The Corporeal Imagination. Patricia Cox Miller
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and time period as “early Byzantine,” I am considering it an extension of late antiquity insofar as the concerns of the “material turn” were intensified as well as problematized. As I read them, these hagiographies are testaments to the success of the process of materializing the holy, and also to its dangers, especially the danger of idolatry. Two aspects of these hagiographies are highlighted: first, their emphasis on tangible saintly presence, mainly connected with miracle-working, and second, their presentation of icons as animated with saintly presence. Whether an incorporeal saint is shown hugging one of her devotees, as in the case of Saint Thekla, or whether saints are portrayed as zooming in and out of their icon, as in the case of Saints Cosmas and Damian, these hagiographical images temper the pictorial realism with hints that these bodies are not so corporeal as they might seem. As “things,” they are certainly excessive, but they are also ontologically unstable—“ephemerally solid,” as I argue, and so safe from the charge of investing the human body with too much divine power.
The Body in Theory
The overall focus of this book, then, is on the human body and its refraction through various images and rhetorics, and I am aware that anyone who now approaches the topic of the body must do so with some trepidation, given how problematic and complex it has become in a wide variety of disciplines. In an article in the collection entitled Fragments for a History of the Human Body, classicist Jean-Pierre Vernant summarized the situation succinctly: in contemporary theory “the body is no longer posited as a fact of nature, a constant and universal reality, but as an entirely problematic notion, a historical category, steeped in imagination, and one that must be deciphered within a particular culture by defining the functions it assumes and the forms it takes on within that culture.”75 As a problematic phenomenon, the body has left the natural realm and entered the discursive domain. In light of—and indebted to—the work of Michel Foucault, contemporary social and philosophical theory has viewed the body in three basic ways, articulated as follows by Bryan Turner: (1) “as an effect of deep structural arrangements of power and knowledge”; (2) as “a symbolic system that produces a set of metaphors by which power is conceptualized”; and (3) as “a consequence of longterm historical changes in human society.”76
As Turner observes, all three of these views “challenge any assumption about the ontological coherence of the body as a universal historical phenomenon”; one “cannot take ‘the body’ for granted as a natural, fixed, and historically universal datum of human societies,” despite the fact that cultural conceptualizations of the body condition perception of the body in such a way that the body may seem natural.77 And yet, despite their concern to historicize and particularize the body, sometimes such theories risk losing the body in a haze of abstractions. After some two decades of cultural obsession with the body, theorists are still “far from assured about its referent,” as Sarah Coakley has remarked.78 Already more than ten years ago, feminist philosopher Judith Butler, attempting to write on the materiality of the body, wrote about her own frustration in this regard: “I tried to discipline myself to stay on the subject, but found that I could not fix bodies as simple objects of thought…. I kept losing track of the subject … and I began to consider that perhaps this resistance to fixing the subject was essential to the matter at hand.”79
As Butler goes on to say, her resistance was aimed at philosophical approaches, “always at some distance from corporeal matters,” that “try in that disembodied way to demarcate bodily terrains: they invariably miss the body or, worse, write against it.”80 In recent years a host of interpreters has joined Butler in her quest for a more satisfying account of the materiality of the body, as the following litany of book titles suggests: Transgressive Corporeality, The Body in the Mind, The Absent Body, Cutting the Body, Stately Bodies, Pictures of the Body, Volatile Bodies, and of course Butler’s own punning title, Bodies That Matter.81 All of these, and many more, can be read as attempts to address Butler’s question, “What about the materiality of the body?”82
Historians of ancient Christianity have also made significant contributions toward answering this question, especially regarding ascetic behaviors, gender construction, and sexual practices and theories. In various ways recent scholarly studies of the desert fathers and mothers, of resurrection, of such theologians as Jerome, John Chrysostom, Gregory of Nyssa, Athanasius, and Augustine, have all brought forward the body “as a tangible frame of selfhood in individual and collective experience, providing a constellation of physical signs that signify relations of persons to their contexts.”83 The perspectives that have provided the framework for these historical reconstructions have been drawn, in the main, from social history and anthropology, as well as from rhetorical and feminist theories. What my study adds to these is a broadly aesthetic perspective, one that emphasizes the role of the senses and imaginative sensibility in any approach to the question of the body in late ancient Christianity. By focusing on the material turn in this time period, I hope to show how the life of affect, while fully instantiated in corporeality, was endowed with a creative, cognitive function.
My own approach to the question of the materiality of the body has focused in large part on analyzing the intrinsic role of word-pictures in shaping knowledge of material substance. In this I have been indebted to Michael Roberts’s conception of what he calls “the jeweled style” in late ancient literature and art.84 This was a style that privileged brilliance and dazzle, in art as well as in writing. It was a style that conveyed meaning by juxtaposing images, as in a frieze sarcophagus or collective hagiography, rather than by mounting a linear argument. The appeal of this style, that is, was to the fragment, like a colorful mosaic tile; the visual immediacy of the part was crucial to the role that this aesthetics played in the development of a corporeal imagination in late ancient Christianity.
As I have put together this book, I have emulated something akin to the “jeweled style” of late ancient Christianity. In particular: most of the ideas in this book began as engagements with “fragments”—with a text’s scintillating metaphor or oddly provocative anecdote. Textual images can themselves be considered “things” (to recall Brown’s thing theory) whose excess or surplus value make them magnets of interpretive attention. I have thus been engaged with the dazzle of late ancient rhetoric from the beginning. In general: I have assembled the material in this book in chapters that circle around a common set of themes rather than following a linear, chronological argument. This means that some ancient texts appear in more than one chapter. As with the jeweled style, repetition is valued for the difference it can disclose. Thus each time texts appear they take on additional shades of meaning because each chapter presents a slightly different language and framework for the phenomenon under discussion. Finally, I have imagined that each chapter is a single “image”juxtaposed with the others, and I hope that this introduction has helped articulate the meanings that emerge from such juxtapositions, though it has certainly not exhausted them. For evocative disclosure, as contrasted with descriptive closure, lies at the heart of the jeweled style.
Chapter One
Bodies and Selves
The shift in sensibility that I have called “the material turn” was not limited to late ancient Christianity. The reconfiguration of the relationship between materiality and meaning was part of a wider cultural phenomenon, as several studies have shown. Beginning in the fourth century, there was an increase in appreciation for color, glitter, and spectacle, from public ceremonies to personal clothing.1 This heightened appeal to the eye, variously characterized as a new theatricality and “a peculiarly expressionistic manner,” can also be seen in poetry and sculpture—a “jeweled style” based on preference for visual immediacy, which was achieved by emphasis on the part at the expense of elaborations of organic wholes.2 Petitioning the visual imagination of the spectator also marked the biographical literature of this period, as authors invited readers to “see” holiness in the bodies of their heroes.3 As noted in the Introduction, an increase in the ability to “see more than was [literally] there” seems characteristic of the cultural scene that also witnessed a new appreciation for the role of both “things” and of the material imagination in understandings of self-identity.4
Central to the material