"The little blue flower is red": Relics and the poetizing of the body (An exploration of the culture and spirituality of Christian religio-aesthetic ritual devotion)

Viewing relics from the perspectives of the rhetoric and art in which they were embedded, this essay argues that the transformative process whereby hu man body-parts became relics was aesthetic. Attentive both to the specter o f idolatry and to the danger of a spirituality that negates "matter", late ancient Christians created a religio-aesthetic environment within which the remains of special human beings could be apprehended as relics, that is, a s spiritual objects worthy of ritual devotion. More specifically, the paper focuses on such relic-minded Christians as Prudentius, Asterius of Amaseia , and Paulinus of Nola. Their use of a particular rhetorical form, the ekph rasis, is highlighted as a major component of the aesthetic style that vest ed in bones a signifying capacity that marked their emergence as relics. In addition, the paper explores literary and artistic dependence on an aesthe tic sensibility associated with the late ancient cultural taste for color a nd brilliance that contributed to the sensuously intense atmosphere within which the cult of relics achieved expression.