An Embodied Reading of The Shepherd of Hermas; The Book of Visions and its Role in Moral Formation; Harkins

Angela Kim Harkins [+–]

Boston College

Angela Kim Harkins is Professor at the Boston College School of Theology and Ministry, USA. She was a Marie Curie International Incoming Fellow at the University of Birmingham, UK, in 2014–2015, and a Fulbright Scholar at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, in 1997–1998.

Harkins has authored or edited eight books and more than 40 journal articles and essays on prayers, emotions, and religious experience in ancient Jewish and Christian texts.

She is the author of Reading with an “I” to the Heavens: Looking at the Qumran Hodayot through the Lens of Visionary Traditions (De Gruyter, 2012), and Experiencing Presence in the Second Temple Period (Peeters, 2022). She is the co-editor of several volumes, the most recent of which are Experiencing the Shepherd of Hermas, with Harry O. Maier (De Gruyter, 2022) and Selected Studies on Deuterocanonical Prayers, with Barbara Schmitz (Peeters, 2021). Angela Kim Harkins and Jonathan Klawans are the co-editors of the Journal of Ancient Judaism (Brill).

The Shepherd of Hermas (70–150 CE) is one of the oldest Christian writings from a major urban center. While the majority of manuscript evidence of the Shepherd is concentrated in North Africa, the work has a long-standing association with the city of Rome. It consists of three major sections: the Book of Visions, the Mandates, and the Similitudes. The Shepherd was enormously popular during the early centuries as a catechetical text used for moral formation. Its manuscript evidence during the early centuries far exceeded that of the Gospels.

This book focuses on the first section of the Shepherd known as the Book of Visions, which narrates Hermas’s visionary experiences in first-person voice. The book argues that enactive reading can help to generate immersive experiences of Hermas’s visions and explain the success of the Book of Visions among ancient readers. Cognitive approaches also highlight how modern scholars, who are trained to read apocalypses ‘against the grain’ in their search for historical or theological information, fail to notice and appreciate the very things that made apocalypses engaging to a broad range of ancient readers and hearers.

Series: Studies in Ancient Religion and Culture

Prelims

Abbreviations vii

Acknowledgements ix-x

Introduction

Seeing the Shepherd of Hermas with New Eyes 1-28

Chapter 1

The Popularity of the Shepherd of Hermas in the Ancient World [+–] 29-62

Chapter One presents the manuscript evidence for the Shepherd and shows that it was a compelling work for ancient readers, especially for the elite literary culture at Oxyrhynchus in the third and fourth centuries. This narrative of a man with a slavish past was a very successful literary work, an achievement that can be measured by the fact that it was produced with a frequency that rivaled or exceeded that of the Gospels. The ancient evidence indicates that the Shepherd was identified by ancient authors as an important catechetical work, but this alone does not account for its widespread popularity. We know that the Shepherd was extremely popular in regions where there was a strong elite literary culture, particularly in third- and fourth-century Oxyrhynchus in Egypt. This chapter begins by asking generally what the elite literary culture of third- and fourth-century Oxyrhynchus found appealing about the visionary experiences of a former slave. We review all of the early manuscript evidence that has survived for the Shepherd, with special attention to the oldest manuscript that preserves the sequence of the Book of Visions and Mandates together in a bookroll format. This is the papyrus manuscript known as P.Oxy 69.4706, which is dated to the third century. This chapter argues that the physical experience of reading the Shepherd in a bookroll instead of in a codex introduces a new set of questions that scholars of this ancient work have not previously considered. The bookroll apparatus constrains the reader’s reading by ensuring that he or she moves through the Visions in a linear way. The format also prevents random access of the later parts of the Mandates and Similitudes, ensuring that the reader moves to those portions of the Shepherd only when he or she is ready to do so.

Chapter 2

Taking a Look at Hermas [+–] 63-99

Chapter Two examines references to Hermas’s proprioception and interoception in greater detail. This chapter continues to highlight how the modern reception of the Shepherd by scholars stands in contrast to the enormous popularity of the Shepherd among the literary elite in Egypt. Modern commentators routinely note the text’s monotony and repetition, with significant disdain for the unheroic character of Hermas. This chapter analyzes the proprioceptive and interoceptive cues in the text to read the Book of Visions enactively and immersively. Painstaking descriptions about Hermas’s bodily postures and movement, along with interoceptive details about his fear and anguish are often dismissed as mundane or unimportant by modern scholars who read for analysis and information; yet these are precisely the details used in enactive reading. Such details are needed to understand Hermas as a compelling character with an interior consciousness. Details about Hermas’s awareness of his embodied movement through the narrative world (proprioception) and descriptions about his awareness of interior states of emotion (fear, anguish, dread, as well as sexual arousal (interoception) are recognized from our own lived experience and associated strongly with the consciousness of real individuals. Proprioception refers to the kinesthetic details about the seer’s extended body as it moves through space. It also includes descriptions of the seer’s bodily positioning and posture. The Book of Visions also provides abundant details about the seer’s visceral interior experiences, which are known as interoception. These are associated with the bodily experiences of pain, hunger, temperature, and sexual arousal. They also include emotions of the seer that are displayed in the body. For example, the state of fear can be expressed in the body through various interoceptive experiences: weeping, blanching of the face, goosebumps, nausea, clammy hands, or the trembling of the body. Consideration of these embodied experiences can broaden our understanding of sensory perception by moving beyond the classic sensorium of the five senses: seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching. The first-person narration that is characteristic of apocalypses allows a reader to imaginatively enact Hermas’s proprioceptive and interoceptive cues and greatly assists in a reader’s ability to imagine him in a compelling way, as a person with an interior consciousness.

Chapter 3

Sticky Thoughts that Make Presence from Absence [+–] 100-130

Chapter Three explores how the cognitive process known as rumination is generated and exploited in the Book of Visions in a way that further grips the readerly imagination. Rumination is the on-going, involuntary contemplation associated with various cognitive processes: decentering, problem-solving, and the mind’s ability to make presence from absence. Here we consider the different ways the Book of Visions uses scenarios and scenes to generate the cognitive state of rumination experientially within the reader. In addition to describing the ways ancient texts sought to place narrative scenes before the eyes of the reader by using rhetorical strategies like ekphrasis and energeia, this chapter proposes that the cognitive processes associated with rumination can shed light on two elements of Hermas’s visions: (1) the excessive desire that Hermas has for the bathing Rhoda, and (2) the regret and longing that Hermas experiences through his recurring acts of compunction. While often connected to grief, rumination is a way of speaking about the cognitive processes associated with problem-solving and pining for romantic love. Rumination includes the cognitive processes that are associated with different varieties of recurrent thinking, “sticky thoughts” that persist and create palpable experiences for the reader. Chapter Three explores how the arresting scene of the bathing Rhoda that opens the Book of Visions can be said to generate “sticky thoughts” that stay with Hermas and create the opportunity for him to be confronted by his excessive desire in the form of the heavenly Lady. This provides a model whereby readers can examine their own innermost thoughts, perhaps especially necessary for evaluating those thoughts that were not acted upon. Hermas’s recurring weeping and remorse-filled actions throughout the Book of Visions resemble those of early Jewish apocalypticists whose practices can be said to have contributed to the ruminative states that led to the experiencing of visions, in which presence is made from absence.

Chapter 4

Experiencing the Journey [+–] 131-163

Chapter Four is divided into two sections. The first discusses how cognitive literary theory’s understandings of spatiality and journeying can be understood strategically to heighten a reader’s watchfulness for what will happen in the narrative. Hermas’s nighttime journey and waiting in the field function purposefully to prepare the reader for the vision of the Tower in Vis. 3. This strategic framing is found in other apocalypses and has not been appreciated by modern scholars who rush to interpret the Tower vision. The second part of the chapter applies cognitive literary theory’s understanding of narrative worlds and spaces, including approaches known as ecocriticism and wayfinding, and applies them to Hermas’s fourth vision of the beast. This chapter argues that reading the Book of Visions in a bookroll format allows for the accumulation of affect and anticipation within the reader as he or she moves from this portion of the Shepherd into the later sections of ethical instruction.

Chapter 5

Immersion in the Narrative World of Apocalyptic Visions [+–] 164-188

While overwhelming evidence points to the widespread popularity of the Shepherd and its role in moral formation, the majority of modern scholarship on the Shepherd has been driven by disciplinary questions that seek exegetical, theological, and historical information. Since the focus of our study is the first book of the Shepherd of Hermas known as the Book of Visions, Chapter Five begins with an examination of how the Shepherd has been understood within the broad scholarship of ancient apocalypses. This chapter follows on the heels of the previous discussion, which established the Shepherd’s success as a popular work among the elite literary readers of the third-and fourth-centuries. In contrast to the Shepherd’s generally positive reception in the ancient world, modern scholars have received the work with ambivalence. This chapter examines how the literary form of visions, or what modern scholars call the apocalypse genre, contributed to the Shepherd’s popularity among ancient readers. Interdisciplinary approaches associated with cognitive literary theory are used to complicate the historical-critical understanding of ‘apocalypse’ as it has been applied to the Shepherd of Hermas by analyzing (1) the scholarly distinction between “thisworldly” and “otherworldly” spaces, and (2) the kinds of bodily experiences had by the seer, Hermas, which are presented in this chapter as proprioceptive and interoceptive experiences. This chapter begins with the modern form-critical understandings of apocalypses and raises questions about the strong conceptual divide that is often set up between “thisworldly” and “otherworldly” experiences. Instead of the stark divide between the spaces and experiences of “thisworld” and the “otherworld,” a distinction that perpetuates an analytical bifurcation of reality, our discussion presumes that the worldview of the author of the Shepherd is porous and “spirit-infused.” Ancient apocalypses present “thisworldly” and “otherworldly” experiences as intertwined and overlapping, not as two totally distinct realms set apart from one another. The second part of this chapter argues that the description of the seer’s proprioception and interoception found in the Book of Visions is similar to other apocalypses in its concern to provide a detailed description of the bodily experiences of the seer. We argue that apocalypses provide readers with access to the kinds of embodied experiences that allow them to infer the presence of an interior consciousness and to gather information about the possible world of the seer. Apocalypses achieve this vivid immersive quality through descriptions of the seer’s proprioceptive and interoceptive experiences.

Conclusion

Conclusion [+–] 189-194

The book concludes by returning to the opening discussion of the bookroll as a format that limits and constrains the reader’s experience of the narrative. The Visions also cultivate emotional predispositions for introspection and self-examination as Hermas’s interior consciousness becomes disclosed more and more to the reader. Watchfulness increases as the reader moves with Hermas along his foot-journey through the narrative world of the Book of Visions. These effects of enactive reading contribute to the moral formation of the reader by drawing the reader immersively into Hermas’s narrative world and cultivating the emotional states that generate the necessary predispositions for reading the subsequent sections known as the Mandates and the Similitudes, namely a watchfulness and a heightened state of anticipation.

End Matter

Bibliography 195-215

Index of Ancient Texts 216-227

Reviews

This book is a breath of fresh air in biblical studies, presenting as it does an enormous amount of insight into different theoretical perspectives. Harkins’s analyses of the Book of Visions are thought-provoking, and her application of embodied cognition to an ancient apocalyptic text is stimulating and demonstrates the potential of enactive reading.
Angela Kim Harkins is to be commended for her meticulous care in balancing the cognitive and psychological insights on universal human dispositions with the historically and culturally conditioned contexts of our ancient sources.
Armin W. Geertz (University of Arhaus) and Melissa Sayyad Bach (University of Copenhagen), Journal of the American Academy of Religion

Angela Kim Harkins has pioneered a fresh chapter in Shepherd of Hermas research, aligning herself with the recent revival of interest in Hermas studies. She steers away from the traditional historical critical preoccupations of Shepherd scholars (date, number of authors, genre, social and historical backdrop, etc.) to consider the work in a new way through a combination of literary theory and cognitive science. She pushes back against scholarly criticisms of the Shepherd as an overlong and boring writing filled with irrelevant and tedious details, even a failed apocalypse, to argue instead that such assessments fail to understand the way these aspects engaged ancient readers and listeners to make it one of the most widely read and popular works of the Early Church.
This study presents the guild with a new way of engaging the Shepherd that will repay scholarly attention.
Journal of Ecclesiastical History

Studies in Ancient Religion and Culture

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An Embodied Reading of the Shepherd of Hermas

The Book of Visions and its Role in Moral Formation

Angela Kim Harkins [+–]

Boston College

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