The Corporeal Imagination: Signifying the Holy in Late Ancient Christianity

Chapter Six: Subtle Bodies

Chapter Six Subtle Bodies From the fourth through the seventh centuries, late ancient Christianity fostered the development of three remarkable movements—the cult of the saints, the cult of relics, and the production of iconic art—all of which were premised on the conviction that the material world, particularly in the form of the human body, was a locus of spiritual presence. As noted in the Introduction, the ‘‘tangible, palpable piety’’ that began to emerge in the fourth and fifth centuries was spurred in part by a theological position that emerged in the context of the Trinitarian and Christological controversies of those centuries, namely, that ‘‘at the incarnation the divine itself had entered into matter, sanctifying and renewing the whole of material existence. The elaboration of Christian piety in sensory terms was a further expression of this view.’’1 This dignifying of ‘‘matter,’’ however, raised what later became urgent issues: the problem of idolatry, understood as investing the material world with too much meaning, and the consequent need to articulate how the holy could be present in the contingent order in a nonidolatrous fashion.2 The focus of this chapter is on one of the most interesting features of ancient Christian representations of the bodies of the saints, namely, that they disrupt the conventional binary of transcendence and materiality in such a way that the material can ‘‘show’’ the holy without being completely identified with it. In a seventh-century ex-voto mosaic in the Church of Saint Demetrius in Thessaloniki, for example, the saint appears in living color in front of a petitioner—but his hands are rendered in silver, not in mosaic tiles. In a single image, this icon brings together the transcendent and material aspects of the saint, whose silver hands emphasize ‘‘the intimacy of touch yet also its supernatural quality .’’3 This phenomenon of the saint as material apparition was part of a particular problematic in late ancient Christianity that developed in the course of the burgeoning of the cult of the saints in the fourth and fifth centuries: how might human holiness be depicted without either transgressing on the prerogatives of divinity or undermining the earthy humanity of the saint? The hagiographers whose saintly images are featured in the following discussion did not, of course, articulate this prob- Subtle Bodies 117 lematic as I have. Yet I argue that their crafting of these images can be read as pictorial strategies for conceptualizing transfiguration enacted on the human level. Imagining Saintly Bodies As the later iconoclastic controversy of the eighth and ninth centuries made very clear, the transfiguration of both Christ and human beings could be understood in two quite different ways: on the one hand, as the triumph of spirit over matter, and on the other, as the triumph of flesh over human fallenness. In art, the primary battleground of the iconoclastic controversy, these different understandings of transfiguration had direct implications for the representation of saints as exemplars of human holiness. In Marie-José Mondzain’s succinct summary of the issue, the iconoclasts’ position that transfiguration signaled a triumph of spirit over matter rendered ‘‘the portrayal of that triumphant and radiant immateriality useless and impious,’’ while the iconophiles’ understanding of transfiguration to mean ‘‘the triumph of the flesh over sin, suffering, and death’’ entailed an affirmation of art. ‘‘Portrayal [of saints as well as Christ] is therefore the portrayal of life itself.’’4 The two sides of the debate could not be clearer: either the body is glorified, or else it is beside the point. In the three centuries prior to the outbreak of the iconoclastic controversy —centuries that witnessed a ‘‘growth industry’’ in hagiographical literature as well as what Averil Cameron has termed an ‘‘extreme proliferation of religious imagery’’5 —the battle lines drawn between ‘‘radiant immateriality’’ and ‘‘the flesh’’ were not quite so stark, and yet there were indications that religious investment in human holiness carried certain risks. It was one thing for authors such as Basil of Caesarea to declare that even the tiniest plants and animals might offer a ‘‘faint reflection’’ of the grandeur of God6 ; but it was quite another to view certain people, or their relics, or their artistic portraits as somehow imbued with the holy. In part this was because embodying the holy in the form of saints posed a new problem in terms of imagining the relation between the human and the divine. For centuries, the Graeco-Roman cosmos in which Christianity developed had been densely populated...