Divine Embodiment: Ritual, Art and the Senses in Late-antique Christianity

"How does antique Christianity look if the lens of Cartesian dualism is removed and replaced with an embodied perspective? In responding to this question, this thesis proposes a new way of understanding ‘art’ and religion as integrally linked through ritual in Christian Late Antiquity. The investigation proceeds via ‘common-sensory archaeologies’ of material evidence. This is a methodology designed to enable interpretation of artefacts in ways not necessarily dependent on the imposition of literary interpretative methods, particularly semiotics. It enables new information to be elicited directly from materials. The argument addresses ‘magical’ practices and objects, and the ideas underpinning Roman religious practices, before analysing rituals specific to late-antique Christianity, including Holy-Land pilgrimage, saint cult, and the Eucharist. It differentiates rituals that were institutionalised, and those which evolved ‘organically’ among adherents, in order to highlight common underlying impulses. A picture emerges of the complex and subtle overlap between religions in Late Antiquity, which questions stark differentiations between ‘paganism’ and Christianity. This period’s ‘common sense’ (or, encultured mode of embodiment) is suggested to oscillate between two poles of cosmology – ‘cosmic uniformity’ and ‘infinite materiality’. Central to both perspectives was the need for (embodied) humans to engage ritually with the world through their senses in order to interact with the divine. By paying attention not just to what Christians thought but also to what they did, it is suggested that certain tensions in our understanding of late-antique culture may be resolved by retracting assumptions of stark Cartesian contrasts between belief/ritual, soul/body, text/material, and Christian/’pagan’. Furthermore, an embodied approach is shown to open avenues not just into elite culture, but also into the popular Christian perspective, by expanding our purview to the lived practice of, rather than just the theological debate surrounding, antique religion.