Sonia Velázquez’s riveting book Promiscuous Grace: Imagining Beauty and Holiness with Saint Mary of Egypt was conceived as a demonstration of the space and stakes within art history that an analysis of religious, indeed theological, themes could address. Its political significance is subtle but sustained, effervescing from the author’s “attention to beauty and, in particular, to the judgments about the beauty of women’s bodies” (2). While pursuing the project, however, she came to see that the illuminating impact would run both ways.
While our material turn in religious studies is now in the rear-view mirror, the significance of art qua art is not often in the foreground. In other words, does art have to be made a test site for something else, evidence of social norms or a reflection of doctrinal debates, or can it be encountered as a form of mediation that does not reduce to authorial intent or audience reception? Is there any room for aesthetic judgment in the study of religion (even as aesthetic interpretation is widespread)? And if there is, can the power of beauty be the subject of rigorous analysis when attempts to define it tend to spin out into platitudes?
Promiscuous Grace attempts a course correction by which all of the above questions can be answered in the affirmative, charting a path through the interstices of art history and religious studies that is as ambitious as it is controversial. “Holiness,” after all, has long been as fraught an analytic arena in the latter as “beauty” has in the former, and as someone whose own work addresses the slippery but inescapable lived power of holiness, I am compelled by the core provocation of Velázquez’s text: that holiness and beauty are not just empty signifiers that resist or disincentivize inquiry but are, rather, “encounter[s] produced between particularities” (12), inviting us to imagine possibilities hitherto unconsidered and stimulating “desire for a relationship, for something to be created together, unlike awe, which reduces the spectator to silence and private contemplation” (12).
Promiscuous Grace is an exercise in “thinking with” a prominent but in some ways idiosyncratic saint whose veneration solidified at a pivotal moment in the Byzantine consolidation of Christian doctrine and imagination. Accordingly, she approaches the saint through a contested history of multi-mediation in a particular modern context, Spain. In these respects, my own book, Saint George Liberator, is much the same, even as its contents, context, and argument are quite different. I want to consider a few areas of Velázquez’s analysis of Saint Mary the Egyptian in which her exploration of terrain shared by our two books may open up novel aesthetic, hagiological, and indeed theopolitical implication.
First, Velázquez devotes serious and sensitive attention to one of the most bedeviling and intractable problems of Christian history (no mean feat for a two-hundred-page book in which it is only one of several vectors of analysis): namely, the difference between idols and icons, and the proper status of mimetic craft in the representation of holy people. It is no doubt foolish to attempt a few-sentence summary of this problem, but it can be said to pertain to the difference between two different styles of attention or imagination rather than the difference between two different types of objects or between two different subjects of representation. That is, as John of Damascus and his inheritors famously articulated this distinction, what makes an image capable of mediating holiness rather than leading viewers into undue and deleterious worship of material things is the posture of the devotee—not the material substance in which the image is inscribed (whether paper or wood or stone), nor indeed the identity of the person, place, or thing represented (because even an image of an unambiguously holy person, such as Christ and the Virgin Mary, can be mistreated imaginatively by a viewer, leading that viewer to misunderstanding and ruin).
One and the same material object can be either an icon or an idol, depending on how and by whom it is approached. Worshipping an image itself is idolatry; using the same image as a means to worship or honor that which is represented in it is icon-veneration. Therefore, proper pedagogy and formation are required to ensure that Christians are capable of being edified by the invisible/interior holiness of the referent that is inseparably united with, but should never be confused for, the visible (indeed beautiful, and therefore at least potentially dangerous) materiality that constitutes the site of encounter. At the same time, the iconoclastic fathers quite reasonably worried that representing divine things in human media—which are necessarily forged of earthly substances, culture-bound, ever susceptible to idolatrous misinterpretation or venial misuse—would collapse the holiness of the referent into the mundanity and potential profanity of the reference. At the base of the theological controversy, as Velázquez rightly notes, are the status and dynamics of mimēsis (a hotly contested philosophical concern since Plato): under what conditions does imitation falsify and so dishonor or distract from the thing imitated, and under what conditions does imitation facilitate an approach to and internalization of the thing imitated?
In light of this classic icon-idol debate (which Velázquez also traces at times into its modern manifestations, such as in the work of Jean-Luc Marion), one of the most compelling interpretive refrains in Promiscuous Grace is the treatment of the Spanish hagiographical tradition around Mary of Egypt as an “iconophilic hagiography” (51). By this she means that poets, painters, and dramatists took the risk of depicting the saint’s pre-saintly predilections (those of a beautiful and promiscuous young woman whose confidence in her body’s power to move and please others is neither hidden nor explained away by the hagiographers’ pious intentions to represent her trajectory of conversion to a life of desert asceticism) on the grounds that—Velázquez argues—the beauty of Mary’s physicality need not be positioned either as irrelevant to nor opposed to the holiness with which she would increasingly be aligned in her later, ascetical existence. Those more conventional readings of hagiographical art (designated by Velázquez as “iconoclastic”) would have viewed the representations of Mary’s physical beauty, her promiscuous behavior as a young woman, and even the degradation of her body by ascetic rigor later in life, as “anti-icons” (85) in which an alluring, spiritually dangerous beauty is depicted in order to produce righteous satisfaction at its destruction.
By contrast, in the artistic productions she considers, the “surfaces” of Mary’s life are neither deceitful masks nor disguised gateways for esoteric knowledge. They are sites of a truthful encounter with a human life in which redemptive conversion is possible, a life in which the obstacles to holiness are themselves the way to holiness. Such “iconophilic” hagiography—whether the poetry of the Vida de Santa María Egipciaca, the paintings of Jusepe de Ribera, or the hagiographical theater of Juan Pérez de Montalbán—consistently defies the implication shared by many critics of sacred art in these artists’ own time that the all-too-human means of mediation must ultimately fall silent in order to prove truthful.
I think it is worth considering the stakes of this debate, and in particular the side of it on which Velázquez’s hagiographers consistently fall, for it frames an approach to public religious discourse that is anything but abstractly philosophical. This iconophilic sensibility recognizes human bodies, human ideas, and human media not as necessarily separated from their objects by an infinite qualitative distinction but rather as capable of being vehicles for moral and spiritual transformation (even if, in the event, they fail to be so). The sensibility provides foundations for an optimistic and exoteric political theology in which the material and aesthetic texture of our communication matters, is owed scrutiny and rigor, and is capable of being translated—not perfectly but fruitfully—across purportedly unbridgeable cultural-linguistic gaps.
In the final analytic chapter of Velázquez’s book, this refrain crescendos to what I think is its most significant intervention, as the author takes up a work of hagiographical theater as the venue for concluding her argument around the functions of formal beauty of word and image in making saintly lives accessible and desirable. Theater combines the eloquence of poetry with the physicality of visual art, and perhaps in virtue of its multi-mediated magnetism it also has historically run afoul of the most vigorous critiques of deceptive “spectacle.” Yet, the hagiographers considered by Velázquez take advantage of the powerfully moving and motivating aesthetics of theater to align the moral exemplarity of saintly lives (here in particular one that leaves behind the priorities of the flesh more gradually than is comfortable for some) with the “value of entertainment” (146) and indeed with the face-value of visible beauty as a path to holiness.
I struggle to think analytically about saints and the theater without recalling the influential fourth-century homily of John Chrysostom, “Against the Games and Theaters,” in which Chrysostom presents the theaters of his day as a rival institution to that of the “spiritual theater” of the saints, whose trials and tribulations the preacher exhorts his audience to view and listen to and internalize. But with Chrysostom there is a paradox at hand, akin to that which Velázquez ably charts in the seventeenth-century Spanish context. When the hagiographer denounces theatrical shows and works to position saintly narratives in their place, he is adopting and deploying many of the same theatrical techniques that he warns his audience are liable to corrupt their capacity to know and desire the good. In a string of lurid and sensual descriptions to rival the hair-raising messenger speeches from classical drama, Chrysostom conjures before the inner eyes of his audience the very “strutting,” “gyrating,” and “lusty melodies” of the burlesque performers that he warns will follow them home from the theater as a seed of pornographic imagination—just like the saintly figures that he hopes will come to inhabit his audiences’ inner life.
So too, Juan Pérez de Montalbán takes the risk of presenting his saintly figure in the theatrical terms of a beautiful body and enticing speech—wagering, according to Velázquez, that the attractive embodiment of these appearances is not opposed to the hagiographical function of the drama but rather a means of realigning the desire of the viewers toward Mary’s own trajectory of conversion and holiness. Mary’s (represented) desire to see, to experience, and to devour with the eyes becomes, in Montalbán’s clever presentation, a “metatheatrical figure” (142) for defending the hagiographical theater itself—which constructs a multimedia spectacle and stimulates the excitement and desire of the audience as “instruments of spiritual transformation” (150). The beauty of the theater, like that of the saint, is claimed by Montalbán as revelatory rather than deceptive. As I explore in some depth in Saint George Liberator, however, the degree to which hagiographical media, particularly those which are immediately appealing or emotion-stirring, can be appropriated to morally questionable political or cultural projects should not be too optimistically downplayed. Just because the surfaces and artistic textures of a “redeemed theatricality” (153) can be vehicles for edifying wonder and a strengthened civic morality, we cannot assume that they will necessarily be so. It would seem to me that the conditions under which hagiographical spectacle incentivizes or fortifies one or another possibility are still owed considerable attention.
I have a deep appreciation for Velázquez’s attention to the nuances of hagiographical artistry and for her highlighting of the public implications of hagiographical functions: that for which hagiographical representations are put to work. There are select places in the book where she raises these issues explicitly, such as in her discussions of how Mary the Egyptian’s conversion narrative served as evidence in favor of the iconophilic position at the Second Council of Nicaea (25) or of the use of her relics and narratives by bishops in an effort to convert prostitutes and transform the civic environment some centuries later (140). Nevertheless, and without in any way diminishing the achievement of her book on its own terms, I would have liked to see more thorough and sustained attention to the political grip of the hagiographical functions Velázquez considers. What, for instance, of the political dimensions of the controversy over material/visible representation that embroiled the eastern church in the eighth and ninth centuries—precisely when the veneration of Mary of Egypt was becoming more widespread and being deployed as evidence and pedagogical strategy?
Furthermore, does the hagiographical affirmation of faithful mimēsis and “the visibility of holiness” (10) that Velázquez traces through the Spanish tradition of Mary the Egyptian risk the shadow-side of reclaiming (whose?) beauty as associated with holiness, and therefore at least potentially reactivating longstanding, politically significant cultural associations of ugliness with moral disarray? Might these truth-telling fictions of hagiographical spectacle, these “appearances that will not lead viewers astray” (158), lead us in the promising direction of a broader political-theological engagement with speculative fiction, which offers a bracing cognitive estrangement from which the hegemonic presuppositions of our primary, historical world can be critiqued? Velázquez’s interests in the categories of the paradoxical, the monstrous, and the grotesque are likewise generative for inquiry into the political stakes of uncanny or unexpected hagiographical appeals for readers and viewers to understand their lives anew in the light of the saints’ holy interruption of the status quo.
Velázquez and I agree, ultimately, that the persuasive force of hagiographical art is a potential energy coiled within the beauty of that art as much as it is a kinetic rhetorical appeal made by its discursive message. If this force can be said to approach that which the poet Rilke apprehended in the curves and lines of a fragmentary, archaic torso of Apollo—“You must change your life”—then it behooves us to consider explicitly the broader political entailments of those (often interpersonal) changes that are invited and activated by hagiography, such as the media Velázquez considers around St. Mary and those I consider around St. George.
