Visceral Seeing: The Holy Body in Late Ancient Christianity

Attending to the material orientation of the spiritualizing and ascetic culture of late ancient Christianity, this essay explores the phenomenon of the "ambiguous corporeality" of saintly bodies as they were represented in hagiography and in the cult of relics. Central to the religious sensibility that was both promoted and elicited by these representations were convictions that everyday human life was saturated with divine presence, and that the human body could be a locus of sanctity. Hagiographic texts employed sensory realism, especially in terms of sight and touch, in order to articulate how the holy could be present in the world in a nonidolatrous way. Both ephemeral and tangible at once, saintly bodies provided a site for the negotiation of central theological concerns, with the implications of the doctrine of the incarnation being among the most significant.