THIS ESSAY IS ENCHANTED with sanctity in a heterodox sense, as a state of being outré, out of the way, surprised, surprising. We want to see a naked sanctity, the saint denuded of doctrinal dress, a kind of holiness we cannot properly look upon. In order to achieve this vision, to produce the appearance of what is not given to gaze at directly, our essay works by a kind of hermeneutic triangulation, taking aim at a space between and within a saint and a transgressor of the sacred: Angela of Foligno (d. 1309) and Actaeon. Distant, Angela and Actaeon are yet next to each other in fascinating ways related to language, body, presence, vision, and metamorphosis. Like two stars in a constellation, they are close in separation, far apart only to appear impossibly proximate. Most conspicuously, Angela and Actaeon are corporeally near in nakedness and disintegration. Where Angela strips herself to stand naked before the cross, Actaeon is rendered animally nude by mutation into a stag. Where Actaeon is torn apart by his hounds after seeing a god- dess, Angela’s limbs are separated when God enters and withdraws from her body. The where of these conjunctions, the unwitnessable place they reveal, is an unseeable state of identity between transgression and sanctity. We call this secret locale dislocation.
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