The Narrative Shape of Emotion in the Preaching of John Chrysostom by Blake Leyerle;

Author:Blake Leyerle;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520975729
Publisher: University of California Press

Disgust

Although disgust does not figure in Aristotle’s social analysis, many since Darwin have placed it among the most primal emotions. At its core, it is linked with the sense of taste. Specifically, it names the reaction to the ingestion—either real or imagined—of an offensive object, an embodied belief that a rejected item is both distasteful and dangerous.61 It is thus predictably triggered by bodily products (feces, urine, vomit, blood, and mucus), and by corpses (or any violation of the body “envelope”), as well as by creatures that commonly come in contact with rotting flesh (flies, rats, vultures, and other scavengers). Its characteristic facial expression of nose wrinkle, upper lip retraction, and mouth gape—with or without tongue extension—mimics an instinctive expulsive reaction and can be readily identified across cultures.62 But disgust can also be elicited by purely ethical violations, especially those connected to notions of divinity.63 On the basis of these two quite different triggers, Paul Rozin and colleagues have termed disgust “the body and soul emotion.”64

Chrysostom shows himself adept at evoking disgust and typically binds the two kinds of elicitors tightly together. References to vomit, snot, and excrement occur throughout his homilies, where they serve to arouse his listeners by contaminating behaviors that they find unproblematic or pleasurable. Consider, for example, the following description of the effect of sin: “They do not see like a healthy person, nor hear clearly, nor speak articulately, but are full of gas, and go about with saliva dripping from their mouths. If only it were saliva and nothing worse! But as it is, they vomit out words fouler than any muck and—what is more intolerable—they cannot spit away this saliva of words, but instead, taking it in their hand really grossly, they smear it on again, thick and coagulated.”65 He knows that his words disgust his listeners, since he immediately adds, “You’re probably sickened (nautiate) at this description.” But triggering nausea is his intention: “Be more so at the reality.” To arouse his congregation from their slack indifference, he intentionally evokes the disgust reaction. To this same end, we find numerous references to pigs.

Pigs were familiar figures in the great cities of late antiquity. As scavengers, they performed the vital service of seeking out and devouring all kinds of organic waste: a category that included not only rotting foodstuffs, but also feces, and corpses.66 Such alimentary choices made the animal a ready elicitor of disgust. Chrysostom evokes the pig’s proclivity for dirt—in all its nastiest forms—to correct a range of moral failings, and in particular, covetousness and illicit sensuality.

Where Chrysostom uses piggish language to describe greed, the imagery targets both the quantity of food consumed and the avidity with which delicacies are sought out. “As a hog loves to wallow in sewer filth,” John intones, so are the greedy.67 Like a pig rooting in the dirt for delicacies, they poke about mines and caverns searching for precious metals and gems.68 Their houses may be made of gold, but their heads are “smeared with sin.”69

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