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

This latest of Patricia Cox Miller’s books draws together two themes that have been her concerns for a long time: the holy and the bodily, or perhaps more precisely, saints and bodies. The links between the two have been noticed ever since scholars paid attention to the notion of the holy in late antiquity. In the first martyrdom account preserved, that of Polycarp, the faithful used to vie with one another to touch his body during his lifetime; after his death, his relics were important. Such respect, or rather, veneration, for the dead bodies of saints marked out Christians from pagans, who were horrified by bringing corpses into cities, the dwelling place of the living. The cult of icons, which developed out of the cult of relics, also concerns bodily elements. What Miller does in this book is to explore the various notions of bodily elements in late antiquity and also apply the methods and results of modern cultural theory, in particular “thing theory,” taken from the work of Bill Brown. There seem to be two aspects to Miller’s approach. On the one hand, she distinguishes various approaches to bodily elements connected with thing theory—i.e., the notion that in certain ways bodily objects become things, as opposed to mere objects—a focus of attention and significance, which is expressed in late-antique writing through ecphrasis and what Miller calls “visceral seeing” (p. 104). She also introduces notions such as the corporeal imagination of the book’s title and the notion of the “material turn” (p. 3). This latter notion sounds familiar, as it is present in Miller’s “linguistic turn” (in The Poetry of Thought in Late Antiquity: Essays in Imagination and Religion [Burlington, VT, 2001], p. 6) and “cultural turn” (in The Cultural Turn in Late Ancient Studies: Gender, Asceticism, and Historiography, ed. Dale B. Martin and Miller, Durham, NC, 2005). On the other hand, Miller takes us through various ways in which the body becomes significant in late antiquity: the way in which the body becomes integral to the notion of selfhood; the significance of relics; and the way bodies are depicted, which leads naturally to the icon. Throughout, Miller provides examples, drawn from her extensive knowledge of the primary and secondary literature. She moves through the material at quite a pace and too frequently moves from one investigation to another before reaching any, if provisional, conclusion. In the end, it cannot be said that Miller’s discussion is comprehensive. There is no question that her subject is of immense importance. In the ascetic literature, to which she pays less attention, it is increasingly evident how the very importance of ascetic practice, for all that it seems to be directed against the body, ultimately confers on the body central significance. The development of Eucharistic theology points in the same direction: It is our bodies that enable us to participate in the divine through the Eucharistic elements—something, as St. John Damascene points out, denied to the angels, so that in some sense we are superior to the angels through our bodies. Miller helps us to see the importance of the tangible in Christian religious experience in late antiquity, but the treatment is too episodic to be entirely satisfying.