The Corporeal Imagination. Patricia Cox Miller

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Figure 6. Sarcophagus with Christ and the Twelve Apostles. Early Christian, 2nd half of fourth century C.E. Museo Pio Cristiano, Vatican Museums, Vatican State. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY.

      Just as Ausonius characteristically wrote prologues to his poems, giving the reader hints about how to participate in constructing their meaning, so also the authors of collective biographies of desert ascetics wrote prefatory pages that encouraged readers to read in specific kinds of ways. For example, the author of the Historia monachorum describes his preference for narrative disjunction, that is, the preference for juxtaposition over continuity, by informing the reader of the virtual impossibility of writing an exhaustive narrative account of the lives of his holy ascetics: since their number is so large as to be virtually uncountable, as he explains, he has adopted enumerative selectivity as his principle of representation, a few standing in for the many.⁸² Theodoret says the same, and even indicates how the reader should negotiate the divide between abstraction and particularity: “We shall not write a single eulogy for all together, for different graces were given them from God—to one through the Spirit a word of wisdom, to another gifts of healing, to yet another workings of powers—but all these are worked by one and the same Spirit.”⁸³ Each ascetic “fragment” is crucial because together they make tangible the spiritual theme of the collection itself. Thus there is difference, but the activities of each individual are all variations on an abstract theological line, an understanding of how human life can be suffused with spiritual presence. A particular form of religious anthropology, then, is the “narrative line” that is brought to the fore by the repetitive format that makes collective biographies read like processions of verbal icons.

      The discrete parts of these collections are not full biographies but ekphrastic sketches that picture a “way of life” (πολιτεία) that the authors hope will be paradigmatic, as the reader is invited to participate in imagining those activities that embody the so-called “angelic life.”⁸⁴ Imagination is paramount here, since each compositional unit is itself only a series of disjointed fragments; often only two or three anecdotes suffice to convey the paradox of fragmentary fullness that was also characteristic of relics. Representational integrity, in other words, is carried by the fragment.

      Similarly, the visual immediacy of these literary “jewels” is emphasized: the authors of these collections constantly privilege metaphors of looking by calling attention to the fact that they had gazed at these ascetics, and this, together with their use of metaphors of light to describe the shining faces of many of these near-angels, calls attention to the permeability of the texts’ boundaries as readers are drawn into the visual experience that the texts evoke.⁸⁵ As we have seen when considering the ekphrastic art of other texts, they often achieve their “reality-effect” by petitioning senses that exceed the visual. This is true of these collections as well. What reader of the Historia monachorum, for example, could resist the sensuous allure of an anecdote such as the one that pictures Macarius entering an eerie garden in the middle of the desert, conversing with and embracing the two holy men who lived there, and eating the marvelously large and colorful paradisal fruit that they provide?⁸⁶

      Like relics, the subjects of these collections have been aestheticized and function as verbal artifacts. Theodoret, in fact, was overt about his compositional goal of constructing word-pictures.⁸⁷ In his prologue, he explains that he is “honoring in writing” ascetics who are “living images and statues” (τινας εἰϰόνας ἐμψύχους ϰαί στήλας), but his descriptions, he is quick to note, are not sculptures in bas-relief (τὰ τούτων ἐϰτυπώματα); that is, his ekphrases are not mimetic to mere appearances. Rather, what he has done is “to sketch the forms of invisible souls” (τῶν ἀοϱάτων ψνχῶν τάς ἰδέας σϰιογϱαϕουμεν),⁸⁸ a statement whose verb connotes the artist’s practice of “painting with shadows” in order to achieve an effect of solidity. Theodoret, like Gregory of Nyssa and others, draws attention to the figural status of his verbal representations by suggesting their mutual inherence with painting; thus his collection occupies two registers at once, just as his subjects do, being simultaneously angel and human. As “things,” Theodoret’s subjects are these word-pictures, images that are both sensuous (human) and metaphysical (angelic). They signify both as fragments of the whole and emblems of the theology of the whole.

      Finally, Theodoret’s claim that his sketches do not reproduce mere appearance is a succinct characterization of what I see as one of the most significant aspects of the aesthetics of discontinuity, its creative understanding of mimesis. When Gregory of Nazianzus wrote the funeral oration for his friend Basil of Caesarea, he noted that many of Basil’s contemporaries, acting on a kind of misplaced admiration for the man, had imitated his habits and person (his gait, the shape of his beard, his way of eating) and even his physical defects (his paleness and hesitant manner of speaking), so that “you might see many Basils as far as what appears to the eye, [but these are] just statues in the shadows,” like an “echoing of a sound.” In contrast to what he calls “ill-conceived imitation,” Gregory commends the kind of mimesis engaged in by Basil: he imitated, not “Peter,” but the “zeal of Peter”; not “Paul,” but “the energy СКАЧАТЬ