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.
Chapter Three
Dazzling Bodies
There is no better exemplar of Bill Brown’s “thing theory” in late ancient Christianity than a relic. As a specifically spiritual object, a relic is a mere object, a body part of a dead human being, that has become a “thing” because it can no longer be taken for granted as part of the everyday world of the naturalized environment of the death and decay of the human body. In antiquity, the relic as thing was a locus of surplus value: because it was a vehicle for the mediation of divine presence in human life—that is to say, a crucial nodal point linking the transcendent and earthly realms—a relic was both the facilitator as well as a signifier of a belief system in which the concept of intercession placed spiritual power squarely in the midst of the material world. In short, as thing, the relic represents the seemingly paradoxical use of the material to enhance the spiritual, as noted in Chapter 1.
As both the sign and the carrier of a relation between materiality and theology, the phenomenon of relics aptly illustrates a major feature of the material turn in late ancient Christianity, namely, the revaluation of the religious significance of the material world in a positive direction. This revaluation was, however, problematic: in the view of some, relics signaled a corporeal imagination run amok by investing the material world, in the form of parts of the human body, with too much extrahuman meaning. Given this troublesome aspect of the revaluation, the task of those who created positive interpretive frameworks for relics was basically twofold: first, to answer the question how a material object can have a spiritual life, that is, to explain how the necessary excess that marked relics as spiritual objects was not idolatrous, and second, to reeducate the senses of fellow Christians so as to enable them to perceive the material-spiritual relationship in relics. Their overall task was to articulate a religio-aesthetic environment