Tertullian's Precarious Panopticon: A Performance of Visual Piety

Abstract

In this article, I analyze the ways that Tertullian (ca. 160–220 c.e.) uses rhetoric of visual piety, ways of seeing and of being seen, to describe and define Christian identity and difference. Such visual practices of piety are fraught with power dynamics, and these dynamics serve to produce and distinguish boundaries between groups. For Tertullian, these visual practices of piety create a number of distinctions: between God and humanity, between Christians and the broader culture, and between Christian men and Christian women. Tertullian describes each of these demarcations in visual terms, and I analyze his visual metaphors to uncover hidden assumptions about power and agency. By exploring these assumptions, I demonstrate that not all such assumptions or outcomes are positive. When this rhetoric promotes a shared enactment before the divine gaze, it brings together Christians through a common visual performance of spirituality. When Tertullian turns away from that shared nature and towards a performance that is limited only to women, however, he taps into isolating rhetoric of other-ing, which functions instead as a divisive and disciplinary trap. The power of this panoptic performance is precarious and ultimately fails to gain traction: the women who rejected the veil also rejected this panoptic hierarchy that Tertullian envisions through his rhetoric of visual and visible piety.