C.P. Cavafys Christianity in The Context

C.P.
Cavafy’s Christianity in the Context of Fin de

Siècle Discourses on Pleasure: The Vicissitudes of
Reinvented Love
Vasiliki Dimoula
Journal of Modern Greek Studies, Volume 37, Number 1, May 2019, pp. 149-178
(Article)
Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/mgs.2019.0005
For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/723005
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C.P. Cavafy’s Christianity in the Context
of Fin de Siècle Discourses on Pleasure:
The Vicissitudes of Reinvented Love
Vasiliki Dimoula
Abstract
In many fin de siècle medical and literary texts, Christianity is understood

not as a religion of the soul but as a cultural background which favors the
production of discourses on the body and its pleasures. A reading of Christian
allusions in C.P. Cavafy’s writings in this intertextual context sheds new light
on the role of religion in his work by uncovering a strong connection between
Christianity and modes of enjoyment. This is true especially in poems that
bear the traces of the transition from the Greco-Roman world to that of Chris-
tianity. The enjoyment sustaining the Christian dialectic between fleshly
obsession and guilt can be traced back to the patristic texts on which Cavafy
relied for poetic material. But the strong affects (disgust, fear, terror) that are
associated with and even generated by Christianity in a number of his texts
(“Salome,” “Julian at the Mysteries,” “Terror,” “Myris”) suggest that Cavafy
places Christian enjoyment in a critical perspective. Τhe same affects mark
the intersection between Christianity and sexuality in the work of Arthur
Rimbaud, who—despite his very different ironic poetics—offers a parallel to
Cavafy’s rewriting of the body through rather than in spite of the Christian
legacy.
In the unfinished fourth volume of his History of Sexuality, Les Aveux de la

chair (Confessions of the flesh), which was not published until 2018, Michel
Foucault explores the key role of the mechanisms of power and control that
Christianity developed around the flesh for the production of discourses
which placed sexuality at the heart of modern subjectivity.1 In what follows,
I take the Foucauldian, secular view of Christianity—as a set of histori-
cal and cultural practices in which the genealogy of the Western subject is
Journal of Modern Greek Studies 37 (2019) 149–178 © 2019 by The Modern Greek Studies Association
149
150 Vasiliki Dimoula
embedded—as a lens through which we can read the intersections between

the Christian cultural inheritance and discourses on sexuality that appear
in fin de siècle medical and literary texts.2 In line with Foucault, modern
scholarship on biblical and postbiblical accounts has displaced the emphasis
from the preoccupation with the salvation of the soul to the prominence of
the body in the Christian tradition (Brown 1988; Bynum 1991, 1995; Shaw
1998; Harvey 2006; Smith 2008; Kleinberg 2015). But it is not before the end
of the nineteenth century and the nascent scientia sexualis in the West that
the behavior and functions of the Christian body were drawn into the realm
of the sexual, now broadened to include pleasures which are classified as
so-called perversions. My main aim in this essay will be to draw attention to
the relevance of this contemporary Western European context to C.P. Cavafy’s
conflicted engagement with Christianity.
Despite his different Orthodox environment and the “splendor of our
Byzantine heritage” (“In the Church,” 1892/1912) that fuels his interest in a
Hellenic-Christian and Hellenic-Oriental synthesis in the 1890s (see Haas
1996, 71–90; 91–102), Cavafy was also exposed to the perverse sense of Chris-
tianity that appears in the contemporaneous reception of the Western Chris-
tian tradition via his readings of the French decadents (Joris-Karl Huysmans,
Paul Verlaine, Charles Baudelaire) and British aesthetes (Oscar Wilde, Walter
Pater).3 As Ellis Hanson shows in his seminal study Decadence and Catholi-
cism (1997), decadent authors invoked Christian rhetoric in order to express
“perverse” or “aberrant” (16, 18, 21) sexualities in their work. They represent
the climax of a tradition that builds on “the great paradox at the heart of
Christianity, the always already transgressed boundary between spirit and
flesh” (Hanson 1997, 10–18). Hanson’s analysis tends to celebrate the spiritu-
alizing, mystical overtones conferred by Catholicism on the morbid eroticism
of the decadents (1997, 23).4 Cavafy’s texts, on the contrary, both employ and
critically reflect upon the fleshly emphasis of Christian discourse and its fin
de siècle transformations, thus exposing the cultural burden of the dialectic
between guilt and the fascination with the flesh which Foucault sees at work
within the Christian genealogy of modern subjectivity. Arthur Rimbaud—in
whose work the cultural impact of Christianity as a religion of the flesh is read
ironically—is a parallel case. A brief discussion of his work better teases out
Cavafy’s critical stance.5 The strong affects (disgust, fear, horror) that mark the
intersection between Christian rhetoric and the expression of aberrant sexual-
ity in both Rimbaud and Cavafy, far from contributing to the mystification of
sexuality, serve to historicize and render culturally tactile the contamination
of the sensual world by Christian guilt.6
Cavafy’s Christianity in the Context of Discourses on Pleasure 151
My focus on Christianity and the flesh in Cavafy brings together two

aspects that scholarship to date has tended to keep apart. On the one hand,
Christian allusions are deemed accidental or secondary to the exploration of
an eroticism that centers on blood, pain, illness, and suffering in Cavafy’s work
(Vassiliadi 2010, 7). On the other hand, Christianity is considered as a dimen-
sion that contributes to the idealization or spiritualization of the flesh—an
approach legible in Diana Haas’s emphasis on the poet’s combination of Neo-
platonic and Christian influences, by which the limits “between the human and
the divine, the immaterial and the material” are effaced (1996, 212). Via com-
parison with Cavafy’s contemporary Western context, I insist instead on the
inherence of perverse, nonspiritualized eroticism in the Christian legacy itself.
My approach certainly neither denies the various other threads that compose
the “religious problem” (Haas 1996) in Cavafy, nor does it exhaust his interest
in Christianity, especially in the “sensual” and “material” (McClanan 2015, 31)
aspects of Christian culture that recent work has linked to the poet’s depiction
of the Byzantine world. Rather, it tries to reconstruct a broader history of the
problematic relations between Christianity and sexuality in Cavafy’s work
through the complex lens of fin de siècle writing on Christianity in general
and that of Rimbaud in particular. More specifically, while Christian morality
stigmatizes copulation as sinful, it thrives on a “perverse core” of sadomasoch-
istic pleasure (Lacan 1975, 144; Beattie 2015, 39), intimately linked to the sac-
rificial implications of the crucifixion.7 Although much more complicated and
broader, the psychoanalytic notion of jouissance may be invoked to describe
the kind of pleasure at work within Christianity: “there is jouissance at the level
at which pain begins to appear” (Lacan 1967, 60, quoted by Braunstein 2003,
103); “if desire is fundamentally lack, lack in being, jouissance is positivity, it
is a ‘something’ lived by a body when pleasure stops being pleasure” (2003,
104); it is “not the satisfaction of any bodily drive but one linked to the death
drive” (108); “jouissance appears in guilt, in remorse, in confession, in contri-
tion” (109). References to Christian pleasure throughout the essay assume this
nonpleasurable aspect of pleasure captured by jouissance.
Thus seen, the relations between Christianity and pleasure shed new
light on a number of Cavafy’s poems, especially those which stage the ten-
sions of the encounter between Hellenism and Christianity. In these poems,
Cavafy invokes a paradigm of desire associated with the Greco-Roman world,
a desire which is playful, shifting, and versatile, and brings it into sharp con-
trast not with Christian asceticism but with Christian jouissance and its affec-
tive accompaniment of disgust as the “experience of a nearness that is not
wanted” (Menninghaus 2003, 1). This contrast is Cavafy’s distinctive way of
historicizing and criticizing the establishment of pain, guilt, and disgust at

the very heart of Christian fleshly enjoyment. However, disgust is a conflictual
affect, in which attraction is hard to distinguish from repulsion (Miller 1997,
x). Poems such as “Kaisarion,” as well as Cavafy’s late love poetry, aspire to a
productive repurposing whereby those elements of the Christian tradition that
suggest transgressive eroticism are stripped of Christian guilt and the body
redefined as the site of a new affirmation of sensual experience.
Christianity as a cultural background for the development of discourses

on pleasure and perversion in fin de siècle medicine and literature
In this section, I will examine two different strategies of dealing with Christi-
anity in Cavafy’s contemporary fin de siècle Western context. First, some med-
ical and sexological studies and literary texts of the time uncover connections
between Christianity and the sexuality it supposedly attempted to repress, often
utilizing mystical allegories stemming from Christianity for the idealization of
“deviant” love. Second, and in contrast to the reappropriation of Christianity for
sexuality, Rimbaud offers an example of the poetic rejection of Christian plea-
sure through ironic disgust at the way Christianity has polluted fleshly desire.
Fin de siècle medicine and literature. In his Studies in the Psychology of Sex,
Havelock Ellis, the theorist of sexual inversion who was also Cavafy’s contem-
porary, observes that it is not in pagan but in Christian literature that sexual
references proliferate: “the preoccupation of much early Christian literature,
with sexual matters, may be said to be vastly greater than was the case with
the pagan society they had left. Paganism accepted sexual indulgence and was
then able to dismiss it. . . . But the Christians could not thus escape from the
obsession of sex; it was ever with them” (Ellis 1921, 151).
Fin de siècle medical and sexological authors, whose relevance to Cavafy’s
work has been demonstrated by Dimitris Papanikolaou (2014, 91–149), reveal
this same obsession when they weave Christian references into the new dis-
course on so-called perverse sexuality. It was not uncommon for sexologists,
despite their general mistrust of religion, to look back to the early stages of
Christianity, the gospels, and the Church Fathers for a connection between
faith and the body—which was, or so the narrative goes, later replaced by the
prejudiced rejection of sexuality a thousand years later.8 Legitimizing in its pri-
mary intent, the gesture to place the new interest in the body’s polymorphous
eroticism under the auspices of a language of authority ultimately became a
reading of Christian discourse itself as dangerously close to the perversions it
presumably condemned. In Uranisme et unisexualité, Marc-André Raffalovich

inadvertently brings the lovers of Christ and the pervert lovers described by
Richard von Krafft-Ebing next to one another: “the soul of man which cries
and kisses the feet, the hands, the merciful side” of Christ in the texts of the
mystics (Angelus Silesius, Friedrich Spee, Saint John of the Cross, Saint Teresa)
is animated by a passion hard to distinguish from that of the lovers in Psycho-
pathia sexualis, who suffer from “sadism, masochism and unisexuality” (Raf-
falovich 1896, 31). In Psychopathia sexualis, Krafft-Ebing himself establishes
connections between religious and sexual feeling: sadism and masochism are
said to result in both religious and sexual pleasure, while the most aberrant
“sexual episodes” are encountered in the lives of saints (1893, 7–10). Ellis again
builds on this connection between religious and sexual emotions in the work
of Krafft-Ebing and reports a number of case studies in which the two inter-
twine in a variety of ways. In Sexual Inversion, for example, one of Ellis’s case
studies (History IX) refers to patient R.S., aged 31, who confesses that he has
projected his inverted impulses, prohibited by society and education, onto the
Trinity, the Eucharist, and the Incarnation. These aspects of Christianity, the
patient further admits, arouse in his soul a “holy terror”—the same “terror”
we will soon encounter in Cavafy’s poem “Terror,” as well as in “Julian at the
Mysteries” (Ellis 1908, 65–66).
In the “decadent Catholicism” of contemporary literature, Christian mar-
tyrdom becomes a trope for the deviant pleasures of the vulnerable body. Saint
Sebastian is only the most famous figure to illustrate the complex overlapping
between Christianity and perversion that we already saw at work in the sex-
ological texts of the time. In the works of John Addington Symonds, Walter
Pater, Oscar Wilde, John Gray, and Marcel Proust, among others—and often
under the influence of Renaissance depictions of the arrows piercing his body
(Kaye 1999, 113)—Sebastian is adored as the “homoerotic totem,” par excel-
lence.9 The fascination with martyrdom takes on such dimensions at the turn
of the century that Sebastian seems to do justice to Jacques Lacan’s insight that
the image of the crucifixion in Christian cultures is the “apotheosis of sadism”
avant la lettre, the “divinization of everything that remains in [the] sphere . . .
of the limit in which a being remains in a state of suffering” (Lacan 1986, 304;
translation, Lacan 1999, 262). Hanson captures something essential regarding
this distinctively Christian jouissance as pleasure-in-pain when he writes that
it achieves an effect whose essence is “erotic, though not necessarily genital or
even pleasurable” (1997, 121), and when he underlines the prominence of Chris-
tian references in the nonpleasurable pleasures of “shame, remorse, disgust,
and the occasional bout of syphilis” (Hanson 1997, 23).
Fin de siècle medical and literary texts therefore draw into the domain of
the sexual the vicissitudes of what in Christian tradition is referred to as the
“physical body,” the “burden of the flesh” (see Shaw 1998).10 It is noteworthy
that Foucault uses this latter word—flesh (chair)—to describe both the object
of Christian repression and the “confessing” agent, whose detailed accounts of
guilty pleasures transformed sex into discourse under the influence of Christi-
anity (Foucault 1976, 28–30). In other critical accounts of the Christian legacy,
it is again the flesh (rather than simply the body as a passive object) which
connotes self-reflexivity, “self-touching,” and immediate access to the body
proper, whether it be “Christ musing over his unleavened bread,” or Christ
“tearing open his throbbing, blood-soaked Sacred Heart” (Nancy 2008a, 5).11
No rigorous binary between flesh and the body is applicable to the poetry of
either Rimbaud or Cavafy—yet it is helpful to keep the distinction active as
we now turn to their ambivalent engagement with the multifaceted eroticism
carried by Christian rhetoric and themes.
The case of Rimbaud: Christianity, sexuality, and disgust. In the work of Arthur
Rimbaud, Christian references are woven into the exploration of a wide range
of nonprocreative erotic practices and aberrant pleasures. Religious rhetoric,
however, does not contribute to the idealization of deviant sexuality, as in the
case of the aforementioned texts on Saint Sebastian. Rather, Rimbaud conceives
of the mutual contamination of the Christian and the sexual as a curse: the
curse—as he puts it in Une saison en enfer (A season in hell)—of writing in
the West, namely, “this land, here, and Christianity” (“Mauvais Sang” [Bad
blood]).12 The disturbing blood ties maintained in Rimbaud’s oeuvre between
Christianity, sexuality, and disgust are symptomatic of his critical awareness
of a tradition that can more easily be denounced than escaped. The early poem
“Les Premières Communions” (“First Communions,” Poèmes, 1869–1871),
where he describes the First Communion of a girl, is a revealing example of
the unsettling influence the poet discerns in Christianity’s fleshly obsession.
It is on these grounds that his poetry can be read as a critique of Christianity.
The critique consists less in condemning the restrictions on the body imposed
by religion (Cohn 1973, 152) than in uncovering the contagious grip on the
imaginary that Christianity effects precisely as a religion enmeshed in things
sexual.13 Stanza 8 of the poem is a projection into the future, when the girl,
having become a woman, speaks to her husband and refers to the experience
of her First Communion. The girl’s disgusted, visceral reaction to the obscene
sexual promiscuity with Christ (“Il me bonda jusqu’à la gorge de dégoûts!”;
[Christ] choked me with loathing) is too strong to allow a relationship with

the husband that would not be haunted by this memory:
I was young, Christ soured my breath,
Choked me with loathing
For my First Communion was long ago.
It’s as if I’ve never known your touch.
And my heart and flesh which your flesh has known
Crawl with the putrid kiss of Christ.
(CP, 115).14
The idea of Christ’s rotting corpse disturbs the Christian imaginary, but Rim-
baud strikingly links the disgust of putrefaction not only with death but with
sexuality. The “putrid kiss of Christ,” argues Jacques Rancière, is the “true
poison” for Rimbaud himself: the “tyranny of baptism,” the “obligation of
salvation” (2004, 55). “Nuit de l’enfer” (“Night in Hell”) in Une saison en enfer
is central to this concept: “Et ce poison, ce baiser mille fois maudit!” (And that
poison, that kiss damned a thousand times!; CP, 226–227). Rimbaud’s Chris-
tianity—as Rancière’s intuitive reading suggests—amounts to the fact that “we
do not escape a salvation that has already occurred, one that, having already
occurred, is the true hell: the new hell, that of parody” (2004, 54).
Indeed, Christian references are also entangled in the subversive repul-
sions of the new erotics envisaged in Rimbaud’s Illuminations, placing the
reinvention of love to which Une saison en enfer aspires (“l’amour est à réin-
venter, on le sait”; CP, 228) under the perspective of a bitter irony. The first sen-
tence of Rimbaud’s enigmatic “Parade” (“Parade,” Illuminations, CP, 264–265)
announces the participants of the tragicomic spectacle staged by the poem:
“Des drôles très solides” (Weird-looking, sturdy types). Versatile and elusive
though these persons’ identity remains, their “exploitation” of people’s “con-
sciousness” and the paronymic proximity of the parade to a “most violent
Paradise of the furious grimace!” make plausible the connotation of a Catholic
priesthood and the ensuing parallel between the farce and a religious proces-
sion (Cohn 1973, 272–273). The satire of priesthood is intertwined with the
theme of erotic transgression, which also figures centrally in the parade: “There
are some young people—what would they make of Cherubino?—endowed with
frightening voices and dangerous resources. They are sent into town to parade
themselves, got up in disgusting luxury” (CP, 265). The expression “to parade
themselves” (prendre du dos) has been associated with homosexuality and the
episode of the Sodomites in the Bible to which “Parade” alludes (“bring them
out unto us, that we may know them,” Gen 19:5 [KJV]).15 In my reading, the
shadow of Christianity accounts for the fact that transgressive love is in the
poem associated with disgust (“disgusting luxury”), even as it points to a new
erotics beyond social and religious conformism.16
Disgust again accompanies love in the “atrocious fanfare” of “Matinée
d’ Ivresse” (“Morning of Drunkeness”): “We have the promise that the tree of
good and evil shall be buried in darkness, that tyrannical decencies shall be
exiled, so that we may introduce our love of utmost purity. It began in some
disgust and it finished––unable as we are to seize this eternity here and now––it
finished in a riot of scents” (CP, 271).17 Religious vocabulary of “holiness” and
“faith” permeates “Matinée d’ Ivresse,” even though the new love is explicitly
defined against religious morality (“the tree of good and evil shall be buried in
darkness”). Phrases and words “echo the cadences of Catholic catechism, even
as the physical giving that the poem proposes runs counter to the formulations
of Christian charity” (Cole 2003, 60):
Laughter of the children, discretion of the slaves, the virgins’ austerity, the horror
of the faces and objects which belong here, may you be hallowed by the memory
of this wake. It began in utter boorishness, here it is ending in angels of fire and
ice. . . . Small drunken wake, holy! . . . We have faith in the poison. We know how
to give our life whole, every day (CP, 273).
In the context of Rimbaud’s ironic poetics, the tension between religious rhet-
oric and unconventional “physical giving” cannot be resolved as the “sanctif
[ication of] physical pleasure” (Cole 2003, 60) but calls attention to what
remains a problem: by Rimbaud’s time, the Christian “physical body” had
been linked to polymorphous enjoyment to such an extent that poetry that
chose this body as the vehicle for the reinvention of love found itself enmeshed
in the Christian rhetoric that condemned it. Sacrifice (“We know how to give
our whole life”) and pain (“Atrocious fanfare in which I do not waver! magical
torture-rack! Salute the unheard-of work and the marvelous body, for the first
time!” [CP, 271]), the triumphal signals of new love, are cast in the melancholic
shadow of a “first time” that has already occurred.18 Rimbaud attempts to create
a vocabulary of desire only to realize that it has already been written by Chris-
tianity. The disgust that accompanies sexually liberated acts and that could be
directed against social propriety is enervated, since disgust itself is part of the
Christian vocabulary of guilt.
Fin de siècle Christianity and its affects in Cavafy
Reading Cavafy alongside the contemporary discourses we discussed in the pre-

vious section allows a new approach to the intertwinement of Christianity and
sexuality in his work: despite its explicit ascetic moral content, Christianity is
discursively linked to fleshly desires that fin de siècle science would categorize as
perversions. Our discussion of Rimbaud, on the other hand, better illuminates
Cavafy’s attitude to Christian pleasure: unlike many of their contemporaries,
neither Rimbaud nor Cavafy uses Christianity for the idealization of so-called
deviant love. Rather, as in Rimbaud, Christianity often appears in Cavafy as
a discourse of perverse eroticism whose attractions are shadowed by guilt—a
tension rendered in both poets by the conflictual affective nature of disgust.
Despite the commonality, a shift of temporal perspective is required to address
how Christianity and sexuality are intertwined in Cavafy, since Cavafy’s dis-
tinctive way to take critical distance from Christian pleasure is to place it in a
comparative perspective with the Greco-Roman pagan culture, in poems staged
at the historical moment of the transition between the two worlds.
Scholarship has indeed viewed the relation of Christianity and sexuality
in Cavafy as a parallel to his interest in the cultural and religious syncretism of
the Hellenistic and Roman periods. Discussing the conflicts staged in Cavafy’s
Julian poems, together with the encounter between paganism and Christianity
in, for example, “Dangerous Thoughts” (1911) and “Myris” (1929), G.W. Bow-
ersock argues that “permissive Christianity appears to be the fundamental
interest of Cavafy”: in the historical period in which the poems are placed,
being Christian did not “preclude being pagan in the old sense”; through the
historical analogues of his fictional characters, Cavafy thus moved “toward a
reconciliation of his sexuality and his Christianity” (2009, 150).19 Peter Jeffreys
situates the pagan/Christian binary in Cavafy in the broader Victorian context
of homoerotic aesthetics with the prominent example of Pater as a parallel to
the “interplay and precarious amalgamation of pagan hedonism and Christian
asceticism” (2015, 101). Undoubtedly, justice is being done here both to the
cultural and religious fluidity of the Hellenistic and Roman periods, as well as
to its importance for Cavafy. Yet Christianity’s alignment with asceticism is
taken for granted, and the Christian openness to sensuality remains contingent
on its syncretistic coexistence with Hellenism. I will argue, however, that some
of Cavafy’s Christian allusions from the early decade of the 1890s—which we
will follow in later works, too—initiate an engagement with Christianity not as
a spiritual religion but as a discourse of nonpleasurable pleasure and perverse
eroticism. In Cavafy’s work, it often seems that Hellenic culture in the Near
East—a culture that appears as “playful, curious, hedonistic, mindful of the

vagaries of desire, and marked by humor and good cheer” (Dellamora 2010,
121)—is contrasted not to Christian asceticism but to the obsessive, serious,
exclusive, and pain- and death-oriented nature of Christian pleasure. Inter-
estingly, this conflict deepens rather than bridges the gap between the pagan
and the Christian worlds.
A prominent figure in decadent, aestheticist, and symbolist literature
and art, Salome appears in Cavafy’s 1896 poem of this title, which essentially
puts into verse Jules Boissière’s version of the story in “Comédiens ambulants”
(Vassiliadi 2008, 29).20 In this version, a “young Hellenic rhetor,” a “Sage,”
lightheartedly asks Salome, who is in love with him, for her own head instead
of John’s. The following day, when a slave brings the head of the enamored
woman on a plate, he has already forgotten this desire, returning to his inter-
rupted reading of Plato. Boissière’s Greek rhetor, who becomes the “sophist” in
Cavafy, certainly matches his preoccupation with the Second Sophistic in the
Roman-Christian era, enabling him to highlight yet another parallel between
the sophist and the dandy of contemporary aestheticism (Vassiliadi 2008, 30).
But «αηδιάζει» (is disgusted), the verb Cavafy chooses to signal the sophist’s
reaction to the sight of Salome’s severed head, does not figure in his source. It
is added by the poet:
He sees the dripping blood and is disgusted (αηδιάζει).
He orders this bloodied thing to
Be taken from him, and he continues
His reading of the dialogues of Plato.
(Cavafy 2012, 288)
The addition is important. What is the significance of the object of the sophist’s
disgust, and how can it lead to a better understanding of Cavafy’s interest in
Boissière’s version? The discrepancies from the gospels in the myth Cavafy
narrates via Boissière (the sophist instead of Herod asks for the head, and it
is Salome’s and not John the Baptist’s head) do not obscure the reference to
John’s head behind that of Salome. Often invoking indulgence in “sublimated
sadomasochism” in its depictions in art history (Kristeva 2012, 71), the sev-
ered head of John is yet another image of pain that—like the Crucifixion or
the body of Saint Sebastian—codifies the jouissance accompanying gruesome
images in the Christian imaginary. Projected on the head of Salome, this kind
of pleasure brings to light all the more clearly the central paradox of Chris-
tianity’s attitude toward sexuality: while it bans Salome as the sex symbol of
the female seductress, Christian morality nevertheless flourishes on a morbid
fascination with suffering, blood, and sacrifice. The sophist’s disgust brings
forth the contrast between this kind of Christian pleasure and his own “skin-
deep,” playful (it is only jokingly, «αστειευόμενος», that he asks Salome for her
head), “platonic” attitude to desire.21 His appalled reaction does not cancel the
subversive aspect of what he finds repulsive, in a dialectic similar to the one
we followed in Rimbaud. Yet the disgust he expresses remains resonant as a
resistance to enjoyments foreign to Greek sobriety.
Like the sophist in “Salome,” the “bodiless figures” that surprise Julian
in the middle of his pagan conversion in «O Ιουλιανός εν τοις Μυστηρίοις»
(“Julian at the Mysteries,” 1896) are “disgusted” when he makes the sign of the
cross. This, at least, is the affect projected onto them by Julian’s new friends,
the sophists and philosophers who accompany him:
It was just that when they saw you
making that vile, that crude sign,
their noble nature was disgusted
and they left you in contempt
(KS, 181)22
Interpreted differently by the sophists (as “the greatest gods of our ancient
Greece”) and Julian (as “demons”), the figures also bear striking resemblances
to the “Beings and Things that have no name” in the “personal” version of
“Julian at the Mysteries,” «Τρόμος» (“Terror,” 1894; Cavafy 1993, 53), which
alludes to the “temptations of the flesh” that recur to disturb the poetic subject
in his chamber at night (Haas 1996, 361).23 Although “Terror” is written in the
form of a prayer to Christ («Δέσποτα Χριστέ μου», line 1) tο protect the poetic
subject from the «φρικώδη» (horrible; line 23) visions, the supplication, «κρύψε
με» (hide me), implicates the same threatening «τα κρυφά» (secrets; line 23),
which can at any moment assault the subject again in a vicious cycle of sin
and confession. In this reading, the affect implied in the poem is close to the
lingering horror that William Miller defines as “fear-imbued disgust” aroused
by something “for which no distancing or evasive strategies exist that are not
in themselves utterly contaminating” (1997, 26). Like disgust, terror therefore
underlines an intimate link between Christianity and the sins it is supposed to
dispel. Structurally, the link is further supported by the symmetrical position
of Christian faith and guilty fleshly desires in the temporal structure of the
two poems: Julian’s “pious” (that is, Christian) “impulse” («ένστικτο», line 7)
to cross himself belongs to the past, as does the «βδελυρούς καιρούς» (hideous
time) that the subject in “Terror” spent in the dark with the “Beings and Things
that have no name” (lines 9–12).
Furthermore, the affectively charged adjectives the Greeks apply to the

cross, «ποταπότατον» (vile) and «αγροίκον» (crude), indicate that the object
of the shame invoked by the Greeks (lines 19–20), as well as of the disgust
attributed to the ethnic gods, is implicated in passions and functions that tran-
scend mere dogmatic conflict. Read in this light, the verdict that the sophists
and philosophers pass on the incident—that the gods, and by implication they
themselves, were disgusted («συχάθηκεν η ευγενής των φύσις», line 29) by the
cross—does not target Christianity only as a spiritual credo but as a religion
entirely involved in the horrors of temptation, pleasure, and guilt that it con-
demns. Modeled on the words of their counterparts in Gregory of Nazianzen’s
Oration 4 in his “First Invective against Julian the Emperor” («εβδελύχθημεν
. . . ουκ εφοβήσαμεν»; we have made ourselves abominable . . . we have not ter-
rified them; see Haas 1996, 170), the sophists’ «εσυχάθηκεν» is also grounded
on the «βδελυρούς καιρούς» of “Terror.” It is interesting that the cross is
deemed to arouse the same affect as the objects which scare Julian and which
Nazianzen describes as “disgusting” (ἤχους τινάς φασιν ἀήθεις, καὶ ὀδμὰς
τῶν ἀηδῶν, and so on).24 In the end, the Greeks win the emperor back—to
the apparent disappointment of the narrator: “This is what they said to him, /
And the fool recovered from / His holy, blessed fear, convinced / By the unholy
words of the Greeks” (lines 30–33). Like the “holy terror” we encountered in
Ellis (1908, 65–66), Julian’s “holy fear” is aroused by a Christianity in which
guilt and fleshly obsession are inextricably linked, as the comparative reading
of “Terror” and “Julian at the Mysteries” indicated. In the exquisite irony of the
poem—in which Cavafy’s relation to his presumably Christian narrator as well
as to the poem’s characters remains uncertain—Julian’s final pagan conversion
is at once admired and regretted.
The guilty Christian pleasure implied in “Terror” and “Julian at the Mys-
teries” certainly differs from the hedonistic life of the Christians in a much
later poem about Julian dated 1926: «O Ιουλιανός και οι Αντιοχείς» (“Julian and
the Antiochians”). Staged in the years of Julian’s emperorship, the poem inter-
estingly contrasts his “prudish, moralistic form of paganism” (Keeley 1976,
120–121) to the Christians of Antioch, who refuse to give up “their brilliant
theater / Which consummated a union between Art / And the erotic proclivi-
ties of the flesh” (KS, 144). The Antiochians’ union of art and sensuality is cer-
tainly an ideal for Cavafy. Yet one might wonder if, besides prudish paganism,
he also favors it over the more problematic connection between Christianity
and the flesh. Besides contemporary decadence, Cavafy could have observed
the Christian conflation of pleasure and pain in patristic texts themselves. The
works of John Chrysostom, the Christian author who repeatedly castigated
the Antiochians’ way of life, offer a pertinent example.25 Cavafy explicitly

refers to Chrysostom in his 1918 prose essay «Εκκλησία και θέατρον» (Church
and the theater, 1918) in a footnote to his discussion about the “hatred” that
“Christian teachers” have for the “bloody spectacles” of the Graeco-Roman
theater in Antioch, among other «ανήθικων» (immoral) spectacles, and the
Hippodrome: «Πιαίνουν στο θέατρον όταν είναι ακόμη μέρα—μας λέγει ο
Χρυσόστομος—και φεύγουν αργά ‘υπό λαμπάσι και λύχνοις,’ ‘μαλακώτεροι
και πυρέσσοντες’ υπό την διέγερσι των παθών» ([Christians] go to the theater
in the day and leave late at night, feverish with stimulated passion; Cavafy 2003,
137). The reference sums up Chrysostom’s fierce critique of the theater in his
Contra ludos et theatra (PG 56.263–270) and elsewhere, and is more generally
of interest as a token of Cavafy’s familiarity with the author.26 On the other
hand, Chrysostom’s texts are a striking instance of the involvement of the
“proclivities of the flesh” in the very discourse that denounces them. It will
suffice to discuss this intertwinement with respect to the main affect that has
preoccupied us thus far: disgust.
Chrysostom evokes αηδία (disgust) with reference to the “physical body,”
to flesh saturated with enjoyment, as in the case of drinking and eating beyond
measure, to satiety, to the lack of the lack which would safeguard επιθυμία
(desire) and thus ηδονή (pleasure) (for example, In epistulam ad Hebraeos
(Homiliae 1–34), PG 63.208; In Joannem (Homiliae 1–88), PG 59.138). Besides
αηδία, per se, a number of words connoting filth or repulsion are mobilized
by Chrysostom with astonishing frequency, and here the connection to mea-
sureless indulgence in vices like gluttony and deviant, nonprocreative sexual
acts is again central (Leyerle 2009). At other times, αηδία is linked to the sick
and suffering flesh, as in passages where Chrysostom refers to the spectacle
of patients being cut open by doctors in the course of surgeries, which were
at the time performed in public and without anesthesia.27 Could we read the
pervasiveness in Chrysostom of a vocabulary of pain, blood, and suffering as
itself indexing the indulgence in the same questionable pleasures for which the
Christians of Antioch are deemed guilty?28 Could Cavafy have been sensitive
to this ambivalence in his Christian sources, in which so-called nonpleasurable
pleasures are denied with such persistence that they become the Christian
preoccupation, par excellence? At any rate, in his “Simeon” (1917), to which
we now turn, Cavafy avoided precisely those passages in the poem’s attested
literary and religious sources in which Christian jouissance is most prominent.
In one of his 1899 notes on Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,
after expressing his admiration for Simeon Stylites contra Gibbon’s merciless
hostility to monasticism, Cavafy adds a few critical remarks on Tennyson’s
poem “St. Simeon Stylites” (1833): “Its great defect lies in its form of a mono-
logue. The complaints of Simeon, his eagerness for the ‘meed of saints, the
white robe and the palm,’ his dubious humility, his latent vanity, are not objec-
tionable in themselves and maybe were necessary to the poem, but they have
been handled in a common, almost vulgar manner” (quoted in Haas 1982,
66–67). The “vulgarity” in Tennyson’s satiric monologue is not unrelated to
the “confessions of the flesh” that Simeon endlessly delivers in his inexpiable
penitence, whose Foucauldian dialectic reveals the self only to renounce it as
sinful (see Carrette 1999, 179). Simeon’s hatred, repression, and self-imposed
punishment of the flesh (he has chosen the most masochistic, “slowly-painful”
way possible to “subdue this home / of sin, my flesh, which I despise and hate”
[lines 56–57]) produces confessions of nightmares. In these nightmares, devils
and “monstrous apes” (lines 166–170) reveal censored desires, and spiritual
quest yields to the obsessive preoccupation with the flesh, to the interminable,
self-indulgent, and extremely detailed account of its pains: “In coughs, aches,
stitches, ulcerous throes and cramps” (line 13), “till all my limbs drop piece-
meal from the stone” (line 43), “until the ulcer, eating thro’ my skin, / betrayed
my secret penance” (lines 66–67), and so on.29
In 1917, Cavafy wrote his own “Simeon.” Instead of Simeon himself, we
hear in Cavafy’s poem an anonymous, pagan narrator recounting to his friend
Mevis, in an apparently leisurely manner, and in the midst of a conversation on
Syria’s literary life, his encounter with the Stylites. Whether or not we believe
him when he claims that he just happened under Simeon’s pillar “by chance,”
the narrator is “rather upset” by the experience and unwilling to focus on
reading poetry that day:
I slipped in among the Christians
praying and worshipping in silence there,
revering him. Not being a Christian myself
I couldn’t share their spiritual peace—
I trembled all over and suffered;
I shuddered, disturbed, terribly moved. (KS, 204)
If, as Jeffreys suggests, “in contrast to Tennyson, Cavafy transfers this exces-
sive verbiage into the mouth of the poet/sophist, who may even be a parodic
portrait of Tennyson himself” (2001, 69), what is also ironized in this change
of roles is Simeon’s constant attention to the vicissitudes of the flesh, of which
the reaction of Cavafy’s pagan viewer preserves but an echo: “I trembled all over
and suffered / I shuddered, disturbed, terribly moved.” Strikingly, in Cavafy’s
poem not a trace remains of any depiction of the saint’s body. This importantly
serves his intention to preserve Simeon’s sanctity and refrain from compromis-
ing the spiritual integrity of Eastern monasticism, as Jeffreys argues (2001, 69).
Indeed, in his 1899 note, Cavafy explicitly states his admiration for Simeon as
the “only man who has dared to be really alone” (quoted in Haas 1982, 66) and
enthusiastically comments on the language used by one of his main sources
for the poem, the life of Simeon in Theodoret’s Religious History: “people came
from the farthest West and from the farthest East . . . to gaze on the unique
sight—on this candle of faith (such is the magnificent language of the historian
Theodoret) set up and lit on a loft chandelier” (quoted in Haas 1982, 66).30
However, it is crucial to note not only what Cavafy borrows from Theo-
doret but also what he leaves aside. In Religious History, alongside the candle
metaphor (26.13), Theodoret enumerates the very same gory details which
Cavafy disliked in Tennyson; in fact, Theodoret makes abundantly clear that
they constitute an integral part of Simeon’s exceptional sainthood. Entire para-
graphs of his text describe how Simeon girded a rough cord so tightly around
his waist as to cause severe bleeding wounds (26.5); how he starved himself
almost to death (26.10); chained himself to a rock and let the bugs lurking in
the leather attached to the iron inflict on him their painful bites (26.10); let a
malignant, oozing ulcer develop on his foot while standing on the pillar; and
even invited a disbelieving man to touch him and see the ulcer as a proof of
his humanity (26.23).31 Cavafy’s silencing of all these details, together with the
absence of any description of Simeon’s body in his poem, amounts to a critical
resistance to the representational modes of his Christian source, in which the
flesh and the spirit are too much enmeshed. An unexpected alliance emerges
here between Cavafy’s implicit critique and Gibbon’s open decrying of Simeon’s
“voluntary martyrdom” (1896–1900, vol. 4, 73), of the “sensations” “offensive to
man” that incur in the anachorites’ life, of the “horrid and disgusting” “aspect”
of their self-tormenting bodies, of their belief in the “synonymy” of “pleasure
and guilt” (vol. 6, 66–67).32 If Cavafy saves Simeon’s sanctity from Gibbon
by censuring the fleshly emphasis in Tennyson and Theodoret, the lingering
specter of the flesh in Cavafy’s “Simeon” nonetheless ensures that the encounter
between the pagan and the Christian worlds remains fraught with tension. The
“shudder” of the Christian Other that for a moment traverses the pagan friends’
world might be attributed by the narrator to Christian “spiritual peace”; but, as
we saw, its origin is all too corporeal, the echo of Tennyson’s and Theodoret’s
excessive accounts of self-punishment, which are otherwise eliminated.
At the end of the poem, the narrator turns to his literary preoccupations,
just as the sophist in “Salome” returns to his reading of Plato: “but Mevis, I
think it better that you report this: / whatever the other sophists may say, / I at
least recognize Lamon / as Syria’s leading poet” (lines 25–28). However, unlike
the sophist’s, the narrator’s interest in literary talk has been ruined (“I’m in
no mood for work today,” line 24); as his anxiety throughout the poem shows,
his world has been deeply shaken by the Christian encounter. The homoerotic
bond between the narrator and Mevis, built on a shared love for poetry and
beauty, has been unsettled by the shudder of Christian jouissance, and the
tension is hard to dismiss.
Indeed, anticipated in “Simeon,” this shudder of Christianity escalates
with a vengeance into the terrifying sensation that overcomes the pagan nar-
rator in Cavafy’s most celebrated poem on Christianity, “Myris, Alexandria,
a.d. 340” (1929), while he listens to Myris’s relatives commemorating the young
man’s life in conformity with the Christian religion:
The Christian priests were praying loudly
for the young man’s soul.
I noticed with how much diligence,
how much intense concern
for the forms of their religion, they were preparing
everything for the Christian funeral.
And suddenly an odd sensation
took hold of me. Indefinably I felt
as if Myris were going from me;
I felt that he, a Christian, was united
with his own people and that I was becoming
a stranger, a total stranger. I even felt
a doubt come over me: that I’d also been deceived by my passion
and had always been a stranger to him.
I rushed out of their horrible house,
rushed away before my memory of Myris
could be captured, could be perverted by their Christianity.
(KS, 163–164)
Whether they focus on the transition from Greco-Roman religion to Christian-

ity, or comment on it only in passing, readings of “Myris” tend to link Christi-
anity to a “strict code of purity, ascesis, and morality” (Charalambidou-Solomi
2003, 120–121); to “Christian asceticism” and its precarious “symbiosis” with
“Hellenic hedonism” (Syrimis 2010, 87); to the “Christian zeal” (Jusdanis 2015,
129) that aims to “capture (and presumably save) dead Myris’s soul” (Keeley
1976, 138); to “things spiritual” (πνευματικά) and opposed to the pagans’
“devotion to pleasure” (Angelatos 2000, 96). In short, it is assumed that what
the narrator experiences as a threat to the memory of his lover is the effect of
the “proffered peace and salvific vision” of the Christian rites (Jeffreys 2015,
113). But let us pay closer attention to the “flash-backs” or “analepses” that
contribute to the poem’s “dramatic dénouement” (Kapsalis 1983, 114).
The incidents the narrator remembers, which in retrospect seem to sepa-
rate Myris from his pagan friends, are Myris’s displeased lack of humor when
his friends suggest taking him to the Serapeion (lines 41–44), his “looking
elsewhere” when the company made libations to Poseidon (lines 45–47), and
his whispering, quietly enough to be heard only by the narrator («οι άλλοι δεν
άκουσαν»), “not counting me,” when someone invoked the protection of the
“great, the sublime Apollo” (lines 48–52). Of these incidents, none is immedi-
ately connected to Myris’s adherence to Christian asceticism and abstinence
from pleasures. What they share is, rather, a kind of secrecy, which is moreover
announced by the line that introduces the flashbacks: “He never spoke about
his religion” (line 41). Or at least it is perceived as secrecy by the narrator, who
admits parenthetically that he understands Christianity only imperfectly («δεν
ξέρω την θρησκεία τους καλά», line 30). Rather than forcing on the narrator’s
perplexity (which is plausible in an era of religious fluidity and turmoil) a
preconceived notion of Christianity as the religion of the soul, we should try
to draw the contours of this secret, following his own words even beyond their
intended meaning. Such a reading is consonant with a poem very much about
one’s blindness to the truth involved in one’s words, to what one does not know
when one asserts that one knows.33 (The narrator emphatically states that the
pagan friends «γνωρίζαμε, βεβαίως . . . από την πρώτην ώραν το γνωρίζαμεν»
[had known of course . . . had known it from the very start] that Myris was
Christian [lines 31–32].) In order to justify his assertion that Myris “lived
exactly as we did” (line 34), the narrator brings evidence that introduces a dis-
equilibrium: «Απ’ όλους μας πιο έκδοτος στες ηδονές» ([he was] more devoted
to pleasure than all of us; line 35). The examples of Myris’s devotion to pleasure
that follow (he “scattered his money lavishly on amusements,” “threw himself
eagerly into night-time scuffles,” participated in “wonderfully indecent night-
long sessions” [lines 36–40]) all involve an excess unknown to the others in the
company; they all suggest that Myris enjoyed differently and more. The narra-
tor’s retrospective intimation confirms not Myris’s foreignness to pleasure but,
on the contrary, his excessive indulgence in pleasure. But while for the narrator
this is evidence that Myris was indeed “one of them,” his intimation ironically
turns into a terrifying threat to the memory of Myris at the end of the poem.
What is lost on the narrator and emerges instead at the level of poetic irony
is that it is precisely excessive passion, and not abstinence from pleasure, that
prefigures Myris’s “unity,” in death, with his own—the Christians.
Myris’s death is indeed invested with the “odd sensation” of a death-

c entered jouissance, which culminates in what David Ricks describes as the
“union in the Body of Christ” (2001, 25); part of the poem’s effect lies in
the ironic tension between the narrator’s intended meaning and the pressing
weight of words that unintentionally allude to the intertwinement of pleasure
and death. In the last stanza, the threat rendered by the vocabulary of proxim-
ity («ενώθη», «να με σιμώνει») is not that the Christians might have gained over
Myris’s soul. It is the threat of a terrifying immediacy, which Jean-Luc Nancy
locates, as we saw, at the center of the Christian concept of the flesh (2008a,
5). And the vocabulary of distance that resists it—«σαν νάφευγεν από κοντά
μου» (“as if [Myris] were going from me”), «πετάχθηκα έξω» (“I rushed out”),
«έφυγα γρήγορα» (“I rushed away”), «πριν αρπαχθεί» (“before [my memory of
Myris] could be captured”—is eloquent of a horror (their “horrible house,” το
φρικτό τους σπίτι) that rhymes with the disgust experienced by the represen-
tatives of the Greek world in “Salome” and “Julian at the Mysteries,” and which
Chrysostom would describe as a saturation of pleasure, the lack of the lack
that sustains desire (επιθυμία). As Tina Beattie puts it in a Lacanian reading of
desire, embodiment, and God, in contrast to the pagan “divinization of the sex-
ual relationship, in Christianity the body is deprived of its sacred sexuality and
bears instead the encryptions of an endless and sublime torment that seduces
the subject towards death” (2015, 39). While the pagan narrator, “deceived,” as
he now realizes, by “passion,” believed in a relationship of mutual desire, the
dying Myris has “the name of Christ constantly on his lips, / his hand holding
a cross” (lines 25–26). This is certainly not Rimbaud’s “putrid kiss of Christ,”
but it could be close, and the specter of putrefaction does haunt the final word
of the narrator’s horror (which would thus be more accurately rendered as
“decayed” rather than “perverted”): «πριν αλλοιωθεί / απ’ την χριστιανοσύνη
τους η θύμηση του Μύρη».34 The narrator storms out of the Christian house
just in time, before he is utterly overcome by his aversive feeling that no reversal
may occur from the self-absorbed pleasures of Christianity to a relationship of
mutual desire, even in memory.
“Kaisarion”: Rewriting the body through the Christian legacy
A way to understand the Christian curse in Rimbaud is, as we saw, that the
expression of the most subversive eroticism finds itself enmeshed in the very
same Christian rhetoric that castigates it as “disgusting.” Cavafy would cer-
tainly be far from conceiving of Christianity as a curse, but his work often
testifies to the same vicious cycle. Christian allusions uneasily persist even in
a poem such as “The Bandaged Shoulder” (1919), which is not only “essentially
modern” (Papargyriou 2011, 89) but also a powerful affront to the sexual
hygiene recommended in conservative fin de siècle accounts of “sublime inver-
sion.”35 Given Cavafy’s ambivalence toward the cultural influence of Christi-
anity as a discourse of the flesh, I suggest that a fruitful way to consider the
representation of the body in his writing is to work through this discourse
rather than despite it.
The famous arrival of the young man in the poet’s room in Cavafy’s “Kai-
sarion” (1914/1918) serves well to illustrate this point. It suggests a productive
repurposing by which the transgressive eroticism inherent in the Christian
tradition is reclaimed for the reinvention of love to which Cavafy’s poetry, like
that of Rimbaud, aspires.
And there you were with your indefinable charm.
Because we know
so little about you from history,
I could fashion you more freely in my mind.
I made you good-looking and sensitive.
My art gives your face
a dreamy, an appealing beauty.
And so completely did I imagine you
that late last night,
as my lamp went out—I let it go out on purpose—
it seemed you came into my room,
it seemed you stood there in front of me looking just as you would have
in conquered Alexandria,
pale and weary, ideal in your grief,
still hoping they might take pity on you,
those scum who whispered: “Too many Caesars.”
(KS, 84)
As Haas suggests, there is a thematic link between the martyr in the now lost
poem «Άγιος Στέφανος» (Saint Stephen) composed in 1898 and included under
the rubric «Αι αρχαί του Χριστιανισμού» (The beginnings of Christianity) and
the young men in poems whose context is no longer religious but political,
with a latent sensual element: “27 June 1906, 2 pm” (1908), “Aristovoulos”
(1916/1918), and “Kaisarion” (see Haas 1996, 175). At the same time, Kaisarion’s
vulnerability, as well as his pallor and tiredness (χλωμός και κουρασμένος,
line 28), allude to what Martha Vassiliadi aptly discusses in terms of Cavafy’s
“nosographical” poetics (2010, 5). The intersection of Christian and medical
discourse in “Kaisarion” is especially significant in the frame of fin de siècle
representation of martyrdom and the perverse pleasures of suffering.
Cavafy, however, removes the body from the reach of both Christian
pleasure and pain through a process of temporal displacement. This process
can be fruitfully described with reference to some remarks by the art historian
Georges Didi-Huberman. Writing on the nineteenth-century photography of
the medical symptom, Didi-Huberman links it to a reinvention of the “Chris-
tian body”: as in Christian icons of martyrdom, suffering, and pain, so in
medical pictures intended to aid in the diagnosis of illness and formulation of
a prognosis sight does not refer to the present, but instead indicates “foresight,
anticipating knowledge in sight” (2003, 33).36 In both Christian iconography
and medical photography, time is therefore turned for Didi-Huberman into a
question of the “visual” (le visuel, 104), which is linked to a thinking about the
image that counters the imitative, representational paradigm of the “visible”
(2007, 98) and attempts to explore instead the visuality (visualité) of the unseen
(2007, 125). Kaisarion’s tiredness and his imminent death allude to something
that is no more or not yet—past nights of love and the announcement of the
youth’s execution (“the villains who were whispering: ‘Too Many Caesars!’ ”).37
Τhe way temporality operates in the poem thus renders “visual” something
that is not present within the representation of the young man: the body’s
past surrender to pleasure and its exposure to an expectation indefinitely sus-
pended—the present participle suggests—in the moment between hope and its
frustration: «ελπίζοντας ακόμα», “still hoping” (line 30). What thus appears in
the poem is a corporeal figure that remains in excess of the poetic image that
strives to capture it. The figure alludes to the polymorphous enjoyment of flesh
of the fin de siècle martyr we discussed above with reference to Saint Sebastian.
Yet Cavafy’s techniques of distancing through temporal displacement and
uncertain modality remove this figure from the short circuit of guilt and plea-
sure of its Christian analogue, redefining the body as a site of the potentially
non-Christian pleasure he further explores in his late love poetry.
In a poem that may be read as a rewriting of “Kaisarion,” “Δύο Νέοι, 23
έως 24 ετών” (“Two Young Men, 23 to 24 Years Old,” 1927), the Christian
representational paradigm has been abandoned.38 The two terms of an implied
simile (like a martyr, like a god), are conflated into the body as the only term.
Yet, as Didi-Huberman puts it, the suspension of the figurative function of lan-
guage is the point where figuration begins: “là où toute figure s’abolit . . . toute
figure s’ origine” (2007, 241). Far from being reduced to an obvious realism or
to a simple description, homosexuality in Cavafy’s late love poetry becomes
a vehicle whose tenor is the deepened meaning of erotic experience, thanks
to the fusion of desire and history, of sensual experience and its duration in
time (Athanasopoulos 2007, 147–149). It also involves envisioning a society in
which transgressive eroticism will have been purged of the guilt that colors it
with disgust in the Christian tradition. “Two Young Men” brings the body, the
lovers’ “good looks, their exquisite youthfulness,” into the contemporary urban
context, into a “very special / house of debauchery,” where they “asked for a
bedroom / and expensive drinks, and they drank again. / And when the expen-
sive drinks were finished / and it was close to four in the morning, / happy,
they gave themselves to love.” (KS, 147). Through the poet’s explicit reference
to homosexual love here and elsewhere, through his “minoritizing self-atti-
tude,” what is effected is a “universalizing” promise that society will change
(Papanikolaou 2005, 256).39 From the point of view adopted in this essay, what
contributes to the utopian dynamic of Cavafy’s most “literal” erotic bodies is
that these bodies are not identical to themselves. Rather, they carry a produc-
tive self-difference—which crucially differentiates them from the self-presence/
self-reflexivity of Christian flesh—in that they allude to what they are not: the
body in “Two Young Men” is not that of the martyr, or even that of Kaisarion,
but becomes the figure of a pleasure that refuses to participate in the vicious
circle of sinful confession and fleshly obsession.
Concluding remarks
Cavafy’s poems “Salome,” “Julian at the Mysteries,” “Simeon,” and “Myris”

involve latent links between Christianity and sexuality, if we consider the latter
in its contemporaneous sense of a discourse that involves a wide range of plea-
sures and perversions. The strong affects that mark this intersection arguably
reflect Cavafy’s critical reading both of the Christian cultural legacy of the
“confessions of the flesh” and of fin de siècle perverse Christianity. Cavafy’s
ironic strategy largely consists in juxtaposing the different perspectives of his-
torical characters who inhabit the period of transition from the Greco-Roman
to the Christian world. What emerges from within the historical plot of poems
staged on this transition is the following: the Hellenic-Christian synthesis
founders not on the grounds of the difference between two worldviews but
because of the different modes of enjoyment that sustain each of them. Orga-
nized around restriction and obsession, excess and death, immediacy, touch,
and pain, the Christian economy of pleasure is separated by an unbridgeable
gap from the Hellenic exemplum of an ideal fusion of art and sensuality, whose
achievement by the Christians of Antioch is only an exception. It is, of course,
a gap haunted by the “shudder” of the Christian Other we saw in “Simeon,”
as well as of Mevis’s own ambivalent “smile” in the same poem (“please don’t
smile,” line 16)—nonverbal signs that betray the liminal contact involved in a
missed encounter. And the uncommon, in Cavafy, typographical emphasis of

the word “stranger” (ξ έ ν ο ς εγώ, ξ έ ν ο ς π ο λ ύ) at the end of “Myris,” both
denotes a retrospectively growing distance and resounds with resistance to the
horror of an uncomfortably close Christian jouissance, in relation to which the
pagan narrator would want to remain a stranger indeed. Cavafy’s own critical
engagement with the cultural legacy of Christianity as a discourse of the flesh
preserves an ambivalence that cannot be explained away. Rather, its presence
is felt as he works his way toward a spiritual Christianity without flesh (as in
“Simeon”) or toward body without Christianity (as in “Kaisarion” and his later
love poetry).
NATIONAL AND KAPODISTRIAN UNIVERSITY OF ATHENS
NOTES
Acknowledgments. I am grateful to the Seeger Center of Hellenic Studies at Princeton Uni-

versity for giving me the opportunity to pursue research on Christianity in late antiquity and
Cavafy in the frame of a Visiting Research Fellowship at the Center. I also owe special thanks to
Karen Emmerich, William Stroebel, and the anonymous readers of this essay, to whose valuable
comments on crucial aspects of my argument I owe the completion of my work.
1 Foucault (2018, 50) argues that Christian practices of self-evaluation through the institu-
tionalized penitence and ascetic monasticism, when compared to Greek and Latin philosophy of
late antiquity, “did not simply produce a reinforcement of restrictions or call for greater rigor in
morals. They defined and developed a certain mode of relation to oneself, and a certain relation
between evil and truth—or, more precisely, between the remission of sins, the purification of
the heart and the manifestation of hidden wrongs, of secrets, and the arcane mysteries of the
individual” (my translation). See also Carrette 1999, 126.
2 For a brief account of the theoretical and philosophical paradigm in which Christianity
appears as a cultural discourse rather than as religious belief, per se (Hegel, Feuerbach, but also
Lacan and Žižek), see Johnston 2014, 219.
3 See Arampatzidou 2013 for detailed research on Cavafy’s indebtedness to aestheticism, as
well as Vassiliadi 2008 and Jeffreys 2015 on Cavafy and Western decadent literature of his day.
4 In a similar manner, scholarship on Cavafy tends to assimilate religious references into
an idealization of love in the poet’s work, in discussions of the parallels between pagan gods and
beautiful young mortals (Kosofsky Sedgwick 2010, 9), or of Cavafy’s transition from religious
esotericism to “erotic esotericism” in his mature period (Haas 1996, 371).
5 The parallel assumes Cavafy’s familiarity with Rimbaud’s work and with the Western
tradition on which Rimbaud draws. Cavafy’s preoccupation with Baudelaire is well attested
(Karambini-Iatrou 2003, 74, 78–79, 112), while Rimbaud and Verlaine are both included in an
anthology that was in the poet’s possession (Karambini-Iatrou 2003, 76).
6 On “affect,” a central term in the way cultural and political transformations are understood
in the social sciences and the humanities, see especially Terada 2001; Massumi 2002; Ahmed
2004; Clough and Halley 2007; Manning 2007; Gregg and Seigworth 2010; Chen 2012. On disgust
and cognate feelings, see Miller 1997; Menninghaus 2003; Ngai 2005.
7 The notion of “perverse core” alludes to Slavoj Žižek’s book The Puppet and the Dwarf: The
Perverse Core of Christianity (2003). On sadomasochism as a perversion that permeates Chris-
tian ideology, and obscures what Žižek otherwise considers the emancipatory, atheist content of
Christianity, see Mitralexis and Skliris 2018, 21–23.
8 See Ellis 1921, 124. On Christianity and sexual inversion, see Madden 2000, 126, arguing
that at the turn of the century the interaction between Christianity and homosexuality reaches a
“most fraught, most anxious and yet perhaps most productive stage”. See also Roden 2005 on the
construction of Victorian homosexuality with reference to medieval Christianity.
9 For the influence of Renaissance painters (Tintoretto, Titian, Guido Reni, Perugino, Bot-
ticelli, Bazzi) on the “homosexual sublime” in nineteenth-century aestheticism, see Kaye 1996,
88–90.
10 See Saint Paul (I Cor 15:44): “If there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body.” On
this “intra-material” distinction (which contrasts not only the body to the soul but two different
kinds of body), as well as the “physical body” as the site of “physical frailty,” “liability to death,”
and the “undeniable penchant of instincts towards sin,” see Brown 1988, 48.
11 See Rugo 2003, 17–21, for the terms “flesh” and the “body” in Jean-Luc Nancy, in com-
parison both to the Christian tradition and the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and
Michel Henry.
12 This line is central to Jacques Rancière’s reading of Rimbaud (2004, 54), to which I will
return. For a survey of scholarly accounts on the influence of the doctrine of the Incarnation in
Western culture, see Ranft 2013, 3–8.
13 Rimbaud’s gesture finds a recent parallel in Nancy’s discontent with Christianity as the
“religion of touch, of the sensible, of presence that is immediate to the body and to the heart,” the
religion where “even the body of God is given to be eaten and drunk” (2008b, 14).
14 Page numbers accompanying Rimbaud’s poems refer to Rimbaud 2001 (the Oxford bilin-
gual edition of the Collected Poems translated by Martin Sorrell, hereafter CP).
15 See Claisse 2012, 104, following Fongaro 2004, 153–155. Claisse observes that the expres-
sion prendre du dos is probably made up by Rimbaud himself, since its first lexicographical
appearance in the sense of “active pederasty” does not occur before 1931, in the slang dictionary
of Chautard.
16 For the connection of luxury to male prostitution through the allusion to Revelation 17,
see Claisse 2012, 107.
17 The poem draws on the topos of paradis artificiels in Gautier (Le Club des Hachichins,
1846) and Baudelaire (Les paradis artificiels, 1860) but places the emphasis on the revolutionary
potential of the erotic undercurrent of the ritual that starts with disgust (Brunel 2004, 245).
18 For the meaning of chevalet (“torture-rack”) as “instrument of punishment” (littré) here,
see Brunel 2004, 231.
19 Compare Savvidis’s well-known position on the poet’s «φιλελεύθερη Χριστιανική ηθική»
(liberal Christian ethics; 1985, 154).
20 An extract from Boissière’s text figures as the epigraph of Jean Lorrain’s article “Salomé
et ses poètes,” which appeared in Le Journal on 11 February 1896 (the day, that is, of the premiere
of Oscar Wilde’s eponymous play), and which Cavafy copied on the manuscript of “Salome”
(Haas 1996, 257).]
21 Wilde’s play Salome, whose French and English versions were published in 1894 and 1895,
respectively, and which Cavafy knew, also explores Christianity as a cultural territory of aberrant
pleasures, to which the celebrated final scene of the play adds a gory aspect: “I have kissed thy
mouth, Jokanaan, I have kissed thy mouth. There was a bitter taste on thy lips. Was it the taste of
blood? . . . Nay: but perchance it is the taste of love” (Wilde 1989, 36).
22 Unless otherwise indicated, page numbers for Cavafy’s poems refer to Cavafy 1992 (trans-
lations by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, hereafter KS).
23 For the sources of the historical plot of “Julian at the Mysteries” (Sozomen’s Ecclesiastical
History 5.2, Gregory Nazianzen’s Oration 4 [“First Invective against Julian the Emperor”], and
Eduard Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire), see Haas 1996, 166–168.
24 See Oration 4.55 in Grégoire de Nazianze 1983): «ὡς δὲ προιόντα τὸν γεννάδαν προ-
σβάλλει τὰ δείματα, καὶ ἀεὶ πλείω καὶ φοβερώτερα, ἤχους τινάς φασιν ἀήθεις, καὶ ὀδμὰς τῶν
ἀηδῶν, καὶ πυραυγῆ φάσματα, καὶ οὐκ οἶδ᾿ οὕστινας ὕθλους καὶ λήρους, τῷ ἀδοκήτῳ πληγεὶς,
καὶ γὰρ ἦν ὀψιμαθὴς τὰ τοιαῦτα, ἐπὶ τὸν σταυρὸν καταφεύγει, καὶ τὸ παλαιὸν φάρμακον, καὶ
τούτῳ σημειοῦται κατὰ τῶν φόβων, καὶ βοηθὸν ποιεῖται τὸν διωκόμενον· καὶ τὰ ἑξῆς φρικωδέ-
στερα» (“But when, as my fine fellow proceeded in the rites, the frightful things assailed him,
unearthly noises, as they say, and unpleasant odors, and fiery apparitions, and other fables and
nonsense of the sort, being terror-struck at the novelty (for he was yet a novice in these matters),
he flies for help to the Cross, his old remedy, and makes the sign thereof against his terrors, and
makes an ally of Him whom he persecuted. And what follows is yet more horrible”; Gregory
Nazianzen 1888).
25 On Chrysostom’s critique of the Antiochians’ participation in the profane life of the city,
see Brown 1988, 313–316.
26 As Haas suggests, a first indication of Chrysostom as a source for poetic material for
Cavafy is his now lost poem «Ευδ[οξίας] (Ευδ[οκίας]) Αυγ[ούστας] Έπαινος», composed in
1892. The poet also likely draws on Chrysostom for a number of the Julian poems composed
after 1918—the date, that is, of “Church and the Theater” (Haas 1996, 37–40). On the conflictual
issue of the date of Cavafy’s access to the volumes of J. P. Migne’s Patrologia Graeca (1857–1866;
hereafter PG) more generally, see Haas 1996, 39–40, 170–171; Bowersock 2009, 144–145.
27 See, for instance, In Paralyticum demissum per tectum (PG 51.55). For a discussion of
this and other passages in the context of surgery in Byzantine medicine, see Bliquez 1984, 194.
28 For an interesting reading that does justice to Chrysostom’s social vision and aspiration
to social reform, see; Leyerle 2009, 356: “the preacher’s mobilization of disgust is designed not
to marginalize the vulnerable low, but to downgrade the ostentatious behaviors of the powerful
high”; see also Wesser 2010.
29 For the text of Tennyson’s poem, see Tennyson 1991, 89.
30 It would be interesting to compare Cavafy’s admiration here with Peter Brown’s reading
of Simeon as fleshing out (in fourth-century Syria) a promise of change, as “a living sign of the
imminent end of the present age, a pocket of ‘anti-matter,’ threatening to dissolve the solid foun-
dations of the social order” (1988, 196).
31 For Theodoret’s text, see Théodoret de Cyr 1979.
32 The following comment on Gibbon’s words in Cavafy’s 1899 note is defensive rather than
critical, and Gibbon’s reference to Simeon’s “voluntary martyrdom” must be the target of the
poet’s correction: “There is no exaggeration in the words ‘Simeon was repeatedly saved from
pious suicide.’ To make the sense clearer the word unintentional should be added” (quoted in
Haas 1982, 66).
33 See Papatheodorou 2003 and Karavidas 2013 on Cavafy’s art of writing history in verse
by rendering a period or event from the perspective of anonymous contemporaries and on the
affinities of this strategy with Carlo Ginzburg’s notion of microhistory. My reading’s emphasis on
Christian jouissance is not meant to obscure other factors that account for the narrator’s anxiety
in “Myris,” such as the increasing marginalization of Greco-Roman religion by Constantius’s
austere measures, which certainly contributes to the narrator’s sense of cultural estrangement.
34 On this dark vision of Christianity, see also Hegel’s Lectures on Revealed Religion, before
he dissipates it in the speculative process, in which death would in turn be negated by the Res-
urrection (Hodgson 2005, 171–174): “God has died, God is dead—this is the most frightful of all
thoughts, that everything eternal and true is not, that negation itself is found in God” (Hegel
2006, 465).
35 On a version of “sublime inversion” where “chastity” is praised as a means to exclude
illness and contagion, see, for instance, Raffalovich 1896, 75, 205. On Christian allusions in the
“Bandaged Shoulder,” see Corn 2009, 33: “the emotional power of blood as regarded in the con-
text of love takes us instantly back to the Crucifixion or to martyrdoms like Saint Sebastian’s”;
Vassiliadi 2010, 7, arguing that the “bloody rag” as a token of “recognition” of the secret life of
the Other’s inner body recalls the scene of doubting Thomas.
36 See Papargyriou’s subtle remark (2011, 91) on the relevance of “Kaisarion” to photography:
“seen within a visual culture, ‘πολυκαισαρίη’ is not simply linguistic, but functions as a kind of
technical reproduction; the authenticated discourse rendered within quotation marks ensures
that the framed words are a ‘photograph’ of language. This is a xeroxed sample of opposition, a
second imaginary photograph that threatens the purity of the real one.
37 For young men’s tiredness as a trace of sexual acts in a number of Cavafy’s poems, see
Papanikolaou 2014, 195.
38 The waiting lover in “Two Young Men” grows tired of “reading newspapers / mechan-
ically” (KS, 147) in the same way that the poet in “Kaisarion” reads the volume of inscriptions
about the Ptolemies “partly to kill an hour or two.” And the lover’s night is redeemed by the
jubilantly announced appearance of his beloved, which recalls Kaisarion’s more unlikely entrance
into the poet’s room: “But when he saw his friend come in— / weariness, boredom, thoughts
vanished at once.”
39 For an interesting aspect of this promised social change, see Roilos 2009, 207: in “Two
Young Men, 24 to 25 Years Old,” as in Cavafy’s late love poetry in general, capitalist values are
undermined by means of the “antieconomic” forms of pleasure, the “unorthodox logic of inflated
consumption and self-exhausting indulgence” staged by the poems.
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C.P. Cavafys Christianity in The Context

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C.P.

Cavafy’s Christianity in the Context of Fin de

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

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In many fin de siècle medical and literary texts, Christianity is understood

In the unfinished fourth volume of his History of Sexuality, Les Aveux de la

embedded—as a lens through which we can read the intersections between

My focus on Christianity and the flesh in Cavafy brings together two

historicizing and criticizing the establishment of pain, guilt, and disgust at

Christianity as a cultural background for the development of discourses

presumably condemned. In Uranisme et unisexualité, Marc-André Raffalovich

[Christ] choked me with loathing) is too strong to allow a relationship with

Fin de siècle Christianity and its affects in Cavafy

Reading Cavafy alongside the contemporary discourses we discussed in the pre-

East—a culture that appears as “playful, curious, hedonistic, mindful of the

Furthermore, the affectively charged adjectives the Greeks apply to the

the Antiochians’ way of life, offer a pertinent example.25 Cavafy explicitly

Whether they focus on the transition from Greco-Roman religion to Christian-

Myris’s death is indeed invested with the “odd sensation” of a death-

“Kaisarion”: Rewriting the body through the Christian legacy

Cavafy’s poems “Salome,” “Julian at the Mysteries,” “Simeon,” and “Myris”

missed encounter. And the uncommon, in Cavafy, typographical emphasis of

NATIONAL AND KAPODISTRIAN UNIVERSITY OF ATHENS

Acknowledgments. I am grateful to the Seeger Center of Hellenic Studies at Princeton Uni-

R EFER ENCES CITED

of Cavafy], edited by Michalis Pieris (Μιχάλης Πιερής), 95–103. Irakleio: Panepistimiakes

Karavidas, Kostas (Καραβίδας, Κώστας). 2013. «Καβάφης, Αναγνωστάκης και μικροϊστορία:

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