The Inverted Dionysus. A Draft Body-theory of Algaesthetic Self-constraint, Smili, Athens 2011

The Inverted Dionysus. A Draft Body-theory of Algaesthetic Self-constraint


Christianity’s saint-martyr-ascetic triptych presents a unique particularity which defines to a large extent the essence of this religion’s salvational character. For the Christian believer, the exceptional existential constitution of sainthood transcends the distinction between the functioning presence of the body as a ‘subject/body-in-living’ on the one hand, and the organic absence of the ‘object/relic-in-death,’ on the other hand, inasmuch as the organic absence of a body is transformed into the material presence of the holy relic. In this way, the relic of the martyr or ascetic is made accessible to and familiar for the believer, incorporating his living reality into the master plan of future salvation. As the believer invests the object-relic with the meaning of salvation, the presence of the martyr or ascetic is experienced as a special kind of conversance. The relic is thus totally embodied into the believer’s body, which now operates as the active recipient of the saint’s body; this embodiment assumes the guise of an ‘erogenous sensuality.’ This lies in the heart of the Byzantine human’s imperative need for direct contact with and ownership of holy relics. Their ownership reveals the embodied presence of the subject-saint in the objectification of sainthood that is reproduced through certain self-constraint practices. Given this purely material signification of the body, the ultimate value of the Christian salvational message is connected with the essence of the body, even in the necrosing version of relics. Within these relics, the objectified facets of the natural being are deployed because, in the majority of cases, the material bodies of martyrs or ascetics are dismembered and dispersed, either in holy pilgrimage destinations or in portable shrines. This practice perpetuates the exercise of spiritual power upon the bodies of believers, rendering them active vehicles of worldly sainthood. Therefore, it becomes apparent that the progress towards an embodied sainthood creates a novel feeling of bodily fulfilment which, in its turn, constructs mechanisms of projecting selfhood upon the world and sets the scene for a new familiarisation of the subject-believer with his/her worldly or out-worldly surroundings.

The ability of the subject-believer to in-corporate the ‘technology of salvation’ through martyrdom and exercise elevates the latter from a simple natural automatism into the very medium of a life’s signification, affected by bodily practices of self-constraint. This relates to the fact that the believer is expected to assimilate the material absence of the martyr/ascetic’s body and, in return, to substitute for it through the experience of painful algaesthetic practices that become the only ways in which the symbolic distinctiveness of the saint’s body can be disclosed anew. However, the possibility of an experiential identification of the believer with the ‘subject-body’ of the dead saint through algaesthetic practices has to be founded of the dys-appearance of the saint’s body since the only thing that can be used towards this goal is the believer’s experience of physical pain. Inevitably, this is a case of using the dys-appearance of the saint/ascetic in a salvational way (for example when bones refer to bodily decomposition or when hagiographical representations detail the bio-physiological imaginary apparatus of torture) and not of a bio-physiological constitution of his body that reaches a concrete and permanent temporal presence. Through this dys-appearance, the communication of the believer with the divinity is validated since the alien body of the saint is objectified, thus becoming an essential tool for the consciousness of the believer. This way, the recurring depiction of saints being tortured in Byzantine and post-Byzantine churches can be explained as the ‘paradigmatisation’ of a dys-appearance in the real world. It is the symbiotic relationship of the believer with the saint/ascetic that is brought forward through the latter’s dys-functional or dys-morphic appearance. Furthermore, this dys-appearance transforms the very relationship between the believer and his body since every sensory apperception of pain explores and pushes the limits of human corporeality. Through these popular practices, Christianity, in its incarnation par excellence that was the Byzantine ‘paradigm,’ since the early monastic communities, employed to the ultimate degree the distortionary depictions of this ‘technology of salvation,’ which was mostly based on the experienced sense of a bodily dys-function.

Christianity’s establishment of practices immediately linked to bodily inefficiency, disfigurement or malfunction contributed decisively towards setting the boundaries of the body as an entity. This boundary-setting process led to the reassessment of the believer’s relationship with his ‘embodied self’ and of the accepted view that he is not a mere carrier of his body, he is not in possession of his body as a neutral material substratum but, instead, he is his own body. In this way, the awareness of the body was transmuted into the very real responsibility of the individual believer to achieve the expected salvation and also into a multitude of accepted mechanisms of bodily self-constraint aiming at this ultimate end. The intolerance of the body does not promote an objectified distance as far as the body of the saint/ascetic is concerned; it rather makes clear that the believer’s body, if he wishes to partake of salvation, has to be permeated by the intent of a strict self-control eventually ‘subjectifying’ anew the saint’s body through the use of pain. Within the cultural milieu of Byzantium, in which pain is accepted as a means to surpass the body and a series of practices towards a constant ‘de-bodiment’ have been adopted, a subjectivity geared towards salvation is defined by an increasing degree of consciousness of the body-self relationship. This contributes decisively towards the disentanglement from all limitations associated with algaesthetic situations and intolerances. By approaching the believer’s body exclusively through practices associated with pain, the embodied self aims to participate in a transcendental union with God.

In contrast to this ascetic cultural ‘paradigm,’ the widely accepted way of life today is founded upon a network of practices that aim to disengage the self from any algaesthetic situation. The entire modern and, even more so, the post-modern ‘paradigm’ relies on the denunciation, the real and symbolic mitigation or, indeed, extirpation of pain. This probably is the reason why we forget that the Christian world tried to discover its meaning in realities which, within a post-modern context, would be classified as weakness or illness. The need and quest for a meaning in worldly life was deeply rooted in a reality of hazardous circumstances that brought the bodily identity of the believer into necessary and binding relationship with conditions of extreme pain and suffering, a process of identifying the body with the self. Within this cultural context the infliction of pain was not a sort of dangerous alterity but the only necessary condition for fulfilling the state of salvation, at once bringing forward and tearing down the erroneous perception of limits between interiority and exteriority, between the endangered body and the menacing pain.

Christianity as a religious faith, but mostly as a set of cultural practices, not only promoted the decisive role of pain (this ostensible alienation that happens within the body) in building the identity and defining the eschatological horizon of the subject-believer but also brought to the fore the fact that a life which is exclusively orientated towards biological self-preservation and avoids ways in which salvation can be embodied through algaesthetic practices offers no hope for salvation. The physical and mental weaknesses and malfunctions of those unable to belong to a prescriptive environment of ‘institutionalised discourses’ and ‘traditional networks of social interaction’ (defined by concrete perceptions of mental ability and normal function of the human body) were viewed through this duality between the ‘natural-biological’ and the ‘salvational.’ This reality is reflected in the wider acceptance of the existential ‘type’ of the mad saint within the Byzantine salvational horizon.

Through exercise and for the sake of redemption, Christian asceticism controlled bodily practices constantly and incessantly. The intensification of this control led to self-constraint practices that materialised in algaesthetic situations. In reality, Christianity borrowed the living example of a religious practice already tested for centuries in Hindu asceticism. The body was ‘morally exploited’ by ‘intensifying its (spiritual) productivity’ with the ultimate goal of salvation. When in the nineteenth century and later this religiously-derived ‘moral exploitation’ of the body was gradually devalued, the strengthening of the body’s worldly (financial and political) constitution evolved into a peculiar sort of power that nevertheless exercised a highly self-conscious self-constraint through a secularised asceticism.

In our study we examine distinct facets of various cultural practices of self-constraint (either as a ‘broader private space’ or as an integrated interiority) during the emergence of the Christian world, in the Late Roman period; these practices later infiltrated into the Byzantine civilisation. Self-constraint practices, combined with an exaggerated algaesthesia, constituted the salvational core of redemption in the Christian world. The algaesthetic reality of self-constraint practices, like exercise and martyrdom, was one of the main cultural trajectories that fed into sociocultural processes, like self-control, self-isolation, introversion, the perspective into the otherworld or the resistance to pain for the sake of salvation.

Actually, the cultural role of self-constraint practices is, on the one hand, a methodological tool for interpreting cultural phenomena like the death of Christian martyrs in the Roman arena or severe asceticism, while, on the other hand, it discloses important facets of a spiritual experience with groundbreaking results, capable of changing or even distorting people’s resistance to pain or even their gender. Within the Late Roman world as well as the Byzantine world, two contexts that were connected anyway, both these examples represent outcomes of a clear shift. The ideal of an algaesthetically conditioned self-constraint became increasingly popular and, by the time the persecutions of Christian martyrs had concluded, it was established in the consciousness of the believers through asceticism and, later on, monasticism.

Since the times of the Late Roman Empire, self-constraint practices (as in the case of the eager surrender of the martyr to death or the hardships of ascetic life in the desert) helped create a ‘culture of redemption.’ This culture transformed the political ideology of Late Antiquity in general by offering the means of upsetting the established social order and of structuring a new social and political language through the integration and promotion into the social fabric of those whom Roman aristocracy considered as pariahs and through adopting a way of life founded on rejecting urban culture and embracing ascetic desert life.

By adopting a culture of self-constraint and pain, Christianity questioned two cultural stereotypes that were established for centuries: It promoted the ideals of passive resistance and of enduring pain as signs of manhood per excellence and it facilitated the acceptance of the barbarous, for Roman sensibilities, and deprived anchoretic way of life as a substitute for refined urban living. This allowed for the ultimate degree of bodily self-awareness and for the systematic suspension of natural and emotional urges, promoting self-constraint as the best-established and accepted way for the believer to join the Christian flock. Starting from this signification of diversity, the Early Christian world created a broadly democratic and inclusive cultural ideal since it offered female martyrs and ascetics an optimistic outlook towards their emancipation from the patriarchal mechanisms of traditional societies. Parallel to that, a special effort to get familiarised with death allowed one to be able to supersede it.

Practices derived from experience and a transcendental-religious justification for a cultural ideal based on self-constraint and algaesthesia created a framework for grasping the relationship between the subject-believer and the world within the Early Christian cultural sphere. It is only by appreciating the resilience of this cultural ideal that we can reach a clear understanding of the bold attempts of 16th century post-Byzantine religious art, produced under Ottoman rule, to depict frequently and persistently the martyrdom of saints in a state devoid of external manifestations of feeling or instinctive impulses as they remain unmoved during their torture.

The algaesthetic imagery of Byzantine torture that unfolds for the first time with such frequency on the interior surfaces of the Philanthropenos Monastery walls (1542/1560), on the Pamvotis Lake Island at Ioannina, carries with it the negative connotations of extreme humiliation. It is an implicit intimidation of the believer as the iconography of martyrdom demands an absolute hold on his will since salvation is threatened. If the believer disengages himself from the other actors in this drama of martyrdom, he is implicitly guilty of denying his faith, of being ‘devirgined,’ since behind the imagery of martyrdom lurks an entire universe of divergent demoniacism and Christian legitimacy is threatened. Depictions of martyrdom help the believer accept the raw brutality against his corporeality, as was the case with martyrs, an act that begs for the restoration of Christian order. Therefore, depictions of martyrdom represent a reality in which violence, cruelty and bodily harm dominate the everyday life of the believer as absolutely normal events. If the believer-viewer of depictions of martyrdom does not participate in the represented abominable acts of violence against him, he stands for an inverted situation, equal to sacrilege. On the contrary, it falls on him, the human-victim carrying a corporal stigma, to transform the symbolic ‘violation’ of consciousness effected upon him by the image from an exclusively bodily ‘violation’ into a ‘violation’ against the body of Christian society.

Increased numbers of martyrs proved a prerequisite for consolidating Christianity as a fundamental cultural phenomenon of the western world. The mnemotechnical organisation of Christianity was founded on incidents of occasional violence upon the bodies of its confessors effected during persecutions by the Romans and was gradually replaced by the act of punctuating the cyclical time of Church life with commemorations of violence against martyrs, thus enabling the symbolic re-establishment of annual worldly order. Organising the Church year around memorial rituals of violent martyrdom offered the Church various pieces of evidence: places, testimonies, representational and hagiological confirmations that substituted the violent acts against the martyrs with the liturgical and dramatic preservation of their memory. Church writers in their turn reproduced acts of torture against the bodies of martyrs and introduced them within the framework of Christian teaching. On the one hand, the evidence of memory had a dramatic impact because of its inherent violence and amplified the power of any argument in support of faith. On the other hand, the pictorial adaptation of the dramatic event of martyrdom created theatrical precedents which inevitably encouraged the believers, by assimilating the representational memory of violence, to accompany the acts of the martyrs. Consequently, the cyclical constitution of martyr commemoration created an ideological context that transformed the violence inflicted on the martyrs by bringing diverse elements together: views on everyday life and moral conduct, social structures at a local, or broader, level and aspects of a salvational promise.

It should be borne in mind that the memory of martyrs was an excellent way to organise and maintain the unity of proto-Christian communities and, as such, played an important role in safeguarding a cultural continuity that evolved into a tradition which could be used as proof for the unity of Christian life in place and time. The blood of martyrs eventually served as building material for a shared identity and as a bonding element for communicating a painful reality, acting as an example to follow and a reference point when the Christian dogma was questioned. In this way, remembering martyrdom made it ‘always present’ and allowed for the self-experience of the piacular sacrifice of martyrs, since their deaths were seen as symbolic idealisations of Christ’s sacrifice for the world’s salvation. The professional character of the victimisation of the Christian martyr by the Roman social and political system, legally based on accusations of godlessness and irreverence, transformed pain and suffering into hope for salvation for the Christian believer.

The facets of the cultural ideal of algaesthetic self-constraint and what they disclose for the ideological and political constitution of Early Christian society made clear the need for a greater degree of tolerance and respect for the rights of others and also for a rejection of barbarising violent practices, already widespread in the Roman world. They also enriched and injected life into a new code of moral conduct applicable, at first glance, only to individual persons, the ways of whom, however seemingly alien within their historical-cultural context, soon served as paradigms for an emerging and, by the 4th century, institutionally established Christian Church.

The study at hand owes much to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s and Pierre Bourdieu’s interpretations of the processes for incorporating the social subject; it is also indebted to Norbert Elias’s groundbreaking sociological views on regulating the affect, based on his examination of the civilising process through a network of constraints and self-constraints that constituted social behaviour in modern Europe. An increasing control on the affect as well as emotional inhibitions and a self-conscious distancing from the emotional manner (with reference to the ‘self-experience’ of a less –or not at all– impulsive self) totally restructured the personality of the modern human through dynamic processes. Elias made manifest the gradual transformations of interdependences between people through the perspective of self-regulating and self-constraining conducts that constitute the private sphere opposite the social sphere for the modern human. The primary argument of the study at hand is that, by the Late Roman and Early Christian times, parallel symbolic and objectified ways of approaching self-awareness through a self-constraining control over the affect, strengthened by the special characteristics of a ‘culture of pain,’ had prevailed as ways to build a Christian self and to overthrow the dominant cultural paradigm of imperial Rome.

The martyrs’ bloodshed in the Roman arena was not unconnected to the shift in the idiosyncrasy of Early Christian culture, within which the instinctive and emotional urges of martyrs and ascetics were not classified as public spectacle operations but became –suspended and performed as steps towards an exploration or appropriation of the inner self– the tools for a private experience of the self. This experience allowed self-constraint to lead into a transformation and mitigation of social violence through its in-corporation and in-plosion. As already mentioned, the rise of cultural diversity brought gradually forward two heretofore repressed and rejected realities: the existence of those who did not partake of Roman citizenship and of those who lived outside the urban world of Late Antiquity, especially in the desert. The historically and culturally diversified process of bodily self-constraint, which corresponded to a transformation of the social world from within, laid the foundations for the ‘culture of pain’ that was at the same time for Christianity a ‘culture of redemption.’ Furthermore, within the Early Roman cultural paradigm of ‘inward asceticism’ can be traced the establishment and first manifestation of a phenomenon that would decisively contribute to the materialisation of the modern social subject through self-constraint. The second part of the study at hand focuses on the structural characteristics of the cultural constitution of self-constraint practices in Christianity which are viewed as a cultural continuum. Attention is drawn to examples that complement the body of the text and to comments on quotes that outline the objective context within which the subject’s conduct of detachment and self-constraint had been created in the eastern part of the Byzantine Empire by the 10th century.

Bringing the believer’s body into focus, as a dynamic process of symbolic or actual embodiment of God on behalf of believers (or as its mirror process of the single victim to divinity in other cultures, an example detailed in the appendix), an effort was made to unveil the complexity of the symbolic relations that constitute both the substance of an algaesthetically experienced ritualisation and the manner that a society builds its very identity on it. In this way it was attempted to grasp the extensiveness of complex historical-cultural operations through the ‘thick description’ of small and seemingly insignificant events that proved decisive in reshaping Byzantine culture.

It should always be borne in mind that corporeality in pre-modern cultures was directly connected to religious and political realities that perpetuated dominant and powerful mechanisms. In several cases, the body of the other was dismembered through bloody rituals culminating with human sacrifice in an effort to vent the agony for the eternally-stoked cosmic energy and to preserve cosmic order, thus embodying on a cultural level a socio-political difference that invested meaning into regulatory formulae of structuring the world.

The replenishment of ‘godly famine’ in order to preserve cosmic harmony was already since the Toltecs a modus operandi of Mesoamerican cultures. Both social life and people’s relations with nature resulted from this exchange of energy that was effected through large-scale prisoner of war sacrifice rituals aiming to ‘feed’ the cosmic symbols of the Sun and the Moon. Without this offering of human flesh the celestial bodies could become immobilised, the sequence of day and night and seasons of the year could be interrupted and therefore the survival of living species would be endangered. Therefore, human sacrifice offered access to another value system that prevented the possibility of the cosmos grinding to a halt. It was only through the death of another human, who functioned as a substitute for the self, that one could gain access to what lay beyond. It is not a coincidence that Christian worship is centred on an embodied transmutative communion of Christ’s flesh and blood that corresponds to a symbolic cannibalistic ritual.

The quantity of blood spilled by Christian martyrs in the Roman arena is of little consequence today. Even their number is irrelevant. However, the symbolic idealisation of blood ‘matured’ the Christian God in a fashion similar to blood replenishing the Mesoamerican Pre-Colombian Sun God in a different cultural context. In both cases, this life-giving ‘adulthood’ was based on practices involving institutionally lower, passive and deprived of a social identity human beings, representative of alterity opposite the established official culture.

ως προς τη βιωμένη σωματικότητα
Το σώμα, εκλαμβανόμενο στη διάσταση της βιωμένης εμπειρίας, συνιστά σημαίνον ενός οντολογικού προσδιορισμού και καθίσταται η οργανική πραγμάτωση ενός κοινωνικού λόγου. Αντιμετωπίζοντας το σώμα ως πολιτισμικό μόρφωμα, αλλά και ως αντικειμενική κοινωνική διεργασία, όπου εξετάζονται οι μορφές κανονιστικότητάς του -κανονιστικές διευθετήσεις της βιοτής- στο περιβάλλον του ρωμαϊκού, του βυζαντινού και του ισλαμικού πολιτισμού, αλλά και των μεσαμερικανικών πολιτισμών, επιχειρούμε να αναδειχθούν οι βιωματικές αρθρώσεις που εστιάζουν στους τρόπους αυτοαντίληψης και φυσιογνωμικής προβλητικότητάς του, αλλά και οι σωματικές πραγματώσεις υπό το πρίσμα των συνηθειών και των πρακτικών του, ώστε να καταφανεί η δυναμική του ενεργού και αυτοκαταναγκαστικά διαφοροποιημένου πολιτισμικά σώματος.

Notre livre vise à présenter l'importance culturelle –picturale aussi bien que textuelle– de la douleur physique et de la souffrance psychique, ainsi que leur promotion comme valeurs positives pour l’établissement et la consolidation de l’identité byzantine.
La douleur comme moyen d'expérience intuitive a été d’une signification cruciale pour la consolidation du christianisme en Orient. La persistance des martyrs à la lutte pour la foi et à la mort, pratiques qui présupposaient toutes les deux la réciprocité avec la personne du Christ, a été censée leur accorder la sécurité d’un «autodépassement», devenue possible grâce à l'acceptation volontaire de l'expérience douloureuse. Le processus de concrétisation sotériologique des martyrs pendant les premiers siècles de l’Église a été une partie intégrante de la «situation algaesthétique», laquelle offrait l’expérience authentique de la vérité transcendante comprise comme union avec le divin, ce qui serait autrement inaccessible au croyant. De plus, la vie ascétique dominée par la douleur fut de son côté pendant des siècles le moyen par lequel se trouvait justifiée la pratique algaesthétique dans la perspective de transcendance de l’humain.
La culture byzantine, d’autant qu’elle s’adressait principalement à l’affect, fourmillait de textes et de représentations picturaux qui encourageaient une «hyperalgésie» chronique, répartie parmi les croyants, dont le but était l'établissement de la «doctrine correcte» et la défense de la foi. La précision de la narration et l'affichage détaillé de tortures horribles sont directement liés à la possibilité de faire preuve d’une douleur de plus en plus intense, ainsi que de provoquer un sentiment de culpabilité, afin que les croyants se maintiennent dans un état de «morbidité permanente». Ainsi, toute possibilité de guérison du traumatisme que causerait la vie d'un martyr aurait pu conduire à faire entrer le fidèle dans une nouvelle douleur torturante. C'est peut-être la raison principale pour laquelle l'utilisation instrumentale, à la fois textuelle et picturale, du martyre par l'Église a pu survivre pendant des siècles à travers divers contextes politiques et socioculturels.
L’environnement algaesthétique de l’art byzantin, même si le croyant ignorait plusieurs aspects de la vie ou de l'histoire personnelle du martyr, témoigne de la consolidation d’une objectivité algaesthétique qui, tirant sa légitimité dans la douleur atroce de Jésus-Christ lui-même, encaisse l'idéalisme transcendantal du salut dans le réalisme de la douleur physique. Il serait, cependant, intéressant de noter que ces manifestations douloureuses de proximité du croyant avec le divin étaient basées sur la présentation malformative du corps du martyr. De plus, la mise en valeur de la malformation corporelle du martyr, témoignée par l’exposition de son corps ouvert et de ses organes internes, minimisait la distance entre ce dernier et les fidèles. La représentation du martyre amenait ainsi le croyant-spectateur à un mode de vie authentique, afin qu'il puisse participer lui-même au zèle du martyr. Par conséquent, l'implication émotionnelle du croyant aux images algaesthétiques du martyre avait en principe une fonction dynamique au renforcement de la foi.
La culture byzantine a été construite sur l'intégration du modèle algaesthétique, même s’il fût régi par une attitude de dépréciation du corps humain. Sur ce modèle a été déposé la signification d’une intériorisation spirituelle afin que le corps matériel du croyant puisse acquérir un degré élevé de l'assimilation de l’expérience mortelle dans la vie. De façon paradoxale, ce modèle de restreint algaesthétique du soi, qui servait à l’Église comme mécanisme de «normalisation» des fidèles, aboutit finalement à une vraie métamorphose de la douleur en jouissance à travers l’acceptation volontaire du martyre comme signe de participation à la mort du Christ.