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Chapter Eight Saintly Bodies as Image-Flesh This chapter continues the inquiry, begun in the previous chapter, into the relation between saints and their icons as portrayed in hagiographical anecdotes about them. Although the focus will continue to be on a poetics of saintly substance and its pedagogical value, more attention will be given to later icon-theory and hagiographies’ anticipation of some of its major theses. Since this chapter deals more explicitly with the visual and with problems of representation in literature as well as in iconic art, I begin by introducing a set of terms that will shape the discussion that follows. In his book Picture Theory, W. J. T. Mitchell coined the phrase ‘‘the pictorial turn,’’ by which he meant ‘‘a postlinguistic, postsemiotic rediscovery of the picture as a complex interplay between visuality, apparatus, institutions, discourse, bodies, and figurality.’’1 In a subsequent book, Mitchell returned to this phrase in order to correct the ‘‘fallacy’’ of understanding the postmodern pictorial turn as somehow unique or historically unprecedented, since readers apparently neglected to note his insistence that the turn is a rediscovery. In that later book, entitled What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images, Mitchell wrote, ‘‘The pictorial or visual turn, then, is not unique to our time.’’ Rather, ‘‘the pictorial turn is a trope, a figure of speech that has been repeated many times since antiquity.’’ Further, ‘‘a critical and historical use of this figure would be as a diagnostic tool to analyze specific moments when a new medium, a technical invention, or a cultural practice erupts in symptoms of panic or euphoria (usually both) about ‘the visual.’’’2 In late ancient Christianity, there was such a pictorial turn in the ‘‘image-rich’’ culture of icon-veneration, especially in the eastern empire of the sixth and seventh centuries.3 And this cultural practice certainly did erupt in symptoms of ‘‘panic’’—the iconoclastic attack— and ‘‘euphoria’’—the iconophile defense—in the course of the eighth and ninth centuries, as Christians debated the role of the visual in religious devotion. Prior to the overt theorizing about pictorial representation that characterized the iconoclastic controversy, hagiographies of the sixth and seventh centuries were registering symptoms, if not pre- Saintly Bodies as Image-Flesh 149 cisely of panic and euphoria, at least of awareness that the ‘‘new’’ medium of icons posed problems regarding the status of visual representation that required addressing.4 This awareness is carried in hagiographical anecdotes regarding saints’ relationships with their own icons. As noted in the last chapter, my argument is that these anecdotes are verbal portraits of the process of picturing; that is, they are a kind of theory in storytelling form that anticipates the later, more straightforwardly conceptual debates about images.5 My focus in this chapter is on the odd doubling of saint and icon that occurs in these hagiographical anecdotes. Drawing on Mitchell’s view of a picture as a complex interplay among (inter alia) visuality, bodies, discourse, and figurality, I will analyze hagiography’s depiction of the saint-icon relationship as a meditation on the manner in which flesh enters the order of representation. Image and Prototype A straightforward example of the kind of doubling that is my focus is the following anecdote from John Moschus’s The Spiritual Meadow, a late sixth-century compendium of mini-hagiographies similar to the History of the Monks of Egypt and other late ancient Christian collective hagiographies . According to John Moschus, a group of monks in the monastery of Skopelos in Cilicia told this story: In our times a pious woman of the region of Apamea dug a well. She spent a great deal of money and went down to a great depth, but did not strike water. So she was despondent on account both of her toil and her expenditure. One day she sees [sic] a man in a vision [θεωρει ] who says to her: ‘‘Send for the likeness [+μοωμα] of the monk Theodosius of Skopelos and, thanks to him, God will grant you water.’’ Straightaway the woman sent two men to fetch the saint’s image [ε κνα], and she lowered it into the well. And immediately the water came out so that half of the hole was filled. The men who had conveyed the image brought to us some of that water, and we drank it and gave praise to God.6 In this anecdote, the icon bearing the likeness of the saint performs a miracle, just as the saint would have done in...

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