It is fitting that a work as concerned with paradoxes as Ellen Muehlberger’s latest book is itself paradoxical: a lecture book for lectures that were never given—or, at least, never given as part of the sort of residential lecture series that it takes as its model. Still, the acknowledgements make clear that much of this material was presented orally during the book’s genesis. In a short preface, Muehlberger frames the work as an attempt to right two wrongs, one explicit and one implicit. The explicit wrong is the overwhelming whiteness and maleness of the authors who have historically been invited to the series that spawn books of this sort. The implicit wrong is the broader decline of the genre. On both counts, Muehlberger is correct. The annual Sather Lectures at Berkeley, which may justifiably be called the flagship lecture series in the field of Classics, has been awarded to only six women since 2000.[1] Meanwhile, eight recipients during that period have not produced volumes from their lectures, and I would ask the reader to reflect on how many of those that have appeared they have read. This is not to cast aspersions on the quality of these volumes—the two that I have read are excellent—but merely to point out that the role of these books in our field has shifted, a point to which I return below.
The volume opens with a brief introduction that establishes the thematic throughline uniting the chapters, namely questions of knowledge and knowing constructed in broadly Foucauldian terms. Muehlberger frames the question through the tension between faith and evidence present in the Letters to the Hebrews. On the basis of late antique translations, she argues persuasively that faith could be understood to be logically prior to evidence, meaning that faith enabled the discovery of evidence rather than evidence enabling the development of faith. She then argues that we should understand Christian knowledge as fundamentally apocalyptic in its original Greek sense of revelatory: faith revealed an “additional reality” that was not available to non-believers (5). The structural tension between this additional Christian reality and other realities along with the ever-present possibility of their reconciliation lent dynamism to “the Christian shape of knowledge” (6). After arguing for the value of knowledge as an analytical term, Muehlberger explains how knowledge and knowing link her four topics: the rhetorical figure of the prostitute (πόρνη) who has gained self-control (σωφροσύνη); the role of dwellings in Christian epistemology; the emergence of infallible figures in debates over Christian orthodoxy; and the reception of the Fayyum “portraits.” While Muehlberger argues for the analytical coherence of these topics, she also questions the value of coherence, arguing that the virtue of a lecture book is precisely that “it is often a grab bag, chronologically and topically adventurous, a kind of writing that asks you to trust the expert hand that created it” (11). Moreover, she “firmly believe[s] that we should always hold our sense of coherence up for question. What belongs and what doesn’t, what illumines what—these are evaluations based on esteem and tradition” (12).
The first chapter examines the figure of the prostitute in rhetorical exercises. Muehlberger argues that the rhetorical prompt, widely attested in ancient progymnasmata, of the speech by a prostitute who has achieved self-control, is itself a paradox because the prostitute was defined in both the popular imagination and the logic of the prompt as incompatible with self-control. Moreover, this paradox carries others in its train. For instance, why would a society as patriarchal and misogynistic as ancient Rome require elite boys to both imagine and, to some extent, present themselves as low-status women? Why, if these boys were imagining themselves as women, do we not see evidence of increased empathy for women or sex workers? Muehlberger finds the answer to both questions in a theory of domination through imagination. Taking on the role of women, however superficially, provided these boys with an imagined knowledge of the world that inoculated them against authentic perspectives, a knowledge that was validated by the social approval that their speeches earned from teachers and peers. Muehlberger combines this argument with a “biography” of this stock character that runs from Libanios, through an anonymous rhetorical exercise, to the Life of St. Mary of Egypt, which she persuasively argues should be understood as a reception of this same figure. Her analysis of these texts, though necessarily brief, is excellent and consistently illuminating, especially for the Life. This is a chapter that anyone with even a passing interest in its topics should take the time to read.
Despite its many strengths, I could not help but feel that there is a pessimism in Muehlberger’s interpretation that outstrips her evidence. According to Muehlberger, rhetorical exercises were virtually incapable of producing empathy both because identifying with others is intrinsically difficult and because “first-person ventriloquization, when performed by the powerful to represent the less powerful, does not challenge the hierarchies that allow it in the first place” (36). As evidence, Muehlberger points to the missing consequences of empathy: there was no “revolution in social relations” that can be linked to these exercises (35-36). This may be an unreasonably high bar. Christian concern for the poor did not revolutionize ancient economic relations, but it did result in new institutions that offered material support to widows, orphans, and the sick. There is similar evidence for attempts to improve the lives of sex workers by, among other things, forbidding slave-owners and fathers from forcing women under their authority into prostitution, attempting to abolish prostitution in Constantinople and, in general, creating monasteries to provide support and shelter for former sex workers.[2] The motivations for these measures (not to mention their efficacy and consequences) were surely diverse, but I don’t see how we can entirely rule out empathy or, given the link between rhetoric and the ruling elite that Muehlberger identifies, that exercises such as this might have inspired at least some elite Romans to feel that empathy. Likewise, Muehlberger is certainly correct that social approval played an important role in how the lessons of these exercises were internalized, but much would have depended on the precise framing of that approval. Were schoolboys praised for capturing the truth of the prostitute’s experience or for their rhetorical techniques, for instance their subtle use of grammatical voice to express a character’s evolving agency (the focus of Muehlberger’s analysis of Libanios)?
Chapter two turns to a central epistemological dilemma in late antiquity: how to tell if someone was truly Christian. After establishing the historical context of the question, Muehlberger argues that building metaphors were central to Christian epistemology because they influenced the “shape of ignorance” and thus determined the heuristics through which Christians sought certainty about the beliefs of others. We can find evidence for this heuristic in phenomena such as Christian discussions of the contents of pagan temples, which was always some flavor of repulsive, as well as in the practice of Christian home invasion employed by Shenoute and various groups in the Church History of John of Ephesus. Structures were thus structural features of Christian epistemology.
Chapter three is the most abstract in the book and considers the absurdities created by epistemic absolutism. Muehlberger posits the development of a category of Church fathers, whom she labels “superfathers,” whose members functioned as repositories of authority precisely because they had been stripped of any concrete beliefs, agenda, or even a stable body of work. She explores this idea first through the figure of Cyril of Alexandria who incorporated into his writings the statement that all Christians should believe in “one incarnate nature of the Word,” an idea that was widely but falsely attributed to Athanasios of Alexandria. The assertion by Cyril of views that would come to be understood as heretical set in motion a chain of absurdities. At the Second Council of Constantinople, convened by Justinian in 553, an authentic letter by Ibas of Edessa was declared a forgery because he criticized Cyril, which could not be reconciled with orthodoxy, but it had already been cleared of heresy by the Council of Chalcedon in 451, which made his orthodoxy unquestionable. Logically, then, the only solution was to delegitimize the letter in question. Muehlberger uses this episode to consider the role of forgeries in the construction of a Christian past before arguing that the collective weight of a superfather’s status ultimately devoured every other element of their lives and works, hollowing them out to make them more effective vessels of orthodoxy.
The final chapter considers the Fayyum “portraits” and returns to the dark side of imagination. Muehlberger opens the chapter with a series of quotes from art critics who describe exhibitions of the paintings with a combination of trite banalities and cartoonish hyperbole. Muehlberger uses these responses to good effect, juxtaposing the presumption of authenticity and accessibility inherent in them with the long history of deracination and adulteration that has stripped these paintings of their cultural and material contexts in order to facilitate their use as photographic portraits, vehicles for essentializing narratives about Greek art, and, above all, blank canvasses for imaginative projection. The chapter is incisive and captivating. I learned a great deal from it and recommend it to every reader of this review.
The volume lacks a separate conclusion, but the final pages of the fourth chapter reintroduce some of the central themes that bind the project together. Muehlberger’s suspicion of imagination as being, perhaps inescapably, an act of domination returns, as do questions of authenticity, and cycles of wonder and “unknowing,” which Muehlberger sees at the heart of our thinking about the ancient world (156-157).
Things Unseen is an evocative and rewarding work for anyone interested in late antiquity and the ancient world more broadly. (It is also open-access and available for free digitally, which makes it easy to recommend.) Not the least interesting questions that it raises concern its own genre. Muehlberger explicitly frames the book as a response to more traditional academic writing, to books that, in her memorable phrase, are “evidenced within an inch of their lives” (xi). Here, however, she asks the reader to rely on the authority of the author to guarantee accuracy and rigor. In return for that trust, she argues that the lecture book offers readers bolder theses, broader synthesis, and the satisfaction of “paradoxes presented and then solved, or long-held paradigms neatly upended and replaced” (xi). There can be no question that Muehlberger has earned our trust by any metric one might reasonably apply: the quality of her previous work, her standing in the field, or the prestige of her appointment. Nevertheless, I wonder whether we, as a field or as readers, benefit from trusting.
To turn the book’s hermeneutics back upon itself, what is this request for trust if not a tacit request for willing submission to authorial domination? Evidence is egalitarian because it forces authors to make their claims accessible and contestable, and the reader exercises agency, in part, through their apportioning of trust. When we as readers relax our demands for evidence or offer trust in advance, we surrender our agency. On what grounds should we allow authors to claim such profound epistemic power? As Muehlberger argues, traditionally the answer has been whiteness and maleness, but her analysis is incomplete: it has also been prestige, as is clear from even a cursory glance at the institutional affiliations and Ph.D.s of the past quarter century of Sather lecturers. Perhaps, like the exercises in Libanios’ classroom, the lecture book is a genre that cannot challenge the hierarchies that allow it.
Notes
[1] The list of future recipients indicates active efforts to remedy the gender imbalance. The whiteness persists: https://dagrs.berkeley.edu/index.php/people/sather-professor/past-future-professors
[2] Legal restrictions: C.Th. 15.8.2 = CJ 1.4.12 and 11.41.6. Constantinople: N.Th. 18. In general: CJ 11.41.7. Monastery: Prokopios, Buildings 1.9.1-10, cf. Prokopios, Secret History 17.5-6, which criticizes this foundation in terms that support Muehlberger’s analysis.