Bonds of Secrecy: Law, Spirituality, and the Literature of Concealment in Early Medieval England and the coeditor of Thinking of the Medieval: Midcentury Intellectuals and the Middle Ages.
He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Turning Away: The Poetics of an Ancient Gesture, and shared the following:
From page 99:Visit Benjamin A. Saltzman's website.As a turn inward and from others, Augustine’s conversion is also crucially a turn away from corporeal sensation, a turn away from those things outside the soul. In Fra Angelico’s The Conversion, Augustine covers his eyes and holds his hand over his ear. It’s an incomplete disruption of the senses. If conversion is realized as a turn away from the senses, in Augustine’s case it also happens to be initiated through the senses: “Suddenly I heard” (ecce audio) (Conf. 8.12.29). In this sudden and unexpected interjection of sound, memory kicks in: He stops weeping and recalls having heard (audieram) the story of Antony listening to the words of the Gospel (Conf. 8.12.29). And when he returns to the book, Augustine opens it up to the passage upon which his “eyes first set” (Conf. 8.12.29). Sensory experience precipitates conversion to inner sensation.There are probably more exciting pages in the book—not least, the seventeen carefully sequenced color plate in the middle—but this page does give a sense of the energy of the project. Here we are considering the variety of meanings possibly attributable to Fra Angelico’s depiction of St. Augustine in the Milanese garden where he would find his way toward conversion. And in these meanings, we can see some of the variety of the gesture more generally: from a turn away from corporeal sensation (into spiritual sensation), to atmospheric and emotional darkness, to perspectival instability (turning this way and that), to a ruptured sense of time. In many ways, as I type this, I’m surprised to find that the Page 99 Test actually works! For this is one moment where all of the chapters of the book are brought together in a single iteration: ambivalence, sensation, darkness, retroversion.
Augustine experiences darkness: the “dark clouds of doubt” (dubitationis tenebrae) that dissipate upon conversion materialize in Fra Angelico’s use of gesture. As Augustine blocks his eyes, he deploys a gesture that often formally signifies a state of darkness. I will explore this aspect of the gesture more closely in chapter 4, but for now it bears on the relation between Augustine’s separation from the senses and his state of perspectival instability.
These dark clouds emerge from Augustine’s perspectival instability. In Fra Angelico’s The Conversion, as we have seen, perspective is distorted. The buildings and figures are so disunified that distances between objects seem greater or lesser depending on what objects are prioritized in the viewer’s attention. I would like to think that this perspectival play evokes theunreliability of bodily senses, particularly corresponding to the instability of Augustine’s own senses in these moments just prior to his conversion. His senses—hearing and sight—are thrown off. And so are ours. When Augustine reflects on his own fragmentation, a kaleidoscopic ego thus emerges: “It was I who was willing, I who was not willing: I was (ego eram)” (Conf. 8.10.22). The repetition of ego enlarges Augustine in his own words, much as Fra Angelico does by placing him at the center of the painting. But it is a fragmented ego that splits him away from himself and turns him away from the outside world, from Alypius, and from us. We may be dizzy, unsure of where we stand in relation to the scene and to Augustine’s turning self. It requires a different kind of perspective altogether.
One effect of this altered perspective is a ruptured sense of time (insofar as the human experience of temporality is a function of the inner sense, distended in its relation to the past and future). We may take it for granted, but Augustine’s halo signals his status as a saint. As such, it sets the pre-conversion scene of indecision at an already post-conversion moment. Antony’s presence in the cave is similar: According to his vita, he enters the desert only after he has converted and committed to a life of solitude. The distant memory of Antony speaks to Augustine in the instant of the viewer’s present, which is at the same time the instant of Augustine’s decision as he recollects the story of Antony’s own auricular experience. And yet Fra Angelico’s scene already anticipates the resolution of that decision and resolves this temporal distention with the use of gesture. Augustine’s gesture is a turn into memory’s ruptured temporality, creating something akin to what Elina Gertsman recognizes in the “semiotically rich emptiness” of absent images, in which visual voids work as “temporal bridges, between terrestrial and celestial time.”
--Marshal Zeringue
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