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