Afterlives of the Saints

by Colin Dickey

  those of his acquaintance who came to him often spent days and nights outside. They heard what sounded like clamoring mobs inside making noises, emitting pitiful sounds, and crying out, "Get away from what is ours! What do you have to do with the desert? You cannot endure our treachery!" At first those who were outside thought certain men were doing battle with him, and that these had gained entry by ladders, but when they stooped to peek through a hole, they saw no one, and they realized then that the adversaries were demons. They were frightened and they called Anthony, and he heard them, but he disregarded the demons. And coming close to the door, he urged the men to be on their way and not to fear.

  What to make of Anthony's torments from a contemporary perspective? Dubious of demonic possession, a modern etiology might assume him to be the sufferer of ergotism, a fungal poisoning characterized by hallucinations, or even epilepsy, which might account for his convulsing, raving body. Indeed, Anthony would eventually become the patron saint of both epilepsy and ergotism. He is the patron saint, one could say, of those whose bodies are given over to some other force— be it of godly, demonic, or biological origin.

  The first half of the narrative is taken up by the demons who assail Anthony. But Athanasius wanted to make sure it was clear that our monk was beset by other temptations in the form of heretical misinterpretations of Christ's message. "In things having to do with belief, he was truly wonderful and orthodox," we are told. "Perceiving their wickedness and apostasy from the outset, he never held communion with the Meletian schismatics. And neither toward the Manicheans nor toward any other heretics did he profess friendship, except to the extent of urging the change to right belief, for he held and taught that friendship and association with them led to injury and destruction of the soul."

  Athanasius is quite clear on this— Jesus may have dined with prostitutes and moneylenders, but associating with heretics is surely a way to one's damnation. Pointedly, Anthony's final words in Athanasius's narrative are warnings about encroaching, alternative interpretations of the Gospels:

  He called to those who were with him . . . and said to them, "I am going the way of the fathers, as it is written, for I see myself being summoned by the Lord. . . . You know the treacherous demons— you know how savage they are, even though weakened in strength. Therefore, do not fear them, but rather draw inspiration from Christ always, and trust him. And let there be no fellowship between you and the schismatics, and certainly none with the heretical Arians. For you know how I too have shunned them because of their Christ-battling and heterodox teaching."

  This is how Anthony supposedly leaves the world, railing against heretics whom Athanasius saw as dangerous. This is, after all, only the third century, and the Catholic Church has not yet crystallized into a single voice of authority. Dozens of differing factions are warring over the true meaning of Christ and his words, so it's not surprising that Athanasius employs Anthony to articulate the single, true path. This parallel structure, in which demons are replaced with heretics, is hardly coincidental; the two halves of the work reflect each other, painting a portrait of a righteous man beset on all sides by temptations. Anthony is thus the one who is inundated, and inundated by multitudes and multiplicity. His hallmark is the excess of temptations, a plurality without limit that threatens the single, solitary path.

  Nor will demons and heretics be the only two categories of troubles to beset Anthony in the years to come. Again and again, we find him fighting off hordes and groups of different kinds as his story is recycled in different epochs. In fact, we might go so far as to suggest that Anthony's temptation is itself multiplicity: What threatens him is a deviation from cultural unity to multiculturalism, from the orthodox to the heterodox. Alone in the desert of your own mind, cut off from family and community— that's when you are the most vulnerable to wild deviations and divergences, to the manifold voices of temptation.

  In the year 857, annals from Western Germany describe how "a Great Plague of swollen blisters consumed the people by a loathsome rot, so that their limbs were loosened and fell off before death." This is the first recorded instance of ergotism, an alkaloid poisoning caused by fungal infections in rye. In addition to the gangrenous symptoms, ergotism can cause vomiting and diarrhea as well as central nervous disorders, leading to spasms and convulsions. It can also cause hallucinations: In the early 1930s, the primary alkaloid ergotamine was synthesized and given the name lysergic acid, which Albert Hofmann would shortly use as the basis of LSD. Prior to the identification of this fungus, however, ergotism was commonly interpreted as demonic possession or bewitchment— recent scholars have gone so far as to argue that the Salem witch trials may have been spurred by an outbreak of ergot poisoning.

  In 1095, the son of the French nobleman Gaston of Valloire was afflicted with this horrible condition until he was miraculously cured by the remains of Anthony at the Benedictine priory of Saint-Antoine l'Abbaye. Whether or not these were actually the remains of the saint is to be debated; the nearby Saint-Julien in Arles also claimed to have a complete set of the saint's relics, as if the hermit's body itself was miraculously multiplying. But the bones at Saint-Antoine were good enough for Gaston, who was so impressed by his son's recovery that he founded the Hospital Order of Saint Anthony, a congregation of monks that was devoted to curing ergotism, plague, and other skin diseases. It was in this manner that ergotism came to be known as " Saint Anthony's fire." It is also how Anthony became associated with epilepsy, whose symptoms often mirrored ergotism and which was also taken to be the result of demonic possession. Since pig fat was often spread on these wounds to soothe the irritation, Anthony was often depicted with pigs in the background, and his new role as the healer of skin diseases was assured.

  As the Antonine Order spread and its influence grew, the popularity of Anthony the Great grew throughout Europe. The next major representation of Anthony's temptation came with the publication of The Golden Legend, a collection of narratives about the saints, in the mid– thirteenth century. Here again, the multitude of demons was stressed, though the Legend's take differs slightly; Now the beasts are described not by name but by their anatomical characteristics: "And anon they came in form of divers beasts wild and savage, of whom that one howled, another siffled, and another cried, and another brayed and assailed St. Anthony, that one with the horns, the others with their teeth, and the others with their paws and ongles, and disturned, and all to-rent his body that he supposed well to die."

  This shift seems slight on a descriptive level, but it was enough to usher in a dramatic change in the representations of Anthony and his troubles. In the following years he became a popular pictorial subject, and as painters in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries turned to Anthony more and more as a subject, new figures begin to appear. In the late fifteenth century, Martin Schongauer depicted him as lifted into the air by these demons, and while the horns, teeth, paws, and ongles are all there, we are far from the identifiable list of animals that Athanasius listed.

  Schongauer's image was copied by a twelve-year-old Italian named Michelangelo in what would be his first painting, but it was in northern Europe countries that images of Anthony and his temptation reached their fullest expression. The most well known of these is the triptych by Hieronymous Bosch, painted in about

  1505. Whereas earlier Roman and Byzantine images of Anthony had placed him squarely as the focus of the image, staring head-on, benevolent and full of wisdom, Bosch's Anthony is lost in the sea of fantastic creatures and demons that afflict him. In the left panel he is held aloft by the bat-like creatures tormenting him. He appears again in the foreground, his body broken and attended to by followers who nearly obscure him altogether. He has regained his composure in the center and right panels, though his half-turned posture in both makes exegesis difficult. In the right panel, he turns away from Lust as she emerges from a tree, but does his turning result from his steadfast resolve, or is he more tempted by the bizarre and sinful figures before him on the table? I
n the center panel, he gestures toward the tiny crucifix in the middle of the painting, but is his look meant to exhort us to follow his example, or is he giving in to the demons all about him?

  Roughly five years later, Matthias Grünewald would revisit this scene with his altarpiece for Isenheim. Grünewald's masterpiece is well known for his horrifying image of Jesus Christ afflicted with sores— an image that has become a sort of shorthand in art history surveys for, to quote one textbook, "symbolic expression" through vivid "gesture and color." But if Grünewald's Christ is horribly wracked by skin disease, it is because Isenheim was a monastery for Antonine monks, and Christ is here suffering from Saint Anthony's fire. Indeed, it is the desert ascetic, not Christ, who is the true heart of the altarpiece. He appears to the right, his staff bearing the symbol of his order, flanking Christ along with Sebastian, patron of plagues. When the altar's first set of wings are opened, more peaceful scenes of Christ's annunciation are depicted, but there is yet another set of wings, and when the altarpiece is fully opened, the innermost images are of Anthony— on the left meeting with Paul the Hermit and on the right undergoing his temptation. As in Bosch's triptych, Anthony is nearly overwhelmed by the demons attacking him, but his expression is far from that of the placid, contemplative saint who easily resists these torments in Bosch's work. As the German writer W. G. Sebald described the scene,

  To him, the painter, this is creation,

  image of our insane presence

  on the surface of the earth,

  the regeneration proceeding

  in downward orbits

  whose parasitical shapes

  intertwine, and, growing into

  and out of one another, surge

  as a demonic swarm

  into the hermit's quietude.

  In this fashion Grünewald,

  silently wielding his paintbrush

  rendered the scream, the wailing, the gurgling

  and the shrieking of a pathological spectacle

  to which he and his art, as he must have known,

  themselves belong.

  Why did Anthony's torments become such a fruitful ground for painting during this time? Why are we so drawn to monsters and grotesques? The importance and significance of this subject and its emergence in the Renaissance are best explained by Michel Foucault, who uses the temptation paintings as points of departure in his history of madness. They appear, he argues, precisely at the point at which madness is introduced into the Western world, and they are emblematic of this shift. Previously the world of nature was clearly and inextricably linked with a stable system of symbols: The nightingale stood for melancholy, the ermine for purity, and so on. At least since the Book of Genesis, when Adam names the animals brought to him by God, the natural world had been seen as a clear and readable text by God— all creatures large and small belonged to a hierarchy of symbolic meaning, and this symbolic structure had remained stable for centuries.

  But with the sixteenth century, the idea of madness first appears and begins to break all this apart. No longer does reflecting on the natural world allow for wisdom and transcendence; now that natural world is an impenetrable cipher. This comes about not from a loss of meaning but from an overload of meaning. "Things themselves," Foucault writes, "become so burdened with attributes, signs, allusions that they finally lose their own form. Meaning is no longer read in an immediate perception, the figure no longer speaks for itself; between the knowledge that animates it and the form into which it is transposed, a gap widens."

  The image of Christ, for example, is no longer the simple, unalterable picture of triumph over suffering since it is now burdened and overburdened with so many kinds of suffering. Now he is not just crucified— he suffers from ergotism, or is it plague, or epilepsy? That pig by Anthony's side— does it indicate the pig fat used to cure skin diseases, or has Anthony become the patron saint of swineherds? How has our ascetic hermit, who wanted only to be left alone, become the patron saint of basket-makers and brush-makers, of gravediggers and lost items, of butchers and domestic animals? He is assailed by yet another multitude, this time one of patronages. But he is not alone; in such a plethora of attachments, iconography veers toward the meaningless, as does the whole world of symbols that once were self-evident, each giving way to a cacophony of possibilities.

  It is for this reason that the temptation paintings, with their wild, uncontrolled bestiaries, come to have such importance. It is the very nature of Anthony's story that tells the story of madness. Unlike those saints who are iconically associated with one distinct object— Sebastian with his arrows, Lawrence and his gridiron— Anthony is associated with plethora itself, with a multitude that can take any shape. Thus, it is his story that becomes paramount, and the beasts that surround him, with their increasing strangeness, give expression to a world in flux— our world.

  In the early Renaissance, Foucault continues, "the beasts were let loose, and they made their escape from the world of legend or moral instruction and took on a fantastical life of their own." The Renaissance was an age of hybrid monsters: butterflies with the heads of cats, owls with lobster claws, monstrous figures that defy any explanation. The creatures that torment Anthony are only the most visible expression of this breakdown— made up of recognizable elements, bits of animals whose individual meanings might be known, these hybrid creatures nonetheless stubbornly resist interpretation as the forms collide into a cacophony.

  If the beasts that torment Anthony seem haphazard, partial, out of alignment, it is because they no longer represent stable symbolic forms but instead offer only the fragments of an un knowable nature. More so than ever, we understand only that we don't understand, that the world exceeds our grasp. For Foucault, this is where madness takes hold in the Western imagination, between the incomprehensible image and the multiple, contradictory meanings retreating behind it. Perhaps madness can bridge this gap — the madman just might understand the meaning of these creatures, but that is an esoteric, terrible knowledge that cannot be put into words.

  "Madness also exerts a fascination because it is knowledge," Foucault writes. " These strange forms belong from the outset to the great secret, and Saint Anthony is tempted by them because he has fallen prey not to the violence of desire but rather to the far more insidious vice of curiosity." In these paintings, we see Anthony still beset by a multitude, but not of heretical sects; the multitude here consists of fragments of once symbolic forms, unmoored from that symbolism and set loose to wander. Or, looked at another way, the multitude consists of all those endless and hermetic forms of knowledge that lie beyond the grasp of the human mind. And if the temptation is now that much more tempting, if the Anthony depicted by Bosch and by Grünewald seems closer to giving in than Athanasius ever imagined, it is because the visual world itself has given into temptation— it can no longer maintain a single, orthodox meaning.

  In the beginning was the Word, the Gospel of John tells us, and the Word was with God. And for a time, the Word held dominion over the visual. But art is itself now excess and madness; it is the multitudes of the visual sign freed from the Logos. Anthony is tempted by this, too — the multiplication of the visual image that inundates the univocal Word of God. This estrangement between word and image is permanent; we will never heal this rift, and the visual image with its excess of meaning will henceforth threaten that writer who seeks the single and just word that names the world. Images confront the writer as the demons confront Anthony, tempting him into madness.

  By the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, our approach to madness had undergone a shift. The mad were locked up in asylums along with the unemployed, prostitutes, blasphemers, and other misfits— those, in other words, who had failed to become productive members of society. As market capitalism developed in the Western world, the most dangerous element was those people who could not be assimilated into its new economies— the madman was not so much ill as he was useless. Worse, his uselessness was potentially contagious, and so it
had to be contained.

  More and more, a suspicious eye was turned toward those pursuits that encourage this uselessness, idles and pleasures that led impressionable women and children away from their societal duties and into time-wasting and fantasy. But what most needed to be prevented was precisely the kind of solitary introspection of someone like Anthony. The stories of Jesus and the rich man and of men like Anthony who could take it seriously and walk away from commerce were no longer welcome in the burgeoning capitalist landscape. In the new economy, withdrawal was punished; in the new economy, everybody pays, and everybody plays.

  Of course, one of the chief vices in this regard is the novel, particularly the realist novel. There is nothing physical about a novel— it consists of no raw material, no labor, no surplus that can be touched or resold, no exchange. All the work that is done, all that is produced, is in the mind of the reader— a closed loop that takes you out of the world of production and into the dangerous desert of solitary imaginings. In the words of an anonymous article from 1768, "The existence of so many authors has produced a host of readers, and continued reading generates every nervous complaint; perhaps of all the causes that have harmed women's health, the principle one has been the infinite multiplication of novels in the last hundred years. . . . A girl who at ten reads instead of running will, at twenty, be a woman with the vapors and not a good nurse." Impressionable readers could not be trusted to tell truth from fiction, reality from novel.