Jesus’s Dazzling Garments

In his exegesis of the Transfiguration account in the Commentary on Matthew, Origen of Alexandria presents Jesus’s transfigured robes as a medium of revelation: to the disciples who witnessed the event and to the Christian interpreter. By contemplating Jesus’s garments, the latter will discover revealed knowledge on the nature of Christ and of the scriptures. This chapter examines Origen’s exegesis through the lens of what Roland Barthes called “written-clothing,” an infusion of garments with definitive value through descriptions and associations that make them signifiers of cultural values. Utilizing a “poetics of clothing” that highlights the color and fabric of Jesus’s robes while associating them with significant temporal, spatial, and historical markers rooted in Scripture and philosophy, Origen enhances the textual spectacle of Jesus’s garments. Moreover he constructs a cognitive model of written-clothing that at once verbalizes Jesus’s garments and “garmentizes” the Scriptures. In the end Origen creates an understanding of Jesus’s robes that transports the reader into contemplation of the incarnate Christ.

Body and Soul

This chapter demonstrates 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 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, but the fourth-century anthropological treatise of Nemesius of Emesa shows that, despite huge debts to the legacies of philosophy, creation and resurrection, though barely mentioned, in fact shape his conclusion that the body-soul union is fundamental to what a human being is; the same is true, for example, of the Cappadocian Gregories and Augustine.

Sacred Bonds

This chapter explores the link between familial and religious devotion by comparing a sibling relationship enacted in poems by and about Mary Sidney Herbert, co-author of Renaissance England’s influential Sidney-Pembroke Psalter, to hagiographic sources reporting on the love between mothers and daughters in early Syriac Christian texts. While in the Syriac context, the accounts of mothers and daughters reveal Christians responding to the urbanization of asceticism by joining familial and ascetic bonds, the renewed biblicism in sixteenth-century England inspired poetry preoccupied with the relational dynamics of authorship, translation, and prayer. The chapter further explores the ways that these varied accounts of spiritual relationships might shed light on the relationality of pedagogy and the transformative potential of relationships between teachers and students.

Five Women Martyrs

Five named women, to whom a wayside shrine in Crete is dedicated, can be identified as five Persian martyrs under Shapur II, executed by their former teacher. As a first step in tracing how their cult reached Crete, the Syriac narrative of their martyrdom is compared with the accounts in the Synaxarium Constantinopolitanum and the Synaxaristes of St Nikodemos.

Crowds and Collective Affect in Romanos’s Biblical Retellings

This chapter examines the role of internal groupings within the biblical episodes retold in Romanos the Melodist’s (ca. 555) hymns (or, kontakia). Performed for liturgical festivals, these sung sermons allowed congregations to sing along with various biblical groups, whether the three youths in the furnace, the magi, Herod’s army, the Ninevites, or Jesus’s disciples. Shaped by recent work on the collective voices in Greek tragedy, this essay considers how groups allowed congregations to share in the emotional world of the biblical characters, sing for those silenced by ignorance or cowardice, and sing to repent with sinners and repudiate villains.

A Question of Character

The similarity of the accounts of monk’s lives, and the function of this homogeneity, in Theodoret of Cyrrus’s Religious History has been the focus of much scholarship on this work. This chapter applies the concept of character from literary theory to these accounts to add an analysis of how, even within the generic elements of the texts, each monk also has a particular individuality. Since Theodoret presents his text as “preventive medicine,” these monks can also be compared to figures in Galen’s medical case studies, such that monasticism provides a means to a new health. Finally, paying attention to the role of character draws attention to other non-human characters, animals and even God, that Theodoret uses to teach monasticism. Altogether, the History shows the many ways to attain holiness even as all monks share the same human soul.

Cultural Heritage Preservation and Canon Formation

This chapter simultaneously traces the history of early Coptic and Syriac public digital humanities projects and reassesses the history of what is usually considered the “founding moment” in digital humanities, Roberto Busa’s computational work on Thomas Aquinas. It argues that each of these endeavors should be considered comparable acts of cultural heritage preservation focused on computational or digital examinations of a community’s canonical cultural heritage. The primary differences between Busa’s work and early Coptic and Syriac computational research are not methodology but issues of canon and resources.

A School for the Soul

According to John Chrysostom, a proper Christian life both limits exposure to dangerous stimuli and redirects the natural impulses of mimēsis (imitation) toward the rituals of the Church. This chapter examines the importance of mimēsis within Chrysostom’s thought for properly educating the soul and developing Christian habits. Because, for Chrysostom, the soul as a malleable substance is subject to the impressions of the body’s external environment, it must be carefully guarded against all corrupting influences, particularly the wrong types of bodily practices that threaten the person’s salvation. In his homiletic activity, Chrysostom offers to provide just this type of protection by relying heavily on a rhetoric of disgust and pleasure in order to draw his audience away from the dangers of the world and entice them toward a virtuous life, present first and foremost in the Church and its scriptures.

Introduction

This essay surveys the many ways that embodiment shaped religious identity in late antiquity, drawing on the metaphor of garb: transformative, expressive, transcendent, interpretive and interpreted. This introductory chapter also provides a summary and overview of the essays in the book.

Gregory of Nazianzus’s Poetic Ascetic Aesthetic

This chapter argues that the texts of Gregory of Nazianzus’s ascetic poetry can be read as active transformers of the audience rather than as “bodies” transformed by interpretation. An examination of poemata 2.1.34, 45, and 39 reveals that poetic structures demonstrate the resolution of paradox, thereby recognizing and reconciling the paradox of human mixis––unifying the corporeal instrument and leading men by example toward a wholly spiritual life. The text offers readers patterns like chiasm, leading them to experience poetry both physically and spiritually like ascetics living the metaphor of paradise. Thus, the active poetic text, words captured in measured time just like men, performs a purificatory rite and offers a homeopathic cure for the paradox of human multiplicity.