demonstrate a shift in conceptions of the self with respect to materiality, broadly construed to include both the physical world as well as the human body. By plotting this shift as a movement from a religious orientation of the self that emphasized “the touch of transcendence” to one that emphasized “the touch of the real,” I have not wanted to suggest that views of the self in the earlier era of the third century were somehow more spiritual than they were in the later era. Orienting the self in relation to the divine remained a constant. Rather, the shift involved a change in views of the soul’s ability to make contact with the god or gods.
One way to describe the change is to consider how these two groups of authors thought about loss. For Plotinus and Origen, so confident that intense inner contemplation could bring about realization of the self’s divine core, distraction was a major problem; loss of attention diminished the soul’s consciousness of its expansive identity, and this loss was often attributed by them to the particularity of the material world and the body’s involvement with it. For Proclus and Victricius, living in an age when the high gods had become more remote, loss was expressed as a loss of immediacy and as a diminished view of the human capacity to make contact with the divine by using the self’s inner powers. This loss of cosmic optimism concerning the makeup of the self, together with the felt need for figures who could mediate divine presence, eventuated in a new appreciation precisely for particularity. Now the sensible world, including human sense-perception, the body, and objects in the material realm, could be viewed not as distractions but as theophanic vehicles. This was the basic shift, and it entailed a re-formation of the viewing subject, who was newly dependent on rituals of transformation in order to see spiritual animation in the world and the self. Perhaps not surprisingly, when the tendency to suppress materiality as a locus of meaning was revised, the fully embodied “I” could see both more, and less, than in an earlier age.
Chapter Two
Bodies in Fragments
One aspect of the material turn in late antiquity was the development of an aesthetics that emphasized the visual and tactile immediacy of the part—a piece of bone, a single mosaic tile, a word in a poem—at the expense of the whole. In literature and art, compositional techniques such as juxtaposition and repetition were used precisely to highlight fragments rather than wholes. By virtue of these techniques, such fragments became “things” in the sense conveyed by Bill Brown’s “thing theory,” in which objects took on surplus value and stood out against their contexts as magnets of attraction.1 When aesthetically wrought, these fragments took on force as presences both sensuous and metaphysical, and they both induced changes in the human subject’s habitual perception and effected a virtual re-education of the senses. In this chapter, a wide spectrum of ancient arts—sculpture, poetry, ekphrasis, collective hagiography—will be surveyed in order to characterize the aesthetics of the fragment, which will be explored in more detail with regard to relics in the chapter that follows.
In his “thing theory,” Brown does not discuss linguistic “things,” but I think his argument concerning the metamorphosis of mere object into meaningful thing can illuminate the visionary power of verbal images as well as of actual physical objects. Images, too, can assert themselves as “things.” Indeed, the affective appeal of figurative language was one of the forces that helped shape the tangible piety of the material turn. Hence the “things” in this chapter have a double referent, indicating not only concrete things like relics and holy men but also their linguistic images and the kind of narratives in which they were embedded. In terms of the aesthetics of the fragment, such image-things are both fragments of the whole and emblematic of the whole, where the whole is both a literary structure as well as what I call a narrative line.
An amusing example of the idea of a narrative line comes from Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium. Calvino wrote in a chapter in this work entitled “Quickness” that he “would like to edit a collection of tales consisting of one sentence only, or even a single line.” He narrates a story by the Guatemalan writer Augusto Monterroso as one that he would include in this collection of narrative lines. Here is that story in its entirety: “When I woke up, the dinosaur was still there.”2 Like Calvino, I too am interested in narrative structures of a particular type, like his collection of one-liners, in which the genre of the collection is just as important as what it contains. Part of my interest in this chapter is in narrative “lines”—strategies of narration—that operate on the basis of two functional criteria: one, they leave out unnecessary details, and two, they emphasize repetition.3 By omitting unnecessary details, such narratives foreground the objects—the fragments of the whole—around which they are structured. These objects are “charged with a special force” and become “like the pole of a magnetic field, a knot in the network of invisible relationships.”4 However, by emphasizing repetition, they enable a recognition of, and a certain pleasure in, the structure of the form itself, as when a child finds pleasure in fairy tales precisely because of the expectation that certain situations and formulas will be repeated in new-but-familiar ways. Narrative lines like this are effective, writes Calvino, because they are “series of events that echo each other as rhymes do in a poem.”5
Dissonant Echoing
“Dissonant echoing” is the phrase that I am going to use to characterize a certain aesthetic of the narrative line which is found not only in literature but also in the art and ritual practice of the fourth and early fifth centuries of the late ancient era. Originally I was going to name this dissonant character of narrative lines as an “aesthetics of discontinuity” until I discovered that I had been anticipated in this by Michael Roberts’s study of poetics in late antiquity, The Jeweled Style: Poetry and Poetics in Late Antiquity. Briefly, Roberts characterizes the aesthetics of discontinuity as a taste for the densely textured play of repetition and variation.6 There is a preference for effects of visual immediacy, achieved by an emphasis on the part at the expense of elaborations of organic wholes.7 Furthermore, the relationships among such parts operate at an abstract level and must be reconstituted or imagined by the reader or the observer.8 Thus parataxis, juxtaposition, and patterning are among the formal principles that both govern and reveal the disjunctive composition of these “narrative lines.” As Roberts remarks with an appropriately linear metaphor, “the seams not only show, they are positively advertised.”9
The tendency of this aesthetics toward fragmentation can be seen linguistically in poetry, where words are handled as though they possessed “a physical presence of their own, distinct from any considerations of sense or syntax.”10 In fact, Roberts argues, “in late antiquity … the referential function of language [and] art lost some of its preeminence; signifier asserts itself at the expense of signified.”11 This “liberated” signifier then takes on the brilliance, dazzle, and value suggested by the “jeweled style” of Roberts’s title.12
Figure 1. Arch of Constantine, detail. Rome, Italy. Photo Credit: Alinari/Art Resource, NY.
A brief look at certain stylistic features of the art of this period will add an important visual component to the aesthetic disposition that is my focus. While it may be an exaggeration to follow Ernst Kitzinger in characterizing developments in the art of the late Roman era as “a great stylistic upheaval,” nonetheless there were striking changes in artistic representation in this era that have enabled historians of art to discern the emergence of a coherent stylistic tendency.13 Although my focus will be on the sculpting of human figures, particularly on sarcophagi, similar stylistic trends have been discerned in the mosaic and painterly arts of the period.14
One of the basic changes is graphically represented in the contrast between the second-century roundels (literally “liberated” from monuments to Trajan, Hadrian, and Marcus Aurelius) and the early fourth-century frieze of the Arch of Constantine (fig. 1). As Kitzinger observes, the actions and gestures of the figures in the roundels are “restrained but organically generated by the body as a whole,” and the group is held