Georgia Frank, Susan R. Holman, and Andrew S. Jacobs, eds.,
The Garb of Being: Embodiment and the Pursuit of Holiness in
Late Ancient Christianity
J. Edward
Walters
Hill Museum & Manuscript Library
Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute
George A. Kiraz
James E. Walters
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James E. Walters
Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute
2021
Volume 24.2
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https://hugoye.bethmardutho.org/article/hv24n2prwalters
J. Edward Walters
Georgia Frank, Susan R. Holman, and Andrew S. Jacobs, eds.,
The Garb of Being: Embodiment and the Pursuit of Holiness in
Late Ancient Christianity
https://hugoye.bethmardutho.org/pdf/vol24/HV24N2PRWalters.pdf
Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies
Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute, 2021
vol 24
issue 2
pp 558-562
Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies is an electronic journal dedicated to the study
of the Syriac tradition, published semi-annually (in January and July) by Beth
Mardutho: The Syriac Institute. Published since 1998, Hugoye seeks to offer the
best scholarship available in the field of Syriac studies.
File created by James E. Walters
Georgia Frank, Susan R. Holman, and Andrew S. Jacobs, eds.,
The Garb of Being: Embodiment and the Pursuit of Holiness in
Late Ancient Christianity (New York: Fordham University Press, 2020). Pp.
ix + 409; $65.00
The present volume, a collection of essays organized
around the theme of “embodiment” as a way of studying the texts, beliefs, and
practices of late ancient Christians, serves as a fitting gift of scholarship to
honor the work and career of its dedicatee: Susan Ashbrook Harvey. The theme of
embodiment runs through Harvey’s own work, perhaps seen most clearly in her 2015
monograph Scenting Salvation, where Harvey demonstrates that
careful attention to embodied practices of Christian worship and devotion in late
antiquity can reframe modern scholarly discussions of holiness, ritual, and worship.
All of the entries in this volume, in some way, pick up on these themes and develop
them further.
The editors of the volume have provided an elegant introductory
essay that justifies the dual theme of “garbs” and embodiment for the volume,
inviting the reader to consider different “bodies” and “garments” that form objects
of study in late ancient Christianity. They also discuss the rationale for the three
parts into which the essays are organized. In Part I, Making
Bodies, the essays “consider the varied ways Christians approached the
production of individual bodies as Christian bodies” (p. 5).
In Part II, Performing Bodies, the essays are organized
around the theme of “public performance of bodies” (p. 6) and explore how Christians
rhetorically used physical bodies as means of persuasion. And in Part III, Scripting Bodies, the definition of “body” broadens to
include bodies of textual production, as the authors explore questions related to
written corpora and Christian embodiment.
There are three essays in Part I. In the first, Frances Young
(“Body and Soul: Union in Creation, Reunion at Resurrection”) surveys opinions and
arguments about the union of body and soul in early and late ancient Christian
authors, with particular attention to how these authors subtly reframe the common
“soul-body dualism” of antiquity through their theological views about creation and
the resurrection. In Arthur Urbano’s essay (“Jesus’s Dazzling Garments: Origen’s
Exegesis of the Transfiguration in the Commentary on
Matthew”), we catch a glimpse—through Origen’s eyes—of the transfiguration
scene as a moment of early Christian theological speculation. Building upon his own
work on dress/garb, Urbano walks the reader carefully through Origen’s detailed
exegesis, noting the ways that Origen plays with the clothing metaphor throughout.
In the final essay of Part I, Thomas Arentzen (“Conversing with Clothes: Germanos
and Mary’s Belt”) offers a fascinating examination of a particular piece of clothing
as relic and the surprising way it is invoked in a homily by Germanos I, patriarch
of Constantinople. Through Germanos’s invocation of Mary’s belt and other garments
on display in Constantinople, Arentzen invites the reader to consider the embodied
practice of relic devotion in late antiquity and the ways in which people would have
encountered relics, both physically and rhetorically.
In the first essay of Part II, Sidney Griffith
(“ ‘Denominationalism’ in Fourth-Century Syria: Readings in Saint Ephraem’s Hymns Against Heresies 22–24”) examines three madrāshe from Ephrem’s cycle on heresies, noting how his
accusations against Mani, Marcion, and Bardaisan functioned in Ephrem’s attempts to
define the “orthodox” Christian community around him as the true, legitimate
Christian community, while others were considered heretical offshoots. Rebecca
Falcasantos (“A School for the Soul: John Chrysostom on Mimēsis and the Force of Ritual Habit”) examines how John Chrysostom
employed mimēsis as a model for how Christians learn to be
Christian in the context of worship, as opposed to other social habits they might
learn to mimic elsewhere. Rebecca Krawiec (“A Question of Character: The ‘Labor of
Composition’ as ‘Preventative Medicine’ in Theodoret of Cyrrhus’s Religious History”), analyzes the biographical sketches of monks provided
by Theodoret and argues that the small details and variations that distinguish the
holy people from one another allows them to serve as “preventative medicine,” as
different readers are able to locate and admire particular characters that appeal to
them. Applying the modern lens of “celebrity” studies, Andrew Jacobs (“ ‘I Wan t to
be Alone’: Ascetic Celebrity and the Splendid Isolation of Simeon Stylites”)
explores the “paradox” of ascetic celebrities (that is, ascetics who claimed to
desire solitude yet drew large crowds of onlookers and admirers nonetheless), taking
Simeon the Stylite as a case study. Through this analysis, Jacobs asks the reader to
reconsider the economy of production for hagiographic texts and to shift analysis of
those texts accordingly. Through a broad reading of the liturgical hymns of Romanos
the melodist, Georgia Frank (“Crowds and Collective Affect in Romanos’s Biblical
Retellings”) emphasizes the affective role that Romanos’s lyrics might have played
for those who participated in his worshipping community, drawing attention to the
embodied nature of worship in late antiquity. Jeanne-Nicole Mellon Saint-Laurent
(“Christian Legend in Medieval Iraq: Siblings, Sacrifice, and Sanctity in Behnam and Sarah”) reads a twelfth-century Syriac martyrdom
legend not as a straightforward account of historical events, but as a reflection of
a particular community at a particular time. This essay also explores the
relationship between textual production and sites of martyrdom commemoration in the
medieval Middle East.
Part III begins with an essay from Sebastian Brock (“Five Women
Martyrs: From Persia to Crete”), in which he builds on his own prior work with
Harvey on women martyrs in the Syriac tradition. Here Brock connects the dots
between a Syriac martyrdom account, a story in the Greek synaxarion, and a small
shrine on the island of Crete. Suzanne Rebillard (“Gregory of Nazianzus’s Poetic
Ascetic Aesthetic”) provides a close reading of the poetry of Gregory of Nazianzus,
highlighting the ways in which his rhetorical poetic skill engages the reader as an
active participant. Bernadette McNary-Zak (“Eclipsed in Exile: In Defense of
Athanasius and the Ethiopians”) interprets the three letters of Athanasius known as
the Defense before Constantius in light of Athanasius’s
status among Ethiopian Christians, and thus imperial fears about Athanasius’s
support outside the Roman Empire. Constance M. Furey (“Sacred Bonds: Religion,
Relationships, and the Art of Pedagogy”) examines the Sidney-Pembroke Psalter as a
site of “sacred bonding,” wherein human relationships shed light on the production
of Christian books in the early modern period. Also working with sources well beyond
late antiquity, Susan R. Holman (“ ‘And Yet the Books’: Patristics in the
Footnotes”) compares three modern users of patristic texts, specifically for how
they apply these ancient witnesses to modern concerns. Finally, Caroline T.
Schroeder (“Cultural Heritage Preservation and Canon Formation: What Syriac and
Coptic Can Teach Us about the Historiography of the Digital Humanities”) provides a
new overview of the history of the field of digital humanities that incorporates
Syriac and Coptic projects, not just as small-scale offshoots from more well-known
projects, but as significant developments in digital humanities scholarship in their
own right.
Overall, this volume is a pleasure to read, and the wide
variety of approaches and sources discussed makes it accessible to readers with
diverse interests in the texts and people of late antiquity. Through her teaching
and writing, Susan Ashbrook Harvey has continually invited others to see the innate
relationship between embodied, physical existence in the world and the religious
experience of the supernatural. This volume extends this invitation even further,
and many scholars of late ancient Christianity to come will benefit from it.