Fotini Hadjittofi: Revisiting Plato, Defending poikilia: Asterius of Amaseia’s Ekphrasis of the Eye

Asterius of Amaseia is mostly known for his Ekphrasis of the Martyrdom of Euphemia, a description of a painting that was cited in the Second Council of Nicaea (787) to support the veneration of icons. This paper will focus on Asterius’ much less studied ekphrasis of the eye (7.3.7 – 7.5.1), which is part of his homily on the Man Born Blind (John 9). Here, Asterius exalts the beauty and function of the eye and dwells, with much rhetorical flair, on how vision produces knowledge. In the course of this demonstration Asterius employs the Platonic metaphor of the eye as mirror. While Asterius includes clear allusions to the Platonic source-text (Alcibiades 1.132e-133c), his re-use of Plato is not passive. Whereas Plato’s metaphor served to lead us from corporeal vision to the soul’s intellectual contemplation of its archetype, Asterius insists that it is in viewing this world’s variegated beauty that we perceive God’s variegated wisdom (poikilên sophian, evoking Eph. 3:10). By praising both the world (including the eye itself) and God’s wisdom in terms of poikilia Asterius revises the Platonic system, which disparages poikilia especially in relation to the divine. A brief comparison with a fellow-Cappadocian whom Asterius imitates elsewhere and who also uses the Platonic metaphor of the eye, Gregory of Nyssa, will suggest that Asterius may indeed be regarded as a significant, pre-iconoclastic defender of the image.