Mirrors of the Divine: Late Ancient

Christianity and the Vision of God Emily

R. Cain
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Mirrors of the Divine
Mirrors of the Divine
Late Ancient Christianity and the
Vision of God

E M I LY R . C A I N
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Cain, Emily, author.
Title: Mirrors of the divine : late ancient Christianity and the vision of God / Emily R. Cain.
Description: New York, NY, United States of America : Oxford University Press, [2023] |
Includes index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022040724 (print) | LCCN 2022040725 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780197663370 (hardback) | ISBN 9780197663394 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: God—Biblical teaching. | Image of God—Biblical teaching. |
Theological anthropology. | Mirrors—Religious aspects. |
Eyes—Religious aspects.
Classification: LCC BT103 .C345 2023 (print) | LCC BT103 (ebook) |
DDC 233/.5—dc23/eng/20221207
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022040724
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022040725

DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197663370.001.0001

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Integrated Books International, United States of America
 Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments  vii

Introduction  1
1. “Now We See”: Scientific and Scriptural Sight  16
2. Tertullian of Carthage: A Visual Hierarchy of Beards and Veils  44
3. Clement of Alexandria: Seeing God Through a Cataract Darkly  66
4. “Through a Mirror”: (Im)moral, Magical, and Metaphorical
Mirrors  85
5. Gregory of Nyssa: Perpetual Perception  106
6. Augustine of Hippo: The Paradox of Perception  131
7. “In an Enigma”: Reflections on Reflection  163
Conclusion  191

Subject Index  195

Ancient Writings Index  203
 Preface and Acknowledgments

The idea for this book began with a passing observation during the first year
of my doctoral program at Fordham: after reading Augustine’s de Trinitate
and Gregory of Nyssa’s Life of Moses, I noticed that both authors used the
same metaphor of seeing God through a mirror, darkly in related, but inverted
ways. From this seemingly simple observation, I formed an enduring ques-
tion: why? While we may never answer questions of motivation, I began my
own foray into the what and the how of this difference, studying ancient
theories of sight and the history of mirrors and reflection. As my explorations
led me earlier and earlier, I realized that writing on vision was more intricate
than I first supposed.
Metaphors, of course, mean different things to different people and in dif-
ferent contexts, and metaphors of vision and mirrors are especially complex.
They connect the body and the mind, the human and the divine, the self and
the other. They open into new worlds, and they connect to ideas of morality,
knowledge, and self-​identity. Yet the part that stood out to me the most was
the idea that each of us sees the world differently.
My ideas surrounding vision and mirrors have been sharpened by ex-
cellent conversations and feedback at a variety of conferences: the North
American Patristics Society, the Oxford Patristics Conference, and the
International Colloquium on Gregory of Nyssa. Both anonymous reviewers
of the manuscript offered insightful feedback, which helped me to draw out
my significance and framing more clearly.
Earlier versions of some chapters have been published as journal ar-
ticles. Some of the examples of Chapter 2 appeared in “Tertullian’s
Precarious Panopticon: A Performance of Visual Piety,” Journal of Early
Christian Studies 27, no. 4 (Winter 2019): 611–​33. Some of the medical
section of Chapter 3 appeared as “Medically Modified Eyes: A Baptismal
Cataract Surgery in Clement of Alexandria,” Studies in Late Antiquity 2,
no. 4 (Winter 2018): 491–​511. And some of the philosophical sections of
Chapter 3 appeared as “Perfected Perception: Modes of Knowing God in
Clement of Alexandria,” in Studia Patristica CX, vol. 7, ed. Markus Vinzent
viii Preface and Acknowledgments

et al. (Leuven: Peeters, 2021), 167–​75. I am grateful to these publishers for

permission to reuse parts of those articles.
My time at Fordham was especially formative, and I benefitted from
the guidance of George Demacopoulos, Maureen Tilley, Larry Welborn,
Robert Davis, Benjamin Dunning, and Sarit Kattan-​Gribetz. My chapter on
Clement of Alexandria developed in conversation with colleagues for a spe-
cial issue, and I am grateful for the helpful feedback of Kristi Upson-​Saia,
Jessica Wright, Jared Secord, and John Penniman.
I rewrote the project entirely during my time at Loyola, and this was
only possible with support from excellent friends and colleagues, especially
Kristen Irwin, Tisha Rajendra, Sandra Sullivan-​Dunbar, Teresa Calpino,
Lauren O’Connell, Aana Vigen, Xueying Wang, and Thomas Wetzel. I am
especially grateful, as well, to those friends and colleagues who read and
offered feedback on various drafts: Devorah Schoenfeld, Mara Brecht, Mark
Lester, Olivia Stewart Lester, Josefrayn Sánchez-​Perry, Ashley Purpura,
Matthew Briel, Adam Ployd, and Lindsey Mercer. This book is immensely
stronger for the input of each, and all errors left are my own. Finally, this
book wouldn’t have been possible without the constant support of my hus-
band, Ben. Thank you.
 Introduction

There has long been a curious fascination with eyes and mirrors, as evidenced
throughout art, film, and literature. From fantastical characters who shoot
lasers from their eyes to those whose memories are altered visually, the way
in which a story portrays the function of the eyes demonstrates the way the
storyteller imagines the character’s relationship to the world. Is the char-
acter powerful or powerless? Does she impact her world, or is she impacted
by that world? The storyteller’s portrayal of vision answers those questions
and reveals deeper assumptions about the individual and her ability to move
within and to know her world. While eyes are associated with interacting
with this world, mirrors are distinctly associated with interacting with some
other world.1 Mirrors function as portals to other worlds—​windows that
glimpse an alternate reality or harmful traps that hide sinister intentions.2
How an author portrays eyes reveals how she understands the world, while
how she portrays mirrors reveals how she imagines the unknown.
Eyes and mirrors function not only as symbols within stories, but they also
serve as frequent metaphors in language. Modern English regularly pairs
sight with knowledge, such as “I see what you mean” or “Do you see what
I’m saying?” Mirror metaphors are associated with imitation, of course, but
also with reflection or self-​knowledge. These rhetorical links are so common
today that they have become inert metaphors, mere remnants of a scien-
tific belief long since gone.3 In the world of Late Antiquity, however, such
visual metaphors were living, tied closely to a material understanding of the

1 For more on mirrors in Roman art, see Rabun M. Taylor, The Moral Mirror of Roman Art

(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

2 See, for instance, the “Mirror of Erised” that reveals a person’s deepest desire in J. K. Rowling,

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (New York: Scholastic, 1998); Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures
in Wonderland & Through the Looking-​Glass; and classic fairy tales such as Snow White.
3 Alive/​living metaphors tend to surprise the reader by their unexpected pairing. Dead/​inert
metaphors have become so pervasive that they have lost the ability to surprise. For more, see
Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: The Creation of Meaning in Language, trans. Robert Czerny
(London: Routledge, 2008), 111. For a helpful description of inert Christian metaphors, see Janet
Martin Soskice, The Kindness of God: Metaphor, Gender, and Religious Language (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2007), 3.

Mirrors of the Divine. Emily R. Cain, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023.
DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197663370.003.0001
2 Introduction

world and a correspondingly tactile nature of sight.4 What might seem to

be mere science fiction today has its roots in ancient science, with different
assumptions about the science of sight and mirrors.
These differing assumptions impact vision far beyond the basic mechanics
of sight. In his fragmented text On Love from near the end of the first cen-
tury CE, Plutarch noted that if all people were to see the same things in the
same ways, then everyone would fall in love with the same person. The di-
versity of loves, he argued, demonstrates that the eyes are not impartial; they
can be trained by art or developed by nature.5 Plutarch’s comments illustrate
a deeper point that we all know but often forget: each of us sees the world
differently.6 Jaś Elsner locates this difference in what he calls conceptual
frameworks, ways that we interpret what is seen to make it meaningful, and
he notes that these frameworks can lead to “varying and even contradictory
responses and meanings” when applied to the same image by different people
or even by the same person, but at different times.7 Helen Morales notes that
these conceptual frameworks are determined by one’s ethnicity, race, gender,
education, sexuality, religion, and social location.8 And yet these subjective
ways of seeing are not merely descriptive; they are also prescriptive. That is,
they not only indicate one’s social role, but they also serve to produce and to
define it.9 Not everyone sees the world in the same way—​some see it partially
4 Roland Betancourt has argued against a haptic understanding of sight in antiquity, arguing

that the metaphors of touch should be read not as relating to sight itself, but rather as metaphors
for the mental and cognitive processes of perception. Roland Betancourt, Sight, Touch, and
Imagination in Byzantium (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 5–​6. For more on the
material understanding of the ancient world, and what is commonly termed “The Material Turn,”
see Patricia Cox Miller, The Corporeal Imagination: Signifying the Holy in Late Ancient Christianity
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 3ff; David Fredrick, The Roman Gaze: Vision,
Power, and the Body (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002); Susan Ashbrook Harvey,
Scenting Salvation: Ancient Christianity and the Olfactory Imagination (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2006); and Jennifer Glancy, Corporal Knowledge: Early Christian Bodies
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). For more on tactility and sight in early Christianity, see
Shadi Bartsch, The Mirror of the Self: Sexuality, Self-​Knowledge, and the Gaze in the Early Roman
Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 58–​67. For a similar exploration of the tactile
nature of sight in the New Testament, see J. M. F. Heath, Paul’s Visual Piety: The Metamorphosis of the
Beholder (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
5 On Love, Menander, frg. 568 =​K-​A 791.
6 Georgia Frank makes a similar point about ancient pilgrims, “that pilgrims did not necessarily

see the way we see,” in Georgia Frank, The Memory of the Eyes: Pilgrims to Living Saints in Christian
Late Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 103.
7 Jaś Elsner, Art and the Roman Viewer: The Transformation of Art from the Pagan World to

Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 2–​3.

8 Helen Morales, Vision and Narrative in Achilles Tatius’ Leucippe and Clitophon (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2004), 21.

9 See also Morales, who is building on Teresa De Lauretis, Technologies of Gender: Essays on

Theory, Film, and Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987); Helen Morales, Vision
and Narrative in Achilles Tatius’ Leucippe and Clitophon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2004), 23.
 Introduction 3

or not at all—​and the presence or absence of sight becomes a productive place

to think about what it means to be human: revealing assumptions about who
you are, what you can know, and how you can act.
The world looks different when one sees differently, and when we take
sight for granted in these ancient texts, we miss fundamental assumptions
about the subjective experiences of humanity. How we understand percep-
tion shapes what and how we see and also our broader senses of self, and to
miss how sight worked for these late ancient authors, therefore, is to look past
some of the most self-​conscious ways that late ancient Christians thought of
themselves, their worlds, and their God. How do I know and interact with
the world? What does it mean to see God? Can one see God in this life? If so,
how and to what extent? And how is one impacted by sight?
This book asks precisely those questions, seeking to bring into focus how
four influential late ancient authors—​Tertullian of Carthage, Clement of
Alexandria, Gregory of Nyssa, and Augustine of Hippo—​employ language
of vision and of mirrors in their discursive struggles to construct Christian
agency, identity, and epistemology. These authors span from the second
through fourth centuries CE in both Eastern and Western Christianity, and
I analyze their theological writings on vision and knowledge of God to ex-
plore how they pieced together rival and contradictory theories of sight to
shape their cosmologies, theologies, subjectivities, genders, and discursive
worlds. The different theories of vision partly answered the question of how
we see; but more, the differences around vision and mirrors offer a keyhole
into questions of the relationships between heaven and earth, body and soul,
men and women, and beyond.
Each early Christian author describes the vision of God through the
Pauline verse “For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face
to face,” and each ties this metaphor of a flawed vision of God to an under-
standing of a distinctly flawed human body.10 Yet each author also interprets
or applies this verse differently based on a diverse set of assumptions about
how they understand seeing and mirrors to function: does vision occur by
something leaving or entering the eye, is one impacted by seeing or by being
seen, and do mirrors offer trustworthy knowledge? This book brings to light
the significance of those different assumptions. How an author portrays
eyes reveals how they envision one’s relationship to the world, while how
they portray mirrors reveals how they imagine the unknown, and both have

10 1 Corinthians 13:12 NRSV.

4 Introduction

dramatic impacts on how one interprets what it means to see God through a
mirror, dimly.

Context and Framing

Many ancient thinkers were fascinated with sensory perception. Some senses
needed only simple explanations, such as taste and touch that occur through
direct contact. Other senses demanded greater thought, such as smell and
hearing, both of which require proximity, leading to proposed theories of
vapors drifting to the nose or noises drifting to the ears.11 Vision, however,
posed the greatest challenge. Taste and touch require direct contact, while
smell and sound require some amount of proximity, but vision can occur
over vast distances, to the sun and stars, seemingly instantaneously, yet with
no effort. If all other senses can be explained through a kind of touch, how
then does vision function?
Theorists debated whether the eye contained its own fire,12 whether the
eye emitted a ray or visual pneuma,13 how far such a ray or pneuma ex-
tended,14 whether that ray or pneuma takes up space,15 whether the objects
seen emitted particles to the eye,16 and whether a medium between eye and
object, for example air, was required to see.17 Through it all, each author also
described one’s role and ability in the visual process. Was the seer active or
passive, impacting the world or being impacted by the world? In addressing
these questions, vision became deeply tied to agency in describing one’s rela-
tionship to the world.18

11 I expand on ancient theories of perception in Chapter 1. For another excellent overview of an-

cient understanding of sensory perception, see Philip Thibodeau, “Ancient Optics: Theories and
Problems of Vision,” in A Companion to Science, Technology, and Medicine in Ancient Greece and
Rome, ed. Georgia L. Irby, vol. 1 (Oxford: John Wiley & Sons, 2016), 130–​44. See also David C.
Lindberg, Theories of Vision from Al-​Kindi to Kepler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976).
12 Empedocles and Parmenides first suggested that the eye contained a fire, but Plato popularized

this belief in Timeaus. See especially Ti. 45b–​d.

13 Galen, De Symptomatum Causis 1.2 (v22 pp88–​89k).
14 See Galen on Herophilus, De Symptomatum Causis 1.2 (v22 pp88–​ 89k); Alexander of
Aphrodisias, On the Soul.
15 See Galen, De placitis 7 and Euclid, Optica 1–​3.
16 This is usually classified as intromission, though Plato thought that both the objects and the eye

emitted particles in Timeaus. See especially Ti. 45b–​d. See also Diogenes Laertius in Lives of Eminent
Philosophers Life of Epicurus x.46; Lucretius in De Rerum Natura 4.30–​40.
17 Theophrastus, De Sensu 50–​55; Democritus (known through Theophrastus’ De Sensu).
18 See Chapter 1 for more on the ancient theories of vision.
 Introduction 5

Though the authors debated the role of agency in vision, each theorist
agreed on linking vision to knowledge and defending the nature of that
knowledge against the threats posed by optical illusions such as a straight
oar appearing bent in water.19 Optical illusions became prime examples
that illustrate the subjectivity of sight as visual objects that appear differ-
ently from different perspectives, and they also raised doubt about the re-
liability of visual knowledge. Visual theorists sought to show the rationality
of vision despite such illusions: perhaps the particles were damaged by the
air or water,20 maybe the rays grew weary across vast distances,21 or possibly
some aspects of the object simply fell between multiple visual rays.22 While
their explanations for these illusions differed, this discourse demonstrates
that writing about vision was also deeply wrapped up in debates about epis-
temology. And these debates about epistemology, in turn, rest upon a fun-
damental assumption about the subjectivity of vision: if the world looked
identical to all people at all times, there would be no need to defend the na-
ture of visual knowledge.
While scientific discussions of visual perception became intertwined
with debates about agency and epistemology of the world, mirrors garnered
their own associations, as they were perceived to split the gaze between the
self and other-​worldly knowledge.23 Most ancient mirrors were simple pol-
ished metal discs that provided only dim or distorted reflections.24 Ancient
mirrors, like optical illusions, showed the world as other than it is, becoming
associated with a world of possibility: mirrors could be a means of self-​
reflection and self-​improvement, or they could be a means of self-​corruption
and destruction; mirrors could offer glimpses into the other-​world, or they
could become lethal traps. The discussion that swirled around mirrors
demonstrated that reflection was never merely neutral, but it was fraught
with magical or mystical connotations, wrapped up in debates over morality
and spirituality.25

19 Ancient Skeptics had employed such optical illusions to cast doubt upon the very nature of

knowledge itself. See Sextus Empiricus, P. 100–​117; Diogenes Laertius, Vit. Ph. 9.87; Aristotle, Pr.
15.6.911b.19–​21; Plutarch, Adversus Colotem 1121a–​b.
20 Lucr., Rer. nat. 4.353–​363.
21 Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta (hereafter SVF), ed. Hans Friedrich August von Arnim, 4 vols.

(Stuttgart: Stutgardiae in aedibus B.G. Tuebneri, 1903), 863.

22 Euclid, Optica 9.
23 Morris R. Cohen and I. E. Drabkin, A Source Book in Greek Science, 1st ed. (Cambridge,

MA: Harvard University Press, 1948), 263–​64.

24 Willard McCarty, “The Shape of the Mirror: Metaphorical Catoptrics in Classical Literature,”

Arethusa 22, no. 2 (1989): 161–​95, 167.

25 See Chapter 4 for more on mirrors.
6 Introduction

This discourse gained theological significance through the scriptures,

which link vision and mirrors to spiritual health, visual piety, and trans-
formative knowledge of God.26 Discussions of visual perception were prime
locations for philosophical speculation about epistemology and cosmology
as well as theological speculation about mystical theology and theological
anthropology. Late ancient authors sought to define the nature of humanity,
its similarity to and difference from the world and the divine, its ability to act
or to be acted on, and its ability to know the world and the divine.
In this book, I focus on a selection of theological discussions on vision and
mirrors, and I argue that these philosophical and theological speculations of
vision of God are also the very location for important discursive struggles
over claims of Christian identity, Christian agency, and Christian episte-
mology. This frame of identity, agency, and epistemology describes precisely
what each author argues through their depictions of vision, but I also analyze
how each author does this through a second linguistic frame of discourse,
rhetoric, and metaphor, which helps to examine how language shapes and
is shaped by its environment. While we cannot access the world behind the
texts, this linguistic frame reveals aspects of the way that these texts par-
ticipate in constructing and revealing new meaning, particularly when
comparing the texts with one another, as I do in Chapter 7.
The term discourse has been applied in many ways, but I find it particularly
useful to think along the lines of Michel Foucault’s description of discourse
as linguistic practices that shape what they describe.27 By participating in a
discourse about Christian identity, for example, a text does not merely de-
scribe the nature of that identity, but it also serves to produce that identity by
constructing a particular vision of the world and then seeking to convince
its reader of the power of that vision.28 Epistemological debates not only de-
fine knowledge, but they also define who has access to that knowledge and
to what extent. Historically, such discursive struggles were wrapped up in
debates over power and authority, defining Christian identity as distinct from
the world or limiting spiritual epistemology to a specific community. Thus,
these threads of Christian agency, identity, and epistemology were deeply
intertwined with one another, tying together debates about epistemology to

26
Matthew 6:22, Romans 1:20, 1 Corinthians 13:12, and 2 Corinthians 3:18.
27
See especially Michel Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans.
A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972), 49.
28 Laura Nasrallah’s model has been particularly helpful to me in thinking about the way that dis-

course functions. See especially Laura Nasrallah, An Ecstasy of Folly: Prophecy and Authority in Early
Christianity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Divinity School, 2004), 5.
 Introduction 7

distinct identities or abilities. These texts do not offer clear views into his-
torical realities; rather, they offer a glance into the rhetorically constructed
worlds of their authors, and these rhetorical worlds assert their definitions of
Christian identity against other communities or offer their unique claims on
knowledge.
Tied to this definition of discourse is an understanding of rhetoric as a
key to social power but a social power that is a dynamic two-​way process be-
tween both a text and its reception.29 Not only does discourse help to shape
its society, forming a community and ascribing authority, but such discourse
is also profoundly shaped in return. Christian rhetoric is deeply embedded
in its environment; and, as that environment shifts, whether geographically
or chronologically, so also does the nature of that rhetoric. I am not seeking
to reiterate here the excellent work that others have done in describing the
role of discourse in the rise of Christianity.30 Rather, I explore the ways that
late ancient Christian authors engaged in discourses of vision and mirrors
to evoke particular understandings of the spiritual journey and community
for their readers. Such rhetoric shifted over time and across geographies, and
what begins as rhetoric of literal vision gradually gives way to metaphorical
vision.
Metaphor theory has shifted over the years from treating metaphor as
a simple substitution of meaning from A to B to a more complicated com-
parison of similarities between two things.31 George Lakoff, however,
redefined the field of metaphor theory in the late 1980s with his argument

29 See especially Averil Cameron, Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire: The Development of

Christian Discourse (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 4.

30 There are a number of excellent studies that trace the relation between discourse and the rise of

Christianity. See especially Averil Cameron, Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire: The Development
of Christian Discourse (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991) and Judith Perkins, The Suffering
Self: Pain and Narrative Representation in the Early Christian Era (New York: Routledge, 1995).
31 Metaphor as substitution is typically seen as the classical view, but most contemporary theorists

reject this interpretation of metaphor. Some attribute metaphor as substitution to Aristotle in Poetics
1458a, but Janet Martin Soskice argues that it is not from Aristotle, but from Locke. See Janet Martin
Soskice, Metaphor and Religious Language (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 1–​14. For attribution
to Aristotle, see Max Black, “More about Metaphor,” in Metaphor and Thought, ed. Andrew Ortony,
2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 22. For scholarship on metaphor as a com-
parison of secondary meanings, see John Seale, “Metaphor,” in Expression and Meaning: Studies in
the Theory of Speech Acts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 76–​116; Murray Knowles
and Rosamund Moon, Introducing Metaphor (New York: Routledge, 2006), 66. See also Jonathan Z.
Smith, Drudgery Divine: On the Comparison of Early Christianities and the Religions of Late Antiquity
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), particularly pages 52–​53 for a discussion of the role
of comparison (especially exaggeration and difference) in how things might be conceived and
described in Late Antiquity. For an anti-​comparison view, see Donald Davidson, “What Metaphors
Mean,” Critical Inquiry 5, no. 1 (1978): 31–​47; Max Black, Models and Metaphors: Studies in Language
and Philosophy, 1st ed. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1962), 37.
8 Introduction

that metaphor is not only a matter of words but also of concepts.32 He used
the common metaphor love is a journey to demonstrate how a larger concept
groups together a number of smaller metaphors: we’re stuck, we’re at a cross-
roads, we’ve hit a speed bump, and so on.33 He argued that these are not sepa-
rate linguistic metaphors, but rather all stem from the larger cognitive source
domain of journey and apply to the target domain of love in which the lovers
are the travelers, love is the vehicle, and the mutual goals are the destination.
Analyzing an ancient metaphor, then, must begin with the potential strands
that make up their cognitive maps in order to understand how the metaphor
functions.
One critique of Lakoff ’s theory is that he does not distinguish between
different types of metaphors, particularly between active/​alive metaphors
and inert/​dead metaphors. Dead or inert metaphors are metaphors so per-
vasive that people have become unaware of them, and Janet Martin Soskice
describes such inert Christian metaphors “worn smooth, like an old marble
staircase . . . until their original figurative potency was lost.”34 Paul Ricoeur
explains that one’s use of living metaphors surprises the hearer (or reader) by
combining “non-​sensical” elements in an unexpected context.35 In Lakoff ’s
theory, one’s metaphorical statement simply transfers meaning from one
domain to another, but in Ricoeur’s theory, a living metaphorical state-
ment creates new meaning. It is precisely this new meaning that I explore in
this project by examining the metaphorical ways that late ancient authors
combine disparate theories of vision to describe their complicated views of
humanity and of God. It is precisely through paradoxical constructions of
visual theories that these authors construct new theological meaning and re-
imagine what it means to see differently.
One type of metaphor that Lakoff highlights is the ontological meta-
phor: these are metaphors that draw from physical entities or substances and
enable a person to conceive of and to describe abstract things such as events,
emotions, ideas, and so on in terms of such physical entities or substances.36
Lakoff suggests that the main source domain typically comes from our own

32 George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 2003), 244.

33 George Lakoff, “The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor,” in Metaphor and Thought, ed. Andrew

Ortony, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 206–​11.

34 Janet Martin Soskice, The Kindness of God: Metaphor, Gender, and Religious Language

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 3.

35 Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: The Creation of Meaning in Language, trans. Robert Czerny

(London: Routledge, 2008), 111.

36 Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, 25.
 Introduction 9

experiences, particularly that of our own bodies, to describe the abstract.37

Yet late ancient authors did not necessarily conceive of their bodies and
experiences in the same way that we do today; or, for that matter, even with
one another. Because of this disparity, metaphors may have opened concep-
tual possibilities for late ancient authors that are drastically different than the
possibilities available to us today, and my purpose in this project is to explore
how the optical metaphor that links sight to the divine functioned in the con-
text of Late Antiquity in order to gain a new understanding of early Christian
epistemologies and theological anthropologies. It is through their writings
on vision that we can glimpse an author’s portrayal of their embodied rela-
tionship to their worlds, and it is through their writings on mirrors that we
can begin to tease out their construction of new meaning as applied to the
divine.
Throughout the chapters that follow, I move back and forth between the
what and the how, examining what each author portrays in terms of identity,
agency, and epistemology, and I do so by examining how each author engages
discourse, rhetoric, and metaphor. Vision itself is a vast topic, crossing mul-
tiple disciplinary boundaries. In antiquity, the exploration of vision spanned
across the subfields of philosophy, geometry, medicine, and as I argue here,
theology; while today, vision spans the disciplinary boundaries from physics
to psychology and biology, but also history, classics, philosophy, art history,
and theology, among others. A topic as vast as vision, in other words, requires
a prismatic approach.
My own approach brings three facets of that prism together, examining
writings on philosophical, medical, and theological rhetoric about vision.
By focusing on these writings, I uncover some of the most self-​conscious
ways that late ancient authors thought of themselves, their worlds, and
their God, offering a key insight into their theological visions of the late
ancient world. Analyzing rhetoric on vision and mirrors uncovers both in-
dividual assumptions and broader cultural patterns and shifts. This offers
us a way forward in conversations about mysticism, so often separated
from conversations about the body, as evidenced by some contemporary
discussions of the spiritual senses as divorced from bodily senses. Vision,
however, functions as the very juncture between questions of esoteric episte-
mology and mystical theology and deeply grounded embodiment. Vision is
the point of contact between the body and the world; yet, through cognition,

37 Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, 25.

10 Introduction

it is also the avenue for rich imaginings of the divine. As such, this exami-
nation of rhetoric serves to ground late ancient authors’ understanding of
the vision of God in a deeply embodied and subjective understanding of
the world.
These writings about vision were grounded in philosophical, mathe-
matical, medical, and scriptural traditions about vision, but they were also
connected to contemporary visual practices. It is my claim that it is this inter-
section between the historical traditions and their contemporary practices
that reveals not just the embodied nature of late ancient Christianities
but also how they embodied their Christianities. In other words, it is not
simply that the body matters in their theologies, but rather the kind of body
they emphasize; and, in each case, it is a distinctly flawed body that is ele-
vated. Sometimes those flaws are envisioned as something to be overcome,
as in Clement’s and in Augustine’s texts; but, other times, those flaws are
reimagined as the very basis for one’s connection to God, as in Tertullian’s
and in Gregory of Nyssa’s writings. This study, then, offers a window into
conversations about embodied mystical theologies but also into discussions
of health and disability. Examining this rhetoric on vision and mirrors
shows us how these early Christian authors embodied both their theological
anthropologies and their mystical theologies in bodies that are envisioned
as porous, diseased, mutable, or blind. This rhetoric illustrates flawed bodies
reimagined as prime locations for one’s connection to God.
More broadly, this book is also for scholars of the late ancient world, as it
demonstrates the connections among philosophical, theological, and med-
ical ideas. Theological anthropologies are deeply tied to cosmologies, while
mystical theologies are tied to epistemologies. As I will show, the paradoxes
and contradictions found within the authors’ writings demonstrate not a lack
of knowledge of philosophical and medical traditions, but rather a deep and
enduring engagement with those very traditions in ways that attempt to push
back, develop, or enact those philosophies, medical understandings, and
theologies. In other words, the philosophies and medical theories may help
us to better understand the theologies, but the reverse is also true, and we
only discover the connections when such disciplinary lines are crossed.
As I have argued, a topic as large as vision requires a prismatic approach,
as I undertake in this book. I have chosen to focus on some of the textual
facets of that prism, which refract the rich intricacies of these theoretical
and rhetorical worlds with all their contradictions and complexities, and
I focus on the subjective nature of vision. Of course, other facets on vision are
 Introduction 11

needed as well, those that examine art history, material culture, and novels,
and studies on vision’s relationship to affect, memory, sexuality, psychology,
cultural critiques, mystic viewing, and more.38 When taken together, these
varied approaches and projects reveal the rich variety of the broader prism
of vision. It is my hope that this book will be read alongside these others, of-
fering a conversation partner that reveals the subjective ways that late ancient
authors thought of themselves, their worlds, and their God, tying together
rhetoric of science and theology.

Thesis and Outline

In this book, I dive into the ancient Mediterranean world, with its
proliferating discussions on vision and knowledge. I primarily examine
the rhetoric of four late ancient authors: Tertullian of Carthage, Clement of
Alexandria, Gregory of Nyssa, and Augustine of Hippo. I have selected these
authors partly for their prominence, both in written records and in tradition,
but also for their breadth across geographies and time. These authors span
geographically and chronologically across Eastern and Western Christianity

38 Jaś Elsner explores what he calls the realist and the symbolic to show the link between vi-

sion and subjectivity in Art and the Roman Viewer: The Transformation of Art from the Pagan
World to Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Roland Betancourt has
reexamined ancient vision to argue that sight is not touch in Sight, Touch, and Imagination in
Byzantium (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). Maia Kotrosits focuses on the role of
affect in vision in Maia Kotrosits, Rethinking Early Christian Identity: Affect, Violence, and Belonging
(Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015), and she draws together the linguistic and the material in Maia
Kotrosits, The Lives of Objects: Material Culture, Experience, and the Real in the History of Early
Christianity, 1st ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020). Robin Jensen focuses on the
power of images, and particularly portraits, in early Christian teaching in Robin M. Jensen, Face to
Face: Portraits of the Divine in Early Christianity (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2004). Georgia
Frank identifies the role of vision and memory in pilgrimage in The Memory of the Eyes: Pilgrims
to Living Saints in Christian Late Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). J. M.
F. Heath tears down the false dichotomy of material versus spiritual senses, showing instead the com-
plex frameworks from which early Christians might draw in Paul’s Visual Piety: The Metamorphosis
of the Beholder (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). Shadi Bartsch turns to the mirror, with an
emphasis on vision and mirrors in constructions of the self in antiquity in Shadi Bartsch, The Mirror
of the Self: Sexuality, Self-​Knowledge, and the Gaze in the Early Roman Empire (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2006). David Fredrick’s edited volume contains a collection of essays that show
the diverse forms of visuality and sexuality in Rome in The Roman Gaze: Vision, Power, and the
Body (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002). Rachel Neis offers a study on viewing
problematic visuals in Jewish culture in Rachel Neis, Sense of Sight in Rabbinic Culture: Jewish
Ways of Seeing in Late Antiquity (West Nyack, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Rachel Neis,
“Eyeing Idols: Rabbinic Viewing Practices in Late Antiquity,” Jewish Quarterly Review 102, no. 4
(Fall 2012): 533–​60. David Morgan has highlighted the ways in which images impact the viewer in
David Morgan, Images at Work: The Material Culture of Enchantment (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2018).
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The Project Gutenberg eBook of Ara vus prec
 This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United
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Title: Ara vus prec

Author: T. S. Eliot

Release date: December 23, 2023 [eBook #72472]

Language: English

Original publication: London: The Ovid Press, 1919

Credits: Carla Foust and the Online Distributed Proofreading

Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced
from images generously made available by The
Internet Archive)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ARA VUS

PREC ***
 Ara Vus Prec

by
T. S. Eliot

THE OVID PRESS

Or puoi, la quantitate
Comprender dell’ amor ch’a te mi scalda,
Quando dismento nostra vanitate
Trattando l’ombre come cosa salda.
 CONTENTS
page
Gerontion 11
Burbank 14
Sweeny among the Nightingales 16
Sweeny erect 18
Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service 20
Whispers of Immortality 21
The Hippopotamus 22
A Cooking Egg 24
Lune de Miel 26
Dans le Restaurant 27
Le Spectateur 28
Mélange Adultère de Tout 29
Ode 30
Prufrock 33
Portrait of a Lady 38
Preludes 43
Rhapsody of a Windy Night 45
Morning at the Window 48
Conversation Galante 49
Aunt Helen 50
Cousin Nancy 51
Mr. Apollinax 52
The Boston Evening Transcript 53
La Figlia Che Piange 54
THIS IS NO.
 GERONTION
Thou hast nor youth nor age
But as it were, an after dinner sleep
Dreaming of both.

ere I am, an old

man in a dry
month
Being read to
by a boy,
waiting for rain.
I was neither at
the hot gates
Nor fought in
the warm rain
Nor knee deep
in the salt
marsh, heaving
a cutlass,
Bitten by flies,
fought.
My house is a
decayed house
And the jew squats on the window sill, the owner,
Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp,
Blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in London.
The goat coughs at night in the field overhead;
Rocks, moss, stonecrop, iron, merds.
The woman keeps the kitchen, makes tea,
Sneezes at evening, poking the peevish gutter.

I an old man,
A dull head among windy spaces.
Signs are taken for wonders. “We would see a sign.”
The word within a word, unable to speak a word,
Swaddled with darkness. In the juvescence of the year
Came Christ the tiger
In depraved May, dogwood and chestnut, flowering judas,
To be eaten, to be divided, to be drunk
Among whispers; by Mr. Silvero
With caressing hands, at Limoges

Who walked all night in the next room;

By Hakagama, bowing among the Titians;
By Madame de Tornquist, in the dark room
Shifting the candles; Fraülein von Kulp
Who turned in the hall, one hand on the door. Vacant shuttles
Weave the wind. I have no ghosts,
An old man in a draughty house
Under a windy knob.

After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now

History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors
And issues; deceives with whispering ambitions,
Guides us by vanities. Think now
She gives when our attention is distracted,
And what she gives, gives with such supple confusions
That the giving famishes the craving. Gives too late
What’s not believed in, or if still believed,
In memory only, reconsidered passion. Gives too soon
Into weak hands what’s thought can be dispensed with
Till the refusal propagates a fear. Think
Neither fear nor courage saves us. Unnatural vices
Are fathered by our heroism. Virtues
Are forced upon us by our impudent crimes.

These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree.

The tiger springs in the new year. Us he devours. Think at last

We have not reached conclusion, when I
Stiffen in a rented house. Think at last
I have not made this show purposelessly
And it is not by any concitation
Of the backward devils.
I would meet you upon this honestly.
I that was near your heart was removed therefrom
To lose beauty in terror, terror in inquisition.
I have lost my passion: why should I want to keep it
Since what is kept must be adulterated?
I have lost my sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch:
How should I use it for your closer contact?

These with a thousand small deliberations

Protract the profit of their chilled delirium,
Excite the membrane, when the sense has cooled,
With pungent sauces, multiply variety
In a wilderness of mirrors. What will the spider do,
Suspend its operations, will the weevil
Delay? De Bailhache, Fresca, Mrs Cammell, whirled
Beyond the circuit of the shuddering Bear
In fractured atoms. Gull against the wind, in the windy straits
Of Belle Isle, or running by the Horn,
White feathers in the snow, the gulf claims
And an old man, driven on the Trades
To a sleepy corner.
Tenants of the house,
Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season.
BURBANK WITH A BAEDEKER:
BLEISTEIN WITH A CIGAR.
Tra la la la la la laire—nil nisi divinum stabile
est; cætera fumus—the gondola stopped the old
palace was there How charming it’s grey & pink
—Goats & monkeys, with such hair too!—so the
Countess passed on until she came through the
little park, where Niobe presented her with a
cabinet, & so departed.

urbank
crossed a little
bridge
Descending at
a small hotel;
Princess
Volupine
arrived,
They were
together, and
he fell.

Defunctive
music under
sea
Passed
seaward with
the passing bell
Slowly: the god Hercules
Had left him, that had loved him well.

The horses, under the axletree

 Beat up the dawn from Istria
With even feet. Her shuttered barge
Burned on the water all the day.

But this or such was Bleistein’s way:

A saggy bending of the knees
And elbows, with the palms turned out,
Chicago Semite Viennese.

A lustreless protrusive eye

Stares from the protozoic slime
At a perspective of Canaletto.
The smoky candle end of time

Declines. On the Rialto once.

The rats are underneath the piles.
The jew is underneath the lot.
Money in furs. The boatman smiles,

Princess Volupine extends

A meagre, blue-nailed, phthisic hand
To climb the waterstair. Lights, lights,
She entertains Sir Ferdinand

Klein. Who clipped the lion’s wings

And flea’d his rump and pared his claws?
—Thought Burbank, meditating on
Time’s ruins, and the seven laws.
 SWEENEY AMONG THE
NIGHTINGALES
ὤμοι, πέπληγμαι καιρίαν πγελὴν ἔσω
why should i speak of the nightingale?
the nightingale sings of adulterous wrong.

peneck
Sweeney
spreads his
knees
Letting his
arms hang
down to laugh,
The zebra
stripes along
his jaw
Swelling to
maculate
giraffe.

The circles of
the stormy
moon
Slide
westward to the River Plate,
Death and the Raven drift above
And Sweeney guards the horned gate.

Gloomy Orion and the Dog

Are veiled; and hushed the shrunken seas;
The person in the Spanish cape
 Tries to sit on Sweeney’s knees

Slips and pulls the table cloth

Overturns a coffee cup,
Reorganised upon the floor
She yawns and draws a stocking up;

The silent man in mocha brown

Sprawls at the window sill and gapes;
The waiter brings in oranges,
Bananas, figs and hot-house grapes;

The silent vertebrate exhales,

Contracts and concentrates, withdraws;
Rachel née Rabinovitch
Tears at the grapes with murderous paws;

She and the lady in the cape

Are suspect, thought to be in league;
Therefore the man with heavy eyes
Declines the gambit, shows fatigue,

Leaves the room and reappears

Outside the window, leaning in,
Branches of wistaria
Circumscribe a golden grin;

The host with someone indistinct

Converses at the door apart,
The nightingales are singing near
The convent of the Sacred Heart,

And sang within the bloody wood

When Agamemnon cried aloud
And let their liquid siftings fall
To stain the stiff dishonoured shroud.
 SWEENEY ERECT
And the trees about me
Let them be dry & leafless; let the rocks
Groan with continual surges; & behind me
Make all a desolation. Look, Look, wenches!

aint me a
cavernous
waste shore
Cast in the
unstilled
Cyclades,
Paint me the
bold
anfractuous
rocks
Faced by the
snarled and
yelping seas.

Display me
Æolus above
Reviewing
the insurgent
gales
Which tangle Ariadne’s hair
And swell with haste the perjured sails.

Morning stirs the feet and hands

(Nausicaa and Polypheme);
Gesture of orang-outang
 Rises from the sheets in steam.

This withered root of knots of hair

Slitted below and gashed with eyes,
This oval O cropped out with teeth;
The sickle motion from the thighs

Jackknifes upward at the knees

Then straightens down from heel to hip
Pushing the framework of the bed
And clawing at the pillow slip.

Sweeney addressed full-length to shave

Broadbottomed, pink from nape to base,
Knows the female temperament
And wipes the suds around his face.

(The lengthened shadow of a man

Is history, says Emerson,
Who had not seen the silhouette
Of Sweeney straddled in the sun).

Tests the razor on his leg

Waiting until the shriek subsides;
The epileptic on the bed
Curves backward, clutching at her sides.

The ladies of the corridor

Find themselves involved, disgraced;
Call witness to their principles
Deprecate the lack of taste

Observing that hysteria

Might easily be misunderstood;
Mrs. Turner intimates
It does the house no sort of good.

But Doris towelled from the bath

 Enters padding on broad feet,
Bringing sal volatile
And a glass of brandy neat.
 MR. ELIOT’S SUNDAY
MORNING SERVICE
“Look, look master, here comes two of the
religious caterpillars”.

JEW OF MALTA

olyphiloproge
nitive
The sapient
sutlers of the
Lord
Drift across the
window-panes.
In the
beginning was
the Word.

In the
beginning was
the Word,
Superfetation
of το εν
And at the
mensual turn of
time
Produced enervate Origen.

A painter of the Umbrian school

Designed upon a gesso ground
The nimbus of the Baptised God.
The wilderness is cracked and browned
 But through the water pale and thin
Still shine the unoffending feet
And there above the painter set
The father and the Paraclete.

The sable presbyters approach

The avenue of penitence;
The young are red and pustular
Clutching piaculative pence,

Under the penitential gates

Sustained by staring Seraphim
Where the souls of the devout
Burn invisible and dim.

Along the garden-wall the bees

With hairy bellies pass between
The staminate and pistilate:
Blest office of the epicene.

Sweeney shifts from ham to ham

Stirring the water in his bath.
The masters of the subtle schools
Are controversial, polymath.
 WHISPERS OF IMMORTALITY
ebster was
much
possessed by
death
And saw the
skull beneath
the skin;
And breastless
creatures under
ground
Leaned
backward with
a lipless grin.

Daffodil bulbs
instead of balls
Stared from
the sockets of
the eyes!
He knew that thought clings round dead limbs
Tightening its lusts and luxuries.

Donne, I suppose, was such another

Who found no substitute for sense
To seize and clutch and penetrate,
Expert beyond experience

He knew the anguish of the marrow

The ague of the skeleton;
No contact possible to flesh
Allayed the fever of the bone.