Ninth-Century Literary Criticism and the Appreciation of Form

A monumental literary critical work of the mid ninth century - the Bibliotheke of the patriarch Photius (c. ad 810-after 893) - presents a more nuanced approach. (The exact date of the Bibliotheke remains a matter of debate: Treadgold 1980; Markopoulos 2004.) Photius reviews 386 books, works written mostly by late antique authors. Indeed, we know about some of these authors only through the Bibliotheke. Photius is particularly fascinated with history (Kustas 1953; Mendels 1986; Efthymiadis 2000). Late antique authors are, for him, primarily a source for establishing the historiography of Christian dogmatic precision, akribeia. Photius is ambivalent about all Christian authors working before the establishment of Nicene orthodoxy - from Justin to Origen, from Clement to Eusebius. Photius is even more fascinated with style. Most of the authors that he discusses are placed under close stylistic scrutiny. He considers few of them perfect: only the historians Arrian and Malchus, and the theologians Basil of Caesarea and Germanos, patriarch of Constantinople (Phot. Bibl. 92, 78, 233). While Photius’ stylistic criteria derive some of their force from Greco-Roman rhetorical theory (Orth 1928, 1929; Hartmann 1929; Kustas 1962; Afinogenov 1995), his most important stylistic principle is a late antique one, transparency. He insists on the ideal of an unbroken link between content and form. He employs a variety of Greek terms: clarity (sapheneia), purity (katharotes), transparency (to dieides), and precision (akribeia). In accord with those principles, he thinks of authorship as akin to fatherhood, as offering a genealogical clarity. The discursive form or style must present, therefore, both its content and its author’s signature.

Consistent as it may be with late antique aesthetics, Photius’ emphasis on transparency is, nevertheless, marked by a subversive undercurrent that surfaces in his reviews. By insisting on the description of style, and not merely of content, Photius grants style a significant autonomy. For instance, he occasionally finds fault with revered Christian authors who deviate from the norms of style and genre (Bibl. 86 on John Chrysostom as epistolographer; 195 on Maximus the Confessor and dialogue writing). More importantly, he does not refrain from reviewing books that are purely and expressly fictional (from Lucian’s satire to Heliodorus’ novel: Bibl. 128, 73). He admires the style of those texts, which do not dress themselves up as truth, and he finds some moral value in their fictional imitation of reality. Indeed, what seems to bother Photius most are texts that pretend to be truthful while being purely fictional, namely ‘‘heretical’’ texts (Bibl. 114 on the early Christian author Leucius Charinus; 189 on Akestorides). He thus marks a shift in emphasis. While late antique aesthetics demanded transparency in representation, in order to guard the moral superiority of content, Photius, by appreciating transparency, begins to see the value of discourse as such. It is no coincidence, for instance, that he is unenthusiastic about such late antique allegorical theology as that of Maximus the Confessor (Bibl. 192). For Photius, allegorical theology demands a search for meaning behind, and regardless of, textual form.

Photius’ evaluation of discourse brings to the fore a consciousness of form that is absent from the historiography of his own day; but he is not alone in his project. He has to be placed in the wider context of discussions of form in the eighth and ninth centuries. This is the period of iconoclasm (Brubaker and Haldon 2001) - that is, a period of discussion that focused precisely on form and representation. Such authors as John of Damascus, Theodore of Stoudios, and Photius himself construct highly complex theories of the image. The question that these authors go to great pains to answer is how images can afford their viewer a relation with, perception or cognition of, the persons depicted in iconic representation. For them, the question is about form, the material side of representation (Barber 2002). Not surprisingly, these authors approach the debate by turning to late antique theological aesthetics (Demoen 1998, 2000; Louth 2006). They trawl late antique theology for definitions of the terms ‘‘image’’ (eikOn), ‘‘imprint’’ (typos), and ‘‘shape’’ (morphe). These terms were used in Late Antiquity primarily in a metaphorical way, in order to describe, for example, the genealogical relationships within the Christian Trinity. In the new Byzantine context, the terms are used to evaluate material representations. What are metaphors of truth in late antique discourse (that is, discursive functions that enable one to imagine truth) become images in Byzantine iconophile language (that is, material representations of truth). By returning in this way to late antique theology, the writers of the later period make form more than content the matter for discussion. In this light, we can understand Photius’ approach to discourse. As in iconophile arguments, he builds his aesthetics upon late antique principles, yet this aesthetics is simultaneously a departure from the traditional emphasis. Byzantine discourse has moved from late antique theories of truth and is now engaged in theories of representation.