Page - 22 - in Wiener Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte, Volume LIX

aSSAF PINKUS22 the Saint is praying privately.63 Such a private sphere could not ostensibly exist for the clerics; several of the brothers are depicted as watching him clandestinely out of curiosity, while others listened behind closed doors to the words of his prayers. The constant tension between the desire of the novices to imitate their mentor (to see him clearly, as a ‘spectacle’), and the constraint of watching him secretly, implies that his exist- ence was neither private nor public but, rather, in order to become a public being, his privacy needed to be constantly violated. The kind of tension between inner and outer entity on the one hand, and the transparency of his actions, on the other, recalls Thomas of Aquinas’ ethics of intention. Differing from the Augustinian para- digm of the dichotomy between the body and the soul (with the former being inferior and the latter superior), Thomistic thinking reconciles this polarity.64 According to Aquinas, the soul is the form of the body, indicating that that body and soul are perceived as an inseparable unit; inner essence and qualities find their resonance in outer appearance. In addition, his ethics focus mainly on intentions. Actions, even the worse cruelties, are conceived as morally neutral; moral value is extracted from the intentions and psy- chology of their perpetrator.65 Derivative of this new ethic system is that the body ceased to be relegated as inferior, and a new kind of transpar- ency between inner and outer outlook was initi- ated. This ideology, however, was not necessar- ily entirely accepted and materialized in reality. Both St. Dominic and St. Anne, each absorbed in their prayers, are represented in tandem with Aquinas as transparent beings, implying thereby the coherence of body and soul, of intention and action, of inner and outer, interior and exterior. Yet, this transparency is attained by peering and peeping – both are watched circuitously, through several layers of interior and exterior planes that separate the voyeurs from the object of their ocu- lar desire. Both these individuals at prayer thus constitute a voyeuristic invitation to their viewer. The voyeuristic invitation offered by St. Dominic posits the possibility of voyeurism functioning as access to divine truth (or, in Freudian terms – the instinct for knowledge). This idea recurs also in the hagiographic litera- ture; the most familiar case is the conversion of St. Alban to Christianity by the wandering priest Amphibalus, which was illustrated by Matthew Paris around 1240.66 The text recounts how St. Alban – before his conversion to Christianity – attended the preaching of Amphibalus, yet could not believe in what he heard. After experiencing a vision in his sleep, he went to ask Amphibalus about the meaning of his dream. Being starkly impressed by the sight of the preacher praying before a cross, St. Alban forgot his doubts and let himself be converted and baptized. As noted by Cynthia Hahn, while the text of the Life mentions that the priest had spent a night in vigil before the cross, the mid-thirteenth-century illustration by Matthew Paris added a window to depict the priest’s activity as secretive (fig. 5); St. Alban is thus practically peeping at Amphibalus.67 She fur- ther noted that “Alban’s intrusion therefore risks 64 Albeit maintaining the priority of the soul. On the relations between body and soul in Tomistic doctrine, see E. Gilson, The Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, trans. E. Bullough, New York 1929, pp. 204–220; B. Davies, Thoughts of Thomas Aquinas, Oxford 1992, p. 207–226; A. Kenny, Aquinas and the Mind, London, 1993, pp. 145–159, I have mostly relied here on D. Baraz, Medieval Cruelty. Changing Perceptions, Late Antiquity to the Early Modern Period, Ithaca 2003, pp. 20–28. 65 Ibidem, p. 23. 66 Life of St. Alban, Dublin, Trinity College Library, MS 177. For seminal studies on Matthew Paris, see R. Vaughan, Matthew Paris, Cambridge 1958; S. Lewis, The Art of Matthew Paris in the ‘Chronica Majora’, California 1987. 67 Hahn, Visio Dei (cit. n. 4), p. 176. On the illustration of St. Alban’s vita, see F. McCulloch, Saint Alban and Amphibalus in the Works of Matthew Paris: Dublin Trinity College MS 177, in: Speculum 56, 1981, pp. 761–785.