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