A Saint of One’s Own: Emmanuel Levinas, Eliezer ben Hyrcanus, and Eulalia of Mérida

Shame and sanctity are intimately related in ancient lives of Jewish sages and Christian ascetics. Infinitely other, saints (from Eliezer to Eulalia) are also infinitely seductive in the audacity of their willful abjection. Drawing desire beyond law, hagiography evokes not ethics alone, but le saint, la sainteté du saint (Levinas)

Mimicking Virgins: Colonial Ambivalence and the Ancient Romance

Burrus pursues juxtapositional readings of two sets of novelistic texts that cut across religious affiliations and the politics commonly associated therewith: the Acts of Paul and Thekla and Achilles Tatius\u27s Kleitophon and Leukippe, on the one hand, and Heliodorus\u27s Ethiopian Story and Joseph and Aseneth, on the other. Reading for resistance, she also reads for virginity, which functions as a site of articulated cultural ambivalence in each of the romances. That virginity is a characteristic and historically innovative preoccupation of ancient romances is scarcely a novel proposition

2010 NAPS Presidential Address: Fleeing the Kingdom : Augustin\u27s Queer Theology of Marriage

Might attending to the texture of bodies in Augustine’s theology of marriage open up new interpretive possibilities? Eve Kosofky Sedgwick and Patricia Cox Miller give theoretical cues, Danuta Shanzer philological ones, for a dialogical reading of On the Good of Marriage and Confessions that seeks to defamiliarize, complicate, and broaden—in several senses, to queer—traditional interpretations of Augustinian marital theology. Shame and vulnerability, fear and desire, pain and pleasure, are all surfaced, as Augustine depicts marital figures that are shot through with ambivalence—open and torn, cut and bleeding, both cleaving to one another and ripped apart. Ultimately, he attempts to turn desires that won’t quite align as they should toward textual pleasures. If Christ attends, caresses, and enflames through “the mesh of flesh” (Confessions 13.15.18 [CCL 27:252]), as he puts it, Augustine reaches back toward both flesh and divinity through the mesh of text. Seduction may thereby be drawn toward the border where time touches eternity—where a libidinous love evokes the reciprocal gift of fidelity without demanding it, exceeds itself in fecundity without commodifying its own productivity, and, finally, embracing all by grasping at nothing, touches on a joy that knows no end. Fides— proles—sacramentum. At such a barely imaginable limit-point, marriage has become so expansive—an ever-exceeding love set into the very weave of the cosmos—that he need no longer resist its lure

Carnal Excess: Flesh at the Limits of Imagination

This essay explores representations of fleshly excess in Christian and Jewish texts of the late fourth and fifth centuries, from the cosmically-scaled figures of Adam and the resurrected Christ in Genesis Rabbah and Augustine\u27s City of God, on the one hand, to the hagiographical portraits of fat rabbis and monks in the tractate Baba Metsia of the Babylonian Talmud and the Lausiac History of Palladius, on the other. The Platonic figure of the khora is initially invoked to frame two main arguments: first, that these late ancient texts discover transcendence within, rather than outside of, the boundlessness of materiality; and, second, that this incarnational tendency has intriguing implications for practices and theories of representation and imagination

Reading Agnes: The Rhetoric of Gender in Ambrose and Prudentius

Readings of two late fourth-century versions of the tale of the virgin martyr Agnes illumine the place of gender within a late ancient Christian discourse that locates itself in complex relation to both a Christian and a classical past. In Ambrose\u27s account, the tale of Agnes, juxtaposed with that of Thecla, constitutes a reworking of the apocryphal tale of the conversion and witness of a sexually continent woman. In Prudentius\u27 text, allusions to the virginal heroine of classical tragedy represent Agnes as a new Polyxena. Through such intertextual play, the ambiguously gendered virgin martyr emerges not only as a model for the disciplining of the would-be virago of female asceticism but also as a representation of the body of a discourse of orthodoxy that deploys the dual rhetorics of martyrdom and empire, inscribing itself as feminine in an ascetic subversion of the masculine discourse of classical speech, whereby the transcendently male authority of this Christian discourse is paradoxically asserted

Wyschogrod’s Hand: Saints, Animality, and the Labor of Love

That the lives of saints constitute an unmediated appeal suggests both a call to imitate what cannot be imitated (thus can result in no mimesis of sameness) and a call to respond to the extremity of the saint\u27s vulnerability; and I would suggest that the two calls turn out to be the same. Because the saint is radically open to the need of others, she is endlessly vulnerable to need herself (she will give everything, again and again); and because she is endlessly vulnerable to need herself, she is radically open to the need of others