Journal of Early Christian Studies

My reading here will have to be in some way double. On the one hand, a utopistic attempt . . . to find and reflect on the zones in the text where transgression is inscribed; on the other, a necessary recognition of the substantial weight and incredible resiliency of the symbolic order’s phallocentric law.

(Jane Gallop, Reading Lacan) ¹

Undoubtedly, it is as difficult to discuss the sex of a discourse as it is to discuss the sex of an angel: these two apparatuses of circulation and/or drift of meaning—one linguistic, the other cosmological—constantly avoid determinations as to their place. . . .

(Michel de Certeau, Heterologies) ²

This reading of Ambrose represents an initial exercise in the arts of doubled perception required for interpreting not only the fixed coordinates but also the purposeful slippage and drift of an ancient discourse’s ambiguous inscription of its own sex. The framing of this interpretive task already announces its peculiarly late twentieth-century preoccupations and presuppositions. Indeed, such a reading may seem to risk merely confirming the construction of a currently reigning scholarly orthodoxy, by wrenching the ancient texts too violently into the interpretive categories of a school of psychoanalysis that marks language itself as “phallic” while at the same time [End Page 461] veiling the privileged maleness seemingly implicit in such a representation. ³ If the danger of an entrapping circularity cannot be altogether discounted, the historicist’s hope nevertheless persists: might not a reading of late ancient texts also prove subversive of a “phallic” orthodoxy, serving the purposes of not only a genealogical unmasking but also an unmasking of false genealogies, illumining points of disjunction in the ancient discourse—“anti-phallic” moments, as it were—in such a way as to hint at the possibilities of construing gender otherwise?

Scholars of religion have given considerable attention to the late ancient turn toward the body and to the complex convergence of ascetic practice and episcopal authority that provided the matrix for “new” articulations of gender within fourth-century Christianity. ⁴ Not irrelevant to these concerns with the historic constructions of gender and the body, I would argue, is the somewhat more recently arising awareness of the distinctiveness and significance of fourth-century conceptions and practices of “rhetoric.” This awareness has been given voice in two evocative sets of lectures that have appeared in publication in the last few years: Peter Brown’s Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity ⁵ and Averil Cameron’s Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire. ⁶ In conversation with Brown, this present paper explores the social context of persuasive speech in the late empire, illumining the power relations enacted in the dramatic moment in which an emperor is actually addressed and the “wild power” at the center of an autocratic political structure is to some extent controlled by the rhetorical exertions of classically educated men—in this case, by Ambrose, who in the fourth century almost uniquely combined the experiences and authority of a senatorial background, political office, and a major episcopacy. ⁷ In conversation with Cameron, the paper also explores the nature of the late ancient Christian discourse available to and in some sense crucially molded by men like Ambrose—a “totalizing” discourse, as Cameron names it (in [End Page 462] Foucaultian terms), a discourse of “orthodoxy” that deploys the language of both empire and martyrdom, invokes the authority of both paideia and a counter-cultural ascesis, and finally (as I will argue) utilizes gender to articulate its own paradoxical character. ⁸ Two sets of texts will provide the site for explorations of Ambrose’s complex rhetoric of gender, interpreted in its social and discursive contexts: first, the initial two books of De fide, which present themselves in the form of a direct address to the emperor Gratian, and second, the treatises De virginibus and De viduis, ostensibly addressed to ascetic women. All of these well-known works were written in the early years of Ambrose’s tumultuous episcopacy, at a point of significant political vulnerability for the bishop. The urgency of Ambrose’s need to strengthen his position provides an interpretive opportunity, making more transparent the complex rhetorical strategies by which the bishop constituted his authority and staked out the domain of his own discourse. ⁹

A consensus has emerged that the first two books of De fide were composed by Ambrose for the emperor Gratian in order to counter claims of [End Page 463] his own unorthodoxy. ¹⁰ Ambrose had come to the episcopacy in 374 with the assent of the emperor Valentinian, ¹¹ following the death of the Homoian bishop Auxentius, who had led the Milanese Christian community for almost two decades; the emperor died suddenly in 375, soon after Ambrose took office. Ambrose’s strategic show of support for the Milanese Nicene community while holding the office of consularis of Aemilia and Liguria appears to have been directly implicated in his dramatic and unanticipated election to the episcopacy; however, his complex manipulation of the events that led to the election—recently provocatively described as “an improvised response to a botched coup”—seems to have deliberately obscured the terms of his partisanship, and it remains somewhat unclear at what point and under what circumstances he aligned himself publicly and uncompromisingly with the Nicene party of Milan. ¹² At any rate, by 380, when the first two books of De fide were most likely penned, ¹³ Ambrose’s theological allegiance was unambiguous, and it emerges to view in the context of an aggressive strategy both to undercut the power of a vigorous Homoian faction in Milan and to secure the patronage of Gratian, the new emperor in the west, who had adopted Valentinian’s policy of religious neutrality. From what we can tell, Ambrose’s position in the late 370s was precarious indeed: there was an active Homoian bishop in Milan (one Julian Valens); ¹⁴ the pro-Homoian empress Justina (mother of the boy emperor [End Page 464] Valentinian II) had perhaps already arrived to take up residence in the city; and finally Gratian, stationed at Sirmium near the battlefront with the Goths, had begun to take a heightened interest in the religious disputes that burned more hotly in the eastern provinces which had recently come under his control with the death of the emperor Valens—and this in a context where he was exposed to the influence of the Homoian bishops of Illyricum. Whether primarily due to reports from Milan, or to the pressures placed on him by the Illyrican bishops, ¹⁵ Gratian seems to have seen fit to require from Ambrose a defense of his pro-Nicene position. Understandably, Ambrose was not initially in a hurry to respond; indeed, he had to be prodded in a personal interview with Gratian. ¹⁶

Entering the text-world of De fide I–II, the reader thus finds Ambrose poised at that delicate moment evoked by Brown: the moment of address to a somewhat skeptical and all-too-powerful emperor, a moment full of danger but also of opportunity. The question here is not so much of what Ambrose persuades as how Ambrose accomplishes his persuasive task, how his discourse shapes and presents itself, how in the process the discourse of orthodoxy accomodates itself to the limits and possibilities of the late Roman rhetorical context. More particularly, I am interested in how Ambrose uses gender to locate the authority of orthodox speech in relation to imperial power, on the one hand, and the speech of his theological rivals, on the other.

De fide I–II is framed by two illuminating passages in which the bishop directly addresses Gratian, who is in both instances presented in the role of military commander. In these passages, Ambrose balances a rhetoric of subordination—presenting himself as obedient to the emperor’s commands that he submit a statement of faith—with a bold move to identify his own episcopal role with that of the emperor and thereby to press for an alignment of their goals and perspectives. “It is the Augustus, ruler of the whole world, that has commanded the setting forth of the faith in a book, not for your instruction, but for your approval,” Ambrose begins, in a seemingly [End Page 465] strong affirmation of imperial authority. ¹⁷ Subsequently, however, he repeats the account of Gratian’s command in terms that significantly transform the relation between implied author and addressee, while also bringing two time-hallowed masculine roles ¹⁸ into play with one another: “Your sacred Majesty, being about to go forth to war, requires of me a book, expounding the faith, since your Majesty knows that victories are gained more by faith in the commander, than by valour in the soldiers.” ¹⁹ A parallelism here emerges between sword and word: Gratian is about to go to war; Ambrose is about to write a book; both are “equipping” themselves “for victory.” ²⁰ But there is more than a simple (and fairly conventional) highlighting of similarities at work, for now Gratian’s command—seeming initially to represent the fullness of imperial authority—has been found lacking, in need of completion by the written word through which the faith may be expounded, a faith without which military victories are not possible. Subsequently, the roles of Gratian and Ambrose seem to merge more completely, their identification defined in terms of a complementary reversal or communicatio idiomatum in which the emperor setting out to battle the Goths is named “Christ’s loyal servant and defender of the Faith,” ²¹ while the bishop embarking upon a purely theological campaign identifies himself with the priests at Nicea who (in his terms) “made a trophy raised to proclaim their victory over the infidel throughout the world.” ²² Yet embedded in this assertion of the identification of bishop with emperor is a contrasting movement of ascetic withdrawal, in which the bishop’s claim of warrior status seems simultaneously to produce its own anxious denial: [End Page 466] “Truly, I would rather take upon me the duty of exhortation to keep the faith, than that of disputing thereon,” notes Ambrose, going on to suggest that the emperor nevertheless requires of him something other than exhortation. “Whilst I may not pray to be excused from the duty of loyalty, I will take in hand a bold enterprise,” the bishop concedes, at the same time redefining the “bold enterprise” as a “modest opportunity,” while masking the agonistic component of his task: “not so much reasoning and disputing concerning the faith as gathering together a multitude of witnesses.” ²³

At the conclusion of De fide I-II, Ambrose adds still another layer to the parallelism of sword and word. Having spent long pages in verbose exposition, he now feigns sudden recollection of Gratian’s urgent military task. “I must no further detain your Majesty, in this season of preparation for war, and the achievement of victory over the Barbarians. Go forth sheltered, indeed, under the shield of faith, and girt with the sword of the Spirit,” Ambrose proclaims. ²⁴ The point is not only that the power of the word undergirds and completes the power of the sword; the analogy of sword and word presses further for an identification of their objects, as the polemical targets of emperor and bishop are still more closely conjoined. Here is the real punch line for Ambrose: “Nor, furthermore, may we doubt, your sacred Majesty, that we, who have undertaken the contest with alien unbelief, shall enjoy the aid of the Catholic Faith that is strong in you.” ²⁵ If Gratian is to assist Ambrose in the bishop’s fight against the heretics, that is in part because those heretics are identical with Gratian’s military foes, in the terms so audaciously proposed by the bishop: “This is no land of unbelievers, but the land whose custom it is to send forth confessors—Italy; Italy, ofttimes tempted, but never drawn away; Italy, which your Majesty hath long defended, and now again rescued from the barbarian.” Milan and Italy are aligned with the mythic Nicea, the Illyrican Homoians with the “Arian” heretics, and even as he seems to assure the emperor, Ambrose also warns Gratian against any unmanly vacillation that might challenge the solidity of such a symbolic alignment of commitments: “No wavering mind (mens lubrica) in our emperor,” he exclaims, “but faith firm fixed (fides fixa).” ²⁶ [End Page 467]

These framing passages of De fide I–II evoke a strikingly “sword- centered” representation of Nicene orthodoxy. As noted, this representation is not, however, without its own hesitancies and subversions. The body of the treatise frequently takes a more ambiguous or paradoxical tack in its deployment of imagery that is often more explicitly gendered, and the significance of the resisting movements within the framing passages already examined is thereby heightened. Two such subversive tacks will be highlighted here. The first involves the negative representation of heresy as grotesquely material, in terms frequently but not inevitably feminized, indeed seemingly easily shifting into a masculinized representation of heretical carnality that implies a feminized orthodox subject. The second potentially subversive movement involves the continued problematizing of the paradox of a word understood as both persuasive and coercive, healing and destructive, and the corresponding ambivalence that gives rise to the need always to justify the act of speech or the breaking of silence, construed in the terms of a masculinized aggression that is simultaneously rejected and embraced.

In an overtly classicizing passage, ²⁷ Ambrose compares heresy to “some hydra of fable,” the two-headed serpent that ever survives its own decapitation; for heresy—as Ambrose explains—“hath waxed great from its wounds and, being ofttimes lopped short, hath grown afresh, being appointed to find meet destruction in flames of fire.” ²⁸ Heterodoxy is also likened to “some dread and monstrous Scylla,” whose many-headed form [End Page 468] seems to suggest to Ambrose the multiplicity, as well as the fanged threat, of heresy’s deceptive guise; her lower body is “girded with beastly monsters,” and her cavern, “thick laid with hidden lairs” and resounding with the howling of her black dogs, is a place of danger that can only barely be avoided by the prudent pilot who sails, with stopped ears, close along “the coasts of the scriptures.” ²⁹ There is a subtle blurring of genders in these hideous figures, in which femininity embraces the serpentine, a monstrosity gathering all disavowed carnality into itself. It is a small step from the monstrous to the more graphically grotesque, ³⁰ a step that Ambrose seems to take easily as he recounts the death of the arch-heretic Arius: “For Arius’ bowels gushed out . . . and so he burst asunder in the midst, falling headlong and besmirching those foul lips wherewith he had denied Christ.” Ambrose invites contrast between the grotesque quality of the figure of Arius and the sublimated eroticism of the following representation of the evangelist John: “Whom, then, are we to believe?—St. John, who lay on Christ’s bosom, or Arius, wallowing amid the outgush of his very bowels?” he asks. ³¹ In John, not heresy but the male body of orthodoxy is feminized in an asceticizing rejection of grotesque masculinity. Here what is striking is the flexibility of the gendering of Ambrose’s discourse, represented as both transcendently masculine in relation to a monstrously carnal femininity and ascetically feminized in relation to a grotesquely carnal masculinity. This gendered flexibility echoes the ambiguities of the framing presentation of the bishop’s word as swordlike, on the one hand, and alternately superior and submissive in relation to the sword, on the other. [End Page 469]

The grotesque heretic’s lips, sullied with the outpourings of his own burst bowels, are contrasted with the pure lips of the orthodox bishop, cleansed with the burning coal of the divine word and the purifying wine of the eucharistic cup. ³² Ambrose remains nevertheless ambivalent about the purity of his own speech, an ambivalence that on the one hand measures the distance between earthly words and divine Word (in relation to which human beings are not so much lips as ears, as Ambrose elaborates), but on the other hand captures a paradox of the divine Word itself, which expresses itself both through the sword and through the voluntary renunciation of the sword. “For we would not overthrow, but rather heal; we lay no ambush for them, but warn them as in duty bound. Kindliness often bends those whom neither force nor argument will avail to overcome,” remarks Ambrose of his own discourse. ³³ “However, if our adversaries cannot be turned by kindness, let us summon them before the Judge,” the former provincial governor adds significantly. ³⁴ The “kindliness” of a persuasive and healing word is contrasted with the uncompromising authority of a word that carries with it judgment and the threat of violence. In a later addition to the books of De fide Ambrose aptly captures the dilemma of orthodox speech: “If we are silent, we shall seem to be giving way; and if we contend against them, there is the fear that we too shall be held to be carnal.” ³⁵ Ambrose’s written discourse locates itself in this tension between a silent and implicitly feminized modesty and the contentious clamor of masculine competition: “For this reason it was our intention to write somewhat, in order that our writings might without any din answer the impiety of the heretics on our behalf.” ³⁶ Competitively masculine, from one perspective, Ambrose’s orthodox writing nevertheless also represents itself in strategically feminized terms that serve to veil aggression—thereby deviously maneuvering the bishop into a position of superiority in relation to the emperor, who is potentially marked with the grotesque literalism of the sword. At the same time, Ambrose’s representation of orthodox discourse also disrupts the construction of even a sublimated “phallus” by conjoining it paradoxically with the sources of its own critique.

Turning from De fide to two slightly earlier texts, De virginibus and De viduis, the reader encounters the complex gendering of Ambrose’s orthodox discourse from a somewhat different angle. These ascetic treatises, [End Page 470] forged in the heat of debate about the ascetic life advocated by the theologically controversial bishop, ³⁷ complement our reading of De fide by providing a more direct window onto the textual “body” of Ambrosian orthodoxy. This is a body that both speaks the word and is spoken by it, wields the sword and is pierced by it, directs the eye and is made the object of its own gaze—a textual body that (as we shall see) is frequently represented as female, yet also reinscribed with the heavy markings of masculinity.

De virginibus, which constitutes Ambrose’s bold debut into the field of theological writing, anticipates De fide’s problematization of the word: in an ascetic context, masculinized speech can be represented as an affront to modesty and silence interpreted as a sign of virtue rather than lack of rhetorical skill. Ambrose strategically presents his decision finally to take up the pen after more than two years in the episcopacy as a solution to the dilemma presented by the spoken word: “since too my words are listened to with greater risk to modesty than when they are written, for a book has no feeling of modesty.” ³⁸ Despite this claimed dissociation of the written word from any lingering authorial presence, Ambrose is nevertheless inclined to interpret writing as an act of still greater audacity than speech, noting subsequently that “some one may wonder why I, who cannot speak, venture to write.” ³⁹ Having thus not so much argued as asserted the paradoxical humility of his own voice as writer, Ambrose almost immediately shifts his strategy, offering a textual body that more successfully represents the audacious modesty of his discourse in the figure of the virgin martyr Agnes, whom he describes as triumphing over the power of the state by paradoxical means, through her voluntary submission to an explicitly sexualized sword. “She was fearless under the cruel hands of the executioners, she was unmoved by the heavy weight of the creaking chains, offering her whole body to the sword of the raging soldier, as yet ignorant of death [End Page 471] but ready for it.” ⁴⁰ As Ambrose’s Agnes demands that her executioner not delay a death which consummates her marriage to the bridegroom Christ, she seems ready to take up the sword herself. Another virgin martyr, with whose tale Ambrose ends his treatise, accomplishes this merging of the roles of martyr and executioner more literally. Ambrose’s young Pelagia muses, “In truth, if we think of the real meaning of the word, how can what is voluntary be violence?” She goes on to plan her own death: “I fear not that a sword will be wanting. I can die by my own weapons, I can die without the help of an executioner. . . .” ⁴¹ Agnes and Pelagia are strangely masculine girls, in the same act asserting their wills triumphantly and offering their bodies submissively, simultaneously welcoming the sword’s violence and refusing to partake in the agonistic exchange in which masculinity is tested and defined: from the perspective of the complex gendering of Ambrosian orthodoxy, the ambiguous virgin martyrs are productive figures indeed.

A figure from a tale which forms the centerpiece of the literary pastiche of De virginibus may draw still closer to orthodoxy’s body, seeming partly to break through the discourse’s resistance to a direct representation of maleness—namely, the figure of the lion in Ambrose’s version of Thecla’s story. According to Ambrose, the male lion initially faces the virginal martyr Thecla in the arena threateningly, explicitly mirroring the sexual violence signalled by both the “rage” of Thecla’s would-be husband and the “immodest eyes” of the male onlookers who gaze upon the spectacle of her nakedness; yet, subsequently, “by some transfusion of nature” the beast achieves a restrained attitude of reverence for the self-sacrificing virgin who, we are told, freely offers to the lion her “vital parts.” By the end of the episode, the single, tamed lion has been pluralized, facilitating his merging with the male spectators, similarly transformed from a state of transgressive immodesty to one of respectful modesty: “The lions taught a lesson in chastity when they did nothing but kiss the virgin’s feet, with their eyes turned to the ground, as though bashful, lest any male, even a beast, should see the virgin naked.” ⁴² Here modesty serves in part as a veil, or rather a strategy of further sublimation, in a context in which the lion’s averted, feminized gaze continues paradoxically to restrain the virgin, his very gesture of honoring her—indeed of freely mirroring her feminine subjugation—becoming itself the vehicle of her constraint. ⁴³ [End Page 472]

De viduis parallels De virginibus in pursuing dual strategies for representing the gendered body of orthodoxy. Here, too, Ambrose recalls the stories of masculine women who take up the sword, and in this case he is quite explicit about how these figures serve as models or types of the male bishop. At the same time, the bishop continues his pursuit of the elusive male body, again with only limited success. Ambrose marvels at the bravery of the widow Judith: “When the men were intoxicated with wine and buried in sleep, the widow took the sword, put forth her hand, cut off the warrior’s head, and passed unharmed through the ranks of the enemy.” ⁴⁴ The widow’s bravery is for Ambrose paradoxically conjoined with her modesty: “She stirred up her own friends by her modesty, and struck terror into the enemy so that they were put to flight and slain.” ⁴⁵ In Deborah he celebrates a similar paradox of gendered roles and virtues: “A widow, she governs the people; a widow, she leads armies; a widow, she chooses generals; a widow, she determines wars and orders triumphs.” He concludes, “It is not sex, but valour which makes strong.” ⁴⁶ The ascetic Ambrose goes on to compare the figure of the bishop quite explicitly with the figure of the widow, finding especially in Peter’s mother-in-law a type of the priest. “Peter’s mother-in-law, it is written, rose up and ministered to them. Well is it said, rose up, for the grace of the apostleship was already furnishing a type of the sacrament. It is proper to the ministers of Christ to rise, according to that which is written: ‘Awake, thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead.’” ⁴⁷ The parallel between the bishop and the widow, as Ambrose draws it, is precisely in their aroused responsiveness to a Healer Christ who comes “quenching desire with desire” (to invoke Jerome’s language). ⁴⁸ Ambrose urges the widow, “And do you then, who burn with many desires . . . call in the Physician, stretch forth your right hand to Him, let the hand of God touch your inmost being, and the grace of the heavenly Word enter the veins of your inward desires, let God’s right hand strike the secrets of your heart.” ⁴⁹ Likewise he enjoins the priest, who “must be free from the enticements of various pleasures . . . from the inward languor of body and soul”: “First be healed that thou mayest be able to minister.” ⁵⁰ As with the virgin martyr, the sexual metaphor for desire works to feminize the widow and priest in respect to a masculine Christ, configuring them as erotically passive [End Page 473] in a relationship that paradoxically also cures them of their feminine carnality and passivity—placing the sword in their hands, as it were.

Following this tentative and indirect approach toward imagining the male body of the priest, Ambrose returns his attention to the female figure of the widow; however, the male body, although elusive, cannot be altogether suppressed and subsequently reemerges in an intriguing discussion of eunuchs. Able to find some place for involuntary eunuchs, who are (in his view) denied the virtue of continence while still escaping the sin of sexual incontinence, Ambrose has more difficulty with “those who use the sword against themselves (in se ipsos ferro utuntur).” ⁵¹ The problem, for Ambrose, is that self-castration seems to represent “a declaration of weakness rather than a reputation of strength.” He notes with dismay that “on this principle no one should fight lest he be overcome, nor make use of his feet, fearing the danger of stumbling, nor let his eyes do their office because he fears a fall through lust,” concluding that “it becomes us to be chaste, not weak, to have our eyes modest, not feeble.” ⁵² Having reached this point of clarity, the bishop’s rhetoric gains momentum: “No one then ought . . . to multilate himself (se abscindere), but rather gain the victory; for the Church gathers in those who conquer, not those who are defeated.” ⁵³ From Ambrose’s perspective, the troubling energies of a masculine sexuality cannot be confined to the male genitalia and then simply pared away: “what does it profit to cut the flesh (carnem abscindere), when there may be guilt even in a look?” he asks tellingly. ⁵⁴ Yet, on the other hand, when the body of the true Christian is approached more closely, it would seem that its virile strength cannot be altogether dissociated from the male organ either—the examples of Judith and Deborah notwithstanding. “For why should the means of gaining a crown and of the practice of virtue be lost (eripitur) to a man who is born to honour, equipped for victory (ad victoriam praeparatus)?” queries the bishop, in language that anticipates his address to Gratian in De fide. “How can he through courage of soul mutilate (castrare) himself?” ⁵⁵

One final image from the text of De viduis may be mentioned briefly. In the closing passages of this work, Ambrose compares the widow to a soldier who “when his time is ended, lays aside his arms” or a laborer who [End Page 474] “as he grows too old, entrusts the guiding of the plough to others.” ⁵⁶ Here the sword and plough—both traditional metaphors for the penis ⁵⁷—signify the sexual relations that the widow “lays aside” in her decision not to remarry. This is obviously a partial reversal of the previous image of the widow-with-sword, and significantly it is one with which Ambrose is not quite content. In an odd mixing of metaphors, he finishes by noting that the elderly laborer is “still ready to prune the vine,” “to cut off with his pruning knife the wantonness of youth.” ⁵⁸ Through a not-so-subtle sleight of hand, the discarded plough is replaced by the knife.

How is the discursive body of late ancient orthodoxy gendered, in texts that play with the paradoxical images of warrior widows and violent virgins, recumbent disciples and docile lions, eunuchs and swordless soldiers? Gendered ambiguity creates flexibility without decisively decentering maleness, in a rhetorical context powerfully shaped not only by the economies of masculine competition but also by a dispute about the cultural status of masculinity itself. However elusive the figures that remain at the edges of our field of vision, however indirect the trajectories of images that so frequently bounce off the reflective surfaces of female flesh, it seems clear enough that the body woven through these late ancient texts is “finally” male. Does the Christian discourse of Ambrose then present itself as a “phallic” word, in the terms of contemporary psychoanalytic or linguistic theory? The answer to this question is (of course), yes and no. This reading of Ambrose’s apologetic address to Gratian and his early treatises on female asceticism suggests that the paradoxically feminized stance of the ascetic male could allow for the emergence of both “anti-phallic” subversions of masculine discourse—expressed through rhetorical renunciations of the violence of sword, intrusiveness of gaze, contentiousness of word—and strategies of sublimation that contributed crucially not to the deconstruction but rather to the powerful idealization of the “phallus.” Denying and therefore successfully transcending its bodily anchorings without the loss implied by “mutilation,” the sky’s the limit for an orthodoxy that can rise even above emperors, “equipped for victory,” in Ambrose’s memorable phrase.