Introduction

Virginia Burrus

All orthodoxies need heresies, all political regimes need dissenters, not only
to jail or burn them, but also to co-opt them. For as marginal figures, they
hold the secret of creative transformations. If anomalies can be plowed back
into the system--"composted," as Mary Douglas puts it--the system becomes
stronger; if you eat your enemy, you absorb his power. If, on the other hand,
you insist on purity, you become like a body without orifices, which means
you die very quickly. (Morris Berman, Coming to Our Senses) 1

The five papers collected in this collection shared a common stage for their
performance at the University of British Columbia's Twenty-Fourth
Medieval Workshop, held at Green College in November of 1994, with
the financial support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research
Council of Canada. It was perhaps peculiarly appropriate that the topic of
"Heresies and Heretics" provided the occasion on which a long-standing
gathering of medievalists opened its borders to absorb interlopers from the
field of late antiquity. The papers, however, shared more than a common
stage and common Vancouver hospitality. As our varied and idiosyncratic
texts jostled with one another, multiple sites of dialogic overlap and
intersection emerged, some perhaps predictable, others entirely unforeseen.
All of the essays, for example, exhibit interest in the social and discursive
processes of "demarcation" by which orthodoxies define, and thereby in
some sense create, heresies--not only as the inevitable cartographic by-
products of the impulse to draw boundaries or locate centers, but also
(paradoxically, and in multiple ways) as necessary sources of "nourishment"
for orthodoxies themselves. All of the essays likewise exhibit interest in the
particularity of late Roman contributions to the long trajectory of western
constructions [End Page 403] of orthodoxy and heresy. If it is now
generally acknowledged that the second-century gnostic controversy
provided the context for the earliest crystallization of a Christian orthodoxy,
these papers join other recent voices pressing the claim that the period from
the mid-fourth to the mid-fifth centuries has left equally significant marks
on the history of the articulation of a normative Christianity. Finally, these
essays collectively attest to the importance of the notions of "body" and
"text" for current interpretations of late ancient orthodoxy and heresy.
Through these two densely interrelated concepts, a generation of "late
modern" or even "postmodern" scholars is able to view itself as the heir
(however unlikely, reluctant, or even rebellious) of Fathers likewise perched
precariously at the end of an era. Bearing the multiple markings of such
ancestry, we too have learned the arts of reading bodies and writing desire;
we too are familiar with the lure of a textual corpus that seems to promise
the transcendent purity of the closed, the autonomous, and the unchanging,
as well as the fecund messiness of the transgressive, the enmeshed, and the
ever-shifting.

The first of the papers grounds us most concretely in the realm of the bodily,
as Susanna Elm explores a novel emergence in mid-fourth-century anti-
Montanist polemics, namely the charges that the Phrygian heretics engage in
ritual child-murder, killing their victims by piercing their flesh with bronze
needles. Through a dense analysis of a variety of interrelated ancient
Mediterranean practices, Elm demonstrates the complex cultural
associations of "stigmata" that mark the human body as dominated or
possessed by another. She notes in particular the multiple religious
adaptations of such practices of bodily marking: in a context in which the
claim to "serve" or be "possessed" by an all-powerful divinity represents a
paradoxical elevation of social status, the slave's brand or tattoo (whether
literal or figurative) becomes a mark of special sanctity or priesthood.
Calling for an examination of the relation between fourth-century textual
practices that invoke negative images of the visibly marked (priestly?) body
and contemporaneous struggles to define ecclesiastical leadership in the
catholic community, Elm hints at the complex apologetic functions of the
orthodox Fathers' textual representation of the heretical body. Most
explicitly, the heretical body was marked with the sign of the demonic:
carnal, alien, perverse, the brand inscribed not true Christian priesthood but
its opposite. Yet, at the same time, the marked body was not simply rejected
but also translated into the realm of the spiritual, subtly appropriated as a
necessary fleshly metaphor for the more ambiguously--because invisibly--
marked ascetic body in which the transcendent authority of orthodox
episcopacy resided. [End Page 404]

If Elm pursues the implications of practices of bodily marking for

constructions of ecclesiastical authority, Harry Maier further explores the
links between representations of the heretical body and the constitution of
the "body politic" of orthodoxy. Like Elm, Maier offers a reading of a
particular anti-heretical rhetoric--in this case, Leo the Great's anti-
Manichaean polemics. By narrowing the historical focus to the investigation
of a highly localized conflict in mid-fifth-century Rome, he is able
simultaneously to address a broad set of theoretical issues as he attempts to
bridge more concretely the analyses of the social and discursive practices of
late ancient Christian orthodoxy. Utilizing the insights of sociology and
social anthropology, as well as the French philosopher Michel Foucault's
analysis of power and subjectivity, Maier articulates explicitly what is
implicit in the other essays in this volume: namely, the close entanglement
of orthodoxy with heresy (a peculiarly intimate enemy), and the close
mirroring of the external mechanisms of punishment and the internal
techniques of discipline through which an ecclesiastical subject was formed.
Amidst the chaotic social and political circumstances under which Leo's
anti-Manichaean campaign was waged, the process of public accusation,
trial, and expulsion of dissenters from the Christian community functioned
to restore definition to a highly ambiguous social situation, in which
suspected "Manichaeans" were among those gathered for worship in the
churches of Rome. But the punishment of "others" did not only serve to
demarcate the boundaries of the communal "body of Christ," Maier argues,
but was also intimately related to the more localized bodily disciplines or
techniques of the "self" by which the Christian was marked as the subject of
both episcopal authority and a process of internalized self-scrutiny. As Maier
puts it, "the gaze inward and the gaze outward are one and the same" for
Leo's congregation; heresy-hunting and ascetic self-formation are
inextricably linked in the articulation of a late ancient "ecclesiology of
surveillance."

My own essay joins Elm in exploring how late ancient texts represent the
all-too-fleshly heretical body as both alien and familiar, in an ambiguous
play of distancing and spiritualizing appropriation. Like Maier, I am also
interested in the power relations implicit in the construction of an orthodox
subjectivity that emerges within a specific social context. Focusing on three
early works of Ambrose, I examine how the bishop of Milan inscribes
gender on both Nicene and Arian discourse, amidst the political
complexities of imperially patronized Christianity. Ambrose's apologetic
treatise De fide I-IIrepresents orthodox speech in the traditionally masculine
terms of sword and word, twinned weapons wielded triumphantly by
emperor and bishop in the battle against a feminized heretical opposition. I
argue, [End Page 405] however, that this same work also subtly undercuts
such an implicitly masculinized representation of orthodox speech and
thereby subverts the neat alignment of empire and Christianity, as Ambrose
constructs an alternative feminized ascetic subject who may appear
submissive in relation to the emperor Gratian's authority while at the same
time paradoxically asserting the Word's ultimate transcendence of the carnal
masculinity of the imperial sword. Ambrose's treatises De virginibus and De
viduis offer a complementary perspective on the gendering of orthodox
speech and episcopal authority, here represented through the ambiguous
figures of virgin martyrs and warrior widows, as well as swordless soldiers,
docile lions, and eunuchs. Ambrose's complex gendered marking of the
textual body of orthodoxy mobilizes "antiphallic" subversions of
traditionally masculine discourse, while at the same time utilizing strategies
of sublimation that contribute crucially not to the deconstruction but rather
to the powerful idealization of the phallus.

With Neil McLynn's essay, the focus shifts still more decisively to the
disciplining and disciplined construction of a purely textual body, as we
follow the visible process by which the center of Nicene orthodoxy was
contested, deconstructed, and displaced by the engulfing encroachments of
marginalia that claimed a new centrality for their own Arian version of
orthodoxy. The physical text with which McLynn is concerned is a fifth-
century manuscript that constitutes a marked copy of several Latin anti-
Arian documents, including Ambrose's De fide and the Acts of the Council
of Aquileia of 381. The polemical marginal markings, known collectively as
the Arian Scholia, occur in two major blocks. McLynn focuses on the first
(and chronologically later) of these, compiled by the bishop Maximinus who
confronted Augustine in a celebrated debate and whom McLynn identifies as
the representative of a still-flourishing fifth-century Illyrican Arianism.
McLynn argues that Maximinus' additions to the Arian marginalia do not
function as an inept polemical gloss on the original Nicene texts that occupy
the center of the manuscript's pages, but rather serve effectively to interpret
and transmit the teachings of "Fathers" like Palladius and Auxentius to a
new generation of Illyrican Arians. With the introduction of Maximinus'
scholia, the action is now entirely in the margins of the text, and McLynn
points out that subsequent correctors of the text betray little interest in
collating text and marginalia (despite the fact that Maximinus quotes
extensively from the Acts of Aquileia). Maximinus' scholia seem to have
been read in isolation, articulating an independent and coherent Arian
historiographic reconstruction of the earlier Nicene-Arian controversy. The
original textual center does not hold but [End Page 406] rather, having
provided initial fodder for the margins, collapses under the weight of a
heavy remarking that claims its own voracious center.

Textual "marking" takes on still more layers of significance in the final

essay of this collection. Here Mark Vessey reads a late fourth-century
anecdote involving a purported faked forgery as an allegory for the
ambiguities of the quest for literary authenticity implicated in the emergence
of "a new order of books." Christian orthodoxy is textualized, via the
construction in the Theodosian era of an authoritative "patristic" body of
literature. The "forging" of the textual corpus of the Fathers leads not only to
a new incentive for cruder forms of textual corruption but also to a more
subtly duplicitous process of corrective "marking" by which the writings of
a troublesome theologian like Origen--or even Athanasius--might be
purified of purported heretical interpolations, as judged by the standards not
of a constructed author of an individual literary corpus but rather "with
respect to an imagined textual corpus of orthodoxy." The literal practice of
marking spurious passages with the sign of a dagger or "obelos" becomes
for Vessey a trope for the broader disciplining of Patristic texts, a practice
well represented by the notorious exertions of Jerome in the context of the
Origenist controversy. Vessey's essay forms a fitting conclusion to the
collection, not least because it brings the discussion of heresy from the
margins to the center of the academic discipline of "Patristics," joining the
other essays in suggesting that the needle, sword, pen, or dagger that marks
a body as heretical in the same stroke produces the textualized orthodox
corpus as a disciplined subject.

Virginia Burrus is an Associate Professor at The Theological School, Drew

University.

Notes
1. Morris Berman, Coming to Our Senses: Body and Spirit in the Hidden
History of the West (New York: Bantam Books, 1989), 81-82.