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