Straight Reading: Shame and the Normal in Epiphaniuss Polemic against Origen

Blossom Stefaniw

Journal of Early Christian Studies, Volume 21, Number 3, Fall 2013, pp. 413-435 (Article) Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: 10.1353/earl.2013.0038

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Straight Reading: Shame and the Normal in Epiphaniuss Polemic against Origen
BLOSSOM STEFANIW
Epiphanius was a vociferous advocate of a totalized, univocal, and normative version of Christianity. How does his agenda of dening and adjudicating the order of things unfold when applied to questions of reading and interpretation? His sexualized polemic against Origen and Origenist textuality shows that a debate that is ostensibly about hermeneutics mobilizes notions of shame and deviance in order to dene legitimate imaginings of where truth is and what sort of meaning can be found in the Bible. The textualities of Epiphanius and Origen manifest fundamentally conicting notions of how truth relates to the text of Scripture, to the physical world, and to bodies. For Origen, Scripture refers to an intelligible realm outside of time and beyond sense experience and the limits of embodied reason or the written word. For Epiphanius, however, the religious truth founded in Scripture can and should be connected to human bodies, and to the physical world. It is within range of common sense and plain language. Arguing between poles of the normal and the deviant, Epiphanius attacks Origenist textuality on three fronts. In the Panarion, Origen is represented as phanius sexually deviant. The deviance of his textuality follows from that. Epi also afrms a textuality that he portrays as normal and common sensical. He reads in an imagined world where human bodies remain intact and consistent. He therefore cannot accept the indeterminacy of the body suggested by Origens discussion of the resurrection. Epiphanius valorizes physical reality and rejects interpretations oriented to a higher noetic realm as a perversion of the text. Describing this conict in terms of literal vs. allegorical interpretation fails to account for the ideological aspect of exegesis. Instead, this article argues that what Epiphanius promotes is straight reading.

Journal of Early Christian Studies 21:3, 413435 2013 The Johns Hopkins University Press

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Origen of Alexandria lived from 185 to 254. In this period, the state did not recognize Christianity as a legitimate and legal religion and persons discovered to be Christians were intermittently subjected to torture, execution, or disenfranchisement. The communities of Christians spread throughout the Roman Empire described themselves as belonging to a third race or as having their citizenship in heaven. Because of their limited numbers and because of nding themselves at odds with the law and with standards of decency and good comportment, Christians self-identied as aliens, transforming the stigmatization of their identity through public ordeal into ecstasies of martyrdom.1 Epiphanius of Salamis, born roughly three generations after Origens death, was among the rst cohort of citizens to grow up in a world where Christianity was legal and the emperor himself was a Christian. Dying in 403, however, he did not live to see a world in which the apparatus for exercising coercive force in order to dene and impose adherence to doctrines established as constituting right belief had reached its zenith. Epiphanius strongly favored efforts toward the totalization of Christianity and contributed to them signicantly through his writings.2 In the Panarion in particular, Epiphanius undertook to make a comprehensive survey of what exactly everyone else was doing wrong. Since Christian doctrine necessarily had to be argued from Scripture, efforts at resolving and dening right doctrine in a manner conducive to totalizing ambitions required a hermeneutic that could be relied upon to produce clear and unambiguous evidence for one doctrinal position and against another. When Epiphanius, in the Panarion and elsewhere, turns his attention to the rst great Christian exegete, Origen, he is confronted with a hermeneutic that is entirely unsuited to totalizing efforts. Origens way of interpreting Scripture allows for things to remain unknown. It accepts ux and ambiguity both in the text and in human embodiment, and is not much invested in the physical world. Thus Epiphaniuss drive for a form of Christianity that is sorted, which is univocal and totalizable, is offended, and, given the strong and growing heritage of Origenist textuality in his own day, he
1. For two accounts of the development of Christian identities in these terms, see Virginia Burrus, Saving Shame: Martyrs, Saints and Other Abject Subjects (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008) and Judith Perkins, The Suffering Self: Pain and Narrative Representation in the Early Christian Era (New York: Routledge, 1995). 2. On rising Christian efforts at totalization, see Averil Cameron, Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire: The Development of Christian Discourse (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994) and How to Read Heresiology, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 33:3 (2003): 47192.

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must undermine Origen as a legitimate authority as well as undermining the legitimacy of his way of reading. FROM EXEGESIS TO TEXTUALITY Late fourth- and fth-century debates about what constitutes correct exegesis might be understood as methodological disputes leading to a reasonable and necessary move away from allegorizing and towards a more rationalized and literal form of interpretation.3 This view follows from a construal of exegesis as the reading and interpretation of texts where a text is a discrete entity whose meaning can be extracted from it if proper technique is applied.4 The fundamental problem with treating the interpretation of texts as a technical procedure is that it resists the ideological shape of exegesis as a complex social practice of meaning-making. Fights about exegesis manifest ideological drives because they are ghts about truth, about how and where one may legitimately claim to have found truth. That is, if we proceed from John B. Thompsons denition of ideology as meaning in the service of power, any practice that generates and denes meaning can be lent ideological substance if and when it is called upon to shore up a way of imagining the world that has achieved, or is striving to establish, dominance.5 One way to work towards ideological dominance is to attack other imaginings of the world, and other imaginings of the conditions for human knowledge in the world, as nefarious misconstruals. In the present case, Epiphanius does this by undermining the way that Origen does the meaning-making work of interpreting sacred texts.

3. Cf. R. P. C. Hanson, Allegory and Event: A Study of the Sources and Signicance of Origens Interpretation of Scripture (Richmond, VA: John Knox, 1959). Newer approaches to differing hermeneutics can be found for example in David Dawson, Allegorical Readers and Cultural Revision in Ancient Alexandria (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992), and most recently Margaret M. Mitchell, Paul, the Corinthians and the Birth of Christian Hermeneutics (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 4. One treatment of the problematic nature of this view from an American perspective can be found in the work of Stanley Fish, most notably his collection of essays, Is There a Text in This Class? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980). A large section of continental literary theory in the 1970s and 1980s was also occupied with dismantling this notion and will not be detailed here. 5. For this denition of ideology see John B. Thompson, Ideology and Modern Culture: Critical Social Theory in the Era of Mass Communication (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990). For its application in early Christian studies, see Caroline T. Schroeder, Monastic Bodies: Discipline and Salvation in Shenoute of Atripe (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007).

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Using the term textuality adds dimension to the otherwise misleadingly simple concept of exegesis (as a technique for extracting meaning from a text-as-entity) by treating the interpretation of texts as a complex undertaking involving questions of epistemology and truth.6 From this perspective, Epiphaniuss polemic against Origenist textuality reveals itself as a re-imagination of a physicalized Christian world. The perception that Origenist textuality is intolerable is part of a larger shift towards normalizing the notion that truth is anchored in this world as it is perceived through the senses, in ordinary language and in human bodies.7 The textuality that Epiphanius promotes requires both bodies and texts to be discrete, constant, and self-identical entities such that they can sustain univocal truth claims. Epiphanius undermines Origenist textuality by arguing between poles of normal vs. deviant. Because his polemic is cast in these terms, and because of his aversion to the ambiguous, multivocal, uid, and unknowable, Epiphanius takes up a stance of defending what is normal, natural, and real. For this reason, and as a corrective to the construal of this debate as a matter of literal vs. allegorical exegetical technique, the textuality that Epiphanius advocates should be re-construed as straight reading. Attaching notions of normality and deviance to interpretation does not begin with Epiphanius. David Dawsons discussion of the rhetorical function of meaning and interpretation indicates the central role of the belief that the text has an inherent meaning that is essential to it, while an allegorical meaning deviates from the natural and obvious.
Meaning is thus a thoroughly rhetorical categoryit designates the way composers of allegory and allegorical interpreters enact their intentions toward others through the medium of a shared text. Consequently, although
6. Elizabeth A. Clark, Reading Renunciation: Asceticism and Scripture in Early Christianity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 5: . . . the interaction of readers and the written is signaled by the word textuality. While there are diverse modes of engagement with a text which are denoted by the term textuality, the focus here is on interpretation because that is what Epiphanius primarily takes issue with. Since Epiphanius works to elide the difference between interpretation and simply reading the text, the term Origenist reading is frequently used in the following discussion. By making the proper way to engage with a text synonymous with the mere act of reading, cast as innocent and uncontrived, Epiphanius sets a standard against which Origenist reading appears ludicrous and convoluted. Against such a standard, Origen is punished for reading wrongly, when of course Origens own textuality privileges non-literal interpretation and especially noetic exegesis that pursues the higher meaning of a text. 7. On the Origenist controversy as part of a rising preoccupation with the religious signicance of human embodiment, see Elizabeth Clark, The Origenist Controversy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992).

STEFANIW / STRAIGHT READING417 the literal sense has often been thought of as an inherent quality of a literary text that gives it a specic and invariant character (often, a realistic character), the phrase is simply an honoric title given to a kind of meaning that is culturally expected and automatically recognized by readers.... The literal sense thus stems from a communitys generally unself-conscious decision to adopt and promote a certain kind of meaning, rather than from its recognition of a texts inherent and self-evident sense. An allegorical meaning obtains its identity precisely by its contrast with this customary or expected meaning.8

This passage shows how evaluating interpretations as either normal (literal) or abnormal/unusual (allegorical) can, when some one like Epiphanius adds an ideological superstructure, valorize certain readings while stigmatizing others. The notion that texts possess an inherent and self-evident truth or reality that is synonymous with their literal meaning lends interpretive practice normative potential. Identifying a given interpretation as literal amounts to asserting that it is innocent and realistic, conforming to the nature of the text. In the same way that gender is taken, within a heteronormative discourse, to be something which manifests a specic invariant and essential characteristic of a person, so also a certain reading is taken to be what is really there in the text, a guileless and accurate rendering of the plain words on the page.9 Here it becomes clear how a non-literal reading, within an ideological frame that fully exploits the association of the literal with the normal, can be rejected as at odds with the obvious and normal nature of the text. Adding this normative aspect to literal meaning more closely denes different interpretations as deviant; because they depart from the normal or the true, they are unnatural. Dawsons comment also indicates the path to the destabilization of the apparent naturalness and innocence of the literal meaning. If meaning is not the essence of the text, but rather a product of community consensus about what is or is not normal for a given text, then the very meaning that is supposed to be inherent and essential to the text has a beginning and an end, is contingent, and is subject to change across space and time. This destabilization of what constitutes a normal obvious meaning strongly resembles the destabilization of the notion of gender as the manifestation

8. David Dawson, Allegorical Readers and Cultural Revision in Ancient Alexandria (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991), 78. 9. See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York: Routledge, 1993), and Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004) for full articulation of the role of this idea in hetero-normative discourse.

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of some inner truth of the body following naturally from biology. Gender theorists appropriated the work that had been done by literary critics to show the indeterminacy of the text-meaning relation in order to critique the way we think about bodies, gender, and sexuality. Hetero-normative discourse must conceal the indeterminacy of the body (the non-sequitur of sex and gender), and claim instead an incontestable reality for gender, a stable relation between gender and the body.10 In the same way, normative polemics on what constitutes valid interpretation work to conceal the instability of readings that are cast as innocently reecting the obvious, commonsensical meaning inherent in the text. This occlusion of contin10. Current debates in the United States provide ample illustrations of hetero- normative discourse arguing from nature, reality, and plain biological facts. Discourse of this kind can also take on a religious aspect, claiming to represent the God-given order of things since time immemorial, recognized by any reasonable person, as in the following samples from http://www.citizenlink.com/2010/06/15/focus-on-the-familys -position-statement-on-same-sex-marriage-and-civil-unions/ (accessed March 9, 2012). While this is only a small sampling, what is signicant for the present example is that this source is an overt advocate of straightness and that the way of arguing used is very similar to that used by Epiphanius: History, nature, social science, anthropology, religion, and theology all coalesce in vigorous support of marriage as it has always been understood: a life-long union of male and female for the purpose of creating stable families. Marriage . . . has existed as an institution since the beginning of civilization, and thus supersedes our modern laws. Every society at all times has viewed the social norm of marriage as a union of male and female. Studies of previous civilizations reveal that when a society weakens the sexual ethic of marriage, it deteriorates and eventually disintegrates. Even a casual observation of nature reveals the vital distinctions between male and female and the need that each has for the other. Gender distinctions are not simply an articial social construct. Men and women are uniquely designed to complement each other physically, emotionally, and spiritually. The discursive strategies used manifest even more striking similarities to Epiphan iuss pattern of argument in warning against those who hold wrong opinions while identifying themselves as Christians and promoting a notion of interpretation which resists ambiguity: . . . We are convinced that the Bible leaves no room whatsoever for confusion or ambiguity where homosexual behavior is concerned. The Scripture both explicitly and implicitly regards it as falling outside of Gods intention in creating man and woman as sexual beings who bear His image as male and female. Even within the ranks of professing Christians there are those who dont believe that Gods Word and created order afrm heterosexual marriage as the one and only legitimate context for sexual expression. A careful study of this stance shows that its adherents either discount the authority of Scripture or adopt interpretive methods that create the latitude to ignore or distort the plain and obvious meaning of its words. (Quotations from http://family.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/26078/related/1 [accessed March 9, 2012]).

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gency is necessary not only to allow ideological clout to accrue to ones claims as to what constitutes legitimate interpretation, but also to make clear the gravity of the fact that others are doing it wrong. The wrongness of the way others are doing it becomes a matter of encroaching deviance threatening the true, natural, and normal. It is this sleight of hand, this insistence on the plain reality of his reading over against a deviant and perverse reading, which is at the root of Epiphaniuss polemic against Origenist textuality and which constitutes the straightness of his reading. But how does one arrive at the need or desire to stigmatize non-literal readings? In the case at hand, it is the connection of interpretation to epistemology that suggests Epiphaniuss motive. The textual practices of Origen himself, as well as of those accused of Origenism in Epiphaniuss own day, manifest assertions and assumptions about the nature of texts, the location of truth, and the relation of Scripture to the physical world.11 There are several characteristics of Origenist textuality that make it inimical to the univocal, physicalized, and well-dened form of Christian truth that Epiphanius advocates.12 On Origens imagining of the religious world, Scripture reveals truth that is located in the realm of pure intellect; since Scripture bears intelligible truth within it, it refers, when most fully understood, to intellectual and spiritual things. Referents from within the realm of time and space are concessions to those readers who are less advanced or less capable of pursuing truth on an intellective level.13 The reader is to engage with the text such that the text operates upon the person and, ultimately, integrates the impulses and appetites of the body and the movements of the emotions so that the intellect is emancipated from any source of disturbance and becomes able to comprehend the One.14 Origens textuality is as it is because of where he locates the truth of the text

11. For an analysis of the interpretive assumptions regarding just these relations among exegetes later condemned as Origenists, see Blossom Stefaniw, Mind, Text and Commentary: Noetic Exegesis in Origen of Alexandria, Didymus the Blind and Evagrius Ponticus, Early Christianity in the Context of Antiquity 6 (Berlin: Peter Lang, 2010). 12. On the indeterminacy of Origenist textuality, see Patricia Cox Miller, Poetic Words, Abysmal Words: Reections on Origens Hermeneutics, in Origen of Alexandria: His World and Legacy, ed. Charles Kannengiesser and William L. Petersen (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), 16578. 13. The pedagogical reasons for this arrangement are discussed in Origen, Princ. 4. 14. The physical world and the written word are mere means to this end, namely the ability to apprehend the invisible with pure mind. This providential epistemological arrangement is set out most compactly for example in Origens Commentary on the Song of Songs 3.12.

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and because of the intelligible quality of truththe really real is outside of time, space, and material.15 Truth must be attained on a vertical axis, moving away from the sensory and physical and towards the incorporeal and noetic. Because truth is noetic, it always escapes full apprehension by embodied humans. While a great deal of work has been done on Origenist readings, the textuality that Epiphanius promotes has not received much attention.16 By extrapolating from the faults he nds in Origens textuality, it is possible to gather together the components of Epiphaniuss own imagining of the religious world and the textuality that corresponds to it. For Epiphanius, reading towards the truth to which Scripture refers means reading on a horizontal axis, and the truth of Scripture is tightly bound to the realm of time, space, and materiality. The way in which Epi phanius attacks Origen argues for the correction of Origens ambivalent and probing attention to

15. My use of the term really real is drawn from the work of the pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty and refers to attempts to found epistemology in something larger or more substantial than the human mind, such as God, nature, or the forms. 16. Even within the last ten years the following are only a selection of monographs concerned with Origens reading: J. Christopher King, Origen on the Song of Songs as the Spirit of Scripture: The Bridegrooms Perfect Marriage-Song (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Megan William and Antony Grafton, Christianity and the Transformation of the Book (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2006); Mihai Vlad Niculescu, The Spell of the Logos: Origens Exegetical Pedagogy in the Contemporary Debate over Logocentrism (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2009); Blossom Stefaniw, Mind, Text and Commentary: Noetic Exegesis in Origen of Alexandria, Didymus the Blind, and Evagrius Ponticus, Early Christianity in the Context of Antiquity 6, eds. David Brakke, Anders-Christian Jacobsen, Jrg Ulrich (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2010); and Ronald E. Heine, Origen, Scholarship in the Service of the Church (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Scholarly discussions of Epiphanius are concentrated around issues of heresiology and orthodoxy, most notably in the work of J. Rebecca Lyman and Young Richard Kim: Lyman, The Making of a Heretic: The Life of Origen in Epiphanius Panarion 64, Studia Patristica 31 (1997): 445 51, Origen as Ascetic Theologian: Orthodoxy and Authority in the Fourth Century Church, Origeniana Septima (1999): 18794, and Ascetics and Bishops: Epiphanius on Orthodoxy, Orthodoxie, Christianisme, Histoire (2000); Kim, Reading the Panarion as Collective Biography: The Heresiarch as Unholy Man, Vigiliae Christianae 64:4 (2010): 382413, Bad Bishops Corrupt Good Emperors: Ecclesiastical Authority and the Rhetoric of Heresy in the Panarion of Epiphanius of Salamis, Studia Patristica 47 (2010): 16166, Epiphanius of Cyprus and the Geography of Heresy, in Violence in Late Antiquity: Perceptions and Practices, ed. H. A. Drake (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006), 23551. In addition, my discussion of polemic against Origen in the Panarion has proted throughout from the work of John Dechow, Dogma and Mysticism in Early Christianity: Epiphanius of Cyprus and the Legacy of Origen (Ann Arbor, MI: University Microlms, 1975).

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a noetic other world by replacing it with Epiphaniuss binary and incontestable categories of truth and falsehood, and with bodies and texts that are discrete self-identical entities. Epiphaniuss portrays his own textuality as reective of a natural incontestable norm anchored in plain physical reality and the word on the page. By casting Origens textuality as a result of his perversity, Epiphanius urges the rejection of notions of truth that are noetic and hence more complexly related to the physical world or the surface reading of Scripture than is conducive to totalizing efforts. Straight reading is straight because it argues from or towards physical facts, common sense, and reality.17 ORIGEN AND ORIGENISTS AS DEVIANTS Yes, straight society is based on the necessity of the different/other at every level . . . . But what is the different/other if not the dominated? ... To constitute a difference and to control it is an act of power since it is essentially a normative act. Monique Wittig, The Straight Mind, 12 Epiphanius campaigns on three fronts in his efforts to stigmatize Origenist textuality. The third, which denes the textuality he himself promotes, will be examined in the following section. The rst frontal assault is launched against Origen as a man. While ad hominem sexual slander is well within the bounds of the conventional in late-antique polemic, shaming Origen on these terms is signicant because it undermines the asceticism that was the basis for his authority as an exegete and for the respect given him by Christians of Epiphaniuss own day.18 The second line of attack is directed
17. In common parlance, one might speak of Epiphaniuss straight textuality discourse and hetero-normative discourse as analogous to each other simply because one can observe common structures and functions that stand in tidy parallel relations to one another. This would be a use of the term analogy in the literary sense: dog is to wolf, as cat is to tiger. It may be more accurate or more interesting to borrow a term from evolutionary biology and describe the two discursive complexes as homologous. A homology obtains where common features exist due to derivation from a common ancestor, whereas an analogy describes common features that developed independently of each other. Determining whether a totalizing drive can be seen as a common ancestor to both discourses is beyond the scope of this essay, as is the search for some other common ancestor. 18. Jennifer Wright Knust, Abandoned to Lust: Sexual Slander and Ancient Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 17 writes: Sexual slander, ancient and contemporary, is tied to power relations and to knowledge production. Assigning meaning to words, in this case words signaling virtue or vice, is a

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against Origens exegetical practice itself. Here special attention to the characterization of Origenist textuality as perverse, and to what sort of thing looks perverse to Epiphanius, is needed. In Panarion 63, Epiphanius constructs a suggestive interpretive framework for the sexualized biography of Origen soon to follow by recounting the perverse practices of a group known as Origenists. Epiphanius does not concern himself with the doctrinal errors of this group beyond associating them with some gnostic sects already discussed. Instead, he dwells at excessive length and in prurient detail on the degree to which these Origenists are shamefully behaved (63.1.12).19
They soil their bodies, minds and souls with unchastity. Some of them masquerade as monastics, and their woman companions as female monastics. But they are physically ensnared because they satisfy their appetite but, to put it politely, by the act of Onan the son of Judah. For as Onan satised his appetite with Tamar, but did not nish the act by planting his seed for the God-given purpose of procreation and did himself harm instead, thus, as he did the vile thing, so these people commit this infamy when they use their supposed female monastics. They strive, not for purity but for a hypocritical purity in name. But their effort is merely to make sure that the woman the seeming ascetic has seduced does not get pregnanteither so as not to cause childbearing, or to escape detection, since they want honor for their supposed celibacy. In any case, this is their act: others endeavor to get this same lthy satisfaction, not with women but by other means, and pollute themselves with their own hands. They too are imitators of the son of Judah, and soil the ground with their forbidden practices and drops of lthy uid. And they rub their emissions into the earth with their feet, so that their seed will not be snatched by unclean spirits for the impregnation of demons. (63.1.48)20

The charge against these men is that while they purport to be ascetics, they masturbate and also engage in intercourse with female ascetics. They practice coitus interruptus in order to avoid being exposed as fakes when their consorts become pregnant. Epiphanius takes three pages of printed text to explain this. He builds up the sense that these Origenists are obscene and perverse through repetitive and obsessive itemization of their misdemeanors. First pointing out that their sexual activity is incessant, Epi phanius underscores the gravity of their deviance.21 These Origenists are not just
ower-laden process, a site of conict and contention within which the dynamics of p power relations are negotiated. 19. Parenthetical references throughout and English translations are from The Panarion of Epiphanius of Salamis, trans. Frank Williams (Leiden: Brill, 1994), here 2:128. 20. Williams, 2:129. 21. Williams, 2:129.

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cheaters, having sex while claiming to be celibate, but they are deviants who have veered away from valid sexual behavior, which Epiphanius later refers to as Gods appointed method of conjugal intercourse (63.4.1).22 Epiphanius also provokes revulsion towards these Origenists in his readers by including vivid particulars, recounting that they pollute themselves with their own hands and soil the ground with their forbidden practices and drops of lthy uid. And they rub their emissions into the earth with their feet . . . (63.1.78).23 The account of the bodily perversion of the members of this group is immediately followed by an account of their textual deviance: the Origenists use various scriptures of the Old and New Testaments and certain apocrypha, especially the so-called Acts of Andrew and the others. Indeed, they themselves have often freely boasted of doing this (63.2.12).24 The two forms of deviance are then linked when Epiphanius says, I see no need for me to cite the texts which have been their downfall (63.3.2);25 a person who behaves perversely is apt to read perversely as well. In case the reader is not yet clear on what to think of this sect, Epiphanius closes by saying For anyone can see that their practice is not sensible, and that such knowledge is not from God; their mockery, and the disaster of their infamous practice, are diabolically inspired (63.4.7).26 The wrongness of these Origenists is so far from Gods sort of knowledge that it must be from the devil, and it is so absolute that its falsehood should be apparent to anyone. This representation of a group purportedly known as Origenists is the prelude to the biographical sketch of Origen. Its focus on deviant sexual practices encourages the reader to see Origen as a pervert and an object of shame before the anecdotes about his life have even begun. It also associates sexual deviance with shameful textuality, a connection that appears again in the account of Origens life and work. Adding to the shaming techniques he used in describing the Origenists, Epiphanius magnies Origens shamefulness by also repeatedly portraying him as the object of violation and domination.27 After a cursory survey of Origens parentage
22. Williams, 2:131. 23. Williams, 2:129. 24. Williams, 2:129. 25. Williams, 2:130. 26. Williams, 2:131. 27. Jennifer Wright Knust provides an overview of the importance of dominance/ submission and active/passive as organizing principles in ancient constructions of sexuality. Decent citizens were to be active and dominant. Free adult males who allowed themselves to be penetrated were deviants, and more so if the dominant partner was of lower status (Knust, Sexual Slander, 2930).

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and home city, Epiphanius begins his portrayal of Origen by listing incidents in which Origen was exposed to physical violence, introducing him as some one who was often dragged around the city, insulted, and subjected to excruciating tortures (64.1.3).28 Here Origen is already abjected as a victim of ridicule and brutality. Epiphanius then narrates two instances of persecution. In the rst case, Origen is forced to publicly support pagan worship in the Serapeum. His head is shaved and the persecutors make him stand on the steps and hand out palm branches to those who went up the stairs for the vile act of worshiping the idol. Origen is publicly exposed and dominated, coerced into serving pagans in the very act of wrongful worship. The second incident stays on the theme of public humiliation but is far more extreme, and Origen does not resist persecution as in the rst incident.
With diabolical malice the workers of iniquity thought of mistreating him sexually and making that his punishment, and they secured a black to abuse his body. But Origen could not bear even the thought of the devils work, and shouted that if these were his choices he would rather sacrice. Certainly, as is widely reported, he did not do this willingly either. But since he had agreed to do it at all, he heaped incense on his hands and dumped it on the altar re. (64.2.24)29

Assuming that any individual who can be instructed to violate someone must be a slave, the humiliation with which Origen is confronted is profound.30 Penetration by anyone at all was a stigmatized sexual act for an adult male citizen, but coerced penetration by a slave in public was the worst possible degradation. Worse yet, Origen caves immediately and elects to sacrice. Epiphaniuss evaluation of Origen, mediated through this story, is clear. Not only should Origen be ashamed of himself for failing to face up to martyrdom, but his abjection is further argued for in the nature of the incident itselfexposure to sexual assault. The anecdote recalls a story about a female student of Origens called Potimiaena. According to Eusebius (H.E. 6.5.15), Potimiaena was threatened with rape but did not cave under pressure. She deed her persecutors and gained the martyrs crown. In so doing, she successfully performed the

28. Williams, 2:132. Cf. Paul Kolbet, Torture and Origens Hermeneutics of NonViolence, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 76 (2008): 54572. 29. Williams, 2:132. 30. See David Brakke, Ethiopian Demons: Male Sexuality, the Black-Skinned Other, and the Monastic Self, Journal of the History of Sexuality 10 (2001): 50135, for the association of blackness with sexual violence.

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manly role of the courageous martyr. That is the correct pattern for martyrdom. Relative to that standard, Epiphaniuss Origen is a double failure, for he is outdone by a woman and he is undone by his own fear.31 Because of his shameful failure to withstand coercion, Origen was excluded from a martyrs status at that time by the confessors and martyrs who were his judges, and was expelled from the church (64.2.5).32 The community of respectable Christians must eject Origen from its midst, purging itself of a person who has failed the test of manliness. According to Epiphanius, since Origen could not bear the ridicule of those who reproached him, he left and elected to live in Palestine . . . (64.2.6).33 We next see Origen in a church in Jerusalem where he purportedly has retreated to escape the contempt of his fellow Christians in Alexandria.
On arriving at Jerusalem he was urged by the priesthood, as a man with such skill in exegesis and so highly educated, to speak in church. (They say that the presbyterate had been conferred upon him earlier, before his sacrice.) And so, as I said, since those who were then serving as priests in the holy church in Jerusalem urged him to speak in church and strongly insisted on it, he stood up and simply recited the verse from the forty-ninth Psalm, omitting all the intervening verses, But unto the ungodly saith God, Why dost thou preach my laws and takest my covenant in thy mouth? And he rolled the scroll up, gave it back, and sat down in oods of tears, and all wept with him. (64.2.78)34

Epiphanius makes sure the fall from his former respected status is clear: Origens learning and scholarly skill is negated by his failure in the face of torture. When invited to perform his accustomed role of preacher and teacher, Origen publicly afrms his shame. He quotes Psalm 49 in such a way as to identify himself as one who is ungodly and dare not speak about God. This scene closes with dramatic detail: And he rolled the

31. Virginia Burrus, Begotten Not Made: Conceiving Manhood in Late Antiquity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 2528. 32. Williams, 2:132. Virginia Burrus, Saving Shame, 32: If martyrdom is linked explicitly with masculinity as Castelli (among others) points out, masculine identity is itself rendered queerly malleable and unstable by its explicit linking with the suffering endurance of women. Origen is feminized through failed martyrdom, or, more accurately, stigmatized. He is worse than a woman because he fails to muster adequate courage and fortitude to face up to coercion and is therefore a failed man even on the complicatedly inverted and malleable notion of masculinity associated with martyrdom. 33. Williams, 2:13233. 34. Williams, 2:133.

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scroll up, gave it back, and sat down in oods of tears, and all wept with him (64.2.8).35 The same hand that we last saw heaping up incense to sacrice is now made to surrender the Scripture. Not only has Origen been dominated by the threat of physical violence, but in the very act of attempting to perform the masterful exegesis which was the basis for his status and reputation, the text itself now dominates him and exposes his shame before the congregation. As in the account of the Origenists that precedes the discussion of Origens life and works, the stories offered as evidence for Origens physical shame are interspersed with notes on the perversity of his way of reading. In fact, Epiphanius makes the two forms of deviance overlap. He introduces the topic of Origens textuality, referring to his learnedness and the production of the Hexapla, immediately undermining Origens scholarly achievements by asserting that his wealth of learning proved to be his great downfall. Precisely because of his goal of leaving no scripture uninterpreted, he . . . issued mortally dangerous exegeses (64.3.89).36 For those not yet catching on to the association of the shameful Origenists and the shame of Origen himself, Epiphanius reminds the reader of the onanizing Origenists immediately after introducing Origens textuality (64.3.10)37 and then catalogues deviant behaviors Origen is rumored to have practiced on his own body. These include variations on the castration theme and suggestions of self-mutilation, such as the report that Origen severed a nerve so that he would not be disturbed by sexual pleasure or inamed and aroused by carnal impulses. Another rumor that Epiphanius repeats is that Origen neutralized his sexual appetites using medication: he invented a drug to apply to his genitals and dry them up (64.3.11 12).38 The implication, if read along with the account of the perverse Origenists, is that Origen is also a cheater and a fake: while those named after him appear to be celibate only because they satisfy their sexual appetites through masturbation and coitus interruptus, Origen appears to be immune to sexual desire but only because he has taken the short-cut of using drugs or mutilating himself. This is not mere gossip; since asceticism, especially resistance to sexual desire and the (manly) ability to control and subdue sexual appetites, is the basis for authority and respect, Origens alleged

35. 36. 37. 38.

Williams, Williams, Williams, Williams,

2:133. 2:134. 2:134. 2:134.

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inability to do this by strength of will is an indictment that negates any esteem due him as an exegete.39 Another common feature attributed to Origen and the Origenists is a state of superlative badness arising from the perversity of their physical practices added to the perversity of their textual practices. Epiphanius directly links their obscenity to the obscenity of conclusions drawn from Origens way of reading: The sect which sprang from him was in Egypt rst . . . . But this is a dreadful sect and worse than all the ancient ones.... For though it does not train its disciples to perform the obscenity, it imposes an evil meaning, worse than the obscenity . . . (64.4.12).41 Epiphanius keeps up this association of bodily perversion and textual perversion throughout his polemic, saying that Origen is the wickedest of all before and after him, except for the shameless behavior in the sects (64.5.7).42 Here deviance from the natural innate meaning of the text is explicitly labeled as even worse than sexual deviance. Connecting obscene acts and evil meaning gives the text a body that must not be violated. WRONG READINGS, WRONG BODIES At this point, Epiphanius has completed his assault on the rst front (stigmatizing and shaming Origen as a man) and launched his campaign on the second front (stigmatizing Origenist textuality). As he shifts to discussing deviant readings and their results in earnest, he exploits the framework he has built in his account of the Origenists and in his biography of Origen. A lot of Epiphaniuss alarm over Origenist textuality revolves around the views of the uidity and transience of the human body that appear in Origens readings.43 Incompatible readings reect incompatible notions of human embodiment, especially how the quotidian body relates to the prelapsarian or post-resurrection body. In his polemic against Origens interpretation of the garments of skin provided to Adam and Eve by God in Genesis 3.21, Epiphanius confronts Origens incredulous rhetorical appeal: Is God a tanner? Afrming this

40. Although in the H.E. Origen is said to have castrated himself, Eusebius portrays this act as contributing to his authority. The act of self-mutilation attributed to Origen by Epiphanius is intended to contradict any claim to earned ascetic authority. See also the discussion in Virginia Burrus, Begotten Not Made, 2627. 41. Williams, 2:13435. 42. Williams, 2:136. 43. Epiphanius is referring, in his discussion, to Methodiuss representation of Origens views.

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is unthinkable to Origen, because on Origens imagining of how the divine and the human relate, the divine does not make outts for the human. To Epiphanius, the opposite sort of thing is obvious, and he asks with indignation whether it is easier for God to make heaven and earth from nothing, or to make garments of skin.43 That is, his God is engaged with material, he makes material things whenever he wants to, and it is therefore not at all anomalous for him to make garments of skin for Adam and Eve. The rejection of Origens reading turns on whether or not God can make physical objects, on whether or not passages of Scripture that suggest materiality are anomalous and therefore require a special interpretation. If God working upon material is not anomalous, there is no need for an allegorical reading of such a passage. Origens reading is at odds with the text rather than the text being at odds with what Origen can imagine of a perfectly intelligible God. Origens interpretation, according to the quotation from Methodius provided, is that the garments of skin are the bodies of Adam and Eve, provided for them only after the fall. This means that when human creatures existed without sin, they were also without bodies, which in turn suggests that the body is not an essential part of the human person. Epiphanius rejects the idea that Adam and Eve were only given bodies later, using arguments for straight reading that proceed from common sense and the appeal to ordinary language.
And it says earlier, Let us make man in our image and after our likeness. And he took dust of the earth, it says, and fashioned the man. But dust and esh are simply body . . . . The skin tunics were not in existence yetand neither was the falsehood you have created by allegorizing. Bone of my bones and esh of my esh, plainly means that Adam and Eve were bodies, and not bodiless. (65.911)44

The effect of Epiphaniuss reading of this passage in more pedestrian terms is not only to allow God concourse with the material, but also to smooth over any discrepancies between the Edenic body and the bodies of the present age. Human beings are embodied, and the way they are embodied now is the way they always have been and always will be embodied. This drive for cogency and continuity in human embodiment appears most vigorously in Epiphaniuss evaluation of Origens thoughts on the resurrection. Origen uses metaphors for the body as a seed or a garment,
43. Epiphanius, Ancoratus 62 in Epiphanius: Ancoratus und Panarion-1. Ancoratus und Panarion haer. 133, ed. Karl Holl, 3 vols. (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1915), vol. 1. 44. Williams, 2:19293.

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things that are prone to being transformed or discarded.45 As in the commentary on Psalm 1, Origen proceeds from a concept of the body not as a discrete and constant entity but as a provisional state of affairs that will be resolved later when an eternal, and hence non-physical, state is attained.46 This goes against the grain for Epiphanius, to whom any sort of ux is rebarbative. Origen also has technical concerns about how the resurrection of the body could be executed. It is unclear which physical version of a person, from youth, maturity, or old age, would be resurrected if there were a resurrection of our earthly bodies. Origen posits a fundamental form for the body, which is resurrected and which allows for the identity of persons regardless of whether they were intact at the time of death or not. His impatience with any complicated talk of forms suggests that his real concern is not with maintaining the identity of individuals, but with establishing that a truly physical resurrection takes place.47 Epiphanius claims that Origen wrongly suggests that only souls are proper to human being and that thus only souls will be resurrected. Instead, according to Epiphanius, the human body is a necessary facet of personhood and will also be raised on the last day.
For if the body does not rise, the soul will have no inheritance either. The partnership of the body and the soul is one and the same, and they have one work. But faithful men exhaust themselves in body and soul in their hope of the inheritance after resurrectionand you say there will be none! . . . How can we speak of a souls rising when it doesnt fall and isnt buried? It is plain from the name that the resurrection of the body, which has fallen and been buried, is proclaimed, everywhere and in every scripture, but the sons of the truth. But if the body doesnt rise, the resurrection proclaimed by all the scriptures isnt possible. For there is no resurrection of souls, which have not fallen; but there is a resurrection of bodies, which have been buried. And even if a portion of the body is raised while a portion is laid to rest, how can there be any such portion? There cannot be parts of the body which are raised, and parts which are laid to rest and left behind. (63.913)48

45. Caroline Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 2001336 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 63. 46. Bynum, Resurrection, 64. 47. Bynum, Resurrection, 68: Identity, it appears, was not nally the question, for that question Origen could answer. The question was physicality: how will every particle of our bodies be saved? 48. Williams, 2:18990.

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Origenist textuality is problematic for Epiphanius because of its tendency to obscure or negate the religious signicance of the human body: Epi phanius wants real bodies to be resurrected, not just souls,49 and he musters Bible stories of people being raised from the deadwith their bodiesto substantiate this claim. His argument in the above passage hinges on what he proposes as a commonsensical fact: only things that have been buried can be raised again, the body has been buried, hence the body is raised again. Epiphanius also connects the physical resurrection to the investment in the body made by ascetics and by lay Christians practicing renunciationthe work they have done on the body should pay off in a bodily resurrection. Epiphanius is also resistant to complication: either theres a body or there isnt, either it is raised or it isnt. Just as he will not tolerate any separation of the body and the soul, he has no patience with any notion of extra bodily forms or extra types of bodies.
Anyone with a sound mind can see that, because there is a spiritual body and an ensouled body, the spiritual body is not one thing and the ensouled body something else; the ensouled and the spiritual body are the same. (63.14)50

Where Origen holds that river is not a bad name for the body, Epiphanius speaks of rivers in a physical and geographical senseyou can go to the rivers on either side of Eden and drink from them. His reality is in this world. In the same way, the human body is, within straight reading, congealed into a consistent, self-identical, and cohesive entity that remains the same before the fall, in this world, and after the resurrection. On Epiphaniuss reading, a river is a river and a body is a body. For Epiphanius, truth must be anchored to this world, and readings that alienate truth from the physical world are perverse and dangerous. Operating on the basis of this way of imagining how truth, the world, and bodies relate, Epiphanius treats it as a given that allegorical interpretation is abnormal and then casts Origen as a hermeneutical vandal who allegorizes everything he gets his hands on: he interprets whatever he can allegoricallyParadise, its waters, the waters above the heavens, the water under the earth. He never stops saying these ridiculous things and others like them (64.4.11).51 Epiphanius is very concerned to tie the referent of Scripture to the physical world, claiming that if one once surrenders the physical reality of the rivers bordering on the Garden of Eden, the entire story of Adam and Eve must be given up as a fabrication, and has no real49. Epiphanius, Ancoratus 86 (Holl, Epiphanius, vol. 1). 50. Williams, 2:190. 51. Williams, 2:136.

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ity whatsoever.52 For Origen, there is no point in trying to anchor truth to the body or the physical world, because physicality is always in ux and subject to decay, in the realm of becoming, and thus unt as a medium of truth. Truth is in the realm of the eternal and immaterial. Both the rejection of Origenist textuality and Epiphaniuss assertion of what constitutes legitimate textuality take place in an ideological mode. Epiphanius casts Origenist textuality as a threat because it makes the wrong sort of meaning. It wrongly represents the way the world is, and that wrongness is given moral weight. Rather than concluding that Epi phanius is simply a lazy or inept dialectician or writing off his polemic as mere cussedness, it is more to the point to conclude that scholarly refutation of exegetical technique is not the purpose of his endeavor at all. Instead, it is important to Epiphanius to establish that Origens way of reading, and the imagining of how texts, bodies, and truth relate which that reading entails, is intolerable. According to Epiphanius, Origen is a gender deviant, as most insistently presented in Epiphaniuss polemical biography of Origen. But, more curiously, Origen is also represented as a textual deviant, a reader who is perverting the text, allowing it to remain ambiguous, and reading towards the intelligible and immaterial when a normal reader uses common sense and reads towards plain facts.53 A good reader, in other words, is a straight reader, and reads a straight text. THE CONDITIONS OF STRAIGHTNESS With its ineluctability as knowledge, as an obvious principle, as a given prior to any science, the straight mind develops a totalizing interpretation of history, social reality, culture, language, and all the subjective phenomena at the same time. I can only underline the oppressive character that the straight mind is clothed in its tendency to immediately universalize its production of concepts into general laws which claim to hold true for all societies, all epochs, all individuals. Monique Wittig, The Straight Mind, 11 Epiphaniuss textuality purports to represent the plain truth of the text, just as straightness purports to be an innocent manifestation of the truth of the body. Straight reading is built on the occlusion of contingency, arguments
52. Epiphanius, Ancoratus 58.68 (Holl, Epiphanius, vol. 1); Epiphanius, Panarion 64.4.11 (Williams, Panarion, 136). 53. The case of Celsus, as represented in Origens Contra Celsum, indicates that it is perfectly possible to nd fault with allegorical readings without portraying their authors as perverts.

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from common sense, nature, and the self-identity and reality of the body, and a focus on the material and physical as an incontestable location for truth. For Epiphanius, Scripture has a natural, normal, uncontrived meaning that refers to the material world and that manifests itself through embodiment in ordinary language. Origen is cast as a deviant within this regime because he makes a kind of meaning that clashes with the sort of meaning Epiphanius considers to inhere in the text. Origen is deviant because he locates the referent of Scripture in an immaterial, intellective realm. He is also a threat to the straightness of straight reading because he allows for ux and ambiguity both in the text and in human bodies. Epiphanius advocates textuality which refers Scripture to physical reality, and in which the human body (where the body is the referent of Scripture) remains intact and discrete. In straight reading, truth is univocal and can be located and identied within time and space, so that neither the text nor its bodily referents admit of ambivalence. Despite all its efforts to occlude its own contingency, Epiphaniuss straight reading can be partially explained in terms of the very different historical circumstances in which Epiphanius found himself compared to the philosophically informed and speculative Christianity of the early third century, to which Origen belonged. The qualities of the textuality that Epiphanius puts forward as normal and normative result in part from Epiphaniuss location in time relative to major notional and discursive changes within Christian culture. His efforts at connecting truth to the material world are part of a shift away from the philosophical and intellectualist frame of reference in which Origen worked, in which religious truth was located in the intelligible realm. More precisely, Epiphaniuss textuality, as articulated in his polemic against Origen, ts in with what Patricia Cox Miller has most recently articulated as a material turn, incipient in the Christianity of Epiphaniuss age.54 This material turn entailed a new assessment of the potential for the physical world to bear religious signicance and was enabled by Christians new security in the here and now within a Christian empire. Epiphaniuss drive to anchor religious truth in this world could be satised within this later phase of Christian history as it could not in Origens day, when the material world was something from which one was to emancipate oneself.
54. Patricia Cox Miller, The Corporeal Imagination: Signifying the Holy in Late Ancient Christianity (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 34. Here Miller is building on the work of Susan Ashbrook Harvey in Scenting Salvation: Ancient Christianity and the Olfactory Imagination (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006).

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Epiphaniuss historical position also constrains the way he can argue against Origenist textuality. Epiphanius can no longer use the literal/allegorical, eshly/spiritual divide as a viable polemical tool because of how these terms had already been deployed in earlier hermeneutic debates.55 In the late fourth century, Epiphanius is heir to arguments about the interpretation of Scripture within which the literal/allegorical dichotomy had already negatively weighted the idea of literalism as a standard for correct interpretation as something unspiritual, carnal, and part of the regrettably mistaken heritage of Judaism. In taking up a stance against Origenist textuality, overtly and explicitly proposing literalism as the remedy would have positioned Epiphanius on the carnal or eshly side of an opposition which Origen himself had helped to set up. Origen had also identied literal readings, even within the legitimate Christian community, as characteristic of the simpler brethren.56 So Epiphanius can hardly denote his readings as literal and also portray them as normative and spiritually authoritative. By claiming instead that his textuality reects what is normal and decent and sane, Epiphanius avoids falling into either of these traps. But the need for what he represents as natural and real to be portrayed in that specic way is a result of his historical place and thus reveals the very contingency such claims are designed to conceal. One function of making the referent of Scripture concrete and of resisting notions of the body as transient is to provide for a different and greater mode of religious signicance for the human body. Epiphanius wants religious work done on the body to pay off on the body. Those who have engaged in ascetic labors and disciplined their bodies have bodies that deserve a reward, just as those bodies that have been used for dissipation and sin should be punished accordingly.57 Here we should note that for Epiphanius, asceticism in this world stays in this world, but is rewarded at the resurrection. For Origen, asceticism allows for assimilation with the noetic and divine realm and is hence both more worthwhile and more complexly integrated with the practice of the noetic exegesis of Scripture.58

55. Susanna L. Drake, Sexing the Jew: Early Christian Constructions of Jewishness (Durham, NC: Duke University, 2008) and Daniel Boyarin, Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993). 56. Epiphanius is aware of this association because he includes Methodiuss quotation of Origens labeling of literal readings as typical of the simpler brethren (15.5). 57. Epiphanius, Panarion 64 (Holl, Epiphanius, vol. 2). 58. Origens asceticism and consequent assimilation to the divine as grounds for his exegetical skill is, for example, at the base of the account of Origen as a teacher given by Gregory Thaumaturgus in his Address of Thanksgiving to Origen.

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For Epiphanius, even ascetic bodies are clearly located amidst the human and the material, and so is Scripture. Looking at the straightness of Epiphaniuss reading from a slightly more empathetic stance, it is striking that just as much as he is disgusted by the abstraction and complexity of Origenist textuality, he feels pleasure and satisfaction when textuality settles religious truth into the material world.59 In the Ancoratus, Epiphaniuss reaction to Origens caveats about the physicality of Adam in paradise is a giant excursus covering geography, the body, the lineage of Christ back to Adam, and the lineage of the emperor back to Augustus. Epiphanius indulges in a ten-chapter binge of time, space, ancestry, and materiality. Origens textuality is corrected by putting the meaning of the text in its place, in this place, in the world, attached to individuals and specic rivers and mountains. This is not merely literal reading, but straight reading, reading which insists on the religious signicance of physicality, in the human body, in geography, and throughout history. Straight reading fullls a desire for a sort of truth that can be grasped and seen and travelled to, which can be engaged with physically and which is securely sunk into the body and the world. CONCLUSIONS Both sexuality and interpretation are works of the imagination. The work of ideology, as a claim to dene the reality and rightness of a certain world, is to regulate and constrain where the imagination may go. Because Epiphaniuss polemic against Origen involves sexuality, interpretation, and ideology, it is far more, and far more complex, than a methodological debate over what constitutes legitimate exegetical technique. The issue at hand is not the validity of literal or allegorical exegetical methods, but the nature and location of truth and the proper means of access to it given the relations that obtain between texts, bodies, and the physical world. The textuality that Epiphanius proposes portrays itself as normal and natural, innocently reecting the inherent meaning of the text. Epiphanius works to put Origen in his place, a place of illegitimacy and abnormality, but he also puts Scripture in its place, attaching it to his notion of reality which is not noetic, as in Origen, but material, total, and historical. Epiphaniuss mania for the material is a bulwark against contingency: it denies any possibility that everything could also be otherwise.

59. I thank Catherine Chin for pointing me in this direction.

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Nature, history, and reality are the primary anchors of ideology.60 What marks out straight reading in Epiphanius is his use of materializing and physicalizing readings, as in his retrieval of the story of creation from an intelligible other world and his placement of Eden in this world, with identiable rivers and actual trees.61 The anchoring medium of materiality that Epiphanius uses is rather unique, since it goes beyond deploying nature and reality as abstract notions of the order of things. Physicalizing truth places it in the here and now, making it immediate, obvious, and incontrovertible like the body.62 Blossom Stefaniw is Junior-Professor for Ethics in Antiquity and Christianity at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz

60. Terry Eagleton, Ideology: an Introduction (London: Verso, 1991), 45: Ideologies are often thought . . . to be unifying, action-oriented, rationalizing, legitimating, universalizing and naturalizing. 61. An aversion to Origens tendency to read towards the abstract and noetic as a driving force behind Epiphaniuss polemic is discussed also in Dechow, Dogma and Mysticism, 12931. 62. Thanks are due to the other authors in this volume for their patience and advice in the long process of developing this project, and also to Elizabeth Clark, Jamie Wood, and Young Kim for reading egregious earlier versions.