Rhetoric and Role-playing

Across the classical and late antique worlds, conceptualizing mimesis implicitly or explicitly shapes specific forms of selfhood, community, cosmology, and more. Creation stories linked heaven and earth through a series of archetypes and images.^{Footnote 13} Art could be mimetic—with greater or lesser success.^{Footnote 14} And most importantly for this article, mimesis was central to Roman education and social formation. Maturation involved learning the key roles of Roman society intimately enough that they populated the world in which the student participated.^{Footnote 15} Rhetorical education, for example, required students to assume characters from classical literature as well as from many segments of Roman society.^{Footnote 16} Cicero’s “first counsel [primum in praeceptis]” for teachers of rhetoric was to “show the student whom to copy, and to copy in such a way as to strive with all possible care to attain the most excellent qualities of his model.”^{Footnote 17} To learn to speak in the voice of Achilles, for example, required students to know classical literature and allowed them to practice being brave adults. It was education through role-playing.

Students excelled by gathering multiple examples and slowly allowing themselves to congeal into a model with which to identify and imitate. Quintilian writes that “since it is scarcely given to man to produce a complete reproduction of a chosen author, let us keep the excellences of a number of authors before our eyes.”^{Footnote 18} None of the examples on their own were sufficient, as there would always be some distance between imitated and imitator, but by keeping a whole range of exempla before the eyes, the student was able to maintain focus on progress in eloquence. What was crucial, therefore, was that students learned how to imitate the best of the past, how to relate to exempla in order to perform virtuously in the present.

Rhetorical exercises trained students in how to become the characters they played as well as how to acquire the skills and values of the elite—how to be people who knew literature, how to speak for those they play-acted, and how to repeat in the present the ideals told in history.^{Footnote 19} Tim Whitmarsh has argued that “both literary style and life-style alike are affected by the didactic processes of mimēsis, which are thus focused not narrowly upon linguistic etiquette, but on the whole person…. Both life and literature should be conducted as a mode of eclectic mimēsis of the paradigms of the past.”^{Footnote 20} In order to “conduct” life and literature, students had to learn how to relate to them differently so that they harmonized into an eloquent subject. Some characters, such as a poor widow, were to be empathized with and aided; to speak in their voice was to speak for them. Others, such as Patroclus, demanded a creative distillation and repetition; to speak in their voice was to participate in the ongoing presence of the virtue they displayed.

Learning to play a role (ēthopoiia), therefore, was not to “become” a character in any lasting or straightforward way. In his Defense of the Mimes, for example, Choricius of Gaza insists that a male actor who plays the part of a female character will not be “feminized.”^{Footnote 21} This education involved learning about the objects of imitation, but, just as crucially, it created subjects who knew how to imitate. Moving between the characters—learning how to put them on and take them off—was just as important as accurate impressions.

The characters imitated in any particular rhetorical exercise or declamation, moreover, were always subordinate to a larger mimetic relationship, imitation of the teacher. Raffaella Cribiore writes, “affection for his teacher (erōs) made a student’s work a product of imitation.”^{Footnote 22} Eros and mimesis are inextricably linked. The mechanics of those desiring mimetic relationships were the subject of much pedagogical theory and debate, but what we have seen thus far is that mimesis structured a process of gradual maturation as students learned how to relate to their archetypes.

One notable difference between the late antique Christians who will be examined in this paper and the rhetorical schools (in which many Christians trained) is that, in these schools, learning to imitate was, at least in theory, a masterable task. Successful imitation allowed students to capture or possess something of these characters so that they could be most fully themselves. Libanius, for example, instructs students to “install Demosthenes in their souls.”^{Footnote 23} And the assumption was rarely that his students would remain in school for their entire lives. Often a few years of training was sufficient.^{Footnote 24} In the Christian texts examined below there is a similar emphasis on imitation as central to moral formation, but imitation is an activity or mode of relationship that one never concludes. None of these Christians will achieve imitation of Paul in the sense that he becomes so fully internalized that he is completely absorbed, like a drop of water in the ocean; the relationship into which they enter includes a felt distance and is meant to last a lifetime.^{Footnote 25}

Imitation’s capacity both to structure Christian practice and to shape Christian thought also made it, made mimesis—especially when coupled with a figure as central to Christian self-understanding as Paul—a contested and pliable category. We can glimpse the range of possibilities of how to imitate Paul in the diverse conceptions of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, John Chrysostom, and Gregory of Nyssa. Each of these writers is typical of late antique interest in Paul. Each of these authors assumes that a mimetic relationship with Paul is always also one with Christ. Each assumes that the nature of God is unknowable and that a gap remains between creator and creation even in perfect mimesis.^{Footnote 26} And each sees mimetic relationships as erotic relationships.^{Footnote 27} Imitation is what desire looks like; desire leads to imitation, and imitation intensifies desire. But these commonalities make their different styles and approaches to imitation even more illustrative. Mimesis, I argue, compresses and carries with it a great diversity; what on the surface can appear to be a simple process of becoming like another person in fact coordinates complicated relationships that are underpinned by and implicate many contested aspects of late antique Christian life, including theology, anthropology, and moral and spiritual formation. Far from considering mimetic relationships with the saints as something separate and apart from theological reflection, for each of these theologians, mimesis was a contested category that fashioned the most important relationships between heaven and earth, and so demanded sustained reflection.

Rather than making a causal claim about influence, this paper moves in reverse chronological order, starting with Dionysius and working back to Gregory. This order of analysis is simply heuristic. It best allows us to compare and contrast these different approaches to mimetic relationships: ekstasis (Dionysius the Areopagite), ekphrastic (John Chrysostom), and epektatic (Gregory of Nyssa). These are not the only three models of mimesis in late antiquity, but, in seeing how they converge and differ, I hope to encourage more nuanced analysis around mimetic relationships.

Dionysius: Mimetic Ekstasis

Arguably the Christian mystical tradition’s germinal thinker is a sixth-century author writing under the name of a follower of Paul. This pseudonymous author of the Corpus Dionysiacum, whom I will refer to as Dionysius,^{Footnote 28} also coins the word “hierarchy.” To imitate Paul required a “sacred ordering” of heaven and the church, and each of these “orders” has the goal of different “deifying unions,” different blocs where creatures can become “co-workers with God” (θεοῦ συνεργοί). When creatures successfully slot themselves into these ordered spaces, they become what Charles Stang calls circuits through which “the activity (energeia) or the work of God (theourgia) moves.”^{Footnote 29} Christ, who is the “light of the world,” flows from up above the hierarchy, moves through it, and returns to God within this circuit. That is, the hierarchy is the space through which that light flows.^{Footnote 30} And Paul is described as “our common conductor, and … our leader to the Divine gift of light—he, who is great in Divine mysteries—the light of the world—[who] had thought out this in a manner above natural ability.”^{Footnote 31} Paul is both the entry point into the hierarchy and the model of how to live in it. Dionysius, that is, not only describes a cosmology, he also instructs Christians in how to relate to Paul: Paul, existing in a hierarchy, is a conductor and leader who has forged a way beyond human nature.

What is less often noticed is that the hierarchy’s goal is to make possible “divine mimesis” (θεομίμητος). When Dionysius defines the neologism, he writes,

Hierarchy, then, is the space in which a mimetic relation with God can be achieved. Dionysius continues, “For the perfection of each of those called into the hierarchy is to be raised up as much as possible in divine imitation, and what is wholly divine, becoming what scripture calls a ‘coworker with God’ [1 Cor 3:9; 1 Thess 3:2].”^{Footnote 33} Participating in one’s place in the hierarchy firmly grounds Christians within the order of creation and lets them imitate God. As the light moves through the hierarchy, creatures are made by and into the light that pulses through and creates the world. A mimetic relation with God allows creatures to conduct the circuit that runs from (πρόοδος) and back to (ἐπιστροφή) the divine source. Creatures are “lifted” not by moving up the hierarchy but by becoming like that which flows through them.

With Orsi’s emphasis on relationality in mind, it becomes clear that the hierarchy establishes a mode of relationship. Imitation is not assimilation (ἀφομοιόω) in the sense of being fully replaced by the archetype. The hierarchy, like the subject of the hierarchy, persists, and imitation, therefore, must maintain distance through relationship.

The hierarchy forms patterns of behavior that all in the relationship will follow. For Christians, slotting into the hierarchy is a form of stability through imitation, but as they click into place, they also find an erotic pull and an ecstatic release, and this eros and ecstasy, Dionysius argues, mirrors God’s own eros and ecstasy. God’s eros constantly transcends itself, enticing God away from what Dionysius calls “[God’s] transcendent dwelling place” and brings God “to abide within all things” while still supernaturally remaining “within himself.”^{Footnote 34} In other words, when Dionysius says that God is “erotic” by nature, he means that what it is to be God is to be the one who paradoxically reaches outside of God, and so in reaching “outside” God is actually most fully God.^{Footnote 35} God, therefore, remains in Godself while moving through and abiding in all things; and Christians who imitate God, therefore, become most fully themselves when they move out of themselves and into God. Dionysius writes, “divine love is ecstatic, such that lovers are not allowed to love themselves, but those beloved.”^{Footnote 36} A successful mimetic relationship, Dionysius writes, makes the Christian “neither oneself nor someone else.”^{Footnote 37}

To be in a mimetic relationship with God in which Christians can achieve ecstasy, Christians are to imitate Paul. Christians unite with God by entering into the relational hierarchy, and Paul models both a place in the hierarchy and what an ecstatic life in God might look like. Indeed, right after declaring God ecstatic, Dionysius turns to Paul. “Wherefore also, Paul the great, being in the grasp of divine love, and participating in its ecstatic power, says with inspired lips, ‘I live no longer, but Christ lives in me’ [Gal 2:20].”^{Footnote 38} Paul must be out of his own mind in a state of “unknowing” (ἀγνωσία) in order to participate fully in God. Dionysius points to 2 Corinthians 5:13, where Paul writes, “If we are beside ourselves [ἐξέστημεν], it is for God; if we are in our right mind, it is for you.” Paul’s ability to be “ecstatically displaced” puts him squarely within the divine hierarchy where Christ can flow through him.^{Footnote 39} And Paul’s ecstasy mimics God’s ecstasy. His mimetic relationship makes him the model Christian and image of God; standing outside himself in a love for God locks him into the ecclesial order.

Mimesis, for Dionysius, orders a relationship that takes place in a borderland between self and other. The imitator of Paul clears himself away and becomes “neither oneself nor someone else.” Imitating Paul who was himself in ecstasy allows readers to enter that liminal zone between self and other. They cannot imitate Paul directly because Paul too was never fully himself; they must also imitate the ecstasy to imitate the saint. And this hierarchically arranged instability, as opposed to a mimetic relation that stabilizes (ἱστάναι) by clamping image to archetype, allows the imitator of Paul to become an imitator of a God who is beyond all names and stable points of identity. (And that, as Charles Stang has argued, is precisely the role of the pseudonym in Dionysius’s corpus: an author, taking on a new name that is not fully his own, imitates Paul without becoming Paul in any direct way.^{Footnote 40})

Orsi helps us see how Dionysius’s personal relationship with Paul is both irreducibly singular and part of a larger theological system. “To be in a relationship with someone,” Orsi writes, “is not necessarily to understand him or her; but the relationship, which arises always on a particularly social field, becomes the context for understanding.”^{Footnote 41} Readers of Dionysius’s texts find themselves in the midst of a relationship, the contours of which are framed by a hierarchy. Said differently, without the hierarchy (if such a thing were possible), imitating Paul might be a human-to-saint affair; but within the hierarchy, Pauline mimesis becomes the “circuit” through which the divine flows. Within that “social field,” the author, and potentially good readers as well, can be undone through imitation. That ecstatic rupture, however, keeps them in the “field” where they again grasp at understanding, even if understanding only leads to more undoing.

Dionysius, therefore, offers a portrait of one type of mimetic relationship, one version of the “how” to become like an archetype: in this vision, faithful imitators move beyond their own mind and understanding, and they find ecstatic release as they participate in a highly structured set of relationships. They go to church, participate in rites and liturgies,^{Footnote 42} and learn to deploy language in ways that clear them and make room for the light that moves through them just as it moves through those beside, above, and below them in the hierarchy. Participating in these mimetic relationships requires participants to slot themselves into a hierarchy and stand outside of themselves in mimetic ecstasy.

John Chrysostom: Mimetic Ekphrasis

If the hierarchy is the field of relationship for Dionysius, for John Chrysostom it is the intensity of the face-to-face relationship that binds Christians to Paul. “I love all the saints,” Chrysostom writes, “but I love most the blessed Paul.”^{Footnote 43} This affection leads Margaret Mitchell to describe Paul as John’s “soul-mate.”^{Footnote 44} The monk, deacon, then presbyter of Antioch, later bishop of Constantinople, and then exile spent a lifetime acquainting himself with, memorizing, imitating, and introducing others to Paul. Dionysius stylizes mimesis as becoming ecstatic by joining in and imitating God’s ecstasy within a hierarchy; John’s mimesis is framed as an aesthetic relationship in which an affectionate attachment to Paul disciplines a moral life.^{Footnote 45}

More specifically, as Mitchell argues, John’s preaching became a way to achieve a deeper intimacy with the Apostle.^{Footnote 46} Chrysostom’s sermons become a point of contact with the Apostle, and through the sermon, the Christian imitates Paul by making her life a vivid description of her beloved Paul. One mimesis (John of Paul) begets another (congregant of the Paul of John’s sermon). Chrysostom’s theorization of mimesis involves two interrelated steps: (1) a love and even awe of the muse, which is constitutive of and leads to (2) a practice of making one’s life a work of art. Paul, for John, made his life into a work of art, and the Christian life is a continuation of that artistic practice that makes their life an artwork modeled on Paul’s.

As Furey argues, intimacy and relationality “do not disavow or ignore social logic but instead demonstrate how this logic can be both assumed and reconfigured.”^{Footnote 47} Chrysostom’s vision of intimacy with Paul does move away from a more robustly theorized Christian life; it is precisely through the possibilities of loving Paul and fashioning oneself after him that Christian virtue is theorized and livable.^{Footnote 48} Through the sermons, Paul came alive, drawing Chrysostom and his congregants to him and urging them to make their lives in the image of one whom they loved.

John’s artistry is aimed at producing a face-to-face encounter with Paul, an encounter intimate enough to inspire love of the Apostle.^{Footnote 49} John will occasionally interrupt the flow of his sermons to address Paul directly: “What do you say, Paul? Tell me.”^{Footnote 50} The relationality of imitation helps explain how Paul becomes not only the object of imitation, but also the subject who teaches John how to imitate Paul. And this immediacy is available to those who care to pay attention: “The inexperienced reader,” he writes, “when taking up a letter will consider it to be papyrus and ink; but the experienced reader will both hear a voice, and converse with the one who is absent.”^{Footnote 51} The ability to make words conjure a mental image (φαντασία) of Paul, the ability to visualize him, is paramount for John’s preaching. “Just now when we were pronouncing an encomium on the blessed Paul, you jumped for joy as much as if you saw him present,” he writes.^{Footnote 52} The intensity of Chrysostom’s descriptions highlights what Ruth Webb has argued is at the center of ekphrasis: “a type of speech that worked an immediate impact on the mind of the listener, sparking mental images of the subjects it ‘placed before the eyes.’ ”^{Footnote 53}

Rather than a “description,” which is often associated with “static, non-human or dehumanized referents,”^{Footnote 54} Webb argues, ekphrasis is an operation of language in which words make absent things present. Rhetoricians called this a “vividness” (ἐνάργεια),^{Footnote 55} “the power to make us feel ‘as if’ we can perceive [absent things] and share the associated emotions.”^{Footnote 56} The words of the sermons have an intensity or “vividness” that make “spellbound listeners” of John’s ekphrasis of the work of art—here a fictionalized image of the Apostle—see the subject, that is, Paul’s very body.^{Footnote 57}

Paul’s body is not simply an object. It is something to which Chrysostom’s audience must relate. Webb’s analysis highlights the importance of relationship in imitation. “What enargeia, and thus ekphrasis, seek to imitate is not so much an object, or scene, or person in itself, but the effect of seeing that thing, as Elaine Scarry says of the modern reader: ‘imagining is an act of perceptual mimesis.’ By activating the images already stored in the listener’s mind, the speaker creates a feeling like that of a direct perception, a simulacrum of perception itself. It is the act of seeing that is imitated, not the object itself, by the creation of a phantasia that is like the result of direct perception.”^{Footnote 58} Chrysostom’s sermons, therefore, do not present an “image” of Paul for readers to copy that can be held at a distance as much as they present an encounter with Paul on which they can model their lives. Through sermons Christians feel what it is like to be with Paul.^{Footnote 59} As John paints an image in words and then describes that image, he provides audiences the first-hand, affective experience of Paul from whom they are absent. Paul becomes present through texts and especially through homilies, which guide readers to the text. Paul’s presence in John’s life comes through most clearly in John’s exegesis. And that sense of direct perception, which is mediated through the sermon, disciplines Christian virtue.

The rhetorical performances familiarize his audience with Paul, so that Paul, the imitator, who made himself into a work of art, might become present to them.^{Footnote 60} Chrysostom, for example, devotes a homily discussing Paul’s body from feet to head. John rhetorically asks his audience: “Have you seen how beautiful the feet are?” “What could be more beautiful than this belly, which was thus educated to live quietly, and taught all moderation, and knew equally hungering, famishing, and thirst?” “Do you wish to see the hands he has now?”^{Footnote 61} These members come together to form one body. In the thick description of Paul’s “character” (χαρακτήρ), including his physicality—feet, chest, belly, back, mouth, heart, hands, eyes, limbs, and clothes—readers, through John’s evocation, feel the Apostle’s presence despite being distant in time and space.^{Footnote 62} By placing Paul’s desirable body “before the eyes” of his hearers, Chrysostom also allows them to feel Paul’s soul. “Wonderful! Paul’s soul! There’s nothing like it, nor will there be.”^{Footnote 63} Paul is felt so vividly as to be present through the artistry of the sermon.

John ends the ekphrasis by contrasting Paul’s beautiful body with that of “expensive clothing or gold coins,” saying, “if someone were to give me the power to possess the whole world, I would consider Paul’s fingernail [ὁ ὄνυξ].”^{Footnote 64} For John, if you cannot see him, you cannot imitate him; but to see him is worth more than all the clothing and gold in the world because love and imitation of Paul links Christians to virtue, to the poor, and to God. Love of money establishes one “chain” of relationships, a chain binding Christians to greed and the greedy and envy and the envious; love of Paul, however, links Christians to “all people,” especially the poor.^{Footnote 65}

Not only is he “lovable,” but Paul also loves, and being loved by Paul is part of the mimetic relationship Chrysostom envisions. In his Homilies on Philippians, he writes that those who imitate Paul make themselves beloved. “To be loved by Paul so warmly [as he loved the Philippians] is a sign that someone was great and wonderful.”^{Footnote 66} The community of “imitators” of Paul (Phil 3:17) are the ones whom Paul, sitting in prison, holds in his heart. Paul’s “spiritual desire [ὁ ἔρως ὁ πνευματικός] is such a tyrannical thing [τυραννικόν] that it cedes to no occasion but always possesses the lover’s soul and allows no anguish or pain to take the soul under control.”^{Footnote 67} Not even prison could break the “chains” binding Paul to the Philippians, and by following Paul’s example Christians too can know that tyrannical love.

John’s ekphrasis “works across the senses,” allowing congregants to see, hear, and feel Paul’s living presence by hearing the words of the homily.^{Footnote 68} The love inspired by John’s artwork, then, leads to imitation. The intensity of presence inspires audiences to mimetically recreate their beloved in their lives. This is the frame of Chrysostom’s program of moral formation. The virtues become the colors of the Christian’s soul that she uses to paint Paul.

Through John’s preaching—“by hearing alone”—Christians were able to imitate Paul, body and soul. If the hierarchy is the type of the relationship in Dionysius, here the sermon is the relational mode. The sermon allows for what Webb calls an “imaginative mimesis,” and thus imaginative encounter instructs the moral life to which John calls his audience. Hearing, seeing, and touching overlap and reinforce each other, as bodily practices (e.g., giving to the poor) give shape to the image of Paul that in turn calls Christians to give.

Especially when we put Chrysostom next to my reading of Dionysius above, Chrysostom’s artistic and ethical concerns about mimesis look remarkably uninterested in questions of participatory union or what Dionysius calls ἀγνωσία (unknowing). John’s relationship with Paul is vivid enough that he tells his audience that Paul “took possession” of him and forced him to speak about Paul even when Paul was not directly relevant to his topic.^{Footnote 70} But this intensity of relationship does not open into Dionysian “unknowing.” The fact that “there is nobody like Paul”^{Footnote 71} does not put Paul out of reach. If imitating Christ seems like too big of a task for the average Christian, “Paul demonstrates that it is possible… to imitate Christ.”^{Footnote 72} He is familiar in a way Christ is not. Chrysostom writes that “where Paul was, there also was Christ,” as if Christ’s presence is an obvious thing.^{Footnote 73}

In John’s homily series On the Incomprehensible Nature of God,^{Footnote 74} Paul’s words form the raw material of doctrinal disputes, but examining Paul’s life does not fashion the divine.^{Footnote 75} Paul is beloved but not mysterious.^{Footnote 76} Contrast this with Dionysius, for whom imitating Paul cannot happen in any straightforward way because it is always mediated by a hierarchy and the “light of Christ,” the “ray of darkness” which passes through it. Dionysius’s relationship with Paul requires a sense of “unknowing” of both God and Paul, whereas John’s love of Paul happens in a rather bright light.

A mimetic relationship with Paul, for Chrysostom, fashions a face-to-face encounter.^{Footnote 77} Paul becomes present through bodily description, and by “seeing,” his body gains a sense of presence of his soul. Not only is this a tactic for the most accurate representation, it is also a way to create a lasting impression.^{Footnote 78} John’s series of images of Paul fixes a canvas in his audiences’ minds of the Apostle that brings him to life.^{Footnote 79} Only when that clear image of Paul emerges can audiences meditate on and model themselves after that portrait. Vivid, memorable, lovable images are necessary for imitation.^{Footnote 80}

Gregory of Nyssa: Mimetic Epektasis, or between Dionysius and John

If Dionysius’s Paul offers an ekstasis rupture and John’s Paul is an ekphrasis providing an affective response intense enough to discipline a moral life, we can see Gregory somewhere between these two, trying to hold on to both mystical theology and moral formation. When we set Gregory next to Dionysius a shared interest in human incomparability—the unknowability not just of God, but of other people—comes into focus. For Dionysius, theōria requires humans to “stand outside themselves.” For Gregory, however, Paul’s incomparability is not so much a standing outside the self as it is what he calls epektasis, an insistence that the desire that organizes and directs the soul is never complete.

In his Homilies on the Song of Songs Gregory constantly conflates Paul with the bride. Paul is a lover who teaches Christians how to love what cannot be known. His role as the great imitator of Christ allows him to imitate other characters who also love Christ. Paul, Gregory writes, is the bride, who is “wounded by love.” Again, Orsi is helpful:

Paul’s love spurs imitation, but it is an imitation that does not “focus on the end-product” (the “object” of imitation), if by “end-product” we mean anything other than an “end” which has no limit. It does not resolve anything. The bride’s constant wounding, Gregory says, shows that “she is pulled by a yet more intense yearning.”^{Footnote 82} Instead, loving well undoes the lover and causes him to imitate the beloved. Paul, as the bride, who loves his beloved, is “still hastening toward something higher and never leaves off his ascent by setting the good he has already grasped as a limit to his desires.”^{Footnote 83}

Grasping Paul at any particular point only demonstrates that there is something infinitely greater. Paul’s claim, “if anyone seems to know something, he does not yet know as he ought to” (1 Cor 8:2), leads him, in Gregory’s reading, to discover God as “more novel and more surprising [καινότερόν τε καὶ παραδοξότερον] than what has already been grasped.”^{Footnote 84} His participation in God stretches him, and those who can read this desire and imitate Paul will also stretch themselves beyond the Paul they know into the one they see only through a mirror dimly (1 Cor 13:12).^{Footnote 85} Paul’s endless stretching stirs a feeling of endlessness that gives shape to the Christian pursuit of perfection.

The most obvious point of difference, however, is the lack of hierarchy in Gregory. Dionysius’s Paul is cleared away, moving beyond the limits of language, then returning to the same place. Gregory, however, encourages the Christian seeking perfection to move through space, not to stay put so that Christ can move through her in it (à la Dionysius).^{Footnote 86} For example, in the Life of Moses, which is governed by a reading of Paul’s Philippians 3:13, Moses “progresses” through different places: from Egypt to the desert up Mt. Sinai and back down, and so on. Moving through these different places shows that Moses’s soul is also “progressing” in virtue and in intimacy with God. Gregory’s Paul, like his Moses, is also constantly on the move, transforming himself and moving from one place to another. In Paul’s infinite movement and ever-expanding desire for God, readers find an image of an infinite God. Gregory’s God is less ecstatic—moving in and out of Godself—and more saturating, spurring, and governing by providing paths and places for advancement.^{Footnote 87} The erotic pull of Gregory’s God comes not from being split as much as from a constant revealing (and concealing) that grows the capacity of the one seeking to love. Gregory’s Paul dwells not in his place in the hierarchy but in a whole series of places where he can be joined to God; he grows from sinner to saint, and “from glory to glory” (2 Cor 3:18).^{Footnote 88}

When we compare Gregory’s treatment of Paul with what we saw from Chrysostom above, the mimetic imagery becomes even more similar. They both draw on painterly images, seeing aesthetic practice as part of the ascetic practice. But these painterly images serve slightly different functions. John meets Paul face to face; Gregory’s face-to-face meetings with Paul often end with Paul turning and asking Gregory to run after him. Put too glibly, John’s Paul is an image of the incomparable, one whom Christians can look at and love; Gregory’s Paul is an incomparable image, whom Christians run after as he races toward God.

If Chrysostom’s ekphrasis brings disparate qualities together into a single body that Christians can reencounter, Gregory emphasizes the many ways Paul appears to Christians. Gregory provides thirty-four different ways to look at Paul^{Footnote 89} when he discusses Paul in On Perfection. In his introduction to the thirty-four names of Christ provided by Paul, Gregory writes that Paul imitated Christ so brilliantly that “he displayed [δεῖξαι] his own Master in himself, the form of his own soul [τοῦ τῆς ψυχῆς αὐτοῦ εἴδους] being transformed through accurate mimesis [διὰ τῆς ἀκριβεστάτης μιμήσεως μεταβληθέντος] of his prototype, so that Paul no longer seemed to be living and speaking, but Christ himself seemed to be living in him [Gal 2:20].” Mimetic transformation becomes the governing metaphor of the treatise. Paul’s imitation of Christ moves because he continually meets a Christ whom he has not yet met. Paul provides a name for Christ and then moves his reader past it toward another. In that change, “from glory to glory,” he best imitates Christ.^{Footnote 90}

At any moment, “some special characteristic illumines his [Paul’s] manner of life,” but accurate artistic rendering requires refusing to stick to one name or image.^{Footnote 91} In his Homilies on the Song of Songs,^{Footnote 92} Gregory discusses how “progress in virtue” and “being transformed from glory to glory” require Christians to be like actors who “alter their look by changing their mask.”

While many early Christians were famously wary of the theater, Gregory fashions it here as a microcosm of proper “desire for higher things.” As with the rhetorical exercises mentioned above, maturing into Christian virtue is a matter of education through role-playing. Christians put on different virtues and change “character [χαρακτήρ]”^{Footnote 94} as they grow in their relationship with God and with the saints. The many “Pauls” in Gregory do not (and should not) congeal into one.^{Footnote 95}

This contrast opens into a larger one. If Chrysostom’s Paul is ultimately quite knowable—in a way that Christ is not—Gregory never tires of linking Paul to the unknown. Paul again becomes “the Bride,” who

Gregory’s imitation of Paul here requires capturing something elusive.^{Footnote 97} Paul, as Susan Ashbrook Harvey writes of smell, “could not be confined in space any more than it could be classified into unequivocal categories.”^{Footnote 98} Gregory argues that Paul displays the virtues and in so doing captures something of the infinity and inaccessibleness of God. In his life, Paul became a “palpable dwelling of the impalpable Nature [περιληπτικὸς τῆς ἀπεριλήπτου γενόμενος φύσεως] in that it was no longer he who lived, but he shows Christ living in him and gives proof of Christ speaking in him.” Paul points to the way “his intuitions concerning God remain inexpressible,” even when he is caught up “in paradise.”^{Footnote 99} This inexpressibility is not a failure. Paul’s great achievement in his imitation of God is that he imitates what cannot be known.

Christians who imitate Paul must also work toward this incomparability in themselves as well. “Since one of the things we contemplate in the divine nature is incomprehensibility, it is altogether necessary that, in this way, the image [τὴν εἰκόνα] must have the mimesis with the archetype [πρὸς τὸ ἀρχέτυπον ἔχειν τὴν μίμησιν].”^{Footnote 100} Humans live in “total ignorance [ἀγνοίᾳ πάντων]” about God’s essential nature, and, as images of God, about their own essential nature, too.^{Footnote 101} Not knowing oneself is part of what it means to be made in the image of God. To imitate Paul, for Gregory, is not to move from unknown to known; it is to continue to stretch Christians into a deeper, more unknown desire.

Conclusion

Mimetic relationships are only one of many types of relationship, but they are crucial to Christian thought and practice. These relationships coordinate bodily practices, habits of thought, and affective responses.^{Footnote 102} For all three writers discussed above, Paul is the great imitator of Christ, and Christians, in turn, imitate Paul and, through him, Christ. And yet, while scholars have tended to see imitation as a matter of content, of producing an archetype to imitate (what does Paul look like?) or an aspirational goal (e.g., share in suffering, almsgiving), the mimetic relationships these late antique authors present suggest that there is no straight line from archetype to image. None of them “become” Paul in any literal sense. Their relationships with him are both intimate and structured, relationships that carry with them theories of Christian life. That is, as Orsi’s analysis suggests, each of their Pauls is part of a larger network of relationships in which they exhort their audiences to live. While imitation may seem an uncomplicated concept, it always functions within and coordinates theological and ideological patterns.^{Footnote 103} Dionysius emphasizes a hierarchical relationship that leads to ecstasy; Chrysostom a vivid, aesthetic relationship that orients a moral life; Gregory an expanding relationship that leads to the dilation of desire.

Imitation of Paul, for each of these authors, is often fruitfully read as a meaning-making device: grafting the Christian life onto Paul’s provides a goal and standard of valuation and importance, or what Orsi calls “a medium for explaining, understanding, and modeling reality.”^{Footnote 104} And yet Orsi’s emphasis on relationships helps us focus on what I take to be the more important point: that a mimetic relationship with Paul was more than an end goal; it structured and gave tangibility to a way of life. It was a constant “resonance between heaven and earth.”^{Footnote 105} How that resonance is created, worked toward, maintained, intensified, undone, and achieved required imaginative frameworks and daily practices that could be quite different even within a religious tradition. Dionysius’s mimetic ekstasis functions within hierarchies and practices of “unknowing.” Chrysostom’s mimetic ekphrasis ratchets up affective attachment by vivifying Paul, the great imitator who can be imitated. Gregory’s mimetic epektasis constantly moves from one Paul to the next, remaking Christians in the image of a God who can never be captured by a single name or virtue.

Mimesis is both a way to participate in a network of relations and a way to stretch toward the limits of those relationships. Imitation is so basic, so formative a practice of religious communities, that it can seem natural or given, and yet in spite of, or precisely because of, this “givenness,” what is expected in a mimetic relationship is often imbued with communities’ deepest commitments, ultimate concerns, and maybe even their God.