Christ Circumcised. Andrew S. Jacobs
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Sicilian clients, but he is also framing the despoiled, and despairing, Greeks for the masterful Roman gaze alongside the spolia of their statuary.45 The weeping Greek becomes for the Roman viewer an object of both desire (the vehicle of paideia, the value of which is confirmed only by the Greeks’ keen sense of its material loss) and of fear and anxiety (as the weeping Greeks threaten to transform into the litigious Sicilians who were Cicero’s clients). The presence of the Greek highlighted Rome’s strength but also problematized the hybridity of Rome by pinpointing the otherness within.
Indeed, Rome’s hybridized hellenism created the space for Greek resistance. As Rome literally and figuratively colonized the Greek past—erecting Greek statues in the Roman forum, purchasing Greek paidagōgoi to teach the alphabeta to Roman noble children—the ostentatious control over Greek difference served to value that difference. Rome viewed the Greek as homo paedagogus, “definitively characterized by paideutic activity,”46 and thereby provided a means for the Greek to assert his own cultural subjectivity. With the power of hybridized imperialism comes the threat of the “mimic man,” as Bhabha has argued.47 As Rome’s imperial appropriation of Hellenism spread across the face of the Mediterranean, so too did the phenomenon later dubbed by Philostratus the “second Sophistic,” the renewal of Attic artistry that can be read as a response to Roman power: the exploitation of the ambivalent relationship between ruler and ruled, the mimicry of Rome’s colonizing power.48 As Romans appropriated Greekness—because they did so—Greeks found a means to resist Romanness.
The simultaneous appropriation and differentiation of “Greekness” in the early Roman Empire provides merely the most visible and closely studied example of political and cultural hybridity at work among ancient Romans, and a clear sense of how the hybridized Roman both created and (to an admittedly limited fashion) empowered the colonized “other.” One of my assumptions throughout this book is that the overall Roman ideology of empire at work in late antiquity lends itself readily to an analysis of the hybrid self, the self that comes into existence not through rejection of “the other,” but rather through a simultaneous distinction from and appropriation of that other. It is this strategy for identity and difference, I suggest, that is taken up in early Christianity. It is this desire for, and fear of, the other at the heart of the self that I argue becomes visible through the circumcision of Christ.
A Different Fetish
The circumcision of Christ is, as I said at the outset, a small mark, but a potent one. In the next chapter, I explore more closely the specific place of circumcision in the economy of signs that circulated to uphold (but also, potentially, to undermine) Roman power in the imperial period. This particular instance of the sign of circumcision, however—typical yet unique—can reveal a great deal about Christian appropriations of difference, identity, and power. It is, to borrow Anne McClintock’s use of the term, a revealing fetish of late ancient Christianity. The term “fetish” arrives in McClintock’s postcolonial study by the parallel routes of the history of religions, where it marks the materialist fixations of “primitive” religions, and theories of psychosexual development, where it figures as the displaced site of libidinous attachment.49 McClintock sees in the fetish the possibility of a psychoanalytically informed social history, cognizant of ambiguity, ambivalence, resistance, and transgression.50
In its simplest sense, “fetishism” displaces desire, the fixation on an object that always represents something more. In McClintock’s more complex reading, fetishism gives the social and intellectual historian a window into “the historical enactment of ambiguity itself.” If a community’s identity results from paradoxical gestures of distinction from and appropriation of an other (hybridity), then the fetish materially reenacts that paradox. McClintock writes: “The fetish thus stands at the cross-roads of psychoanalysis and social history, inhabiting the threshold of both personal and historical memory. The fetish marks a crisis in social meaning as the embodiment of an impossible resolution. The contradiction is displaced onto and embedded in the fetish object, which is thus destined to recur with compulsive repetition. Hence the apparent power of the fetish to enchant the fetishist. By displacing power onto the fetish, then manipulating the fetish, the individual gains symbolic control over what might otherwise be terrifying ambiguities.”51 The fetish embodies that moment in time when the self is formed, that moment of identification and differentiation and splitting; it embodies, and ameliorates, the anxiety of that moment (am I my-self or an-other?). McClintock takes examples of fetish objects that make sense of the triangulated discourses of race, class, and gender in Victorian England: the crisp, white linen blouse, the polished black boot, the leather “slave” band of a scullery maid. Social groups, she argues, also locate the paradox of communal identity in fetish objects: the map, the flag, and the statue that contain and embody the difference of “nation” or “empire.”
The fetish object grants the historian a glimpse into the contradictory figurations of communal selfhood, what I am calling the historical problem of early Christian difference. Other scholars of early Christianity before me have attempted to describe analytically the dense, contradictory figural language often found in our ancient Christian texts. In two important essays, Patricia Cox Miller has taken her cue from literary criticism: borrowing first the “hypericon” from W. J. T. Mitchell to imagine a “fundamentally ambivalent standpoint toward the desert and its role in the development of Christian anthropology”;52 and later the “grotesque” from Geoffrey Galt Harpham to articulate the “impossible split reference” that is neither “a mediation or fusion of opposites but the presentation or realization of a contradiction.”53 Like Mitchell’s hypericon and Harpham’s grotesquerie, the fetish provides an analytic tool that makes sense of—instead of explaining away—the contradictions and ambiguities of early Christian discourse: “Fetishes may take myriad guises and erupt from a variety of social contradictions. They do not resolve conflict in value but rather embody in one object the failure of resolution.”54 By historicizing the fetish, removing it (as McClintock does) from the “narrow scene of [Freudian and Lacanian] phallic universalism,” we can open it up to “far more powerful and intricate genealogies that would include both psychoanalytic insights (disavowal, displacement, emotional investment, and so on), as well as nuanced historical narratives of cultural difference and diversity.”55 The fetish embodies the anxieties of identity, it replays them, it gives them shape that makes them at once manageable but never resolvable.
Christ’s circumcision is such a fetish for early Christianity. A unique moment—by definition, it could occur only once—it is nonetheless repeated in multiple discourses of early Christianity: interpreted, manipulated, disputed (but never discounted), creating a site for the articulation of Christian paradox. When I first began this project, I assumed that the contradictions embodied and enacted by discussions of Christ’s circumcision would center on the fraught Jewish origins of an increasingly non- and anti-Jewish movement. I found, however, that this was only one level on which the circumcision of Jesus embodies “the failure of resolution” in early Christianity. All manner of paradox and contradiction—of impossible, desirable otherness at the heart of the Christian self—are articulated in this sign, made visible and never fully resolved.
My contention throughout this book is that an exploration of the diverse and often unexpected ways that this curious mark on the body of Christ pops up in ancient Christian discourse reveals a great deal about the making of Christian culture and identity. Like late ancient Christianity itself (as I shall argue), Christ’s circumcision is an ultimately unbounded and confounding object of speculation in late antiquity. I do not examine here discrete treatises or homilies “on the circumcision of Christ” (until the last chapter, which seeks out the first examples of such writings), but find my subject weaving in and out of a variety of other discourses: anti-Jewish apology, heresiology, theological essays, ascetic treatises, homilies, and biblical commentaries. Like Judaism itself—the “signified” to which circumcision metonymically pointed in the ancient world—Jesus’ circumcision is found throughout these early Christian discourses, difficult to “pin down” precisely for its perfusion throughout the early Christian imaginary. The remarkable ubiquity of Christ’s circumcision in so many diverse areas of Christian thought is our first hint that this small, diffuse mark might possess