Object Relations Late Antique Viewer

Object Relations: Theorizing the Late Antique Viewer
Oxford Handbooks Online

Glenn Peers
The Oxford Handbook of Late Antiquity
Edited by Scott Fitzgerald Johnson
Print Publication Date: Oct 2012 Subject: Classical Studies, Classical Art and Architecture
Online Publication Date: Nov 2012 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195336931.013.0030
Abstract and Keywords
This article examines texts and objects made during the late antique period (c.200-c.750),
in order to make a case for a deeply relational sympathy between late antique Christians
and their objects. It discusses the extension of that relation into the material world
around those people, and in so doing, argues that distinctions among humanity, objects,
and world were sometimes blurred or masked. The natural world, thus provided insight
into God's immanence, renewed after the Incarnation of Christ, and even physical
apprehension of it.
Keywords: Late Antiquity, texts, Christians, religious objects, Christianity
A study of late antique relations with objects needs to begin at a point where those
relations were fluid and contingent, where a powerful surfeit of matter was revealed. In a
hagiography from the sixth or seventh century, paint was divinely saturated medicine:
[The woman] depicted them on all the walls of her house, being as she was
insatiable in her desire of seeing [Saints Cosmas and Damian], for which reason
she had been struck by this excessive desire. Perceiving herself to be in danger,
she crawled out of bed and, upon reaching the place where these most wise Saints
were depicted on the wall, she stood up leaning on her faith as upon a stick and
scraped off with her fingernails some plaster. This she put into water and, after
drinking the mixture, she was immediately cured of her pains by the visitation of
the Saints. (Deubner 1907, 137–138 [15]; Mango 1986, 139; see now Cox Miller
2009, 131–133, 144)
How late antique people understood this episode is a crucial aspect of their attitude to
matter, and how historians have understood this story says a great deal about our own
attitudes. Moreover, those attitudes have colored our historical explanations of late
antique images and materiality, for that episode reveals the essential traits of the
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connection between divinity and matter as relational, in short, a worldview without

objects—all are subjects. The fact that the hagiography (p. 971) survives in this form
demonstrates fault lines in the positions of theologians, because that episode was also
adduced as a proof for proper worship of icons at the Second Council of Nicaea in 787
(Mansi 1901–1927, 12:68). Despite the clear evidence of the healing presence of God in
the paint, theologians espoused an apparently self-contradictory position from which
idolatry was rid but a species of animism admitted.
This chapter examines a small number of objects made in the late antique period (here c.
200–c. 750) in conjunction with texts to make a case for a deeply relational sympathy
between late antique Christians and their objects. It offers an understanding of the
extension of that relation into the material world around those people, and in doing so, it
argues that distinctions among humanity, objects, and world were sometimes blurred or
masked. The natural world, then, provided insight into God’s immanence, renewed after
the Incarnation of Christ, and even physical apprehension of it. Divinity infused matter,
and when properly activated and perceived, that matter mediated and transformed, as
the woman so devoted to Cosmas and Damian knew.
This icon of the saints

Sergius and Bacchus (now
in Kiev; fig. 30.1) probably
dates to the sixth century,
roughly contemporary to
the hagiography already
mentioned, and it shows
the two saints as young
men with martyrs’ crosses
Click to view larger (Nelson and Collins 2006,
Figure 30.1 . Icon of Saints Sergius and Bacchus, 126–127). Sergius and
National Art Museum, Kiev, sixth century
(Reproduced with permission © The Bohdan and Bacchus were military
Varvara Khanenko National Museum of Arts, Kiev, saints, but they are
Ukraine). See also color plate section.
dressed in court costume,
with red and gold tunics
partly covered by white cloaks. The panel is small (approximately 28 by 42 cm), and it
was probably once a lid, likely for a reliquary.
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In this period, relics and

images were equivalent,
and the images of the
saints had that same
physical reality and
presence as did bodily
remains. As the woman
here knew, figuration was
relation. Another episode
from the late-sixth-century
Miracles of Symeon the
Younger vividly showed the
ellipsis between saint and
matter. When a priest
Click to view larger
asked the saint to heal his
Figure 30.2 . Clay token of Saint Symeon the Stylite,
son, Symeon sent the
Menil Collection, Houston, sixth–seventh century anxious pair home: “So
(Courtesy Menil Collection, Houston). take this eulogia made of
my dust, depart and when
you look at the imprint of our image, it is us that you will see” (Van den Ven 1962–1970,
1:205–206 [231]). The dust is the matter collecting at the base of his column, that
material that had soaked up the sanctity channeling through the saint from God. It is not
just the dust that works miraculously, but its reshaping into the image of the saint, like
this eulogia, or token, from the Menil Collection in Houston (fig. 30.2). Here a line
between image and saint, representation and relic, loses meaning; agency extends from
saint to relic to image, and the network of relations among them is a constant operation
of power (Bennett 2004; pace Cox Miller 2009, 128–129, 145–147).
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Likewise, the small

Figure 30.3 . Icon of Saint Peter, Monastery of Saint
Catherine, Mount Sinai, sixth–seventh century (By medallion of Christ
permission of Saint Catherine’s Monastery, Sinai,
Egypt). See also color plate section. between the two saints on
the painted panel is a relic.
Without bodily relics, Christ left traces in his representation, and this image is also his
relic: his likeness is his trace. In this same period, the miraculous icon of Christ, the
Mandylion and its relatives, came into being (Belting 1994, 59–63; also Dagron 2007,
181–201; Frommel and Wolf 2006; Wolf, Dufour Bozzo, and Calderoni Masetti 2007).
From the fourth (p. 972) century, Christ’s letter to the king of Edessa, Abgar, had
circulated, and so his voice also circulated, but the image (acheiropoieta, “not made by
[human] hands”) that he produced by miraculous means (either by blood or sweat or
some other medium) came to assume a cultural priority by the sixth century. In the course
of this period, then, Christ and his saints, like Cosmas and Damian, (p. 973) assumed an
essential relation with their images. Images’ object relations with viewer and models
freighted divinity in that world.
Such freighting occurred because these painted panels could be mistaken visually for the
real thing, even though they do not possess verisimilitude in our terms of visual
correspondences. Indeed, the Sergius and Bacchus icon is strongly abstract and two-
dimensional to our eyes and therefore lacks natural likeness with its models on our terms.
An extraordinarily skilled painting like the icon of St. Peter, probably from the sixth
century also and now at the Monastery of St. Catherine on Mount Sinai (fig. 30.3), reveals
the volumetric mass of the saint, and the decorated niche indicates a depth of space
around the saint. And yet the figure is clearly two-dimensionalized, and the awkward
passages in (p. 974) the painting, like the left ear, help ensure a viewer’s recognition of its
artifice. Flatness is a defining feature of these paintings, in other words, and those visual
qualities may have ensured the survival, even the success, of this format, because of their
divergence from the three-dimensional statues that Romans had included in worship.
Eastern Christians and Jews alike appear to have gravitated toward this pronounced two-
dimensionality because it allowed figural art without taint of idolatry (Kogman-Appel
2009; Bland 2004). But this more pronounced two-dimensionality does not imply that
these icons were mere incidentals in that environment. Great power resided in the face,
most markedly the Mandylion and its cognates, and from the earliest period, this
concentration on face distinguished Christian art and theology from Judaism and Islam
(Epstein 2006, 173–203). Apparently free from untoward idolatry—at least from the point
of view of the large silent majority—icons were objects with strong relation and power, as
the rise in private and public devotion to them in this period reveals (Kitzinger 1954;
Cameron 1992; Belting 1994).
Eighth-century iconoclasm marked a terminating point in late antique culture in which

highly stressful discussion over idolatry came to a head and in which each side accused
the other of serious misdeeds and heretical thinking (Barber 2002). The stress arose from
the apparently overweening authority that made-things—that is, art—were assuming
(Cameron 1992). As Hans Belting points out, images had power, and theologians limited
means to counter it (Belting 1994). That stress was then largely restricted to theologians,
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at least with regard to the sources available to us, and it arose out of an irresolvable
conflict: trying to suppress an irrepressible desire in that culture to render the divine
material (Küper 2008).
Perhaps new interpretations can break the impasse and reveal more relational realities
than we have admitted. As Clifford Ando has recently argued, for example, Platonic
metaphysics of representation profoundly affected powerful late antique and modern
understandings of idols and icons (Ando 2008; also Johnston 2008; Frankfurter 2008). The
value of copies in relation to a model is low, on the one hand, because a Platonic reading
asserts that copies are different from and lesser than the model. On the other hand,
representation cannot contain divinity because God exists on a higher, absolute plane.
“Recognizing further hypostases beyond or between the divine and corporeal, people in
the ancient world might well have understood that Cybele somehow was, and yet was not
coextensive with, their black stone; and in that way, she might have been, but not been
identical with, other black stones” (Ando 2008, 42). The relation between representation
and stone is explored later, too, because stone in the late antique world was also in
relation to God and his saints. Those hypostases operated in this world but need to be
explained for us in ways unnecessary for those late antique Christians. Likewise, idols do
not enter in those Christians’ self-conceptions. Despite theological worries, those
Christians knew they did not have idols, simply because their images “worked,” as
Richard Trexler pointed out in another context (Trexler 1991, 72). Such understandings
chase (p. 975) binaries like God and matter, icon and idol, and representation and nature,
and they smooth apparent tensions into a collaborative, relational materiality.
Capgras: A General Condition

Ernst Kitzinger (1912–2003) once asserted that this culture arrived at the fever stage of
idolatry by the end of the period (Kitzinger 1954, 85). However, late antique attitudes to
its objects are in clear need of a new diagnosis that recognizes problems with real things.
Let me propose another pathology to help explain late antique Christians’ apparent
difficulties with object relations. Capgras syndrome is known after its first discussant,
Joseph Capgras (1873–1950), and it is a relatively rare affliction with unclear causes, but
it has strong attestation and is consistent in its features (Capgras and Reboul-Lachaux
1923; Luauté 2009). It is a problem of cognition that affects a subject’s ability to
recognize the true identity of persons or objects. The subject looks at a familiar face, for
example, and sees an impostor, whom he or she may love and trust yet hate and fear at
the same time. Vivid narratives of the dislocation this syndrome brings can be found in
works of fiction, for instance, in Richard Price’s The Echo Maker (2006), but
psychological literature also presents powerful cases where a subject has lost moorings in
social life that undermine one’s very grip on self. One such case described the affliction of
a young man who began to suspect, and then believe, that his parents were no longer
who they claimed to be (Ramachandran and Blakeslee 1998, 158–173). The young man
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saw the physical and psychological resemblances these new strangers had to his parents,
but he could not accept that those resemblances were true. He came to believe that they
were impostors, whose role-playing must have been arranged by his real parents for
reasons he could not understand or explain. His parents tried to reason around this
mistrust by telling their son that the impostor-father had been sent to China and his real
one was now in place, but he could accept this only intellectually, and his emotional
distrust led him to revert within a week to seeing his father as an actor with unclear
motives. This unsettling miscognition finally led him to doubt his own previously secure
sense of self, and he came to admit that he was also possibly an impostor. The real one
had left him in place, now untethered from his formerly inviolable selfhood that had
somehow gone elsewhere. That paradigmatic I, which we all take as a truth of existence,
had split and become a truly disorienting position within a formerly safe world of people
and things.
Capgras syndrome focuses its miscognition most forcefully on persons or objects nearest
and most familiar to the subject. The subject retains the ability to recall and identify
persons and objects but makes an essential error by not accepting the truth of that
ability; in other words, the subject knows the person (p. 976) or object, recognizes
individual features, but cannot accept that what is before him or her is the true person or
object.
Late antique (and also Byzantine) theologians reveal the most extreme symptoms of a
general condition of Capgras syndrome. They argued that Christians were free of idolatry
because images were not real, and others argued against images altogether because
images were so unreal as to be pointless. They were responsible for infecting the rest of
their culture with this syndrome, but they were not entirely successful in spreading it
fully and deeply—natural antibodies existed. Many Christians, the silent majority again,
simply accepted the world to be deeply divinized after the Incarnation and matter newly
charged with God, and they were able to counteract the Capgras in the theological elite
with their own practice of relational Christianity. The issue for historians is that we have
taken the symptoms expressed by theologians at face value; we have misunderstood them
because we share many of them and have read their hysteria without asking about our
investments in it and without searching deeply enough for the condition’s root causes.
In proposing that late antique culture suffered from Capgras, and theologians more than
any others, this chapter uses a metaphor, and perhaps a highly simplifying one, to offer a
way of expressing a blind spot that existed then and exists still. We have believed that
Late Antiquity falls into our Western tradition, as we understand it, and that tradition
offered humans secure definitions of the discrete self and safe relations of that self to the
world outside it. This chapter tries to argue for a diagnosis of late antique cognition and
relation to the world that reads the patients’ description of the condition in a critical
fashion. In short, some late antique Christians—notably theologians in their theoretical
texts—insisted that their miscognition of things around them was correct. They naturally
followed their Capgras in theory as the right way to interpret persons and objects in their
world (on this natural fallacy, see Berlinerblau 2005), but this chapter contends that we
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should interpret the theology of images as symptoms of the Capgras disorder. While
insisting on safe relations between images and models, image theory disguised the fact
that the “normal condition” for the late antique world was the following: in the first place,
that persons and objects, which were said to be not essentially related to a “real model,”
were essentially related after all; and in the second, that that understanding of the world,
so fundamental as almost never to be addressed as such, made the world fully open,
relational, and contingent.
Touching Sight
This argument describes important differences in late antique intuition and sense in the
culture and reclaims them for that distant world (Gumbrecht 2008; Vance 2008).
Naturally, living and thinking with senses in the late antique (p. 977) world were different
in many ways from our own, but the implications of that difference need to be applied to
understandings of things and persons in that world. We ourselves very often experience
the world and its effects in strangely immaterial ways; our intuitive point of reference is
our discretion that we exist as separate Cartesian beings (Latour 1993; also Davis 2008;
Smith 2008, 489). Many effects arise from that intuitive stance, namely, a basic alienation
from the world. Our bodies are strikingly disembodied as we experience the world, since
our senses follow a mechanistic model of cause and effect, or at least as “common sense”
tells us. And it is only when our body fails or betrays us, with pain or malfunction, that we
want that other body back, and we fall out with ourselves (Leder 1990).
That alienation, its recognition and grudging support, is a necessary condition, in these
views, and animism—its opposite—was widely discredited as an explanatory model, let
alone as a belief. Animism has had a long history as an explanatory model for religions of
so-called primitive cultures in various academic fields of the modern period. It fit easily
into a developmental framework of human cultural and religious evolution, but scholars
understood animism, for the most part, as a phase closer to the origins of religion than to
its evolved state in the modern, developed world. Animists were children to our adults, in
this view, voiced most influentially by the pioneering anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor
(1832–1917) (Stringer 1999; Barnhart 1999; Sharpe 1986, 51–58). Sigmund Freud (1856–
1939) worked hard at extirpating that root evil from our psyche, and he did so through
art—a kind of homeopathic remedy, in a way, to rid us of the residue of animism that we
all have (Nixon 2006). But this chapter attempts to recover some of the productive
aspects of discussing animism seriously, along the lines followed by contemporary
anthropologists like Tim Ingold and Nurit Bird-David. It makes an argument that the
condition disguised by late antique image theory was a kind of animism—a relational,
dialogical, contingent view of the world and its things. Like Capgras patients, those
people in Late Antiquity claimed that they did not see the real thing, but like them, they
really did. Image theory sometimes lets it slip, practice almost always does (if we read it
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with this worldview in mind), and the way matter is understood and made reveals its
sensual existence and extensions.
As Eugene Vance has recently written, we need to overturn our own senses, our own
understanding of cause and effect, to come close to comprehending the senses of Late
Antiquity (Vance 2008; Gumbrecht 2008). Perhaps the most difficult aspect to understand
with full implications is the haptic quality of seeing. The physical contact that arises from
looking is a natural outcome of the way that world understood vision to function. Vision
either worked through extramission (the eye sends out atoms that return to the eye with
sensory information) or intramission (things send out atoms), but in either case, the eye
participated physically in the act of looking, not at all like the disembodied light-ray
model that we use as the basis for understanding how we see. The outcomes of that
looking are radically different from our own.
In the first place, inner seeing—that is, with the inner eye so valued by late
(p. 978)
antique theologians—was not solely in the mind but also participating in the material
world. All seeing had moral content; no innocent gaze or imagining was truly possible. In
the ancient world, where these ideas originated, pleasures and dangers of sight were
fully recognized (for example, Webb 2008, 182–183). In the second century, Achilles
Tatius wrote,
You do not know what a thing it is when a lover is looked at. It has a greater
pleasure than the Business. For the eyes receive each other’s reflections and
impress from little images as in mirrors. Such an emanation of beauty, flowing
down through them into the soul, is a kind of copulation at a distance. This is not
far from the intercourse of bodies. For it is a novel kind of embrace of bodies.
(Leucippe and Cleitophon, 1.9.4)
That moral ambiguity inherent in seeing was deeply troubling for theologians, and
Tertullian (c. 160–c. 220) and Clement of Alexandria (c. 150–211/16), for example, may
have seen too vividly the moral danger posed by statues, even inadvertently seen, and
statues therefore were not worth the risk to the Christian soul. Their attitudes to art, as
normally presented by scholars, were probably more complex and accommodating than
we credit them (Murray 1981), but Simon Goldhill’s observation, “How you look is part of
your relation to God,” is fully in keeping with the moral imperatives behind seeing in the
late antique world (Goldhill 2001; Frank 2000).
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In the second place, outer,

or physical, seeing was
also a means of making
actual contact with the
seen. What Paula really
saw when she approached
the place of the Crucifixion
in Jerusalem can never be
known, but in 404, Jerome
(c. 340–420) wrote that
“she fell down and
worshipped before the
Figure 30.4 . Pilgrimage ampulla, Monza, sixth–
seventh century (©Monza, Museo e Tesoro del cross as if she could see
Duomo di Monza, foto di Piero Pozzi). the Lord hanging on
it” (Epistola ad
Eustochium, 9.2; Wilkinson 1977, 49; also Frank 2000; Wharton 2006, 42). The crux in
such statements is always the “as if.” We take it normally to implicate metaphorical force
behind the observation, so that it was a quasi reality and took place only in her mind. But
perhaps that kind of seeing was real enough in that world, after all, and so when that
vision is extroverted, put into the world, we encounter real presence of the reality seen
and participants both. The survival of pilgrims’ tokens from the Holy Land is
extraordinary in itself; a number went to Italy and were kept in church treasuries, and
the small, fragile objects would otherwise have been lost. But they also reveal a
miraculous outcome of seeing places where divinity lived and died: before the kneeling
pilgrims at the foot of the cross is the crucified Lord (fig. 30.4). The relative “as if” is
forceful indeed in this context and does not hedge or fence off (see also Smith 2008, 482–
483).
Such seeing characterized the world of Late Antiquity, and at the end of that period, a
particularly vivid example is provided by a monk living on the edge of the Mediterranean
world and outside the Christian empire. Dadīšō‘—Gift of Jesus—lived in a monastery in
the Qatar region of the Persian Gulf (Carter 2007), and he wrote in Syriac several works
that became influential, one of (p. 979) which was the Treatise on Solitude and Prayer. In
that work, Dadīšō‘ instructed his disciples in the proper ways to find relation with God:
After this rise from both your knees, embrace and kiss our Lord on His Cross, and
then immediately perform ten prostrations, and believe and trust what I am about
to tell you: As your sight perceives the light of the Crucifix and your lips feel also
its heat when the sun shines on it and you pray to it and kiss it, although the sun
itself is in the sky and the Crucifix is on the wall, so also, and in a greater
measure, although the man of our Lord Christ in the flesh sits in heaven on the
throne of majesty, according to the preaching of the blessed Paul, yet His power,
His glory, His working and His dominion are in the cross; and you kiss our Lord
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Himself and embrace Him with love, as it is written: “Who is like unto our Lord
Jesus Christ, who dwelleth on high and beholdeth the depth” (paraphrasing Psalm
113:4)—in Heaven and in the Cross. (Mingana 1934, 136; Brock 1999–2000)
That sense of pressing immanence of the holy in matter was strongly communicated in
Dadīšō‘‘s prescriptive exercises here for his disciples, and vision was the multifaceted
means by which that immanence was triggered. Touch and sight were tightly interwoven,
of course, but God was in—on—that cross, like the energy of the sun is in the wood and
yet the sun itself remains in the sky; he is coextensive like Cybele was with her stones
(Ando 2008). Lips, hands, and eyes made his living presence there in that wood.
Can one call such late antique object relations animistic? Animism is not simply a
(p. 980)
way of imputing life or spirit to things that are actually inert. As Tim Ingold writes, this
view of life is not about the world but provides a way of being in it, and it provides the
potential for dynamic transformations, in which “beings of all kinds, more or less person-
like or thing-like, continually and reciprocally bring one another into existence” (Ingold
2006). Dadīšō‘ advised his students to make themselves closer to God through making
their images more subject and thereby transforming all those beings present into
divinized things in the world (for comparison, Jung 2000, 632). In that reciprocal fashion,
a purified, realized Christian came into being through his contact with wood, which is
Christ.
Nature and Relation

In the third place, materials in relics and icons were not dead, inert matter, nor were
places inactive, and none was more animate than the wood of the cross in the Holy
Sepulcher. That wood had ceaseless capability for regeneration, and its active power
never diminished. As Paulinus of Nola (c. 354–431) wrote after receiving and distributing
some of that wood:
Indeed this cross of inanimate wood has living power, and ever since its discovery
it has lent its wood to the countless, almost daily, prayers of men. Yet it suffers no
diminution; though daily divided, it seems to remain whole to those who lift it, and
always entire to those who venerate it. Assuredly, it draws this power of
incorruptibility, this undiminishing integrity, from the Blood of that Flesh that
endured death yet did not see corruption. (Epistulae, 36–125–33; Wharton 2006,
20)
Gregory of Tours (538–594) later lauded the power of the ground on which Christ had lain
after death and, from that soil, of the tokens fashioned and dispersed throughout
Christendom (In gloria martyrum, Krusch 1885/1969, 42.21–26). Wood and soil store up
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power from those contacts, they gain unique powers of expansion and growth, and they
retain that relational energy when sent away and made into other things.
How one sees the

regenerative potential in
the world around oneself
implicates all manner of
thinking. The wood of the
cross was a special case,
unique in the world, of
course, but it shared that
quality of potential
regeneration and
inexhaustibility with other
Click to view larger materials that we think of
Figure 30.5 . Gold reliquary box, Menil Collection, as being finite and inert,
Houston, sixth–seventh century (Courtesy Menil for instance, metals. In the
Collection, Houston).
ancient world, natural
philosophers held that
metals grew beneath the earth like plants; they were lower forms than plants, but they
reproduced themselves in a similar manner, through seeds, and their root systems, which
we would call veins—rather suggestively, actually—were like (p. 981) another of the
earth’s vascular systems. This idea of the earth’s minerals being renewable resources was
not seriously questioned or even explored really, and it remained viable into the modern
period (Bachelard 2002, 159–162; Merchant 1980, 29–30; Healy 1978, 15–19; Vogel 1967,
287; also Janes 1998). Such views had an impact on how metals like gold and silver were
perceived, that is, as potentially or formerly living parts of matter. This small gold box
from the Menil Collection in Houston was likely a reliquary container, but its history is
largely obscure (fig. 30.5). The lack of decoration, however, intensifies the impact of the
material properties of sheen and light, and those properties have a history, which is part
of that matter’s origins and life. They also generate experiential meaning, for the
contents of the box, now lost, were triggers for radiations of sacred energy. Such objects
react to light (sunshine, candles, lamps) and create this sense of radiation, so that as they
demonstrate their materiality, they also dematerialize, withdraw into their halations. In
that sense, as they mediate between the divine and the human, they themselves enrich,
enliven that very mediation in their material histories and properties.
The connection between nature and nature made into object, which I am arguing for
here, of course seeks to suppress once again binarisms, in this case, a nature-culture
split. Nature was not a neutral screen on which late antique Christians could project
human activities, nor was it simply a symbolic, (p. 982) analogical domain. It was a sphere
in which humans and God, and all other actors in the terrestrial economy, were engaged
in establishing self-transforming processes turned toward divinity. Stories like Gregory’s
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and Paulinus’ revealed how the world could be opened and remain open to God. The cross
is divine wood made into a cross, and the soil under Christ’s body was made into tokens.
Nature and artifact are different, of course, but in that world, essential relations remain,
wherever we ourselves would put them along the spectrum of culture and nature.
If earth and the wood of the cross continued to multiply from their singular contact with
the body of God, then nature was clearly no less responsive to God’s presence and touch.
Such attempts at establishing relations among the natural world, humanity, and God have
often fallen to the field of folklore and ethnography and not been admissible to serious
considerations of deep structures of the late antique world (see, however, Wharton 2006).
But stories of nature and its contingency with God abounded, and the places where that
contingency was present were highly prized. They proved not only that such flashpoints
were accessible but also that nature was widely, deeply open to God. For example,
Sozomen, writing sometime between 439 and 450, described a tree, located at
Hermopolis in Egypt, that was transformed by the presence of Jesus into a healing thing
(Davis 2008, 132–133). More dramatically even, the tree, named Persis, had a sufficient
amount of sentience that it could recognize the Messiah—an ability remarkable indeed
during the lifetime of Jesus.
At Hermopolis, in the Thebaid, is a tree called Persis, of which the branches, the
leaves, and the least portion of the bark, are said to heal diseases, when touched
by the sick; for it is related by the Egyptians that when Joseph fled with Christ and
Mary, the holy mother of God, from the wrath of Herod, they went to Hermopolis;
when entering at the gate, this largest tree, as if not enduring the advent of
Christ, inclined to the ground and worshipped Him. I relate precisely what I have
heard from many sources concerning this tree. I think that this phenomenon was a
sign of the presence of God in the city; or perhaps, as seems most probable, the
tree, which had been worshipped by the inhabitants, after the pagan custom, was
shaken, because the demon, who had been an object of worship, started up at
sight of Him who was manifested for purification from such agencies. It was
moved of its own accord. (5.21.8–10, Hartranft 1890/1952, 2.343)
Sozomen stated that the worshipping tree was due to the presence either of God or, more
probably in his opinion, of a demon shaken by his presence in the vicinity. The inclination
of the tree and its worship imply an energy and will, however, directed toward the
acknowledgment of Christ, and the two (not necessarily exclusive) explanations of
Sozomen are means to show God’s immanence in nature then and now.
Other trees flourished in these conditions of relationality of God and nature. The well-
known complex at Mamre, which was built under Constantine, was a monument built
specifically for the sacred oak tree, the Terebinth, (p. 983) believed to have been the tree
under which Abraham entertained the three angels (Bar 2008, 284–285; Fleischer 2004,
151; Taylor 1993, 86–95). The shrine was widely popular among Christians, Jews, and
pagans alike. Trees have deep connections to shrines throughout the late antique world,
and they can be benign like these examples and protective. They can attack, if they or the
Page 12 of 24

shrine is threatened, and they can be appeased with offerings like rags tied to their
branches. These attitudes—often dismissed as superstition—are deeply embedded in late
antique and Eastern Christian attitudes toward the world around them. Not only in elite
literature do they survive (for example, see Aeneid 3.19–48 among others) but also in
stories relegated to folklore, texts, and oral histories difficult to date but ubiquitous.
(Alexiou 2002 is exemplary in taking this richness of the Hellenic tradition as seriously as
it deserves.)
Late Antique Animism

The episode discussed earlier from the hagiography of Saints Cosmas and Damian in
which paint became an antidote was less a symptom of irrational behavior, from this point
of view, than a natural interpretation of the lively ingredients of matter. That woman’s
yearning for the saints found expression in her eyes and mouth, and she satisfied part of
her desire by having the saints painted in her home, but her desire was greater than the
touch of the eyes could satisfy. The woman wanted to have them inside more thoroughly
than sight alone allowed, and so she flaked off pigments with her own hand and drank
pigmented water. The word epiphoitêsis was translated by Cyril Mango, whose version
was cited, as “visitation,” but that word choice also marks our own interpretative position
on the process of presence and healing. Epiphoitêsis is actually a stronger term than
visitation would suggest in English. Visitation is relatively weak, where the word is
translatable as manifestation, intervention, or even haunting, which in the context of this
passage indicates a more direct, dramatic attendance by the saints. The unfolding story
retells elements of romance after all, where the lover desires the absent beloved, makes
him-her-them present by portrayal, and finds the portrait nearly real enough to satisfy.
The sequence recalls stories like Pygmalion, for example, where the icon comes to
supersede the referent (Stoichita 2008; Bettini 1999). In that legend, Pygmalion entreated
the gods to make Galatea real, but in the hagiography, the woman’s act—faith supporting
her like a cane, as the texts stated—and matter’s cooperation silently make the paint
healing. And the passage in the hagiography leaves serious doubt as to the manner of the
manifestation or intervention: the saints are not said to appear to her directly but must
have acted through the matter, we are left to infer, that the woman shaped in their
likenesses on her walls and then ingested.
(p. 984) That apparent ambiguity is serious, if the passage is read carefully, but seen in
another light, the ambiguity is just a natural implication of potent, multiple effects of art
that relates, that mediates holy and mortal bodies. Perhaps an unusual parallel might
make this familiar late antique tale less ordinary, even easy. For example, Algonquin
tribes made great efforts to acquire beads, and they admired them for their material
beauty and radiance. But they also understood power to reside in them. Part of the power
derived to the tribes from their visual qualities, but another standard means of gaining
full benefit from powerful substances was respiration, and so Algonquins also ground up
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the beads and smoked them (von Gernet 1996, 170–176). Icons in the late antique world
did not, likewise, exist on a safe, purely mental plane, but belonged to a similar world
where “every artifact embodies a particular sensory mix” (Howes 2006, 166). Everything
is therefore touchable and ingestible, with eye, nose, mouth, and body, and everything
potentially reverses the inside and outside through that sensory mix. The icon that is on a
wall can become internalized, and the outside of that viewer is transformed into a purer
human form. When the woman is healed by ingesting the saints, her body is returned to a
state less alienated to God than was her ill, desiring self. That powerful substance
changes her from the inside out, and the sensory mix of that process goes some way to
revealing the relational, tactile continuum between God and humanity. Furthermore,
incense’s odors intensify another aspect of sensory contact with the divine (S. A. Harvey
2006, 186–188). The interaction between humanity and divinity was mediated by smell,
and the interiorization of the smell altered the communicant. Just as God smelled the
offering of Noah as a “sweet savor” (Genesis 8:20–21), all the participating entities took
in that smell and came into sensory contact.
Stone Objects
Doing fieldwork in Manitoba before the Second World War, the anthropologist Alfred
Hallowell (1892–1981) asked an Ojibwa elder if all the stones that they could see were
alive (Hallowell 1960; G. Harvey 2006; Bird-David 1999). The elder thought for a moment
and answered, “No, but some are.” Hallowell collected views on the liveliness of stones,
and he heard that stones move, open their mouths, and appear unexpectedly from the
ground. He cautioned that these stories revealed only that certain classes of objects have
the potential for animation under certain circumstances, but the potential is real, as stone
is a grammatically active word in Ojibwa, and flint, for instance, is a living person in their
mythology.
That potential exists in the Judeo-Christian tradition, if passages like Deuteronomy 32:13
(“He made him draw honey from the rock, and oil from the (p. 985) flinty rock”) and 1
Peter 2:4 (“Coming to Him as to a living stone, rejected indeed by men, but chosen by God
and precious”) are read with this same sympathy. And episodes from pilgrimage sites also
revealed this empathy and life of stones. For example, the Piacenza Pilgrim, who traveled
to the Holy Land in about 570, spoke of living stones, too, such as the “ugly stone” that
murmured to anyone listening to it. In the same passage, he described the column at Sion
that softened itself to the degree that it had been able to accept the impression of the
suffering body of Christ: “his chest clove to the stone” (Antoni Placentini Itinerarium, 22;
Wilkinson 1977, 84). Likewise, Arculf (in Adomnan’s recounting), himself traveling
between 679 and 688, spoke of the portrait-bearing column at the church of St. George at
Diospolis that swallowed the offending hand of a “witless fellow,” as well as his lance.
After killing the man’s horse, the column released his hand only when the man had
admitted the truth of Christianity. The finger holes were still visible in Adomnan’s time,
Page 14 of 24

and the stone floor had still not allowed the horse’s blood to be released (De locis sanctis,
3.4.1–13; Wilkinson 1977, 114–115). At Jabal al-Tayrin in Egypt, Christ had left the
impression of his hand in the living rock, and moreover, an opening in the rock oozed a
black substance called collyrium or kohl:
The church is hewn out of the mountainside, and in the rock is the mark of the
palm of the hand of the Lord Christ—to whom be glory!—which was made when
he touched the mountain, when it bowed in adoration before him, after he had
gone down thither from Syria. He grasped the mountain, when it worshipped
before him, and restored it to its place with his hand; so that the mark of his palm
remains impressed upon that mountain to the present day. In the impression of the
hand there is a fine perforation, large enough to admit a collyrium-needle, into
which the needle is inserted, and, when it is pulled out, brings up a black
collyrium which makes an indelible mark. (Evetts 1895/1969, 218)
This emanation could be used to mark pilgrims’ bodies, to leave indelible markings on
their bodies with real contact to the body of Christ himself. As Stephen Davis recently
wrote, “Received from the palm of Jesus’ own hand, as it were, this sanctified substance
marked the bodies of pilgrims and functioned as a physical sign of their identification
with Christ” (Davis 2008, 140).

Figure 30.6 . View of interior, Hagia Sophia, Istanbul,
constructed 532–537 (© Dumbarton Oaks, Image
Collections and Fieldwork Archives, Washington,
DC).
Page 15 of 24

Ojibwa traditions are

perhaps not as remote
from the late antique views
of the potentials of stone
as one might think.
Evidently, stone was able
to speak, to transform, to
accommodate itself to
contact with the holy, and
to possess sufficient
sentience to realize it was
under attack and react.
Figure 30.7 . View of the North Gallery, northwest
pier, Hagia Sophia, Istanbul, constructed 532–537 (© The episode related by
Dumbarton Oaks, Image Collections and Fieldwork Adomnan makes no
Archives, Washington, DC).
mention at all of George
working through the stone,
nor did the Piacenza Pilgrim state that Christ made the stone move to provide a cavity for
his chest. In both accounts, the stone was the active character, and it self-made its
representation, made itself reflective of divine presence, and made itself combative if
divinity was doubted. One can say that not all late antique stones were alive, in other
words, but special ones were and could be so again.
(p. 986)Stones in special clusters could say things in ways nothing else could, and the
famous marble slabs in Hagia Sophia were splendid showing stones (figs. 30.6 and 30.7).
Not made by human hands, those split marble panels clad much of the vast interior of the
church, and they were also miraculous abstract images. Their figuration cannot be
identified by our de-educated eyes; to late antique eyes, it was limpid (Markham 1859,
38; Trilling 1998). Evidently, late antique viewers of all aspects of a church like Hagia
Sophia found content and connection in areas that our eyes skim. They recognized that
nature revealed divine truths: that divinity worked through nature and was in constant
relation (p. 987) to it. This mode of understanding geology is related to perceiving nature
as in constant, contingent states of divinization: God works himself out in the world, he is
immanent in all of it, and he reveals that presence in answering stone.
Hagia Sophia on the whole was replete with nature, too; its stones spoke of inherent
forms of holy figures, and they recapitulated the world outside it. Paul Silentiarius, for
example, wrote a fulsome description of the church, which appears to have been
delivered in 563. In his ekphrasis, Paul made the church a cosmos in which stars, hills,
flowing streams with flowery banks, wheat fields and wood, along with sheep and olives
and vines can be seen, as well as the “limpid calm upon the blue-grey sea, whipped to
foam by the sailor’s oar” (Ekphrasis tou naou tes Agias Sophias, ll. 286–293; Fobelli 2005,
114–116; Trilling 1998, 125). Such seeing was encouraged on many levels, as Paul
reveals, and in liturgy also, in the sense that veins of laid marble in the floor of Hagia
Sophia were markers of rivers of paradise and of stagings for episcopal consecrations
(Majeska 1978). Germanus, patriarch of Constantinople from 715 to 730, wrote a highly
Page 16 of 24

influential liturgical treatise in which he provided a strongly literalist approach to church

space, in which the altar, for example, was identified with sites like Bethlehem, Golgotha,
and the Sepulcher (Meyendorff 1984). Late antique subjects were evidently open to
reading and relating to the world around themselves with full attention to labile meanings
and responding objects—including stones, buildings, altars, and paint. Everything could
act, exchange, and transform.
(p. 988) Looking at Objects with Animism

Icons, and by extension all things that were made and were inhabiting the late antique
world, were constantly alert sites. In fact, this argument is a view into the abyss, as Ernst
Kitzinger memorably put it (Kitzinger 1954, 147, but see Freedberg 1989, 29), the abyss
that rationalists like Kitzinger feared to impute to a civilized, Western society, that depth
where things were capable of life. Naturally, that fear of the abyss says more about us
than it does about the culture we study. The modernist position normally draws a dividing
line between the world of objects and the world of meaning, but that separation is an
illusion, and a reading of late antique animism would view all objects as potentially
communicative subjects. This animism is a relational position; that is, all human and
material things relate in transformative and productive ways, and they do so in
conversation as equal participants.
The question always arises of how we know what is alive and what is not, and the answer
is usually determined through experience. As the Ojibwa elder implied, we know when it
shows us. Of course, late antique culture had a whole set of complex strategies in play
that established ways of understanding what was living and what was not. These
strategies were always politically inscribed, and they permit the “spread of agency”
throughout the world. For example, the attacking portrait-column of George was serving
the purpose, on one level, of enforcing respect for institutional objects. One always needs
to recognize the stakes when we read their texts with their elaborate, compelling, and
nearly persuasive explanations of their “art.” However, texts and things demonstrate how
to evaluate that liveliness in the world, even if that evaluation is always tentative and
provisional. For as Aristotle (384–322 B.C.E.) wrote, “Nature proceeds little by little from
the inanimate to living creatures in such a way that we are unable, in the continuous
sequence, to determine the boundary line” (Historia Animalium, 588b.4–589a.10; and
Thomson 1995). That contingency of animation, its mysteriously omnipresent
possibilities, demands a critical reading of the world. Western culture believes this
reading is straightforward for the most part, but it relies on the objectification of the
world to make it so. In an animist-friendly world, everything is potentially subjectified,
and that world therefore demands a more creative, open, and fluid understanding of
matter (Rooney 2000). In that sense, overcoming Capgras syndrome happens when we
recognize that we are in front of the real thing and that our miscognition has led us to
interpret the meanings of objects wrongly. Likewise, admitting the contingency of the
Page 17 of 24

world into late antique understandings of matter is the cure for that Capgras. Now we
know we are experiencing the actual thing, as subject with real relation, and we can
know that those people did, too. The objects we experience are really themselves and not
impostors.
So where are the dividing lines for objects, and what are the triggers that make them
sometimes alive? These icons, boxes, and crosses, these things, were (p. 989) surely
active participants in their ritual and devotional performances, and they are not then
“objects of devotion” at all because that wording implies that they receive only, that they
are passive receptacles. Not wholly discrete, their materiality gave means to act in the
world—they are in the world like us—and through their images and their words, they look
and speak. The point, then, is that not only did objects alter subjectivities but also they
actively participated themselves, as entities in a process of exchange among desiring
bodies. This animism is a kind of perceptual strategy, after all, to make the world as full of
God as they could wish it (Guthrie 1993).
Even our own safest category, the apparently disembodied word, was alive and corporeal.
Christian words were also animating presences in that world. Erik Thunø has examined
living writing in late antique culture from this point of view: “The special significance
given by Christians to the written word changed its status from a transparent to an
opaque self-referential signifier, where the subject signified (Christ) was himself also the
signifier” (Thunø 2007; also Krueger 2004, 13–57; Nelson 2005). In such a world, the
words in a manuscript are not empty, but full of participation by the writer, calligrapher,
reader, and God, and the dividing line across objects disappears in a Christian fusion.
So every animism has its own project, its own shifting horizons, and Ojibwa stones and
Algonquin beads are not the same as late antique objects—though they have things in
common. Late antique animism is fraught with its own special histories. We can see
forcefully other ways in which late antique objects worked so energetically on their
viewers and why they broke down apparent differences in identity of viewer and thing.
Late antique objects were part of an ecology of social, ideological, and material relations:
live and let live.
Suggested Reading
Recent exhibition catalogues provide good grounding in the material and bibliography:
Byzantium 330–1453, ed. R. Cormack and M. Vassilaki, London: Royal Academy, 2008;
Picturing the Bible: The Earliest Christian Art, ed. J. Spier, New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 2007; and In the Beginning: Bibles before the Year 1000, ed. M. Brown,
Washington, DC: Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian
Institution, 2006. Recommended on specific media: La sculpture byzantine VIIe–XIIe
siècles: Actes du colloque international organisé par la 2e Éphorie des antiquités
byzantines et l’École française d’Athènes (6–8 septembre 2000), ed. C. Pennas and C.
Page 18 of 24

Vanderheyde, Athens: École française d’Athènes, 2008; B. Pitarakis, Les croix-reliquaires

pectorales byzantines en bronze, Paris: Picard, 2006; A. Cutler, Late Antique and
Byzantine Ivory Carving, Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998; G. Noga-Banai, The Trophies of the
(p. 990) Martyrs: An Art Historical Study of Early Christian Silver Reliquaries, Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2008; and E. D. Maguire and H. Maguire, Other Icons: Art and
Power in Byzantine Secular Culture, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007.
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Notes:
(1) . Georgia Frank, Ann Marie Yasin, and Caitlin Haskill read versions of this essay and
offered encouragement and excellent criticisms; I thank them warmly for that
engagement. In spring 2009, the graduate students in my seminar “Byzantine Things”
were stimulating discussants over these questions, as was my collaborator, Kristina Van
Dyke, and I am grateful to them all for a memorable experience. This essay is part of a
project directed toward an exhibition, Byzantine Things in the World, which will take
place at the Menil Collection, Houston, in 2013.
Glenn Peers
Glenn Peers is Professor of Early Medieval and Byzantine Art at the University of
Texas at Austin
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Object Relations: Theorizing the Late Antique Viewer

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Abstract and Keywords

Keywords: Late Antiquity, texts, Christians, religious objects, Christianity

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connection between divinity and matter as relational, in short, a worldview without

This icon of the saints

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In this period, relics and

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Likewise, the small

Eighth-century iconoclasm marked a terminating point in late antique culture in which

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Capgras: A General Condition

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In the second place, outer,

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Nature and Relation

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How one sees the

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Late Antique Animism

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Ojibwa traditions are

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influential liturgical treatise in which he provided a strongly literalist approach to church

(p. 988) Looking at Objects with Animism

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Studies Quarterly 11:201–214.

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Pagan Imagery in Early Christian Funerary Art. Oxford: B.A.R.

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