The Garb of Being: Embodiment and the Pursuit of Holiness in Late Ancient Christianity

By Georgia Frank, Suzanne Abrams Rebillard, Thomas Arentzen and 10 more

This collection explores how the body became a touchstone for late antique religious practice and imagination. When we read the stories and testimonies of late ancient Christians, what different types of bodies stand before us? How do we understand the range of bodily experiences—solitary and social, private and public—that clothed ancient Christians? How can bodily experience help us explore matters of gender, religious identity, class, and ethnicity? The Garb of Being investigates these questions through stories from the Eastern Christian world of antiquity: monks and martyrs, families and congregations, and textual bodies.

Contributors include S. Abrams Rebillard, T. Arentzen, S. P. Brock, R. S. Falcasantos , C. M. Furey, S. H. Griffith, R. Krawiec, B. McNary-Zak, J.-N. Mellon Saint-Laurent, C. T. Schroeder, A. P. Urbano, F. M. Young

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Release date: Nov 5, 2019
• ISBN: 9780823287031

Suzanne Abrams Rebillard

Suzanne Abrams Rebillard is an independent scholar in Ithaca, New York. She received her PhD in Classics from Brown University and her master’s degree in Library and Information Science at Syracuse University. She is currently completing a translation of Gregory of Nazianzus’s Poemata de seipso for the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library.

Book preview

THE GARB OF BEING

INTRODUCTION

DANGLING BODIES, ROBES OF GLORY: THE GARB OF EMBODIMENT IN ANCIENT CHRISTIANITY

Georgia Frank, Susan R. Holman, and Andrew S. Jacobs

Lazaros, an ascetic who lived atop a pillar in Asia Minor (modern Turkey), astounded followers by his ability to withstand cold and heat, endure long fasts and vigils, bear heavy irons, and suffer biting lice.¹ Yet public admiration quickly turned to horror and distress when he decided to poke his feet out of his enclosure atop the pillar. After learning that a nearby female stylite had dangled her feet from a hole she pierced in her enclosure, Lazaros refused to be one-upped. Even so, his anguished followers below implored him to desist, crying out: Why are you trying to make us orphans so quickly? As Lazaros saw it, If a woman, the weak sex has done this for the sake of the kingdom of heaven, then I really ought to do not only this but other, even harder things.² Lazaros’s competitive zeal seemed (to onlookers) to put his life at unnecessary risk when confronted by the intrusion of a female on the stylite skyline.³

Lazaros dangling his legs precariously from his pillar is an electric and kaleidoscopic image, from which we can view at once the multiple possibilities available for approaching embodied life. This eleventh-century tale about the persistence and disruption of gendered notions of holy bodies among stylites also provides a dynamic backdrop for considering the themes that flow through this book: how the body became a touchstone for late antique religious practice and the religious imagination. What different types of bodies stand before us in such stories, and what do they tell us? How do we understand the range of bodily experiences—solitary and social, private and public—that clothed ancient Christians? How might such experiences and the body as garb itself serve as a productive metaphor by which to explore this attention to matters of gender, religious identity, class, and ethnicity? The essays in this book explore these and related questions through stories from the eastern Christian world of antiquity: monks and martyrs, families and congregations, and textual bodies from antiquity subject to modern interpretations.

In its everyday sense, garb can signify gender, class, religious calling, and public persona or be used to subvert such significations. For instance, in the story of the stylite Lazaros, the leather tunic he wore punctuates key moments of that saint’s life: adopting the tunic in imitation of the stylite Daniel, losing his first tunic to a pack of ravaging dogs, a new tunic now covered in heavy iron chains, a leather tunic worn over twelve years, eliciting comparisons to the prophet Elijah, and the tunic’s removal at the holy man’s death, exposing a shockingly youthful body beneath.⁴ Early Christian ascetics wore distinctive clothing, such that their presence in a church was hard to miss. Evagrius of Pontus, for instance, prefaced his Praktikos, a treatise on the ascetic life, with a detailed description of the symbolism inherent in each item of the monastic’s habit.⁵ Linked to clothing’s performativity is its ability to serve as a mode of social control: the martyr was stripped of her clothing; the ascetic repudiated cloak and habit, standing exposed to the elements; efforts to legislate clothing or jewelry revealed efforts to reshape the body politic; and change in vestments marked conversion to asceticism or even new gender identity. Church leaders’ efforts to prescribe dress could signify an effort to impose hierarchy and order, just as ascetic dress reflected the destabilization of gender. The conversion of Saint Pelagia, a female-prostitute-turned-male-recluse, unfolds through close description of her clothing and accessories.⁶ Through the varieties of embodiment and transformation of subjectivities that developed in late antiquity, the language of garb both performed and signified a sacred and yet fragile materiality.⁷

For lay Christians, ritual garments also connoted new identities. To John Chrysostom, the new convert’s brilliant white robes recalled wedding garments, such that baptism signified a wedding to the divine, reminding neophytes of their newfound splendor, radiance, and brilliance. And beyond liturgical spaces, Christian writers attempted to reinscribe class and gender norms by dictating appropriate hairstyles, clothes, and social norms of modesty.⁸

Garb not only signifies gender, adornment, class, luxury, and religious identity. As the story of Lazaros and the unnamed woman stylite reminds us, garb also traces the social contours of the abject body. The stylite’s body, enclosed or exposed, subject to decay and yet luminous to its followers, highlights the ancient Christian fascination with the abject subject.⁹ Ill-clothed and vulnerable to the elements, diseased yet resilient, the stylite’s body straddled death and transcendence in a narrative of repulsion and desire. The stylite’s body both revealed the fragility of embodiment (and the dissolubility of all human subjectivity) and redeemed and inverted the signification of that fragile body. Repulsive yet evocative, the body in decay was also a body approaching sanctification. Like imperial statues atop columns, the stylite atop the pillar signaled glory and might,¹⁰ while at the same time the living saint revealed the frailty of the flesh. Lazaros’s exposed feet elicited horror but ultimately distressed only the Devil. In the end his followers’ distress turned to joy. If, as Virginia Burrus notes, the weight of materiality appeared at once unbearable and inescapable for those who sought salvation,¹¹ the stylite’s embodied positioning revealed both the glory and the horror of that weight. Clothing (or lack thereof) expressed that tension between glory and suffering, not only for the ascetic but also for those who beheld him (or her).¹²

The body as a garment is also a potent theological symbol for the relation between the divine and the human in the person of Christ. Syriac writers of the fourth to seventh centuries portrayed salvation history using a series of garbing images: from Adam and Eve’s robes of glory in paradise, to the garments of skin they wore following their expulsion from the Garden.¹³ To remedy this situation, God put on a body, such that he might reclothe humankind in the robe of glory. Christ’s baptism became paradigmatic for restoring the robe of glory, which also connotes the garb of angels and of the just, as well as royal and priestly robes, and a wedding garment for the eschatological banquet. Ephraem captured this retrospective and prospective power of the garment:

All these changes did the Merciful One make, stripping off (glory) and putting on (a body): for He had devised a way to reclothe Adam in that glory which Adam had stripped off. He was wrapped with swaddling clothes, corresponding to Adam’s leaves, He put on clothes instead of Adam’s skins.… Blessed is He who descended, put Adam on and ascended.¹⁴

Thus, clothing, undressing, and reclothing traced the arc of sacred history and situated Christians in sacred time and place.

Garment imagery often helped decode visionary experiences. For instance, a sick man who experienced a vision of Saint Artemios at a healing shrine recalled that the saint wore a tunic and belt but no mantle. By the absence of this formal garment, the saint conveyed his ease at home in his church, putting the supplicant’s fears to rest.¹⁵ Whereas Saint Artemios dressed down in this vision, the postmortem visions of Saint Athanasia of Aegina reveal the power of saints who dressed up. She appeared to her bereaved monastic community forty days after her death. In the vision, two men wearing bright robes presented her with a purple robe decorated in pearls and gems, along with a jewel-studded staff.¹⁶ In stark contrast to the simple robes she wore in her monastic life, these royal robes signaled to mourners the saint’s further imitation of Christ’s ascension and enthronement (cf. Acts 1:10).

Thus, the notion of clothing highlights the lived reality of the varieties of bodily practices, perceptions, gestures, symbolism, mimesis, and poetics that shaped late ancient Christianity.¹⁷ Through garb, the body might simultaneously express paradisiac hopes in a fallen world yet bear the marks of its own transcendence.¹⁸ As the paradoxical union of spirit and matter, garb also symbolizes how the person of Jesus came to be understood as the enfleshment, or incarnation, of God. Little wonder that in his celebration of the Virgin Mary as Theotokos, the fifth-century preacher Proclus of Constantinople called the Mother of God "the awesome loom (histos) of the divine economy on which the robe (chitōn) was ineffably woven."¹⁹ What had once been regarded as a destructible or dispensable body instead reveals paradoxical Christian ideals and aspirations. Thus, whereas garb can suggest the interweaving of opposites, it can equally polarize dichotomies of body/soul, earthly/heavenly, male/female, and material/spiritual. If embodiment is something that can be put off, it might, in some of the earliest historical strands, connote the inferiority of fleshly existence to the spirit or soul. According to such a model, salvation required liberation, disembodiment, from what was seen as illusory existence. As an artificial cover, as it were, materiality impeded one’s purest abilities to truly sense the spiritual realm.

The range of such embodiments—solitary and social, private and public—produced the varieties of late ancient Christianity, particularly in the Christian East, that are the focus of the essays here. To guide readers into the narrative of these dynamics, we have divided the essays into three sections: Making Bodies, a consideration of individual bodies and how early Christians grappled with the relation between the body and God; Performing Bodies, as revealed through hagiographers’, hymnographers’, and poets’ works; and, finally, Scripting Bodies, which considers the role of early Christian texts in the creation of communal bodies. United by a sustained interest in how reflection on the body shaped ancient Christian notions of the self, each of the three sections considers, through different textures, ways in which the performativity of Christian bodies interacted with the rhetorical production of bodies: individual monks and martyrs; the social bodies of families and congregations; the singing bodies of congregations; and textual bodies, created in antiquity and, across time, subjected to diverse forms of interpretation. Through a common focus on the meaning of embodiment in Christian practice, this book invites readers into a narrative space of multihued embodied fabric, voices that still speak today from the eastern Christian world.

Overview

Part I: Making Bodies

These first three essays consider the varied ways Christians approached the production of individual bodies as Christian bodies, in contexts cosmological, liturgical, and exegetical. How did bodies even become Christian? As Frances Young shows in her essay, valorizing the body required its integration with the soul. She highlights second-century debates over what it meant to say that the whole human person was in the image of God. Such debates centered on the creation of the first humans and the restoration of the full human being at the resurrection. In particular, it was a challenge to imagine an incorporeal soul not just housed in a body but even unified with flesh. If creation and resurrection highlighted that integration, Jesus anticipated it in his radiant appearance atop a mountain, flanked by Moses and Elijah and witnessed by his disciples (Matt. 17:1–9, Mark 9:2–8, Luke 9:28–36). Patristic interpreters, as Arthur P. Urbano shows in his essay, pondered the sensory dimensions of Jesus’s transfiguration. Color, light, and clothing not only revealed the sensory dimensions of the biblical event but also materialized the words and letters that composed the Gospel story. That something so material as clothing could reveal divine presence led the third-century Alexandrian writer Origen to pay careful attention to all matters of Jesus’s garment: from the luminosity, to the color, to resonances with other epiphanic moments in sacred history, such as Moses’s encounter with God at Sinai. Sensory perceptions of Jesus’s luminous clothing further verbalized Gospel narratives. Through textile and text, a poetics of clothing emerged in descriptions of Jesus’s epiphanic garments, such that the more spiritually discerning apostles were privileged to perceive dazzling divinity whereas others were confined to ordinary perceptions of the Savior.

Yet garments served as more than mere metaphors for flesh or its relation to the soul. As Thomas Arentzen shows, the relics of two garments, the Virgin Mary’s belt and the swaddling bands of Jesus, not only symbolized the virgin birth but also assumed a certain agency in one homily by the eighth-century bishop Germanos. In addressing and petitioning the objects directly, Germanos revealed the intercessory power of garb. He entreats the relics to enfold the supplicating congregation and save its virtue. Such garments aren’t simply armor; they are more than protective: they are alive and responsive to human needs, revealing a vigilance and a liveliness not typically found in objects. The result, one might say, is the thingification of the original wearer, the Virgin.²⁰

Part II: Performing Bodies

The next essays shift our attention to the public performance of bodies: martyrs, rhetors, saints, and clerics all projected the Christian body into a social space in which it was both transformed and transforming. These special Christian bodies—singing, suffering, even dying—opened up new mimetic possibilities for the audience to reframe its own embodied experience of Christian selfhood. As garments inaugurated new identities, they also bore collective memory. John Chrysostom reminded his congregations: let the wearing of clothes be a constant reminder to us of the … punishment which the race of human beings received on account of disobedience.²¹ So too, martyrs’ garments paradoxically signified the athlete and the victor.²² Yet, common Christian garments might also conceal the heretical other, like a wolf in sheep’s clothing (cf. Matt. 7:15). To detect heretics required the power to name them, to change how they were perceived. The true garb of the heretic was to be constituted by naming them, or interpellation.²³ According to French philosopher Louis Althusser, interpellation constitutes and marks the subject. As Judith Butler sees this naming, it is not descriptive, but inaugurative. It seeks to introduce a reality rather than report on an existing one.²⁴ Sidney H. Griffith’s essay on the unnamed heretics in the Syriac Hymns against Heresies highlights the importance of naming as a touchstone for theological truth and for generating collective memory. If, as Ephraem claims, names … bespeak the true reality, then condemning false names is incumbent upon the seeker of truth. By this line of thinking, polemic becomes a mode of performing and even embodying (through names) true identity.

The performative interpellation of the Christian subject also animates Rebecca Stephens Falcasantos’s study of John Chrysostom’s advice on raising Christian children amid the spectacles of civic life in late antiquity. The sheer theatricality of urban life—from processions to theater, oratory, and funerals—exposes how the impressionable soul can be susceptible to false habits and façades, or schemata, to the detriment of the right-guided Christian self. A Christian cannot prevent this permeability but can control her exposure to luxury and spectacle. John exhorts Christians to replace civic spectacles with holy spectacles at church and martyrium and thereby safeguard and edify the soul. The intensely communicable nature of moral formation requires a mimetic environment to ensure that the highly impressionable soul would be effectively guided to redirect its attention. This revised moral geography reveals a materialist integration of body and soul,²⁵ such that worldly possessions may leave lasting impressions on the porous and malleable soul.

The theme of mimetic environments continues in Rebecca Krawiec’s essay on Theodoret of Cyrrhus’s collective biography of Syrian ascetics, known today by its Latin title, Historia religiosa. Krawiec aligns the medicinal with the mimetic to show how the unity of human nature requires a multiplicity of exemplars pursuing varied ascetic practices. Echoing ancient medical advice, Theodoret is attentive to the varieties of food practices of Syrian monks, as a way to show the diversity of ascetic exemplars and to invite recognition of a paradisiacal quality to their lives.²⁶ Although food can symbolize a fallen world, here it restores paradise, a place where Theodoret’s ascetic heroes enjoy an easy communion with animals as well as with God.

The textual production of ascetic spectacles also invited dangerous celebrity. Andrew S. Jacobs draws on recent theories of celebrity culture to revisit what ascetic fame signified for ascetics, their biographers, and Christian audiences. Celebrification exposes the ambiguities as well as the commodification of the ascetic body, casting a raking light on culture’s instabilities and potentialities. In the pillar saint Simeon the Elder’s case, fame centered on his ascetic prowess, but his celebrity came at the cost of commodifying the saint and exposing anxieties surrounding ascetic celebrity.

Part II closes with two essays about the role of performance in forging a sense of collective identity. Georgia Frank examines the portrayal of groups in the sung sermons of the sixth-century hymnographer Romanos the Melodist. Although best known for dialogues between single characters, his biblical retellings endowed groups with voices. Their collective voice, found not only in the stanzas but, more significantly, in the refrain, created the performative conditions for lay congregations to identify with these biblical groups. That aperture into the biblical past extends to martyrologies. Jeanne-Nicole Mellon Saint-Laurent examines how the legend about Persian royal siblings and martyred Christian converts, Behnam and Sarah, spawned the founding of a monastery and relic cult in their honor. In particular, the sibling bond and royal pedigree extend to their followers, who, through a tale of child sacrifice, may claim descent from an imagined dynasty of wonder-working monks, martyrs, and even Assyrian royalty.

Part III: Scripting Bodies

Our access to the embodied experience of late ancient Christianity emerges, to a large extent, from textual remains that have been produced, reproduced, and interpreted. These final essays approach the textuality of ancient Christian embodiment: What individual and communal bodies are encoded in, and emerge from, the written traces of early Christianity? How do texts translate human experience, and how are they in turn translated by readers? What effects—and affects—did these words have on ancient being, and what aftereffects have they enabled in diverse modern and postmodern contexts?

Sebastian Brock’s parallel translations of the Syriac and modern Greek versions of the fourth-century martyrdom of five women from Syria reveal their different emphases. Noteworthy in both versions is the force of the mimetic: at each critical turn, the five women speak in unison. For all their unison, however, their deaths at the sword of a (greedy) coreligionist highlight the complexity of Christian identity for all times and places. From the collective voice of the virgins, the following essay, by Suzanne Abrams Rebillard, turns to the autobiographical voice in two poems by the Cappadocian bishop Gregory of Nazianzus. For Gregory writing poetry is a mode of askesis, insofar as poetry offers a purificatory rite as an ascent beyond the multiplicity of human language. Through a close critical analysis and fresh translation of two poems, Abrams Rebillard shows how the use of poetic devices and a wide range of sensory dynamics forge a poetic ascetic aesthetic. Bernadette McNary-Zak turns to another ascetic voice: that of a diffuse community of desert monks and Ethiopian Christians that lay beyond imperial jurisdiction and that is revealed by an exiled bishop’s letters. This production of textual bodies was instrumental in consolidating communal bodies.

The power of stories, letters, and poems to probe the complexity of embodiment and community did not cease in late antiquity. Such devotional efforts have continued into the modern period, as the final three essays of the collection attest. Constance M. Furey calls attention to biblical translation as generating a devotional bond. Focusing on a seventeenth-century translation of the Psalms by an English countess named Mary Sidney Herbert (d. 1621) and her brother Philip Sidney, Furey analyzes how the sibling bond linked intense spiritual devotion with equally intense familial affections. Just as translation creates new relationships, so too can citation. Susan R. Holman draws on three case studies to focus on the afterlives of patristic sermons in modern social welfare appeals. Her first example is from Daniel Price, a contemporary of Mary Sidney Herbert, who drew on patristic writers in making his appeal on behalf of London’s charity hospitals. His example is followed by a 1917 translation of John Chrysostom’s sermon on the apostle Paul’s collection for Jerusalem as a way to raise awareness of the sensing bodies of the suffering. Two twentieth-century Romanian translations of Basil of Caesarea’s sermon on famine and drought, composed under Communist rule, introduced lay readers to one fourth-century bishop’s depiction of the starving body and the devastating social consequences of crushing poverty. Such afterlives through citation and translation remind us of the political, economic, and social contexts in which patristic awareness of embodiment may be clothed. The last essay, by Caroline T. Schroeder, explores these afterlives in an entirely new context: the digital humanities, which has brought the promise of preservation to endangered cultural resources in Syriac and Coptic but may also be unwittingly reproducing the same Western canonical impulses which have marginalized these cultural resources in patristic studies. Just as the introduction of once-marginal texts, such as Syriac and Coptic sources, has revolutionized our ideas about early Christian embodied experience, so, Schroeder argues, the pioneering digitization of these textual bodies has transformed our hopes (and concerns) about the new digital realms of knowledge: digital corpora expand our sense of the effects of once-marginal bodies.

The essays in this volume, taking as their point of departure the pioneering methods and questions of Susan Ashbrook Harvey, explore equally charged moments for considering potentialities of embodiment: as experience, as performance, as community, as monument, as memory, and as transformation. Few have grasped such interconnections between lived religion, sacred stories, and the possibilities of personhood as insightfully as Harvey. Harvey’s three decades of scholarship on Syrian asceticism, comparative hagiography, sensory studies, hymnography, and liturgical choirs in late antiquity have opened new approaches to the expressive power of the body. The essays in this volume are written by Harvey’s students and teachers and take inspiration from her collaborative, ecumenical spirit and her timely insights into religious dimensions of bodily experience. The garb of being looks different from every angle but never ceases to dazzle and captivate.

Notes

1. Vita Lazari (hereafter V. Laz.) 59, translated in Richard P. H. Greenfield, trans., The Life of Lazaros of Mt. Galesion: An Eleventh-Century Pillar Saint (Washington: Dumbarton Oaks, 2000), 146–48.

2. V. Laz. 59 (Greenfield, Life of Lazaros, 147).

3. An undated funerary inscription to Ma(r)ia the ask(ê)têria styliados found high on a stele in the Pontus region of Asia Minor testifies to the presence of stylite saints in Pontus. Franz Cumont, Nouvelles inscriptions du Pont, Revue des études grecques 17, fascs. 76–77 (1904): 329–34, esp. (Amasia) 332–33. See also Ellen Muehlberger, "Simeon and Other Women in Theodoret’s Religious History: Gender in the Representation of Late Ancient Christian Asceticism," JECS 23 (2015): 583–606.

4. V. Laz. 26, 35, 82 (which ties ending extended fast to changing the ragged tunic), 112, 252 (Greenfield, Life of Lazaros, 110–11, 121–22, 172, 203, 361).

5. Evagrius Ponticus, Praktikos, prol.

6. Vita Sanctae Pelagiae (Syriace) 6.

7. On the garb in ancient and medieval Christian practice, see Caroline Walker Bynum, Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press / Zone Books, 2011), 53, 185; Estelle Cronnier, Les inventions de reliques dans l’Empire romain d’Orient (IVe–VIe s.) (Turnhout: Brepols, 2015), 127–43 (chap. 3, Les vêtements du Christ et de la Vierge). On garments as metaphors of emotions, see Douglas Cairns, Mind, Body, and Metaphor in Ancient Greek Concepts of Emotions, L’Atelier du Centre de recherches historiques 16 (2016), http://acrh.revues.org/7416.

8. Kristi Upson-Saia, Early Christian Dress: Gender, Virtue, and Authority (New York: Routledge, 2011); Kate Wilkinson, Women and Modesty in Late Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Kristi Upson-Saia, Carly Daniel-Hughes, and Alicia J. Batten, eds., Dressing Judeans and Christians in Antiquity (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2014); Denise Kimber Buell, Ambiguous Legacy: A Feminist Commentary on Clement of Alexandria’s Works, in A Feminist Companion to Patristic Literature, ed. Amy-Jill Levine, with Maria Mayo Robbins (London: T&T Clark, 2008), 26–55, esp. 41.

9. Virginia Burrus, Saving Shame: Martyrs, Saints, and Other Abject Subjects, Divinations (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 44–47; Andrew S. Jacobs, Christ Circumcised: A Study in Early Christian History and Difference, Divinations (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 72–88; Béatrice Caseau, Syméon Stylite l’Ancien entre puanteur et parfum, Revue des études byzantines 63 (2005): 71–96; Corinne Jouanno, "Corps du saint, corps du pécheur: L’exemple de la Vie de Syméon Stylite le Jeune," Lalies 24 (2004): 87–107.

10. Anthony Eastmond, Body vs. Column: The Cults of St. Symeon Stylites, in Desire and Denial in Byzantium, ed. Liz James (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 1999), 87–100.

11. Burrus, Saving Shame, 47.

12. As in, for instance, cenobitic monastic regulation of prayer and weaving. See, e.g., Bentley Layton, The Canons of Our Fathers: Monastic Rules of Shenoute (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 81–82nn14–15.

13. Sebastian P. Brock, Clothing Metaphors as a Means of Theological Expression in Syriac Tradition, in Typus, Symbol, Allegorie bei den östlichen Vätern und ihren Parallelen im Mittelalter (Internationales Kolloquium, Eichstätt, 1981), ed. Margot Schmidt and Carl-Friedrich Geyer (Regensburg: Verlag Friedrick Pustet, 1982), 11–40; Hannah Hunt, Clothed in the Body: Asceticism, the Body and the Spiritual in the Late Antique Era (Abingdon, UK: Ashgate, 2012), 137–58.

14. Ephraem, Hymns on the Nativity 23.13, quoted in Brock, Clothing Metaphors, 13.

15. Virgil S. Crisafulli and John W. Nesbitt, eds., The Miracles of St. Artemios: A Collection of Miracle Stories by an Anonymous Author of Seventh-Century Byzantium (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 166–70, 276; discussed in Maria G. Parani, Defining Personal Space: Dress and Accessories in Late Antiquity, Late Antique Archaeology 5 (2009): 495–529, esp. 495.

16. Life of St. Athanasia of Aegina 14.

17. Garb also became a convenient metaphor for poetic expression. Late antique poets experimented with the cento, or patchwork poem, in which new content emerged from sewing together fragments of earlier poets’ verses. Empress Eudocia, for instance, recast biblical themes using Homeric verse, adopting a practice that had unsettled church writers generations before: see Jerome, Epistula 53.7, and Irenaeus, apud Epiphanius, Panarion 31.29, discussed by M. D. Usher, Homeric Stitchings: The Homeric Centos of the Empress Eudocia (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998), 11–12. Cf. Robert L. Wilken, "The Homeric Cento in Irenaeus, Adversus haereses I.9.4," VC 21 (1967): 25–33.

18. On this ambiguous corporeality, see Patricia Cox Miller, The Corporeal Imagination: Signifying the Holy in Late Ancient Christianity, Divinations (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), esp. 102–15. More recently, on the Christological ambiguity of Christ’s clothing in retellings of the Passion, see Fotini Hadjittofi, "ποικιλόνωτος ἀνήρ: Clothing Metaphors and Nonnus’ Ambiguous Christology in the Paraphrase of the Gospel according to John," VC 72 (2018): 165–83.

19. Proclus, Homiliae 1.1, 8, translated in Nicholas Constas, Proclus of Constantinople and the Cult of the Virgin in Late Antiquity: Homilies 1–5, Texts and Translations (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 305–58, here 319 (modified by replacing the Greek letters with transliterations).

20. On liturgical memorialization of Mary’s domesticity, see Susan Ashbrook Harvey, Interior Decorating: Jacob of Serug on Mary’s Preparation for the Incarnation, SP 43 (2006): 23–28.

21. John Chrysostom, Homiliae in Genesim 18.5, translated in Robert Hill, trans., Homilies on Genesis 18–45, Fathers of the Church 82 (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1990), 6.

22. Passio Perpetuae 10.7, 20.3–5 (cf. 1 Cor. 9:24–27), discussed in Barbara K. Gold, ‘And I Became a Man’: Gender Fluidity and Closure in Perpetua’s Prison Narrative, in Roman Literature, Gender, and Reception: Domina Illustris, ed. Judith P. Hallett, Donald Lateiner, Barbara K. Gold, and Judith Perkins (New York: Routledge, 2013), 153–65.

23. Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997), 2.

24. Ibid., 33–34.

25. On moral geography, see Christine C. Shepardson, Controlling Contested Places: Late Antique Antioch and the Religious Politics of Spatial Controversy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014).

26. See similar descriptions of Egyptian ascetics in Blake Leyerle, Monastic Formation and Christian Practice: Food in the Desert, in Educating People of Faith: Exploring the History of Jewish and Christian Communities, ed. John Van Engen (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 2004), 85–112.

PART I: MAKING BODIES

BODY AND SOUL

UNION IN CREATION, REUNION AT RESURRECTION

Frances Young

Symeon Stylites practiced a healthy regime, with his vegetarian diet and constant prostrations: something like that was the surprising and insightful comment I remember hearing from one of my graduate students many years ago. It foreshadowed the direction of Susan Ashbrook Harvey’s research interests, in asceticism, the body, and the senses, a pursuit which bore spectacular results in her remarkable book Scenting Salvation.¹

At approximately the same time as Susan was studying in Birmingham, I was working on two anthropological treatises of the fourth century: Gregory of Nyssa’s De opificio hominis and Nemesius’s De natura hominis. My principal interest then was to observe the influence of scripture on the way they each approached the question of human nature. To my surprise the work of both challenged the accepted view that patristic body-soul dualism undermined the psychosomatic unity of the human person found in the biblical material. Since those years there has been an explosion of interest in the body, in early Christian studies provoked by Peter Brown’s The Body and Society² and in religious studies more generally by feminist theology. My purpose here is not to review that material but to return to the issue of body-soul integration and to show how arguments about creation and resurrection in the second century ensured that by the fourth century even those Christian thinkers with the most leanings toward Neoplatonism would espouse the view that the union of soul with body was constitutive of the human being as a creature among creatures, and so a necessary aspect of the reconstitution of the human person at the resurrection.

Soul-body dualism is often treated as the default anthropological position in antiquity. That would at first sight seem to be confirmed by Nemesius’s treatise, On the Nature of Humankind,³ which opens by affirming that most leading thinkers have asserted that humankind is composed of a rational soul and body, a point restated at the end of the exordium: the common saying has it that humankind consists of soul and body.⁴ Early on he mentions Plato’s version of this dualism: Plato seems not to regard humankind as a twofold being of soul and body, but a soul that makes use of such and such a body. Plato concentrates all attention on the soul, and there is general consent, Nemesius admits, that the body is only an instrument employed by soul—the evidence being the body’s passivity when the soul is separated from it in death. It soon becomes clear, however, that for Nemesius the union of soul and body is what makes humankind what it is. Placing humankind on the border between the phenomenal and the intelligible, on the grounds that humans have much in common with animals yet are rational, he points out that this indicates the unity of creation and so proves that the whole universe is the creation of one God. He draws out the continuity of the inanimate, the vegetative, the animal, and the rational orders of creation, one shading into another, mentioning the authority of Aristotle for this but also showing how it justifies the order of the Mosaic account of creation and appealing to other scripture texts to confirm the point that humanity is on the borderline between the rational and the irrational, the mortal and the immortal—indeed, not merely the crucial link in the hierarchy of created orders of being but a mikros kosmos, bearing an image of the whole creation in its own nature. This setting of humankind in the context of creation as a whole ensures the primacy of the union as constitutive of what a human being is.

Here, then, is no simple dualism, and the rest of the treatise confirms this, as Nemesius explores bodily composition out of the four elements, the composite nature of the soul itself, and the complex relation between soul and body. Following for the most part the medical philosopher Galen, he explores the influence of the elements which constitute the body on a person’s temperament, acknowledging that emotion is the driving force of human action. His physiological statements also presuppose the intimate union of soul and body: Whatever movement takes place by the operation of nerves and muscles involves the intervention of soul, and is accomplished by an act of will (26.43).

Soul also provides the energeia in respiration: panting and sobbing accompany moments of great grief, and soul keeps respiration going during sleep. In his discussion of sense perception and dreams the physical and the psychic are again intimately woven together. Indeed, a living creature is composed of soul and body: the body is not a living creature by itself, nor is the soul, but body and soul together (33.49). What Nemesis describes, I suggest, makes the soul the equivalent in our terms of the central nervous system.

The manner of the soul’s union with the body, however, is a matter not easily resolved (see 3.20–22). Being itself incorporeal, the soul is yet present in every part of the body, giving it life and movement, while also being transcendent, that is, not confined to some portion of space—dreams provide the classic instance. So the union is a puzzle because there are no satisfactory analogies. Normally, what comes together to form a single entity is made completely one only if the constituents undergo change. Having ruled out juxtaposition and mixture, Nemesius speaks of the soul putting on the body and being united with it through sympathy. Intelligibles, he suggests, can unite with things adapted to receive them and remain unconfused while in union. He makes explicit the implicit Christological analogy, turning it on its head in the sense that Christology is used to explain the anthropological puzzle rather than vice versa.

Moral choice is the principal interest of this largely philosophical treatise, focusing as it does on the importance of rationality being in control of behavior, despite behavior being affected by bodily temperament, upbringing, and habit. Human potential for immortality through the proper exercise of free will is really its theme. It utilizes the options canvassed by philosophers to explore the way in which the very nature of humankind makes such choice possible and, for the most part, hardly seems distinctively Christian. Yet what is notable is the way in which it adopts certain specific options precisely because they cohere with the view that human beings are integrally part of a created order called into being from nothing by God’s creative Word. Humankind was created as a complex unity at the cusp of created orders of being and has two choice prerogatives: human bodies alone, though mortal, are immortalized, a privilege of the body for the soul’s sake; and only human beings can repent and gain forgiveness, the soul’s privilege on account of the body (angels do not have the same distractions as embodied human beings have). So, just as the soul has this other privilege for the body’s sake, which is infirm and troubled by many passions, so peculiar to humankind and unique, enjoyed alone among living creatures, is for its body to rise again after death and enter on immortality (1.7). Thus, despite huge debts to the legacies of philosophy, it turns out that creation and resurrection, though barely mentioned, in fact shape Nemesius’s conclusion that the body-soul union is fundamental both to what a human being is and to what human life is all about under the providence of God.

The connection between creation and resurrection is a striking feature of texts which most probably belong to the second century. This, along with its profound implications for Christian understanding of the nature of humankind, is something I observed when asked to offer a paper on early Christian eschatology.⁵ A treatise on resurrection attributed to the apologist Athenagoras is particularly pertinent.⁶ Demanding that those with doubts about the resurrection should not put their opinions forward without critical investigation, the author immediately raises the issue of creation: either they must ascribe the creation of human beings to no cause, or, if they ascribe the cause of existing things to God, they should examine closely the presupposition of this doctrine (2.2). If they do, they will be able to show that the resurrection doctrine is untrustworthy only if they can show that God, either is not able or is unwilling to knit together again dead bodies … and restore them, so as to constitute the very men they once were (2.3). He goes on to argue that it is impossible for God … to be ignorant of the nature of our bodies:

before the particular formation of individual things, God knew the nature of the elements yet to be created from which bodies arise; and he knew the parts of the elements from which he planned to select in order to form the human body. (2.5)

So God has the requisite knowledge; he also has the requisite power:

the creation of our bodies shows that God’s power suffices for their resurrection. For if, when he first gave them form, he made the bodies of men and their principal constituents from nothing, he will just as easily raise them up again after their dissolution, howsoever it may have taken place. For this is equally possible for him. (3.1)

To shape shapeless matter or give life to what is lifeless demonstrates a power which can also unite what has been dissolved, can raise up what has fallen, can restore the dead to life, and can change the corruptible into incorruption (3.2). Indeed, such a Creator God can overcome the difficulties of reconstituting bodies torn apart and devoured by animals or drowned in shipwrecks and become food for fish or even cannibalized (3–4). Indeed, the resurrection of decomposed bodies is not only possible for the Creator but willed by him and worthy of him (11.1).

The author proceeds to argue for resurrection on the basis of God’s purpose in creating humankind (12.1–5) and for reconstitution as a composite union of soul and body (12.8–13.1–2): "The reason, then, for man’s creation guarantees his eternal survival, and his survival guarantees resurrection, without which he could not survive as man (my emphasis). The resurrection is demonstrated by the reason for man’s creation and the will of the Creator (13.2)—indeed, because of the will of the Creator and the nature of those created (14.6). The next move, then, is a discussion of the human as a creature constituted by an immortal soul and a body … united with it at its creation" (15.2). God did not create either separately, but rather, humans

are made up of both, so that they might spend their life and come to one common end with the parts from which they are created and exist.

All there is is one living being composed of two parts.

All these things—the creation of man, the nature of man, the existence of man, the deeds and experiences and way of life of man, and the end which suits his nature—might be fully integrated into one harmonious and concordant whole.

So the oneness of the entire living being will be the same in a union appropriate to [its parts] if what has undergone dissolution is again united to reconstitute the living being (15.3).

The author continues to insist that it is man—not simply soul which is the object of the Creator’s purposes: it is absolutely necessary that the body should be permanent in a way that conforms with its own nature, and should exist eternally with the deathless soul (15.8). This, of course, raises the issue of what permanence means for the body, which clearly dissolves in death; this lack of continuity, however, is met by considering the analogy of sleep (16.4–6) and the changes experienced at various stages of life (17.1). In any case the body at resurrection will gain incorruptibility through a transformation (16.2)—continuity and change are built into the process. The body is … receptive to the changes decreed for it, including, along with the other changes affecting age, appearance or size, also the resurrection (12.8).

Ultimately,

all of the arguments previously brought forward for our investigation to confirm the resurrection are of the same kind, since they spring from the same basic idea; for their principle is the origin of the first man by creation. (18.1, my emphasis)

The fact of creation is what drives the entire discourse, and creation as a composite of body and soul is taken to determine the human constitution.

Now the authorship and date of this treatise have been contested. The suggestion made by R. M. Grant that it was an anti-Origenist work of the third century was taken up by Schoedel in the introduction to his Oxford text and translation of the work.⁷ That view was vigorously contested by L. W. Barnard in his study of Athenagoras published around the same time as Schoedel’s text.⁸ Whether or not this work is as early as the second century, the intimate connection between creation and resurrection can be traced back behind it. It is evident in 2 Maccabees 7:23 and 28 and is implied in Romans 4:17–21. Where these earlier texts used creation as encouragement to faith in God even in the face of death, the author of De resurrectione turns that tradition into a philosophical defense of resurrection. Others took a similar line, and they can be firmly dated in the second century. Theophilus of Antioch, for example, insists that God created you, bringing you from non-existence to existence, and that is a pledge that God who made you can later make you once again (1.8).⁹ God can be trusted, for the creation provides analogies, particularly seeds and fruits: a grain of wheat first dies and is destroyed, then is raised and becomes an ear, he writes, echoing John 12:24 (1.13; cf. 2.14). Elsewhere, he insists that there would be nothing remarkable in God making the world out of preexistent matter—even a human artisan can make whatever he likes out of whatever material he has to hand; but the power of God is revealed by his making whatever he wishes out of the nonexistent, just as the ability to give life and motion belongs to no one but God alone (2.4). This is the kind of creative power which guarantees the resurrection.

Tatian even more explicitly links resurrection with creation out of nothing (5, 6).¹⁰ God was definitely alone, he asserts; matter is not like God, without beginning. It was brought into existence by the Creator, who begat our world, having first created the necessary matter. It is on this account that we believe that there will be a resurrection of bodies. Tatian confesses that he did not know who or what he was before he was born; but being born, after a former state of nothingness, he obtained a certainty of his existence. In just the same way, having come to be and through death existing no longer, he would exist once more; for there is nothing to stop the creative power of God from restoring him to his original pristine condition, even if all trace of his physical existence were to be obliterated by fire or dispersed through waters or torn in pieces by wild beasts. Behind this argument is his utter rejection of the immortality of the soul, a point which he spells out later (12). The immortality of the soul he recognizes as incompatible with the doctrine of creation; the soul is mortal. There is a possibility of it not dying if it knows the truth; but otherwise it dies, dissolved with the body. Body and soul belong together in one united being, and both may together ascend with the Spirit: for the soul is the bond of the flesh, which contains the soul, and if this composite structure is like a shrine, God is willing to dwell in it through the Spirit, his representative (15.2), this divine Spirit being the image and likeness of God (12). Without God there is no immortality any more than without God there is no existence. As an integrated body-soul being in the context of creation, a human being will receive God’s gift of future life as a soul-body reunion.

We hardly need reminding that creation was a contested issue in the second century—indeed, I have previously argued that creation out of nothing was first unambiguously articulated in the second century, particularly against the Platonist picture of a divine craftsman imposing form on inert or chaotic matter.¹¹ Now Outi Lehtipuu has explored in all their complexity parallel debates about resurrection.¹² Not everyone within the Christian ambit understood that resurrection involved reconstitution of the flesh, and even if they did, they imagined its transformation, appealing to Paul’s notion of the spiritual body (1 Cor. 15:43ff.). For our purposes we need only take a look at the Epistle to Rheginos—the treatise on the resurrection found among the Nag Hammadi texts¹³—to see how loss of the link with creation made understanding of both resurrection and anthropology much more ambiguous. According to this treatise the Lord existed in flesh and lived in this place where you remain, but the author adds, I call it ‘Death.’ The Lord embraced flesh and death,

possessing the humanity and the divinity, so that on the one hand he might vanquish death through his being Son of God, and that on the other through the Son of Man the restoration to the Pleroma might occur; because he was originally from above, a seed of the Truth, before this structure (of the cosmos) had come into being. (44)

This is then explained in terms of swallowing up death, putting aside the world which is perishing, swallowing the visible by the invisible, transforming into an imperishable Aeon, and giving us the way of our immortality. This is the spiritual resurrection which swallows up the psychic in the same way as fleshly (45–46). The exact status of flesh when one ascends to the Aeon is far from clear, since interpretation of the key text is contested: "you received flesh when you entered this world.