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Chapter Five: Ambiguous Bodies
- University of Pennsylvania Press
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Chapter Five Ambiguous Bodies Relics were not the only objects that became ‘‘things’’ when they were endowed with surplus value. And they were also not the only things that were difficult to visualize because, as noted in the previous chapter, they were ambiguously corporeal, both immaterially material and materially immaterial. Like relics, saintly bodies were corporeal objects that demanded a strong form of imagination in order to make their spirited presence intelligible in human life. Late ancient hagiographers were confronted with a problem similar to the one faced by Victricius in regard to relics, namely, how to portray the ongoing liveliness of a sainted , but dead, human being. Taking the phrase ‘‘ambiguous corporeality ’’ seriously, this chapter explores hagiographic texts’ use of sensory realism, especially in terms of sight and touch, in order to articulate how the holy could be present in the world in the form of an intangibly tangible saintly body. As objects of the late ancient Christian hagiographical imagination, saintly bodies were subject to what I call ‘‘visceral seeing,’’ a form of interpretation that achieved a transfigured gaze such that saintly bodies emerged in hagiographies as presences that were both ephemeral and tangible at once. As part of the new enthusiasm for the presence of the holy in everyday life, saints signaled a relation of the human subject to the sanctifying potential of human physicality as locus and mediator of spiritual presence and power. As noted in the Introduction, however, the phenomenon of the saintly body raised the issue of reifying the holy in the human. How was it possible to present human corporeality as a vehicle of transcendence without losing the mediating sense of ‘‘vehicle ’’ and simply collapsing matter and spirit into each other? The form of imaginative visualization denoted by the phrase ‘‘visceral seeing,’’ which produced the ambiguously corporeal bodies of the saints, was hagiography’s answer to this question. Hagiography’s crafting of ocular, affective images of the bodies of the saints materialized their invisible but real presence in the world in a rhetorically compelling fashion. As with aspects of the jeweled style discussed in earlier chapters, visceral seeing contributed to the sensuous intensity of the material turn pre- Ambiguous Bodies 103 cisely by joining the traditionally privileged sense of sight with other senses, especially touch: hence visceral seeing—the endowing of the ocular with affect. Saint Augustine, who was no stranger to visceral seeing, will set the stage for the discussion of hagiographical images of the saints that follows . In a passage in De doctrina christiana, Augustine asks the reader to think of the Church as the Bride in the Song of Songs, pointing in particular to the line in which her teeth are compared to sheep. The context for his discussion of this image is his view of the greater pedagogical usefulness of figurative expressions when compared with prosaic language . He uses an explanation of the role of the saints in the church as an example. If one were to explain the role of the saints in nonfigurative language, Augustine writes, one would simply say that the church uses the exemplary lives of saints as disciplinary tools to correct improper behavior and belief. But, Augustine asks, ‘‘Why is it that if anyone says this he delights his hearers less than if he had said the same thing by expounding the passage in the Song of Songs where it is said of the church, as she is being praised as a beautiful woman, ‘Thy teeth are as flocks of sheep that are shorn, which come up from the washing, all with twins, and there is none barren among them’? Does one learn anything else besides what he learns when he hears the same thought expressed in plain words without this similitude?’’1 ‘‘Nevertheless,’’ he continues, ‘‘in a strange way, I contemplate the saints more pleasantly when I envisage them as the teeth of the church cutting off men from their errors and transferring them to her body after their hardness has been softened as if by being bitten and chewed.’’2 What Augustine apparently means here is that striking images, being inherently affective, make their point more efficiently than matter-of-fact statements do. But, however pleasant Augustine may have found it, this is a physically gruesome similitude, and its effect is surely visceral. Readers are drawn into the image by virtue of their very bodies, and are forced by the text to imagine saints as teeth in a presumably very large mouth, where...