The story of a collapsing statue summarizes the epistemic, moral, and aesthetic imperatives that Late Antiquity bequeathed to Byzantine discourse, especially with respect to the manner in which Byzantium was to look at, and consequently speak about, its past. The chroniclers of the ninth century knew these imperatives well. When they come to narrate their historical past, they define clearly their metahistory, the presuppositions that govern their writing of history. Theophanes the Confessor (c. AD 760-817/18), one of the first medieval Byzantine chroniclers who devotes his narrative to Late Antiquity, speaks in the introduction to his Chronographia of the precision (akribeia) with which he composed his work (Theophanes, Chronikon 3-4). Precision means here absence of mediation. Theophanes claims that all events are presented in their correct order (taxis) without any interpretive rearrangement. Similarly, Georgios the Monk (in the second half of the ninth century), author of a universal chronicle that begins from the creation of the world and ends in the year AD 842, declares that his narrative presents ‘‘the entire truth’’ (aletheia) without any exterior cover but with ‘‘most transparent clarity’’ (sapheneia enargestate). His discourse is ‘‘plentiful of content’’ and void of ‘‘fashioned words and artistic constructions.’’ It is written without hiding falsehood behind a ‘‘most forceful method of construction.’’ His is a discourse, he tells us, that will narrate a past in which pagan idols, fictions, and myths are overthrown and that will thus teach salvation; a discourse, as Georgios implies, of direct vision (theoria) that does not alter or deceive the senses (aistheseis) (Chronikon 1-5; with Karpozilos 2002: 233-42).
Such metahistory is reflected in the historical narrative itself: these chronicles are full of visible signs, semeia, that make the presence of both God and the past directly accessible to the reader. The reader can see, hear, and perceive the very texture of past events: heretics suffering terrible deaths, the sign of the cross appearing time and again, fires that destroy, physical objects that obey the metaphysical order. Furthermore, the history of Late Antiquity is presented as a competition of signs - that is, the emergence of new Christian signs and the destruction of pagan ones. For instance, Constantine’s mother, Helen, finds the Holy Cross under a temple and statue of the ‘‘demon’’ Aphrodite in Jerusalem. Then, through the power of the Holy Cross, the body of a sick woman who had been rendered ‘‘breathless and immovable’’ is revived. Later in Constantinople, Constantine erects his own statue, as part of the construction of his new city; but Julian, soon after Constantine’s death, installs there idols of himself and other pagan Gods. Julian’s idols are then superseded by a discovered statue of Christ. Julian also attempts to converse with an idol of Apollo, who is silenced, however, by the holy relics of a Christian martyr. So the story continues (Theophanes, Chronographia 25-6, 28, 49-50). These narratives are structured around ‘‘perceptual grids’’ (Spiegel 1983: 46). They show little interest in comprehending the past per se or historicizing it. Representation supersedes explanation, cognition, and critique. The reader is confronted with a series of narratives that are intended to function as direct and transparent images of the past.
What is at work in both the metanarrative theory and the narrative practice of these chronicles is a dominant theoretical stance adopted in late antique discourse: the pursuit of clarity and utter transparency (sapheneia and enargeia), the suppression or erasure of the surface of discourse; in short, the valuing of truth over discursive form. Eusebius, Athanasius, Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa, John Chrysostom, Theodoret of Cyrrhus, all speak out repeatedly against discursive form, deceitful appearance, and rhetorical hypocrisy, and in favor of transparent and clear signs, presences, and truth. This is a transparency quite different from the aesthetic principles of enargeia or akribeia that defined much of Greco-Roman, Hellenistic, and imperial aesthetics; the transparency that Lucian, for instance, demands of history writing or that such historians as Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Plutarch pursued (Walker 1993). In the Greco-Roman theory of writing, transparency is appreciated not merely for the representation of truth, but also for the very artistry involved in producing a transparent representation. Greco-Roman aesthetics, therefore, which forms the background to late antique patristic aesthetics, values clarity and truth as well as the artistic ability to make the content of discourse available to the senses. In the late antique version of transparency, the one that Byzantines later inherit, artistry is to accede entirely to the moral demands of authenticity, according to which transparency does not carry even a hint of artificiality. Discourse is intended to let the listener or reader hear or (primarily) see through it; to bestow upon its content an unmediated presence. In late antique aesthetics, veracity replaces verisimilitude and theology replaces rhetoric.
This theoretical development marked a significant stage in the history of late antique discourse: the gradual disappearance of the conscious and acknowledged production of fiction. By the fifth century, fictional narratives - most notably the Greco-Roman novel - gradually disappear from cultural production and are replaced by hagiographical narratives that never acknowledge their fictionality (Bowersock 1994a). In cultural terms, such a disappearance is an inseparable feature of the gradual decline in and ultimate ending of the production of new, free-standing sculpture (the last recorded new statue during the Late Antiquity was made in the seventh century: Mango 1986). This suppression of fiction and ‘‘burying’’ of statues - those inescapably material artistic signs - are related symptoms of the theoretical stance against rhetorical and aesthetic appearance that Late Antiquity bequeathed to Byzantium.
Byzantine writers knew well that this theoretical attitude was late antique. Georgios the Monk, for instance, repeatedly invokes the authority of Gregory of Nazianzus and other patristic authors in support of his historical writing. In John of Damascus’ eighth-century Sacra Parallela, a slightly earlier systematization of late antique knowledge, late antique texts are excerpted and codified under such headings as ‘‘On truth and trustworthy testimony,’’ ‘‘On external beauty and the good appearance of the body,’’ ‘‘On those who keep silence,’’ ‘‘On hypocrisy, and irony, and feigned piety.’’ Evident in the Parallela is a fear of words as mere ornamentation, forgery, and simulation; a fear of the surface of discourse and the aesthetics of mere appearance. Late antique texts are paraded one after the other precisely to reinforce that fear. What is interesting here is that the late antique theory of discourse and its fear of discursive form is adopted by those who in Byzantium write the history of Late Antiquity. The late antique past is thus determined by an aesthetics propagated during that past. For it is theological transparency, namely the necessity for an uninterrupted continuity of content and form, that defines the Byzantine perception of Late Antiquity. Byzantine historiography, it appears, is absolutely entangled in Late Antiquity. It can only view the late antique past through late antique eyes.
World History
