The Corporeal Imagination. Patricia Cox Miller
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the Incarnation had legitimized the material realm. In particular, it designates the affective appeal of figurative language about saintly bodies, especially in late ancient and early Byzantine hagiography. Hagiographical images of saintly bodies taught the reader how to bring together the “real” and the transcendent, the material and the spiritual, in a single image. As ephemeral and tangible at once, saints were presented in hagiography as visual paradoxes, and these paradoxical bodies were signs of transfiguration at work in the world. The ambiguous corporeality of the saints, and the way in which pictured bodies, by appealing to the sensory imagination, provoke thoughts of spiritual transformation, is discussed in several of the following chapters. Here I would like to address the phenomenon of the affective image in one of its most visceral (and theological) modes, in which partakers of the Eucharist see the elements of bread and wine turn to “real” flesh and blood before their very eyes.
These images of a bloody Eucharist, contained in texts from the fifth and sixth centuries, had as background the effect of the new emphasis on Incarnation on ideas about the Eucharist in the fourth century. Especially, though not only, in the eastern part of the empire, theologians began to emphasize not the sacrificial, memorial, or symbolic character of the Eucharist, but rather the conversion or materialist theory that regarded the bread and wine as really transformed into the body and blood of Christ. John Chrysostom, for example, exploited “the materialist implications of the conversion theory to the full,” speaking of “eating Christ, even of burying one’s teeth in his flesh,” though he admitted that the transformation could be apprehended not by the senses but only by the mind.59 Ambrose expressed the perceptual conundrum straightforwardly: “Perhaps you may say: ‘I see something else; how do you tell me that I receive the Body of Christ?’”60 Not only did the bread look ordinary, so did the wine: “Perhaps you say: ‘I do not see the appearance of blood.’”61 Clearly, visceral imbibing of the Eucharist of the sort advocated by Chrysostom was difficult; as Georgia Frank has remarked, “receiving the Eucharist required a stretch of the imagination.”62
A central player in this stretching of the imagination was Cyril of Alexandria, for whom the Incarnation was central to an understanding of the Eucharist. As Charles Barber has noted, in his Eucharistic doctrine Cyril “shifted emphasis from the death of Christ to the Incarnation, seeing in the transformation of the elements a sign of the power of the Incarnation to transform man.”63 By taking on flesh, the Word had made possible the transfiguration of human nature, guaranteeing the resurrection of the body.64 Hence it was essential that the Eucharistic elements be truly the body and blood of Christ because, just as Christ represented a transformed humanity, so also the sacramental elements were the vehicle through which the process of deification occurred.65 “He offers us as food the flesh that he assumed,” as Cyril argued.66 The Eucharistic elements were material and divine at once; only thus could they effect metamorphosis.
Cyril’s view of the Eucharist was central to his opposition to Nestorius, whom he perceived to have separated the human and the divine in Christ, thus rendering the Eucharistic “body” a merely human one and so incapable of producing the spiritual and physical transformation of humankind. One legacy of Cyril’s theory of the Eucharist lay with the Monophysite monks of Gaza, who opposed the Council of Chalcedon’s Christological formula that distinguished—too sharply, they thought—the two natures of Christ and so in their view represented a revival of Nestorius’s thought.67 One of those anti-Chalcedonian ascetics of Gaza, John Rufus (bishop of Maiouma, port city of Gaza, in the late fifth century), wrote a hagiographical account of his fellow Monophysite Peter the Iberian, in which he recorded the following scene: “And he [Peter] celebrated the entire [liturgy of the] Eucharist: when he came to the breaking of the almighty bread, with continuous weeping and disturbance of his heart and many fears, as it was custom to him, so much blood burst forth when he broke [the bread] that the entire holy altar was sprinkled [with blood]. [When he turned around he saw Christ next to him who told him:] “Bishop, break [it]! Don’t fear.”68 In his treatise Plerophoria, a series of visions and prophecies that attempt to vindicate especially the Christology of the anti-Chalcedonian party, John Rufus recorded a similarly bloody event that occurred during Lent to a man in the church of St. Menas:
When the holy offering of the eucharist had taken place and everyone had received the terrifying mysteries, he, too, came forward, with tears, to partake. And when he opened his hand he saw, instead of bread, flesh soaked in blood, and his entire hand became blood-red. And trembling from the incredible wonder that had taken place, he said, “Woe is me, how is it possible that I have been found receiving meat when everyone else has received bread? How is it possible that I am partaking in flesh when this is a time of fasting?”69
As Lorenzo Perrone noted, such anecdotes are “the projection in image of the monophysite Christological dogma.”70 But what a projection! These images constitute visceral seeing at its starkest.
Like many of the hagiographical images treated in this book, these Eucharistic images are constituted by a carnal rhetoric that has an ocular and affective immediacy. In keeping with the technique of visceral seeing, they appeal to the sensory imagination, and they certainly demonstrate the role of word-pictures in shaping knowledge of material substance—in these cases, the sacramental elements. But, as with images of relics and their connection with the notion of intercession, the Eucharistic images appeal not just to the senses but also to the intellect, to the extent that they invite the reader to “see” a belief system. Visceral seeing, then, denotes a pictorial idiom in which the senses have cognitive status and the mind is materially engaged. Above all, this idiom teaches readers to “see” what is visually intractable—here, the fleshly presence of Christ in the Eucharist; in chapters that follow, the presence of divine power in a human body or the animate quality of a seemingly inanimate work of art.
Pictorial Theatricality
In these techniques of visualization, the secret of the image’s vitality is its spirited surplus as well as its pictorial theatricality. It is to this latter point that I will now turn in conclusion. The success of the material turn insofar as it was devoted to the paradox of spiritual bodies was due in large part to its cultivation of an inner visual imagination that was emotional and sensuously intense. Especially in the literature about martyrs that arose in connection with the cult of relics, the reader/hearer was situated as an active participant in the martyrial drama by the force of emotionally charged rhetoric. Augustine, for example, preached about the trials of Saint Cyprian by creating a form of spiritual theater of the mind: “Look, here am I, watching Cyprian; I’m crazy about Cyprian…. I’m watching him, I’m delighted by him, as far as I can I embrace him with the arms of my mind.”71 Who could remain unmoved by this dramatic inner spectacle that summons a past event excitedly into the present as though it were playing itself out before one’s very eyes?
This sensibility, based on the visionary power of images—seen in the chapters that follow in such authors as Prudentius, Victricius, Asterius, and Paulinus, in addition to Augustine—might be illuminated by comparison with what art historian Norman Bryson, discussing a text of Philostratus the Elder, has called “the Philostratean ‘Look!”’72 Philostratus’s Imagines, a series of ekphrases that summon forth a series of paintings in a (probably imaginary) gallery, is punctuated with moments when the author, in the midst of one of his descriptions, exclaims, “For look!”73 With this exclamation, as Bryson observes, “the description at last reaches the moment of lift-off,” as “one of the principal desires of the descriptions in the Imagines” is fulfilled: “to cease being words on the page, to come alive in the form of an image, to pass from the opacity of words to the luminous scenes behind the words.” This is “a textual moment at which the description at last feels its own language to dissolve into the light of the scene it opens upon.”74 Late ancient Christian authors too were eager to summon the luminous scenes behind the words, and many of them animated “the dead,” as it were, by using powerful imagery to make the invisible visible.
Enthusiasm for pictorial theatricality as a means for materializing the holy in the everyday world continued into the sixth and seventh centuries, particularly in hagiography. In the final chapters of this book, the focus