The Corporeal Imagination. Patricia Cox Miller

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СКАЧАТЬ remarks, and he summarizes the function of the incarnation as follows: “According to Athanasius, the incarnation of the word made a successful ascetic life possible once again…. When the Word of God assumed a human body, and perfectly guided it, he divinized this body and made it incorruptible; through their ‘kinship of the flesh’ to the Word’s body, individual human beings can restore a proper relationship between their own body and soul and thus live a virtuous life.”¹²⁸ Those who came closest to this divinization of the flesh were those who, like the exemplary Saint Antony of the Life of St. Antony, practiced ascetic self-discipline.

      In the wake of Athanasius’s hagiographical master-text, such holy persons—whether alive or dead—not only gave “human density” to the need to connect heaven and earth, they also came to be seen as conduits of spiritual power.¹²⁹ If the fourth century witnessed the rise of the holy man and the boom in hagiographical literature devoted to this figure, it also witnessed the burgeoning of another form of visible holiness, the cult of the saints and their relics. Like the body of the theurgist, the living body of the ascetic holy man and the dead body of the saintly martyr were seen as vehicles of transcendence, their “matter” charged with religious meaning.

      The body parts that were venerated in the cult of relics were mostly from bodies of martyrs, who had not necessarily been practitioners of asceticism.¹³⁰ Yet the view of ascetic practice as the highest form of Christian spirituality and the veneration of relics were connected, since it was precisely ascetics (Ambrose, Jerome, Gregory of Nyssa, and Victricius, for example) who promoted the cult of relics.¹³¹ As forms of spirituality aimed at overcoming human instability, asceticism and the cult of relics were united by the need for a tangible locus of sanctity.¹³² Furthermore, they shared similar views of the nature of divine presence in the world insofar as both demanded sensory expression, whether in a living or a dead body, for their abstract belief in conduits of divine power. Treading a fine line between the touch of the real and the touch of the transcendent, they espoused a spirituality that embraced earthy contact while avoiding idolatrous materialism.¹³³

      As one who developed a “radically incarnational theology” of relics, Victricius of Rouen, bishop from 385 to 410 C.E., is the only known theoretician of the cult of relics.¹³⁴ As his treatise De laude sanctorum shows, the performative as well as the religio-aesthetic dimension of “matter” was a feature of the Christian cult of relics as it was of the Neoplatonic animation of statues.¹³⁵ As part of his argument that “the truth of the whole corporeal passion [of the martyr] is present in fragments of the righteous,” Victricius wrote that a proper understanding of relics called for an imaginative use of sight as well as language: “Why, then, do we call them ‘relics’? Because words are images and signs of things. Before our eyes are blood and clay. We impress on them the name of ‘relics,’ because we cannot do otherwise, with (so to speak) the seal of living language. But now, by uttering the whole in the part, we open the eyes of the heart, not the barriers of our bodily sight.”¹³⁶ One can only understand how “blood, after martyrdom, is on fire with the reward of divinity” when one interprets with the “eyes of the heart,” not allowing “bodily sight” to be a barrier. This would seem to be a reversion to Origen’s doctrine of the spiritual senses were it not for the fact that Victricius and his congregation were in fact literally looking at fragments of human bodies. What Victricius hoped to accomplish was a retraining of physical sight, such that one could apprehend how “an animate body” (animatum corpus) had been converted by God “into the substance of his light” (ad sui luminis transferre substantiam).¹³⁷ Victricius shared with Proclus an ability to see more than was there as he developed this strategy for retrieving what was visually intractable, the presence of divine power in an earthy object.

      It is difficult not to notice the similarity between the theurgist’s ἄγαλμα ἒμψυχον, the animated statue, and the relic venerator’s animatum corpus, the animated body. Writing about Augustine’s worry that agency might be attributed to the martyrs themselves rather than to God, Clark notes that “invocation of martyrs could too easily be assimilated to theurgy (which used ‘sympathetic’ physical objects to invoke divine powers) or, worse, to sorcery.”¹³⁸ Assimilation of the two is understandable, since both were material objects that centered divine power, giving it a place from which it could be communicated to human beings, thus drawing them into the network of relationships that they activated. Unlike animated statues, however, whose function was to impart divine wisdom, the major performative function of relics was healing: because martyrs, who “heal and wash clean,” are “bound to the relics by the bond of all eternity,” they bring “heavenly brilliance” into human life in the very concrete form of physical restoration.¹³⁹

      Although Victricius mentioned healing at several points, recitation of miraculous cures was not part of his sermon. His main interest lay elsewhere, in explaining how such tiny bodily fragments can be so powerful. His argument hinged on his view of the consubstantiality of all bodies. Since the saints are entirely united to Christ and thus to God, and since God cannot be divided, therefore the whole is present in every part: “nothing in relics is not complete” and “unity is widely diffused without loss to itself.”¹⁴⁰ Bringing out the full incarnational thrust of his argument, Victricius stated that not only the souls but also the bodies of the martyrs are united with Christ: “They are entirely with the Savior in his entirety … and have everything in common in the truth of the godhead…. By righteousness they are made companions of the Savior, by wisdom his rivals, by the use of limbs concorporeal, by blood consanguineous, by the sacrifice of the victim sharers in the eternity of the cross.”¹⁴¹ Much like the theurgical view of the diffusion of the transcendent in special material objects, Victricius’s position was premised on the belief that “God is diffused far and wide, and lends out his light without loss to himself.”¹⁴²

      Having established that “the martyr is wholly present—flesh, blood, and spirit united to God—in the relic,” as Clark observes, “Victricius preempts a shocked reaction: is he really saying that these relics are just what God is, the ‘absolute and ineffable substance of godhead’ (8.19–21)? His answer, apparently, is ‘yes.’”¹⁴³ Yes, but with an important qualifier: the martyr “is the same by gift not by property, by adoption not by nature.”¹⁴⁴ Relics, that is, retained enough of the human so that they could function as condensations of the ideal self that ascetics such as Victricius hoped to achieve. Not only are the martyr-saints advocates, judges, and associates of their venerators, but they are also teachers of virtue who “remove the stains of vice” in the human, body and soul.¹⁴⁵ Perhaps the most astonishing aspect of Victricius’s view of relics is their ability to remake human identity in their own image. When Victricius says, “I touch fragments,” he is touching the fiery rays of his own transformation.¹⁴⁶

      In the presence of relics, one of the things that their venerators “see” is that the martyrs are “dwellers in our hearts” (habitatores pectoris nostri).¹⁴⁷ What relics put one in touch with, that is, are models of human identity toward which the soul strives. Victricius was fairly straightforward about this. In the following passage, in which he imagined the ceremonial entry of the relics into Rouen as a Christian adventus, he wrote:

      There is no lack of things for us to admire: in place of the royal cloak, here is the garment of eternal light. The togas of the saints have absorbed this purple. Here are diadems adorned with the varied lights of the jewels of wisdom, intellect, knowledge, truth, good counsel, courage, endurance, self-control, justice, good sense, patience, chastity. These virtues are expressed and inscribed each in its own stone. Here the Savior-craftsman has adorned the crowns of the martyrs with spiritual jewels. Let us set the sails of our souls towards these gems.¹⁴⁸

      One feature of this passage that deserves mention first is its description of the ritualistic character of the entry of relics into the city. Underlying Victricius’s imaginative portrayal is an important feature of the cult of relics: human body parts did not become the animate bodies that were relics СКАЧАТЬ