The Corporeal Imagination: Signifying the Holy in Late Ancient Christianity (review)

For over twenty years, Patricia Cox Miller has written field guides to inscrutable regions of the late antique imagination. Whether studying dreams or desert ascetics, centaurs or saints, gender bending or gibberish, she tracks the effects of transcendence on the deepest recesses of the human body. Her newest book, The Corporeal Imagination, explores how late ancient men and women imagined the bodies of saints in various modalities: as post-mortem fragments (relics), as bodies in motion (hagiography), and as power-wielding pictures (icons).

In all these modalities, saints' bodies can best be understood as "things," according to Miller. Unlike mere objects, whose lifeless utility is taken for granted, things affirm presence and demand attention. Drawing insights from cultural critic Bill Brown's "thing theory," Miller finds apt language for exposing the anxieties and tensions related to the notion of spiritual bodies. Is a body just stuff? Or, can it be more? That "more" marks what Miller calls a "material turn," by which the ontological gap between matter and spirit narrowed. Focusing on the fourth through sixth centuries, Miller detects a valorization of the body as a conduit for encountering the divine, rather than as some antithesis or obstacle to spiritual insight.

According to Miller, this material turn required new representational strategies by which to show how spirit and matter intertwined. With greater appreciation for color, glitter, and spectacle in public spaces and poetics, late ancient thinkers reimagined the body as a "tangible frame of selfhood" (18). As Miller describes the "corporeal imagination," it consists of "pictorial strategies" that rendered unseen realities visible and animated objects (8). Miller offers a stunning array of late antique sermons, miracle stories, martyrologies, and saints' lives in which such narrative techniques release the "more" of holy "stuff." Metaphors, in particular, merit special attention for their "stretching of the imagination" (12). Attuned to the effects of figural language (yet free of slavish literalism), Miller draws attention to the power and poetics of fragments, whether in the dust specks from a saint's tomb or in the flecks of paint scraped off a saint's portrait and ingested to heal.

Portions of Miller's book first appeared in the pages of this journal. In this revised and expanded form, the broader poetics of embodiment become even more pronounced. Miller recasts these earlier studies against the backdrop of a magisterial chapter on shifting Christian and neoplatonist conceptions of selfhood in the third through the fifth centuries. With focused attention on bodily practices and imagined places, theurgy provides a rich context for understanding defender of relics Victricius of Rouen, who also recognized the importance of matter's connection with the divine.

Miller's remaining eight chapters fall under three broad topics: relics (Chapters 2–4), living saints (Chapters 5–6), and icons (Chapters 7–9). That Miller sandwiches the saintly bodies between their "afterlives" as fragments and portraits is in itself an original and bold reminder that all bodies—whole or in parts—require imagination. Miller offers an engrossing and erudite account of how fleshy bodies emerge from desiccated remains. Relics could be divided without losing their spiritual power. Yet, in this deep replication there was also an aesthetic of discontinuity. This jagged edge to corporeality reshaped how Christians viewed the power and potency of saintly bodies. Miller articulates particularly well the discursive strategies that represented saints as fully present in matter, yet sufficiently separate, too. Most rewarding is her analysis of the discursive strategies through which "the material can 'show' the holy without being completely identified with it" (116). How "relic-minded Christians" embraced a materializing rhetoric while also haunted by the specter of idolatry is a central tension energizing Miller's analysis.

In her justly acclaimed Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire (1991), Averil Cameron called attention to a "rhetoric of paradox" that defined Christian self-identity within the Roman empire. Miller builds on this insight by finding further uses for...