The Corporeal Imagination: Signifying the Holy in Late Ancient Christianity

Conclusion

Conclusion In his work Earth and Reveries of Will, devoted to what he called the ‘‘imagination of matter,’’ Gaston Bachelard wrote the following about images that ‘‘seek substance’’: ‘‘In a world of metal and stone, wood and rubber, images of terrestrial matter abound. They are stable and steady; visible to the eye; palpable to the hand. They arouse a muscular pleasure the moment we experience a desire to work them. It would seem, then, a simple task to illustrate the philosophy of the four elements through such images.’’1 It would seem a simple task to elucidate material images but, as Bachelard went on to observe about ‘‘the substances of earthen matter,’’ they are so familiar, ‘‘their forms so manifest, so evident, so real, that it is not readily apparent how dreams of their deepest essence are to be extracted.’’2 Quoting Baudelaire, he concludes, ‘‘‘The more concrete and solid matter seems, the more delicate and difficult the work of the imagination.’’’3 The central difficulty in imagining matter, as Bachelard saw it, is that the apparent solid palpability of earthy objects seduces one into the realist trap of thinking that perception precedes imagination: ‘‘first we see things, and only then do we imagine them, combining in the imagination fragments of perceived reality with memories of actual experience .’’4 Bachelard rejected this positivistic view: images (and the imagining process) do not passively reproduce ‘‘reality’’; they actively create it.5 Images, that is to say, do not function to confirm habituated modes of understanding; they are themselves constitutive of insight.6 In addressing specifically the imagination of matter, Bachelard would have joined Daniel Tiffany (himself a reader of Bachelard’s work) in arguing against the positivist equation of materialism and realism and for the intrinsic role of word-pictures in shaping Western knowledge of material substance.7 Ian Hacking’s position on the relation of image and matter, quoted in the Introduction, bears repeating here: ‘‘Without pictures, there can be no claim to reality.’’8 The inherently figurative character of late ancient Christianity’s appropriation of ‘‘matter’’ as a locus of religious meaning is the perspective that articulates the unifying standpoint of this book. Engaging the ‘‘material turn’’—the shift in late ancient sensibilities regarding the pos- 180 Conclusion itive signifying potential of the material world—has led me to see the paramount importance of the corporeal imagination for Christian meaning-making in the late Roman and early Byzantine period. How Christians imagined matter—specifically, the matter of the human body as presented in relics, hagiography, and icons—as a primary locus of spiritual presence, power, and activity has been the focus of the foregoing discussions. The sanctifying potential of human physicality as locus and mediator of the transcendent in the material world was, I argue, the product of the poetics of matter developed by a variety of Christian authors in a variety of contexts, artistic as well as literary. I have discussed this ‘‘magic by which objects become values’’9 using several different vocabularies drawn from contemporary literary and cultural theory: W. J. T. Mitchell’s ‘‘pictorial turn,’’ Michael Roberts’s ‘‘aesthetics of discontinuity,’’ Bill Brown’s ‘‘thing theory,’’ Daniel Tiffany’s ‘‘poetics of material substance’’ and ‘‘ambiguous corporeality,’’ Gaston Bachelard’s understanding of imagination’s creativity as a deformation of images, James Elkins’s notion of ‘‘visceral seeing,’’ and the New Historicism ’s ‘‘touch of the transcendent’’ and ‘‘touch of the real.’’ In addition to these, there is one phrase that I have mentioned only in passing but that in fact encapsulates and underscores the import and impact of the various theories to which I have appealed to articulate my position, and I will conclude by elaborating briefly on it. In Chapter 5, when discussing the visceral images of saints in hagiography , I noted that ‘‘the ocular and affective quality of these images is an appeal to the sensory imagination of the reader, and their visual and emotional intensity aid in naturalizating the fictive—because textual— world of which they are a part.’’ Next I remarked about these images— and here is the operative phrase—that ‘‘they are figuratively real, that is, they are narrative pictorial strategies that seduce the reader into forgetting that these are images in texts.’’10 Perhaps no phrase better captures the sublime carnality of the early Christian imagination of matter than ‘‘figural realism.’’ As articulated by Hayden White, figural realism is a kind of historical discourse that is ‘‘less a matching of an image...