The Corporeal Imagination. Patricia Cox Miller

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Figure 5. Sarcophagus of Junius Bassus, Roman prefect. Museum of the Treasury, St. Peter’s Basilica, Vatican State. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY.

      Just as the stylistic features of the aesthetics of discontinuity cut across differences of human expression, whether artistic or literary, so also they were not unique to any particular religious affiliation.²³ In conversation with Roberts and other theorists, my contribution to the exploration of these stylistic affinities will be to suggest ways in which certain features of late ancient Christianity cohere with or enact this cultural aesthetics. Specifically, my focus will be on two phenomena of the fourth and early fifth centuries that I think are related, aesthetically as well as theologically: these phenomena are, on the one hand, the ritual, literary and artistic practices associated with the veneration of relics, and, on the other, a genre of literature that I call “collective hagiography”—for example, the Historia monachorum and related collections like Theodoret’s Historia religiosa and Palladius’s Lausiac History—a literary genre that burgeoned with the establishment of desert asceticism. My aim is to provide ways of addressing the following question: how can these two phenomena of late ancient Christianity be seen as “narrative lines” marked by the effects of an aesthetics of dissonant echoing?

      Exemplifying the Aesthetics of Discontinuity

      Before delving more deeply into the formal properties of this aesthetic disposition, however, some concrete examples will be useful. These examples center on the practices of three people, two of whom were near-contemporaries at the beginning of this time period, and one who lived toward its end. First, a Spanish noblewoman who lived in Carthage, dubbed “the famous Lucilla” by Hippolyte Delehaye: she possessed a bone from the body of a martyr and had adopted the ritual practice of kissing the bone prior to engaging in another ritual practice, taking the Eucharist.²⁴ Meanwhile, Optatian Porfyry, a poet and Lucilla’s near-contemporary, sat down and wrote poems that can be read forwards or backwards either as wholes or line by line, such that “each poem contains a number of inherent permutations of itself.”²⁵ He called his poems “chains” and “difficult bits.”²⁶ Finally, toward the end of the fourth century, there was Ausonius, rhetorician and poet: he was a lover of catalogues and enumeration and at least twice he wrote six versions of the same joke.²⁷ He was also a master of the ekphrasis, a narrative description of a material artifact. However, his ekphrastic practice led him to see more than was there; as his friend Symmachus playfully remarked about one such ekphrastic passage, the famous catalogue of fish in his poem “Mosella,” he had never seen these textual fish on any literal table!²⁸

      What do these three have in common? I will address them one by one, attempting to weave them together toward a more formal statement of the aesthetic that is my topic.

      Recall that Lucilla, a venerator of relics, kissed a martyr’s bone before taking the Eucharist. Here are two ritual actions that echo each other, but dissonantly: ritual ingestion of elements considered to represent a whole body is preceded by ritual veneration of an element of a body that was once whole. Further, in each case the fragmentary elements are considered to be suffused with wholeness despite the literal absence to which they attest.²⁹ This structure of not-quite-congruent repetition, together with the focus on the part or the fragment, which is itself an uncanny repetition, are two of the components of the aesthetic that I wish to explore.

      Despite the rebuke of her deacon,³⁰ Lucilla with her bone stood poised on the threshold of the dramatic expansion of the so-called “cult” of relics in the course of the fourth century, a “cult” better described as an aesthetic in which division—the parceling out of the bones, ashes, and other remains of martyrs’ bodies—was paradoxically also multiplication, as in the analogous case of the holy cross in Jerusalem, which remained miraculously whole despite being constantly broken up into fragments, themselves considered to be “whole.”³¹ This was an aesthetic in which the tension between the demands of expansion and limit was made explicit; and also one in which the relationship between objects occupying space and abstract form was explored, particularly in forcing human body parts beyond the limits of the physical to new forms of aesthetic expression. I shall return to the topic of the aestheticizing of relics.

      The knotty linear relationship between objects occupying space and abstract form was explored in a textual way by Optatian Porfyry, a sometime-poet in the court of Constantine the Great, exiled around C.E. 315 and recalled to imperial favor early in 325.³² His poetic practice provides an intriguing literary parallel to Lucilla’s ritual practice regarding relics. Described by one interpreter as representative of a tendency in fourth-century poetry toward “a kind of abstract literary extremism,” Optatian’s creations are pattern poems that “occupy space in two different dimensions.”³³ Few would disagree with the estimation that Optatian’s poems as poems are virtually unreadable; even a sympathetic reader has declared that “Optatian is not a good poet; he is not even a bad poet. His poems are prodigies, monsters in the literal sense.”³⁴ A brief sampling of these poetic monsters will suffice to indicate the aesthetic at work in them.

      Two types of poems are prominent in Optatian’s poetic output, most of which honors Constantine.³⁵ First, there are the figurative poems in which red ink was used to highlight certain letters in particular words so as to form a picture or a geometrical pattern, and the highlighted letters themselves make syntactical and semantic sense when read as a sequence, forming a poem-within-the poem. Perhaps the most astounding of these is his Poem 19, in which the highlighted letters form the shape of an oared ship whose mast is the XP, the symbolic Christogram used here to recognize Constantine as victor. Further, the highlighted Latin letters of the Christogram “change their linguistic orientation and must be considered Greek, the Roman H becoming Greek eta, Roman C sigma, and so on,” as indeed they do in other poems as well.³⁶ In Poem 19, the letters forming the Christogram begin an elegiac couplet in Greek that moves down the mast to encompass part of the ship, at which point a series of Latin hexameters takes over.³⁷

      Of course the poem as a whole, if read as a sequence of innocent linear lines, also makes sense in terms of a conventional semantic flow. However, “the impulse to verbal mimesis is conspicuously weak,” consisting in the main of “stale praises of the emperor” like most of the other poems.³⁸ Further, the alphabetic line of narrative is interrupted by the pictographic line, and “the reader is pushed over the threshold of one order of experience—reading a text—into another—seeing a picture.”³⁹ In terms of the aesthetic under consideration, what is striking is the poem’s refusal to be continuous in the face of being continuous or whole nonetheless. Such pattern poems are fitting, if exaggerated, examples of the ocular dimension of the material turn and its aesthetic style. They enact a visual poetics as well as a poetics of materiality: as Susan Stewart has observed, pattern poets create “a poetry that is objectlike or artifactual,” due to the assertion of the part over against the whole.⁴⁰

      This interest in wholes whose “parts [make] their appeal constantly and all at the same time”⁴¹ is also characteristic of the phenomenon of relics which, like Optatian’s poetic artifacts, not only occupied space in two registers (heaven and earth, in the case of relics) but were also the subject of intense speculation about the relation between disjunction and continuity: as Victricius of Rouen explained, “Nothing in relics is not full [in reliquiis nihil esse non plenum] … Division must not be inserted into fullness, but in the division that lies before our eyes the truth of fullness should be adored.”⁴² СКАЧАТЬ