “challenge any assumption about the ontological coherence of the body as a universal historical phenomenon”; one “cannot take ‘the body’ for granted as a natural, fixed, and historically universal datum of human societies,” despite the fact that cultural conceptualizations of the body condition perception of the body in such a way that the body may seem natural.⁷⁷ And yet, despite their concern to historicize and particularize the body, sometimes such theories risk losing the body in a haze of abstractions. After some two decades of cultural obsession with the body, theorists are still “far from assured about its referent,” as Sarah Coakley has remarked.⁷⁸ Already more than ten years ago, feminist philosopher Judith Butler, attempting to write on the materiality of the body, wrote about her own frustration in this regard: “I tried to discipline myself to stay on the subject, but found that I could not fix bodies as simple objects of thought…. I kept losing track of the subject … and I began to consider that perhaps this resistance to fixing the subject was essential to the matter at hand.”⁷⁹

As Butler goes on to say, her resistance was aimed at philosophical approaches, “always at some distance from corporeal matters,” that “try in that disembodied way to demarcate bodily terrains: they invariably miss the body or, worse, write against it.”⁸⁰ In recent years a host of interpreters has joined Butler in her quest for a more satisfying account of the materiality of the body, as the following litany of book titles suggests: Transgressive Corporeality, The Body in the Mind, The Absent Body, Cutting the Body, Stately Bodies, Pictures of the Body, Volatile Bodies, and of course Butler’s own punning title, Bodies That Matter.⁸¹ All of these, and many more, can be read as attempts to address Butler’s question, “What about the materiality of the body?”⁸²

Historians of ancient Christianity have also made significant contributions toward answering this question, especially regarding ascetic behaviors, gender construction, and sexual practices and theories. In various ways recent scholarly studies of the desert fathers and mothers, of resurrection, of such theologians as Jerome, John Chrysostom, Gregory of Nyssa, Athanasius, and Augustine, have all brought forward the body “as a tangible frame of selfhood in individual and collective experience, providing a constellation of physical signs that signify relations of persons to their contexts.”⁸³ The perspectives that have provided the framework for these historical reconstructions have been drawn, in the main, from social history and anthropology, as well as from rhetorical and feminist theories. What my study adds to these is a broadly aesthetic perspective, one that emphasizes the role of the senses and imaginative sensibility in any approach to the question of the body in late ancient Christianity. By focusing on the material turn in this time period, I hope to show how the life of affect, while fully instantiated in corporeality, was endowed with a creative, cognitive function.

My own approach to the question of the materiality of the body has focused in large part on analyzing the intrinsic role of word-pictures in shaping knowledge of material substance. In this I have been indebted to Michael Roberts’s conception of what he calls “the jeweled style” in late ancient literature and art.⁸⁴ This was a style that privileged brilliance and dazzle, in art as well as in writing. It was a style that conveyed meaning by juxtaposing images, as in a frieze sarcophagus or collective hagiography, rather than by mounting a linear argument. The appeal of this style, that is, was to the fragment, like a colorful mosaic tile; the visual immediacy of the part was crucial to the role that this aesthetics played in the development of a corporeal imagination in late ancient Christianity.

As I have put together this book, I have emulated something akin to the “jeweled style” of late ancient Christianity. In particular: most of the ideas in this book began as engagements with “fragments”—with a text’s scintillating metaphor or oddly provocative anecdote. Textual images can themselves be considered “things” (to recall Brown’s thing theory) whose excess or surplus value make them magnets of interpretive attention. I have thus been engaged with the dazzle of late ancient rhetoric from the beginning. In general: I have assembled the material in this book in chapters that circle around a common set of themes rather than following a linear, chronological argument. This means that some ancient texts appear in more than one chapter. As with the jeweled style, repetition is valued for the difference it can disclose. Thus each time texts appear they take on additional shades of meaning because each chapter presents a slightly different language and framework for the phenomenon under discussion. Finally, I have imagined that each chapter is a single “image”juxtaposed with the others, and I hope that this introduction has helped articulate the meanings that emerge from such juxtapositions, though it has certainly not exhausted them. For evocative disclosure, as contrasted with descriptive closure, lies at the heart of the jeweled style.