Imitations of Infinity: Gregory of Nyssa and the Transformation of Mimesis
288
Imitations of Infinity: Gregory of Nyssa and the Transformation of Mimesis
288Hardcover
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Overview
In Imitations of Infinity, Michael A. Motia situates Gregory among Platonist philosophers, rhetorical teachers, and early Christian leaders to demonstrate how much of late ancient life was governed by notions of imitation. Questions both intimate and immense, of education, childcare, or cosmology, all found form in a relationship of archetype and image. It is no wonder that these debates demanded the attention of people at every level of the Roman Empire, including the Christians looking to form new social habits and norms. Whatever else the late ancient transformation of the empire affected, it changed the names, spaces, and characters that filled the imagination and common sense of its citizens, and it changed how they thought of their imitations.
Like religion, imitation was a way to organize the world and a way to reach toward new possibilities, Motia argues, and two earlier conceptions of mimesis—one centering on ontological participation, the other on aesthetic representation—merged in late antiquity. As philosophers and religious leaders pondered how linking oneself to reality depended on practices of representation, their theoretical debates accompanied practical concerns about what kinds of objects would best guide practitioners toward the divine. Motia places Gregory within a broader landscape of figures who retheorized the role of mimesis in search of perfection. No longer was imitation a marker of inauthenticity or immaturity. Mimesis became a way of life.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780812253139 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 12/07/2021 |
| Series: | Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion |
| Pages: | 288 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d) |
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Introduction
The Mimetic Life
"Christianity is mimesis of the divine nature." That was how, in the 390s, a graying Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335-395) defined Christianity for his young friend Harmonius. Modern scholars do not have many definitions of Christianity from late antiquity, so the sentence itself presents something of a historical gem. But these words are also theologically puzzling in the context of Gregory's larger thought—thought that often theorized forms of asceticism that his brother and sister founded when Gregory was still a young man, and thought that was all the more influential after 381, when Emperor Theodosius, as part of a larger project of making Christianity the religion of the Roman Empire, named him a "standard bearer" of orthodoxy. One puzzle is semantic: the Greek word mimesis carries a wide and often unstable set of meanings: imitation, representation, even an aptness with models. Another is that Gregory was the first Christian to make the infinity, and therefore unknowability, of God central to his theological program. The two pieces raise even more questions: How does one imitate the infinite? Or, perhaps more importantly: If Gregory described the aim or perfection of the Christian life as "never to stop growing towards what is better and never placing any limit on perfection," how did mimesis function within that endless pursuit? And given that mimesis assumes a mode of desire—for love leads to likeness, and imitation incites, intensifies, reorients, and reinforces desire—how did a Christian love what she did not know? What was the presumed relationship between representation and the divine reality? What did Christians imitate when they imitated an inimitable God? What kinds of guidelines or practices governed this life? These questions lie at the heart of Imitations of Infinity.
Imitation is so basic a part of human life that it can be difficult to see its meaning or purpose debated. Not only do all people imitate others, but part of becoming a self, or even a society, involves both what and how we imitate. Today, imitation's opposite is often something like "true," "authentic," or "real." An imitation is a "knockoff." Even in antiquity authors worried about the "cheapness" or "easiness" of imitation and how it could lead people away from the hard work of pursuing what is most real or true. But imitation is not always the opposite of reality; it is also a mode of relationship, a way to engage with and participate in reality. In learning to imitate, we learn not just models but what Plato called an ēthos, a word that can mean a theatrical character, but also a characteristic or a disposition that is more the sum of any examples; we acquire skills, habits, and instinctual modes of desire that push us to unexpected places. Mimesis, that is, creates what Pierre Hadot called "a way of life." In Gregory of Nyssa, especially, we see this other view of imitation take hold.
Mimetic relationships structured much of the classical Greek and Roman worlds. Archetypes and imitations frame discussions of how a teacher molds a student, how art shapes a soul, and how the creator creates creation—questions most intimate or most cosmic, questions of identity, cultivation of the self, power and persuasion, and more. The ubiquity of mimesis in the classical world and in the early Church, however, can blind readers to the different ways its conceptualization formed individuals and communities. Nearly everyone wrote about imitating, but they did not mean the same thing or imagine the same results. The ubiquity, therefore, makes the analysis of the relations of power and ontology implicit in these mimetic relationships even more important. Because mimesis could do so much work, it should not surprise modern readers that it was constantly challenged.
Gregory's most famous contributions to Christian thought—divine infinitude and the human mimicking of that infinitude in our endlessly expanding desire for God—participate in a larger late antique concern with imitating the divine. That is, Gregory carves out a new theorization of mimesis as he insists that humans imitate an infinite God not by becoming like a fixed object but by infinitely expanding their souls' love for God, endlessly growing toward an endless God. Imitations of Infinity shows how, for Gregory, mimesis structures a set of exercises, a way of life, aimed at Christian perfection. His theological and ascetic program involves both what to imitate and how to imitate. My reading of Gregory is structured, therefore, around three of his most common targets of desire: names, spaces, and characters. Each of these governs and propels Christians toward a more virtuous life and an ever-expanding desire; they are images of God that transform Christians into the image of God. It is not enough, however, simply to look at these images and assume we know what we mean by mimesis. Gregory's names, spaces, and characters carry with them modes of mimesis: the structures of desire, theorizations of participation, and practices of representation required for a virtuous life, defined as imitation of God.
Gregory's definition responds to Harmonius's question, a question that is difficult to render in English: Τί τοῦ Χριστιανοῦ τὸ ἐπάγγελμα; The difficult word here is ἐπάγγελμα. It can mean a promise, a profession, an art, or a subject (as in the subject of a treatise). What is the promise of a Christian? What is the profession of a Christian? What is the art of a Christian? What is the subject of a Christian? What is promised to a Christian? We get some sense of the question from the analogy he draws immediately after posing it:
Just as someone who desires to be called a doctor or an orator or a geometrician is not worthy of a title until he has some education as to what it means, that is, until he discovers from experience [ἐπὶ τῆς πείρας] what he is being called, and just as the person wishing to be thus addressed in accordance with truth, so that the calling will not be proved to be a misnomer, will show himself faithful [πιστώσεται] to the title by the practice itself [αὐτῷ τῷ ἐπιτηδεύματι]; so, in the same way, if we, seeking the true aim of the profession [ἐπαγγέλματος] of a Christian, should find it, then we would not choose not to be it when the title is professed [ἐπαγγέλλεται] about us.
Like doctors, Christians should, over time, grow into and then stretch out their titles. From their practice, they learn the truth of their profession. Experience, education, and habits accumulate in Christians and transform them into what their name implies. Put differently, Harmonius is to become a Christian by practicing Christianity. Daily exercise of virtue informs the promise of Christianity.
Mimesis offers a promise, but also carries a threat. Mimesis constellates bodily habits that allow Christians to become what they profess, but what happens when someone is called a Christian without being one? Because means and ends are so tightly intertwined, Gregory fears that some might mimic what they know of the title Christian without their soul's transformation as well. Gregory retells Lucian's story The Fisherman to illustrate this threat. In Lucian's narrative, a man trains a monkey to dance, gives it a mask, and puts it, costumed and accompanied by musicians, on stage. Audiences generally marvel at the masked monkey. But one day, a maleficent audience member tosses some almonds in front of the dancing animal. Seeing the drupes, the monkey forgets his act, tears off his mask, and eats his fill. Gregory worries less about monkeys, of course, than about those "ape-like souls [πιθηκώδεις ψυχάς]." The devil places temptations before those who "through mimesis, play the role of the Christian," causing the actors to "remove the mask of moderation or humility or some other virtue in a moment of passion." Gregory's definition, which is meant to guide a life of virtue, looks surprisingly similar to the dangers of Christian acting. Masks and mimesis here are not the problem. The problem is how easily Christians remove their masks and, so to speak, break character.
If, then, doctors gain experience by watching other doctors, seeing patients themselves, and blending theoretical knowledge with improvised practices of healing, and if orators enter teachers' homes and schools to learn to imitate rhetorical masters, then what is the analogue for Christians? What roles should Christians learn to play? What theoretical knowledge should be in place for successful, often ritualized, improvised encounters with the divine? What names, spaces, and characters can facilitate a mimetic relationship with an infinite God? The easy response is to say, "Christians imitate Christ." But that does not answer the question of how to imitate a Christ whose nature is unknown. Imitation requires imagining an "image of the invisible God" (Col 1:15) and fashioning a relationship with what always exceeds one's grasp.
For Gregory, mystery and mimesis together constitute the Christian life. Disciplining practices and striving toward the infinite are parts of the same profession. Harmonius surely knew that God's essential unknowability is no small thing for Gregory. It was central to the biggest theological battle of Gregory's life, that against Eunomius. For Eunomius, Gregory reported, "the title 'Christian' does not properly apply to those who claim that the divine nature is unknowable." Eunomius argued that Christians had to know who God is in order to worship God. Gregory spent years arguing just the opposite: Christians must profess the infinitude and therefore unknowability of God's nature. But this unknowability does not leave Christians aimlessly peering into the void. Their "total ignorance" must be conducted—both in the sense of a channel moving water and in the sense of a conductor leading an orchestra—and this happens also through mimesis. To be a "Christian," he insists, is to imitate that which one cannot know.
Mimesis, Ontological and Aesthetic
Imitations of Infinity argues that Gregory's definition of Christianity brought together two conceptual discussions of mimesis: one ontological and one aesthetic. That is, mimesis entails both ontological participation in God and aesthetic representation of God. Ontological participation is about who one is. While it is common today to think of oneself as a stand-alone unit, ancient theorists understood themselves to be "participating" in God. Who they "were" was a question of what they were an imitation of, and how they stood in relationship to their archetype. Aesthetic representation is about the kinds of practices, often literary or analogous to a literary practice, that it takes to represent an archetype.
The connection between ontological participation and representation is, in fact, the central concern that leads up to Gregory's definition: "Christianity is mimesis of the divine nature." Participation "unites" Christians to Christ, making them "synonymous with [Christ] whose incorruptible nature is beyond names . . . . For just as by participating [τῇ μετοχῇ] in Christ we are given the title Christian, so it follows that we are also drawn into a share in the sublime names which belong to it." A series of names gathers around Christ, and, in becoming synonymous with him, the Christian "exhibits in his life" what the title "Christian" indicates. Christ is "ineffable, incomprehensible, and exceeding all thought," and, at the same time, "it is not possible to be a Christian (that is, truly a Christian) without displaying in oneself a participation in these names [justice and purity and truth and separation from all evil]." Only in the connection of these two sides of mimesis, therefore, can one be a true imitator of God.
If, then, these two conceptions work together in Gregory's fashioning of mimesis, this book also highlights how God's transcendence troubles mimesis. As soon as he gives his definition of the Christian life, Gregory stages his reader's reaction: How do you imitate the infinite? "Let no one object to this saying [λόγον] as being immoderate and overstepping the lowliness of our nature; it does not go beyond our nature." Instead, Gregory writes, "The promise of Christianity [ἡ τοῦ χριστιανισμοῦ ἐπαγγελία] is to bring humanity back to its original inheritance." For "If humanity was originally a likeness of God [τὸ ἀρχαῖον θεοῦ ὁμοίωμα], perhaps our definition [ὁρισμὸν] is not outside the bounds when we declare that Christianity is mimesis of the divine nature." Humans were made "in the image of God," and while they can turn away from God, they nevertheless live and move and have their being in God; their existence marks them as images and draws them back to their origin.
Humanity's mimetic relationship with the divine, then, is grounded in an original, ontological givenness, but Gregory follows this with an account of the aesthetic aspect. Gregory's tethering of ontological participation and aesthetic representation in his understanding of Christian mimesis appears striking in the following long quote.
Assume that a professional [ἐπαγγελλόμενος] painter is commissioned by a superior to draw the form of the king [χαράξαι τὴν τῆς βασιλείας μορφήν] for those living far away. If he depicts a ridiculous and ugly shape [εἶδος] on the wood and calls this ungracious figure an image of the king [εἰκόνα βασιλέως], would it not be likely that the powers that be would be irritated, because the beautiful archetype [ἀρχετύπου κάλλους] has been insulted through this bad painting among the ignorant [i.e., those who had never seen the king]? For they will necessarily think that the original is what the form on the image shows him to be. If, then, the definition says that Christianity is mimesis of God [θεοῦ μίμησιν τὸν χριστιανισμὸν], the one who has never been given an account of this mystery [τοῦ μυστηρίου τὸν λόγον], believing that the life he sees among us is a correct mimesis of God [μίμησιν θεοῦ κατορθοῦσθαι], will also suppose the divine to be what he sees among us. Therefore, if someone should see among us models of complete goodness, he will believe that the divine revered by us is good; but, if someone is emotional [ἐμπαθὴς] and brutal, changing from one passion to another, and puts on [ὑποδυόμενος] many forms of animals in his character [ἤθει] (for it is easy to see how, in the deviations of our nature, we are changed into beasts), then, should such a one call himself a Christian, when it is clear to all that the promise [ὑπόσχεσις] of the name professes [ἐπαγγέλλεται] an imitation of God, that person in his own life makes what we believe to be divine an object of blame among unbelievers.
Those who participate in God are to make their life an artistic image of that which is unknown and unseen. No one has seen God, but through art, subjects do have a sense of the king, and those images can govern a life faithful to the king. Images, in turn, allow Christians to participate in God. Rather than see the artistic work as only a process of "expression," Gregory insists that because representation and participation function together, Christians are constituted by mimesis; their mimetic relationship forms their "character" (ἦθος). To live the promise and profession of their name, Christians participate in that which they represent and represent that in which they participate. Representation and participation ground each other and together "run out to infinity."
Again Gregory, having brought together the two aspects of mimesis, anticipates his skeptical reader's question about the inimitability of God: "How could it be possible for the earthly to be like the One in heaven, the very difference in nature proving the unattainableness of the imitation?" He responds again, "Human and divine natures need not be combined [συγκρίνεσθαι], but we do need to imitate in life the good actions, as much as possible." The all-important distinction between creator and creation—one infinite, the other finite—does not lead Gregory away from emphasizing a mimetic relationship; it makes it imperative. He repeats the earlier discussion of humans being made in the image of God, and then, quoting the Psalms, argues that God's presence already saturates human nature. "If I ascend to heaven, you are there. If I descend into hades, you are present. If I take up my wings at dawn or dwell at the bottom of the sea, indeed, there, your hand will guide me. Indeed, your right hand will hold me fast." Unless humans "by choice" separate themselves from God, they already "live in heaven." Christians are called to "be perfect as your Father is perfect," but to be "perfect," for Gregory, is not to dwell in "the firmament of heaven as some remote habitation [κεχωρισμένον ἐνδιαίτημα] of God." It is to represent the ineffable who is always already near. Self-sabotage and external tragedy threaten to "corrode" the soul, and the devil constantly removes the masks of virtue. Yet Christian perfection is available not by "overstepping our nature" or by escaping to "some remote habitation." It is forged through the daily practices that over time accumulate into a homed desire that can respond to a God it never fully knows.
Harmonius, therefore, did not receive a specific prescription from Gregory. The letter assumes familiarity with scripture, shared rituals, a disciplined regimen, an orientation toward a promise always yet to come, and faith that participation in and representation of an unknown God center that promise. But there was no to-do list. Mimesis of the divine nature could not work that directly when human transformation was as endless as the God it worships. Endless transformation could not happen according to preexisting patterns; practice must generate the patterns that, in turn, shape a soul.
Gregory framed this endless growth with a metaphor of debt and interest. He hoped his definition would be seed money that compounded over time. It was meant to accrue and expand as Harmonius gained experience in his calling. Putting his treasure in heaven by conducting his love of God should continue to grow Harmonius's sense of what it means to call himself a Christian. "Because of the nature of the One receiving the deposit," Gregory writes, "it is altogether necessary that the return be enlarged [μεγαλύνεσθαι]." And with that dilation of desire should come new images and new understandings of what is ultimately beyond all comprehension.
If the letter's goal is to elicit more questions, it surely succeeds. Gregory's definition exhorts Harmonius to a life that he assumes Harmonius is already living, but modern readers (and likely ancient ones as well) are left wondering: What kinds of guidelines or practices help govern this life? What disciplines must Christians assume if they want to choose this life of Christian perfection? What do Christians imitate when they imitate the divine? Gregory does not quite answer any of these in this letter. Looking to other texts, especially texts from around this time late in his career, reveals how mimesis, for Gregory, became both the way and the goal of Christian perfection. To put it differently, Gregory's definition offers a lens for reading Gregory.
Mimesis and the Study of Religion
In addition to providing a more nuanced understanding of mimesis in Gregory, Imitations of Infinity has three broader implications: for the study of late antiquity, for the genealogies of mimesis, and for the discipline of religious studies. First, late antiquity is often defined as a time when Christian leaders applied classical practices of representation to new subject matter. Reading practices once applied to Homer now work on the Bible. I argue that these new subjects emerged among shifting understandings of mimesis. While Gregory is the main character of my story, his life displays many of the qualities that have made late antiquity a distinctive time period: hybridity and competitions for order, asceticism and classical education, assemblages of a new set of imagined and institutionalized authorities within an empire with a long memory, and glacial changes from civic euergetism to ecclesial power emphasizing "the poor."
His own family lived in the intricate world of late Roman landed aristocracy, although his grandparents suffered as confessors under the persecution of Maximin Daia. Gregory of Nazianzus described them as "trainers of virtue for others—living martyrs, breathing monuments, silent proclamations." His grandmother and mother instilled the family's religious roots that went back to Origen of Alexandria's student Gregory Thaumaturgus, while his father, a rhetorician, rebuilt the family's fortunes during a time when large portions of Pontus converted to Christianity. His oldest sister, Macrina, and his brothers experimented with forms of asceticism and institutionalized poverty relief. And his brother Basil, who studied in Athens at the same time as Julian (later known as "the Apostate"), knew well both the power politics and pastoral care involved in theological debates.
Gregory's life and thought were constituted by all these issues—legacies of martyrdoms, Origen's contemplative practices, rhetoric, asceticism, Christianization of knowledge, imperial-level politics, pastoral care, care of the poor, and theological debate. His life was filled with questions about both what and how to imitate. Both the objects of mimetic desire and the practices of mimesis were up for debate in his life, and, because mimesis governed questions of cosmology, education, aesthetics, and much more, how it was theorized and deployed was hotly contested. With Gregory, moreover, we see imitation move from a temporary tool to the very aim of the Christian life. While many earlier writers saw imitation as a way to achieve a kind of self-sufficiency, Gregory understood mimesis to lock Christians into a life always governed by an archetype.
This shift in the function of mimesis leads to the book's second goal: in addition to providing a thicker description of Gregory's account of mimesis, this book plants seeds for a new history of mimesis. Many of the best studies on the concept skate easily from Plato, to Aristotle, to Neoplatonists, to . . . Michelangelo, and then march toward Derrida and the present. No one study can do it all—and this one certainly does not try—but the persistent break in the story is worthy of note. That these studies plot a similar arc with a similar cast of characters does not make them invalid or even repetitive. Many, however, assume a stability in the contours of conceptualizations of mimesis that can survive the "jump" from ancient philosophical schools to arguments about imitation of nature in the renaissance. In an attempt to lay the groundwork for reading a particular theorist, these narratives often highlight the texts that were key to the theorist; there are advantages to this approach, but often at the cost of reinforcing a narrow path through history. Imitations of Infinity suggests that there is more to this story than these narratives allow. By stretching mimesis to cover this gap, I hope to add more than another plot point in this (secularization) story. Examining mimesis in late ancient Christianity shows that something is lost when modern historians, philosophers, and classicists pass over these religious reflections on mimesis. Mimesis for early Christians formed a "way of life," and erasing late antique Christianity from these narratives obscures the ways mimesis became a way to say the unsayable that involved the reshaping of an entire life.
Mimesis is both a concept and a practice; it organizes the world and gives people something to strive toward. Early Christian theoretical concerns over mimesis emerged from, responded to, and vied for the shape of the basic patterns of a Christian life. We need to see those contests to see what was at stake in conceptions of mimesis. At the same time, to examine the practice without attending to conceptual frameworks that make them meaningful is to assume a rather flat version of mimesis, which makes it difficult to see why mimesis incited so much controversy. It is commonplace to say that Christians imitated Christ. What we need to know is how and why that could be problematic. In focusing on mimesis in late antiquity, and especially in Gregory, we can see how conceptual frameworks and ascetic practices work together to stylize religious subjects as well as their sacred objects. We can only see the stakes of theories of mimesis by looking at the practices just as we can only understand the practices by seeing the theories underpinning them. By showing how debates around mimesis that began with Plato became in late antiquity an especially dense intersection of concepts and practices, I hope readers can begin to see the outlines of a different story of mimesis.
More specifically, including late ancient Christianity helps us see tension between imitation and inimitability. While earlier thinkers of mimesis (e.g., Plato or Origen) emphasized that no representation could adequately capture its archetype, Gregory's stress on the infinitude of God put a different kind of pressure on mimesis. The problem for Gregory is not that representations are not good enough (with the underlying assumption being that with more able intellects they could be); it is that the reality they represent cannot be bounded and therefore is unrepresentable. How does mimesis happen when there is a necessary and unbridgeable gap between representation and reality?
The third goal of Imitations of Infinity is to take up questions that are central to religious studies about how subjectivity is constantly constituted through mimetic relations. Gregory's names, spaces, and characters form both religious beliefs and what Talal Asad calls the "sensibilities and attitudes that are distinct from beliefs." While few might have been able to follow Gregory's argument with the "Eunomians" or "Macedonians," forming relationships with the names, spaces, and characters that Gregory asked his audiences to imitate formed a kind of common sense—shared, structured dispositions and desires. His writings provided patterns of identification and attachment that included and exceeded any specific claim about epinoia or the Trinity. They constructed models of selfhood as they taught people both how and what to desire. Theorizing mimetic relationships was key to this subjectivation. Questions of what to imitate, that is, intertwined with questions of how to imitate.
Like religion, mimesis is a mix of practices and organizing frameworks. And like religion, mimesis is a way to make sense of our lives and a way to feel out the edges of our existence. While questions about mimesis often begin from an account of how art both reflects and creates worlds, the line between art and life is often quite thin. We create the images that create us. Turning back to late antiquity allows us to see how traditional categories of literary analysis became central to contests over how to fashion a way of life that could represent another world, a heavenly sphere, or even the divine.
Critical theorists such as Michel Foucault have observed how literature, institutions, and bodily practices both limit and model possibilities of selfhood. They become archetypes to imitate and worlds to participate in. Foucault, in his rethinking of the modern subject, compares modern notions of the self with ancient ones and notes how the modern self as an autonomous source of meaning is related to a cauterizing of art from life. "What strikes me is the fact that in our society, art has become something which is related only to objects and not to individuals, or to life. That art is something which is specialized or which is done by experts who are artists. But couldn't everyone's life become a work of art? Why should the lamp or the house be an art object, but not our life?" Bodies in space, Foucault argues, can both show the "signs of the time" and kindle other possibilities, can make other forms of life recognizable.
Foucault and his best readers often emphasize how the mimetic relations that create us as subjects carry with them a kind of excess that cannot be captured in their archetype. Robert Orsi includes Foucault's work in what he calls "the tradition of the more," a strand of scholarship that emphasizes (even praises) the "excess" as what escapes representation, positivism, and control, and what holds open the possibility of another way of being. Theorists in this strain often turn to mystical theology to demonstrate how something escapes or exceeds dominant forms of representation and control, and that excess keeps alive possibilities of being otherwise. But what that alternative might be can be quite vague. What might it look like to practice this alternative? Turning to Gregory allows for a more detailed, nuanced analysis of "the more." Transcending oneself, for Gregory, is not an escape from discipline; discipline attempts to shape experiences of transcendence. That God, and therefore all faithful "images" of God, cannot be captured in imitations is his starting point of reflection on Christian perfection. Mystery and mimesis worked together, as new names, spaces, and characters populated the early Christian imagination and shaped practices of Christian perfection.
Outline
The first half of this study situates Gregory's writings within Greco-Roman and early Christian discourses around mimesis. I begin with Plato, who establishes what I call the "two tracks of mimesis," aesthetic representation and ontological participation. On the one hand, Plato theorizes the relationship between representation and reality. He asks how the stories and images that mirror the world affect humans in their pursuit of the Good. On the other hand, within the dialogue named after him, Timaeus theorizes mimesis as primarily a matter of ontology. His universe is created as a series of imitations or microcosms held together by participatory relationships in which creatures are held in existence by their cause. A creature imitates its makers not as a separate, contained existing entity attempting to capture the likeness of another separate, contained existing entity, but as something completely dependent on that which it imitates.
These two aspects of mimesis, moreover, correlate with two erotics or modes of desire. Representational mimesis excites readers to ascend a ladder of desire, which leads from individual images (or bodies) to more abstract loves. Once ascended, philosophers can also differently perceive those bodies: they become flashes of beauty or points of intensity. In ontological mimesis, by contrast, Timaeus does not climb a ladder. He gazes directly at the "first principles" and longs for the perfect circle of the universe in his mind. Transcendence here is that of an uninterrupted contemplation without growth or movement. After laying these two tracks, the chapter concludes with a discussion of Greco-Roman rhetorical training, which happens largely through concentrated practices of imitation. Gregory himself taught rhetoric before his ordination and so would have been familiar with how these teachers emphasized a complex mix of mimetic theory and practice by which students acquired the habits needed to imitate often "inimitable" qualities of the best speakers.
Chapter 2 examines what happens when these two tracks cross, as readers attempt to synthesize Plato's writings into one philosophical system. In late antiquity, readers of Plato—Christian and non-Christian—become particularly concerned with the role of mimesis in the philosophical life. I examine how mimesis forms "a conceptual vein that leads to the heart" of Plotinus's and Iamblichus's philosophical programs, and also how their different conceptions of mimesis lead to quite different organizing concepts and practices. For Plotinus, mimesis is a stepping stone toward a non-mimetic goal in which human souls are united to the One that is beyond all representation. Iamblichus, however, convinced that souls are too damaged to contemplate the divine without help, weds his philosophy to more specific theurgic rituals that require mimesis. In ritual, theurgists encounter "symbols," which are not representations of another reality, but an activating force for something otherwise inaccessible in humans. Only in performing these rituals and engaging the symbols do theurgists imitate and unite with the gods. The chapter finally turns to the emperor Julian, whose devotion to Iamblichean philosophy spread its popularity across the empire, especially in Cappadocia. Susanna Elm argues that what Julian saw in Iamblichus was "a consistent system that merged everything." His theory of everything challenged Christian theologians to come up with their own in response.
Before turning to Gregory, however, we need to set his work in another, competing discourse. Philosophers, after all, were not the only ones concerned with mimesis. Chapter 3 examines a wide range of early Christian debates around mimesis. Paul's request that the Corinthians "imitate me as I imitate Christ" binds Christian formation to practices of imitating those who show what Christ looks like. Martyrs and saints, too, are cast as imitators of Christ, or even "other Christs." But with the multiplication of "other Christs," questions emerge around proper relationships with these holy women and men: Should they be imitated (and if so by whom?), or are there other modes of participation (e.g., awe, reverence, wonder) that can quicken early Christians? By situating Gregory within these larger debates, I hope it is clear that his writings operate within lively and contested discourses concerning mimesis. Late antiquity transformed much of classical culture (e.g., religion, politics, gender norms, ascetic ideals), and with these transformations came a shift in understandings of mimetic relationships.
Having presented these two tracks and shown how their crossing became a problem in late antiquity, in the second half of this study, I show how these two aspects of mimesis played out with respect to three kinds of images that Gregory insisted are not divine: names, spaces, and characters. These names, spaces, and characters are finite and therefore, Gregory argued, cannot be God. And yet, what Gregory takes away ontologically he gives back mimetically. This triptych, I argue, forms not only Gregory's most common targets of mimetic desire, but also form Gregory's own "theory of everything," his way to connect heaven and earth. Throughout the first part of this study we will have seen how questions of mimesis are inseparable from the formation of desire. Put strongly, imitation is what desire looks like. When we turn to Gregory's names, spaces, and characters, we see how these three kinds of images fill souls and make participation in God possible, and how, in their combination, they govern and propel Christian desire.
Chapter 4 examines Gregory's treatise On Perfection and what he calls "the names we take into the soul." A seeming distinction frames the treatise: those names that "we have room for, we imitate, and those that our nature does not have room for in imitation, we revere and worship." That distinction between imitation and worship was a fourth-century commonplace. For Gregory, however, it was one to overcome. When Christianity is imitation of the divine nature, he argues, Christians cannot be satisfied with worshipful participation alone. They must also push at their own edges as they imitate what always exceeds them. Said differently, inimitable things are the only things worth imitating. Gregory insists that Christians will never fully imitate the divine and that there is, indeed, a danger in "arriving too quickly" at imitation. But worship and imitation remain in a dynamic relationship for Gregory. The push and pull between them govern Christian perfection, which Gregory describes as "never to stop growing towards what is better and never placing any limit on perfection." These names, like water entering a ductile container, stretch what they fill. Taking on the name of Christ requires Christians to constantly expand that name by adding more names to it.
Chapter 5 examines two literary practices Gregory often deploys involving "mimetic space." First, I look to his Treatise on the Inscriptions of the Psalms to show how Gregory repeatedly maps the Christian life and asks Christians to make a journey through the stations he curates. After examining this practice of mapping, I focus on the production of affective spaces or spatial images that provide particularly intense sites of the divine. These spaces not only stylize the infinite, they also teach Christians to feel it. Gregory conjures and invites his audience into a space that, in his words, "contains the Uncontained," and there invites them to become an infinite space as well. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre's threefold understanding of space—perceived spaces of practice, conceived spaces such as maps, and spaces of representation or the spaces by which we understand ourselves—the chapter argues that Gregory maps spaces and creates scenes or places that link heaven and earth.
Finally, Chapter 6 turns to what might be the most obvious mimetic relationships Gregory hopes to inculcate, those with characters. These characters are not only moral examples, but also images of God. In Gregory's writing on Moses, Paul, and Macrina, each character's holiness contains a mystery that encourages both representation and participation. Watching a saint's infinite growth, for Gregory, is as close as readers can get to a representation of an infinite God, and their endless expansion invites others to join in their expansive love. These characters both exhort and reveal, spurring imitation by becoming containers of the uncontainable. Through these characters, we will also see Gregory's insistence that, in imitating an unknowable God, Christians become unknown.
The book concludes by asking questions about the ethical and theological implications of imitating what one does not know. What are the demands and dilemmas of containing the uncontained? The question for Gregory arose with respect to God, humans, and all of creation. In forging those mysterious relationships, Gregory theorized Christian perfection as the endless stretching, intensification, and progression of love of God. These names, spaces, and characters governed and propelled the life of Christian perfection, guiding an ever-expanding desire toward a God who was at once infinitely beyond and acutely present to all. Through them, Christians could live the mimetic life.
Notes
Introduction
Table of Contents
Introduction. The Mimetic LifeChapter 1. Two Tracks of Mimesis
Chapter 2. Crossing Tracks: Mimesis in Neoplatonism
Chapter 3. Early Christian Mimesis
Chapter 4. Mimetic Names
Chapter 5. Mimetic Spaces
Chapter 6. Mimetic Characters
Conclusion. Mimesis and Mystery
List of Abbreviations
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments