Architects of Piety: The Cappadocian Fathers and the Cult of the Martyrs (review)

"What satiety could there be in remembering the martyrs for one who loves martyrs?," asked Basil of Caesarea in his homily on the Forty Martyrs of Sebasteia (PG 31.508, trans. Leemans et al. [2003:68]). As Vasiliki Limberis shows in her newest book, satiety was deliciously elusive for Basil, his brother Gregory of Nyssa, and their extended family. No less devoted was another prominent Cappadocian family, that of Gregory of Nazianzus. These two families invested considerable attention and resources to the celebration and veneration of martyrs. By Limberis's estimate, of the roughly 111 saints venerated in the Mediterranean by the mid-fourth century, at least twenty-five were venerated in Pontus and Cappadocia. Focusing on these two families, Limberis explores how promoting and participating in the cult of martyrs shaped piety, preaching, and topography in Christian Cappadocia in the late fourth century.

Each of the book's four chapters focuses on a different facet of martyr piety: festivals for the martyrs, the encomia preached at those festivals, (fictive) kinship to the martyrs, and the intersection of martyrdom and gender expectations in sacred biography. Chapter One, "Life Centered Around the Martyrs," captures best how the Christian calendar and devotions revolved around the cult of the martyrs in fourth-century Cappadocia. At this time, festivals of the martyrs far outnumbered feasts marking events from Christ's life. These panegyreis, as the festivals were called, were elaborate affairs, typically more than two days of rituals, reverence, and revelries. Panegyreis also were occasions for synods and other ecclesiastical gatherings, as well as processions, rousing orations about the martyr's agonies, and, on occasion, incubation, or, sleeping close to the martyr's relics in the hope of visions and healing. Limberis also notes preachers' frustrations with the drunkenness, lascivious dancing, banquets, bazaars, and debauchery that accompanied festivals. Applying insights from recent scholarship on the "material turn" in late antiquity (e.g., Patricia Cox Miller's Corporeal Imagination [2009]), Limberis evokes well the sheer physicality of bodies crowded into cramped shrines, singing antiphonally, and pouring into the streets.

Much as the Cappadocians "framed all Christian life with the cult of the martyrs" (13), they did not shy away from the horror that lurked beneath this piety. Their preaching turned collective corpse-fear into what Durkheim would have called "effervescence." Products of advanced rhetorical education, the ekphrastic skills honed by the Gregories and Basil "enable[d the congregation] to lose their fear of seeing, touching, and smelling a dead body" (61). The more visceral the revulsion to corpses, the more preachers exhorted audiences to transform horror into hospitality and feverishly embrace, kiss, and cling to the relics. Such "pictures in words," according to Limberis, worked as mystagogy, guiding and redirecting the senses to perceive spiritual realities.

This book demonstrates well the Cappadocians as architects, genealogists, and even bricoleurs of martyr piety. Limberis calls attention to the Cappadocians' keen eye for kinesthetic and architectural detail in their ekphraseis of actual martyria as well as their roles in ambitious building projects to promote the cult of martyrs. She looks to another region, Hierapolis, for archaeological evidence of martyr shrines from roughly the same period. This comparanda enhances the reader's ability to "visualize" Gregory of Nyssa's martyrium, even if it is less useful for "gauging the accuracy of his descriptions" (88). Limberis's focus on the "physical permanence and institutionalization" of these cults lays important ground work for future efforts to understand the more fluid and portable aspects of material culture surrounding the martyr cults, such as the proliferation of contact relics and the circulation of martyrs' images throughout Christian Asia Minor. Moreover, thanks to Limberis's multifaceted approach to local martyr piety, interpreters may better reassess the motivations behind Gregory of Nyssa's famous critique of Jerusalem pilgrimage (e.g., Ep. 2).

To my mind, the most interesting craftsmanship Limberis uncovers is found in the Cappadocians' rhetorical inventions, namely their proclivity...