The Corporeal Imagination. Patricia Cox Miller
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from the wall and offer the greatest benefit.”69
This ekphrastic passage contains a densely textured play of repetition and variation, as the reader is carried through a series of contiguously related parallels: from the relic that is the occasion of this spectacle, to the painted images, to the linguistic metaphor of the “speech of colors from the wall” that inversely echoes the passage of writing that gives expression to all this—an echoing, that is, of art and words that was also recognized by Asterius of Amaseia when, in a description of a painting of the martyrdom of Saint Euphemia, he says that “we writers [lit. “servants of the Muses”] possess ‘colors’ no worse than those of painters.”70
Although Gregory and Asterius seem to be defending the congruity of art and words, the fact is that the art they describe exists as figurations in their texts, and both of them force the reader’s imaginative participation to shift between two experiences, reading a text and seeing a picture. And there is more: how is one to imagine the visually difficult suggestion that a painting of scenes from a gruesome martyrdom blooms like a meadow? This is an ekphrastic “reality-effect” that borders on the surreal, akin to Ausonius’s Cupid with sluggish wings or—to cite another ekphrasis connected with relics—akin to Paulinus of Nola’s description of a mosaic in the apse of one of the basilicas dedicated to Saint Felix, a scene that according to Paulinus showed “the Father’s voice thundering forth from heaven.”71 How might one picture a voice in the moment of its thundering? This image of Paulinus’s certainly depends as much on auditory as on visual imagination for its aesthetic effect; it is an image that, in terms of the late ancient Christian corporeal imagination, helped the viewer achieve a transfigured eye.
Hyper-real images such as that of Paulinus were common in the ekphrastic literature that embedded relics in an aesthetics of discontinuity. The praesentia72 or fullness of spiritual power thought to be present in a relic was an abstraction that could only be evoked by effects of visual and sensuous immediacy, as conveyed by Gregory of Nyssa in his well-known description of venerators of Theodore’s relics: “Those who behold them embrace them as though the very body were living and flowering, and they bring all the senses—eyes, mouth, ears—into play; then they shed tears for his piety and suffering and bring forward their prayers of intercession to the martyr as though he were present and whole.”73 Passages such as this signal the late ancient mindset that valued the fragment for the narrative lines it was capable of eliciting. Like words in late ancient poetry, relics were “liberated signifiers” that took on a certain aesthetic dazzle far exceeding the referential function of a dead body part; as Victricius of Rouen noted, relics are “spiritual jewels” that “flower more and more in beauty.”74
The mutual inherence of art, poetry, and relics in a tangled signifying network is nowhere better illustrated than in the Peristephanon of Prudentius. Since the techniques of Prudentius’s visionary storytelling in his hagiographic poems are featured in a later chapter in this book (“Bodies and Spectacles”), I would only note here the pictorial theatricality of his notorious fascination with the bloody gore of martyr-stories, as well as his participation in an aesthetics of writing where “images, intertextual allusions, and etymological wordplay convey more meaning than plot and narrative.”75 “As impressive as the poems are as finished products, they are irresistibly more impressive as activities”—an estimation of the poetry of Optatian that is just as true of Prudentius’s work.76 The individual units of his collection are marked by the effects of uncanny repetition, in which the metonymic relations among words, wounds, art, and relics are constantly advertised; for example, looking at a painting of the martyr Cassian in his shrine, Prudentius describes him as “a page wet with red ink.”77 This is a stark example of the image as “thing” whose blunt affective appeal provokes a change in habitual perception, both of the martyr and of the written page that contains his story.
Jill Ross has argued persuasively that Prudentius’s poems are “mimetic reenactments and representations of martyred bodies” and that they are “an attempt to gain the salvation he so desires.”78 I would add to this the observation that their shared poetic structure makes each of these poems into mimetic reenactments of the others in a narrative chain of puncta analogous to the structure of a column sarcophagus.79 In order to “read” the Peristephanon properly as a whole, the reader must grasp the abstract theme that unifies the collection, Prudentius’s theological belief in the “redemptive power of the written word” that functions as a conduit of spiritual presence and healing.80
Prudentius’s collection exemplifies a particular aesthetic attitude toward the organization of narrative. Viewed as a collection, it has a “narrative line” formally structured on a principle of repetition that produces a series of things—in this case, martyrs—that are eye-catching when viewed as discrete units, but somewhat monotonous when viewed from the perspective of the collection as a whole. In this way his collection is less like a column sarcophagus, whose discrete parts contain different images, and more like a form of sarcophagus-art represented here by a sarcophagus from the end of the fourth century in which the framing devices have disappeared (fig. 6). In such “processional” sarcophagi, difference is still present in details of dress, posture, and gesture in such a way that the mimetic relationships continue to be dissonant, but difference is subordinated to the overall presentation of the individuals as members of a group.
Collective Biography and Dissonance
Certain features of the collective biographies of desert ascetics composed at the end of the fourth and early in the fifth centuries cohere with the aesthetic style of the processional sarcophagi as well as Prudentius’s collection. The aesthetics of discontinuity is at work in such collections in their organization by enumerative sequence, which draws attention to a certain abstract commonality that the reader, once past the prologues of these works, must infer, since there are no narrative connections supplied to link the parts in an organic or conventionally emplotted way. Further, each individual ascetic is differentiated by “a handful of individualizing features”—what they eat, how they pray, their ritual activities and performances of miracles—“that qualify the generic similarity of the figures and provide a subdued tension between synonymy and antithesis.”81 The individualizing details invite the reader to linger—but not for long, since the real interest in such collections is in the network of relationships that represent the theological vision of the collection as a whole. Here the positive relation of materiality and meaning that characterized the material turn is advertised: the parade of ascetic bodies shows how the sensible world can be a medium for the disclosure of the divine in human life.
Figure 6. Sarcophagus with Christ and the Twelve Apostles. Early Christian, 2nd half of fourth century C.E. Museo Pio Cristiano, Vatican Museums, Vatican State. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY.
Just as Ausonius characteristically wrote prologues to his poems, giving the reader hints about how to participate in constructing their meaning, so also the authors of collective biographies of desert ascetics wrote prefatory pages that encouraged readers to read in specific kinds of ways. For example, the author of the Historia monachorum describes his preference for narrative disjunction, that is, the preference for juxtaposition over continuity, by informing the reader of the virtual impossibility of writing an exhaustive narrative account of the lives of his holy ascetics: since their number is so large as to be virtually uncountable, as he explains, he has adopted enumerative selectivity as his principle of representation, a few standing in for the many.82 Theodoret says the same, and even indicates how the reader should negotiate the divide between abstraction and particularity: “We shall not write a single eulogy for all together, for different graces were given them from God—to one through the Spirit a word of wisdom, to another gifts of healing, to yet another workings of powers—but all these are worked by one and the same Spirit.”83 Each ascetic “fragment” is crucial because together they make tangible the spiritual theme of the collection itself. Thus there is difference, but the activities of each individual are all variations