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