Theatrical Shows and Ascetic Lives. John Chrysostom's Attack on Spiritual Marriage (review)

Blake Leyerle. Theatrical Shows and Ascetic Lives. John Chrysostom's Attack on Spiritual Marriage. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001. Pp. xv + 244. $45.00.

Leyerle's approach in this book, much like that of her mentor Elizabeth Clark in Reading Renunciation (Princeton 1999), takes the stubbornly conservative field of Chrysostom research down a much needed new path. Here contemporary theoretical approaches are applied in an effort to further elucidate the late antique past, particularly that feature which is so characteristic of the second half of the fourth century and which looms large in Chrysostom's writings, i.e., asceticism. Observing that the two treatises against spiritual marriage (Adv. eos and Quod reg. [CPG 4311-4312]) owe much of their imagery to the theatre—comedy in the treatise addressed to men, tragedy in that addressed to women—Leyerle digs deeper into Chrysostom's rhetorical agenda to discover that the theatrical imagery serves an even larger cultural critique, that of the virtue of philotimia or love of display. The flip side of this public virtue is the sin of kenodoxia or vainglory.

Inspired by the roughly contemporary Yakto mosaic with its topographical border depicting buildings and activities in Antioch and Daphne, a mythological hunting scene in its middle ground, and a central medallion containing a personification of the virtue of megalopsychia (magnanimity), which she persuasively argues is a coherent allegory of the power of the elite, Leyerle uses the mosaic as a model for her own approach. Her study moves from observable urban reality to ideology to a stylized portrait. It begins with an exploration of the role and nature of the theater in late antique urban life, moves to a study of Chrysostom's view of it, and concludes with an extended analysis of Chrysostom's portrait of "spiritual marriage," which is presented as a species of theater. This analysis is sandwiched between an excursus on the reality of contemporaneous spiritual marriage—necessary, Leyerle argues, if the reader is to understand the degree to which the portrait is a rhetorical caricature—and a discussion of how the portrait is, in fact, a depiction of Chrysostom and his self-understanding, particularly in relation to the monastic movement and the issue of ecclesiastical control. Leyerle concludes that just as in the case of the mosaic, "we see only what the artist would have us see" (211). Consequently, the interest of these "treatises emerges only when they are set where they belong, i.e., in the context of [Chrysostom's] sustained condemnation of the theater . . ., his uneasy relationship to the monastic movement of his day, and his understanding of the rhetorical demands of priestly correction" (212).

Exciting as this book is on one level, particularly for the way in which a primarily literary analysis engages the texts on their own terms, the work leaves the reader strangely unsatisfied. Though the use of the Yakto mosaic is clever and provides a helpful framework on which to develop the analysis, the author's overly strict adherence to the analogy in terms of structure makes the book repetitive in places and difficult to read. At times one feels as if one is swinging back and forth in the manner of Umberto Eco's novel Foucault's Pendulum, wondering if one is ever going to get to the center. Further, the approach that Leyerle takes ultimately does not elucidate Chrysostom's thought-world in the way that she hoped. There are more strands to the issue than Leyerle herself follows, and one has to wonder whether the need to conform to the structure which she adopts does not, in fact, prevent her from digging deeper. By character-ising Chrysostom's attitude towards the theater and displays of wealth and status as "hatred" (4, 5, 41 etc.), for instance, Leyerle, who is so conscious of the bishop's rhetoric in the frame...