Abstract
In this revised doctoral dissertation, Callon investigates a relatively unexplored area of early Christianity: the early Christian utilization of contemporaneous physiognomic thought as a rhetorical strategy and means of persuasion. The first chapter begins with an overview of the wide and complex range of the rhetorical use of physiognomy in ancient times. Building upon the typical view in antiquity that the body and soul were inextricably linked with and reacted to each other, it was commonly believed that a person’s physical characteristics were, once decoded, reliable indicators of one’s moral character. Thus, some general ‘physiognomic principles’ played a significant role in the art of persuasion to represent a person as either morally deficient or superior.
The following chapters offer an informative examination of early Christian discourse and convincingly demonstrate that Christian authors largely conformed with established norms of persuasion in broader antiquity in the ways they employed physiognomic principles to morally discredit their opponents and to achieve their rhetorical purposes. Chapter 2 investigates how the appeal to physiognomy provided early Christian authors empirical evidence and purportedly objective argumentation to undermine the moral credit of the heretic or apostate. Similar to non-Christian writings, the charge of effeminacy was also associated with a variety of vices and was frequently raised against opponents. Chapter 3 examines how physiognomic principles were utilized to demonstrate the moral superiority of the group and the idealized gender characteristics of the members in order to forge group boundaries. Building on the analysis of these two chapters, chapter 4 indicates that gender ambiguity is found in martyrdom accounts. The authors tended to masculinize the female martyrs as brave winners over against their emasculated persecutors. Finally, chapter 5 is devoted to a curious phenomenon: ‘the promotion of a physically unappealing Jesus’ by some early Christian authors (p. 131). Callon emphasizes that the same authors employed traditional physiognomic principles elsewhere and suggests that there were other rhetorical purposes at work in such a phenomenon, such as to prove Jesus’ corporality and the possibility of crucifixion, to avoid potential vanity, and to distance Jesus from Antinous who was thought to be beautiful (p. 158). One wonders, however, whether the Christian theologies of Jesus’ suffering and transformation (such as ‘being in the form of a slave’ and the exaltation in Phil 2:6–10), which were partially in tension with the physiognomic thought about deities, were also direct factors that caused the promotion of an ugly Jesus.
By exploring a valuable topic that has not received its due attention in previous scholarship, Callon has contributed a fuller picture of early Christianity that interacted with the broader Greco-Roman background. Particularly brilliant is her analysis of the persuasive power of masculinization, effeminacy, and descriptions of female chastity and docility in the service of male competition in a predominantly masculine world. In addition to the emphasis on the negotiation of identity, more consideration of ideological beliefs that might have also directly influenced the Christian utilization of physiognomic principles would be helpful for further studies on this topic.