According to one interpreter, the pictorial turn in ancient Christian writers can be explained by pointing to their propensity to look out at the material world—at ascetic bodies, bones, dust—and “see more than was there.”46 Perhaps it might be more accurate to characterize such looking as “seeing the more that they believed was there,” since their techniques for picturing the conjunction of matter and spirit were premised on a conviction not only that the material world was suffused with divine presence, but also that matter could provide an intercessory conduit for human access to spiritual power. In order to illustrate the point of “seeing more than was there” as an essential part of the theological poetics of material substance that is my topic, I turn to a discussion of techniques for achieving the transfigured eye needed to “see” the coinherence of the visible and the invisible in late ancient Christianity.
Ekphrasis
One of the major techniques used by Christian authors for articulating the relation between matter and meaning was ekphrasis. We have in fact just experienced an ekphrastic moment in Gregory of Nyssa’s evocation of the artistic surround in Saint Theodore’s shrine. Ekphrasis was one of the exercises in composition for students of rhetoric; in the progymnasmata, the rhetorical handbooks used in the late ancient period, ekphrasis was defined as “a descriptive speech bringing the thing shown vividly before the eyes,” turning listeners into spectators.47 The topics for ekphrases were varied—places, people, events, art, architecture—and their subjects could be purely imaginary. Thus when, as in the example to follow, a building, or a part thereof, is described in an ekphrasis, the reader should not expect a technical appraisal but rather a subjective, sometimes emotional, response to the topic at hand.48
A good example of the penchant to see more than was there comes from the Gallic writer and bishop of Clermont, Sidonius Apollinaris. In a letter to a friend, Sidonius recorded an inscription that he had written around C.E. 470 for the dedication of a new cathedral in Lyons.49 Inscribed on the far wall of the cathedral, Sidonius’s poem contained these verses: “Marble diversified with a varied gleam covers the floor, the vault and the windows; in a multi-colored design a verdant grassy encrustation leads a curving line of sapphire-colored stones across the leek-green grass … and the field in the middle is clothed with a stony forest of widely spaced columns.”50 Sidonius could look at marble and see grass. As Onians observed, Sidonius “could look at something which was in twentieth-century [i.e., contemporary] terms purely abstract and find it representational.”51 The question is, representational of what?
Sidonius was not simply ornamenting a marble wall with a poetic figure. This becomes clear when one remembers that the wall was in a cathedral, and that the image of verdant, grassy expanses had a long history in ancient Christianity’s envisioning of paradise as a locus amoenus, an idyllic spot of delight and charm.52 Sidonius was petitioning the surplus value of the marble wall as “thing,” indicating in his ekphrasis that the inside of the cathedral was a paradisal spot. In this case, the excess of the object was theological; that is, the conjunction of matter and meaning produced a spiritualization of ecclesiastical space. A hundred years later, Paul the Silentiary could refer to the ambo in Hagia Sophia as adorned with “meadows of marble,” and the anonymous author of the Narratio de S. Sophia made the religious surplus value of marble unquestionable when, quoting the emperor Justinian, he referred to the marble strips on the church’s floor as “the four rivers that flow out of paradise.”53
These ekphrastic images that present marble as organically alive and animated are not innocent poetic figures. Far from being “objective” descriptions of a building, they are in fact subjective judgments that establish and control perception of a church’s interior space, conditioning the human subject’s relation with that space in terms of its theological meaning. Further, such images defeat the binary opposition between the natural, the organic, and the representational, on the one hand, and the spiritual, abstract, and symbolic or nonmimetic on the other. In Sidonius’s case, for example, the ekphrastic poem was affixed to the very thing, the slab of marble, that it purports to bring before the eye, thus making the vividness of the optical truth that it petitions all the more arresting, in that the viewer/reader is being asked to suspend the difference between word, thing, and image, all the while being aware of their separation. Late ancient arts such as this actually worked to subdue potential dichotomies between body and spirit, earth and heaven, material and immaterial by setting in motion an aesthetic play between planes of reality, a play, that is, with boundaries that are only apparently discrete, such that the ambiguity of referentiality is highlighted. This will be as true of ekphrastic appropriations of the human body as of churchly marble, as the explorations of ekphrases of Asterius of Amaseia and Prudentius of Calahorra in subsequent chapters show.
Visceral Seeing
Ekphrasis was only one of the techniques of visualization that contributed to the theological poetics of material substance that is the focus of this book. Another is what I have termed “visceral seeing,” in which the older Christian tradition of the spiritual senses was revised such that the “eye of faith” had a tangible as well as a metaphorical dimension. The older tradition of the spiritual senses, developed most notably by Origen of Alexandria in the third century, divided human consciousness into an “outer man” whose perception was carnal and an “inner man” whose perception was spiritual, spiritual understanding being, of course, privileged.54 Even though, as David Dawson has argued, the doctrine of the spiritual senses rests on “an intrinsic connection between the visible and the invisible,” it is difficult to argue that the man who famously (or infamously) stated that “in order to know God we need no body at all” truly appreciated the role of affect and materiality in discerning the presence of the divine in the ordinary world.55
In the course of the fourth century, the senses were accorded cognitive status and the intellect was materially engaged. Spiritual seeing became more visceral due in part to the dignity accorded to the senses by a new understanding of the Incarnation. P. W. L. Walker’s observations on this development deserve to be quoted at length:
The fourth century was a time when the Church, now more settled “in the world,” began to reaffirm the proper value of the temporal. Not surprisingly this would lead to a greater appreciation of the Incarnation in the Church’s life and thought. If the Cross and the exaltation of Christ were always open to the danger of being interpreted in such a way as to cast a negative light upon the world, the Incarnation of Christ was the biblical principle par excellence that could effectively reverse that trend…. The Incarnation could allow a new attitude to physical matter, the very stuff of the world. It could be used to affirm not just the goodness of this world-order, of creation and humanity at a general level; it might also be used to inculcate a new approach to material objects and places, a new expectation that physical reality might in some way be important to the meeting between God and man…. The Incarnation was a true legitimation of the physical realm.56
Following Walker, Georgia Frank has concluded that “the Incarnation, in theory, legitimated all forms of sense perception as a means for knowing God.”57 In theory, and also in practice: Frank quotes Cyril, bishop of Jerusalem in the mid-fourth century, “boasting to catechumens that ‘others merely hear, but we see and touch,’” and she goes on to demonstrate ancient Christian appropriation of vision as touch, indeed of “eyes as hands.”58
“Visceral