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Chapter Four Bodies and Spectacles A poetics of material substance, as Daniel Tiffany has written, calls for materialization of the invisible world.1 As his use of the word ‘‘poetics’’ suggests, the invisible world is materialized in images, that is to say, in figurative language or word-pictures that are crucial for knowledge, since what is considered to be ‘‘real’’ is a function of the pictorial imagination .2 In late ancient Christianity, the success of the material turn insofar as it was devoted to the paradox of spiritual bodies—in this chapter , martyrial bodies and their relics—was due in large part to its cultivation of an inner visual imagination that was sensuously intense. In the literature about martyrs that arose in conjunction with the cult of relics, martyrs’ bodies and their dramatic stories were often accorded the same kind of rhetorical dazzle that was accorded to their relics. The martyrs themselves, it seems, became visionary spectacles in order to bolster the belief that their relics were conduits of divine power. But because they were dead and so in the literal sense gone, martyrs were situated at the farthest reaches of sensual apprehension where memory turns to imagination.3 Thus in order to animate the martyrial dead, authors such as Augustine and Prudentius relied on a certain pictorial theatricality that made the invisible visible in the form of mental spectacles and of visionary stories that collapsed past and present to create hyperreal dramas, while authors such as Victricius relied on striking metaphors in order to cultivate the transfigured eye so necessary to this romance of matter. To open this analysis of the ways in which martyrs became sensuous and indeed emotionally charged spectacles, there is no better performance of the rhetorical sensibility in question than the following remarks of John Chrysostom: ‘‘What can I say? What shall I speak? I’m jumping with excitement and aflame with a frenzy that is better than common sense. I’m flying and dancing and floating on air and, for the rest, drunk under the influence of spiritual pleasure.’’4 Thus did John Chrysostom open a homily devoted in part to martyrs and their relics in about 401 c.e. in a martyrium outside Constantinople.5 His emotion is palpable. Indeed, in another homily, also delivered in the presence of relics, Chry- Bodies and Spectacles 83 sostom indicated that the spectacle of viewing that occurred in martyria ought to have a visible effect on the body of the venerator, producing more than ‘‘spiritual’’ acrobatics as in the passage above. My point is that in the same way that those who descend from the theaters reveal to all that they’ve been thrown into turmoil, confused, enervated through the images they bear of everything that took place there, the person returning from viewing martyrs should be recognizable to all—through their gaze, their appearance , their gait, their compunction, their composed thoughts. [They should be] breathing fire, restrained, contrite, sober, vigilant—announcing the spiritual life within through the movements of their body. . . . Let’s always return from martyrs , from spiritual incense, from heavenly meadows, from new and wonderful spectacles (θεαμ#των καινω ν κα παραδξων) in this way.6 Indicating by his negative contrast with the effects of secular theatergoing that the seeing connected with relics is a new—chaste—theater, Chrysostom credited the Christian spectacle with a remarkable, and very physical, transformative power.7 So great is that power—‘‘the grace of the Spirit . . . accompanies these bones’’—that it affects not only the bodies of venerators, but also their clothing, shoes, and even their shadows!8 What kind of seeing produced so dramatic an effect? In these two homilies preached at the tombs of martyrs, Chrysostom briefly implied that there were the following two kinds of seeing. On the one hand, while urging his audience to ‘‘stay beside the tomb of the martyr,’’ he advised them at the same time to ‘‘immerse yourself perpetually in the stories of his struggles.’’9 This suggests that the ‘‘spectacle’’ was a form of visionary storytelling in which the drama signified by the martyr’s bones was enacted in the beholder’s mind. On the other hand, Chrysostom used metaphors of light to indicate the power of the spectacle: in the tomb are ‘‘bones that reflect the very rays of the sun. No, rather they release flashes of light that are more brilliant. . . . So great even is the power of the ashes of the saints that it doesn’t just sit inside the remains, but...

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