The Virgin Mary in Byzantium, c.400–1000 by Mary B. Cunningham (review)

Abstract

“not the penalty but the intent.” Augustine’s views energize a larger notion of human experience after the fall that stresses life as continual temptation, countered only by cultivating the soulful interiority in which God’s word lives and animates Christian betterment. Living a martyrial life, rather than dying a martyr’s death, is the goal of cultivating this interior space. Even in those moments where death seems to be central to Augustine’s idea of martyrdom, Fruchtman demonstrates that Augustine consistently undercuts any death-centered ideology of martyrdom. Not the least of the virtues of this view of Augustine’s sense of martyrdom goes to the ways in which it accords with Augustine’s polemics against Manichaeans, pagans, Donatists, and Pelagians. Through a reading of Sermo 335K, Fruchtman offers a deep dive, so to speak, into the life of martyrdom that Augustine would seem to recommend, involving a committed, even relentless concentration on God and God’s purposes, on the glorification of God, and on the reading of scripture as a means of knowing God intimately, all in order to prepare for life in combat against the fallen world. Fruchtman’s analysis of the ways in which Augustine exploits rhetorical tools to confect his living martyr reveals him almost in a cinematic mode, but also exploiting repetition, aural/oral wordplay, parallelism, manipulation of dialogue, and apostrophe. Fruchtman is a powerful reader of the texts she studies because she brings to her work literary sensibilities, as well as a willingness to admit of those sensibilities on the part of the authors she studies. This means she is able convincingly to put art in the service of history. I think especially compelling in this regard is the way in which she takes seriously the function of pagan antecedents in Christian texts as signals that generate meaning with important cultural and spiritual implications. Literary scholars will especially find important the pages on “Prudentius the Poet” (26–28); “The Text As Witness” (70–74); “Rhetoric Rather Than Persecution” (141–48); “Making Martrys Through Rhetoric” (231–39); and the rich discussion of transforming observation into enactment through interpretation as part and parcel of the martyr’s existence (69–74). I should add that Fruchtman’s emphasis on enactment and interpretation is precisely what Prudentius intends for his hymns, and that the connections Fruchtman makes between reading and spirituality accord well with the readerly project Augustine would seem to articulate throughout the Confessions, but also in the Cassiciacum dialogues. This is a terrific book, whose riches I have only skimmed here. Joseph Pucci, Brown University