The Corporeal Imagination. Patricia Cox Miller

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СКАЧАТЬ linked with discursive thought.⁶⁰ The sensible world is not so much abandoned as it is turned into light—a process of substraction that adds insofar as the soul is oriented in a nexus of relationships rather than in an “opaque” world of discrete objects. In order to be free from the attractive tug of particularity, especially in its material forms, the soul “must see that light by which it is enlightened: for we do not see the sun by another light than his own. How then can this happen? Take away everything!”⁶¹

      What kind of self emerges in the light of the transparent sphere? When Plotinus directs the eyes of the soul inward, the vision that emerges is starkly different from the internalized self-watcher of Marcus Aurelius. A certain cosmic optimism pervades his thought, as “the levels of reality become levels of inner life, the levels of the self.”⁶² As “our head strikes the heavens” and becomes the transparent sphere, the illusions of personality and individuality vanish, revealing a “self” that is essentially divine.⁶³ Thus centered in the divine, the Plotinian self is, in Rappe’s words, “infinitely expansive”; “no longer circumscribed by its historical, temporal, and emotional limitations, the Plotinian self embraces a vast domain whose boundaries extend to the fullness of what is encountered in every knowing moment.”⁶⁴ Skittish to the end concerning the dangers posed by materiality, and especially by the human body (considered as a “hindrance”: we must “cut away all the other things in which we are encased”), Plotinus offered a self touched by transcendence, a “self glorified, full of intelligible light—but rather itself pure light—weightless, floating free, having become—but rather being—a god.”⁶⁵

      Origen and the Touch of the Transcendent: The Divine Library

      As for Plotinus, so also for Origen, human corporeality could be troubling, a mark of a self in disarray. Commenting, for example, on Matt. 7:6 (“Do not give what is holy to dogs; and do not throw your pearls before swine”), Origen remarked, “For I would say that whoever is constantly muddied with bodily things and rolls around in the filthy things of life and has no desire for the pure and holy life, such a person is nothing but a swine.”⁶⁶ Origen sometimes thought of human embodiment as the result of spiritual defect; the body in itself is not only “dead and completely lifeless” but is also “opposed and hostile to the spirit.”⁶⁷

      Yet despite his sometime disparagement of the body, Origen seemed more concerned with how the soul orients itself with regard to the Pauline concept of “the flesh,” understood as a willful attachment to false values that drag the soul in different directions.⁶⁸ The soul takes on the qualities of that which it contemplates: hence Origen’s sense of the human dilemma as one of divided consciousness, which he frequently pictured as a kind of doubleness, an “outer man who looks at things in a corporeal way,” and an “inner man” who sees spiritually.⁶⁹ In several of his writings, Origen developed this concept of doubleness at length, arguing that the empirical perceptions of human beings have as analogue the spiritual senses—having a nose for righteousness, an eye of the heart, the touch of faith, and so on through the five senses.⁷⁰ As David Dawson has argued, the doctrine of the spiritual senses rests on “an intrinsic connection between the visible and the invisible” and, “although the bodily realm always informs one’s love for God, it should not become the object of that love.”⁷¹

      However, choosing an object for that love is just the problem. As Origen explained in his Commentary on the Song of Songs, “it is impossible for human nature not to be always feeling the passion of love for something.” And he continued: “Some people pervert this faculty of passionate love, which is implanted in the human soul by the creator’s kindness. Either it becomes with them a passion for money and the pursuit of avaricious ends; or they go after glory … or they chase after harlots and are found the prisoners of wantonness and lewdness; or they squander the strength of this great good on other things like these [including their jobs, athletic skills, and even higher education].”⁷² This picture of a perverted self is very much like the restless and “fussy” self envisaged by Plotinus, a self that is placed only in relation to the material world and its enticements. Human love must be directed to the good, “and by that which is good,” Origen concluded, “we understand not anything corporeal, but only that which is found first in God and in the powers of the soul.”⁷³

      Unfortunately, the powers of the soul are not easy to harness. Frequently relying on scriptural animal imagery in order to picture the soul as a kind of menagerie, Origen argued that consciousness is multiple; it has “secret recesses” (arcanae conscientiae) and can “admit different energies, that is, controlling influences of spirits either good or bad.”⁷⁴ The key to redirecting these inner powers is self-inspection, a probing of the false personae that make the soul “dingy and dirty.”⁷⁵ Thus Origen called for a kind of reflexive self-seeing that is transformative: “If we are willing to understand that in us there is the power to be transformed from being serpents, swine, and dogs, let us learn from the apostle that the transformation depends on us. For he says this: ‘We all, when with unveiled face we reflect the glory of the Lord, are transformed into the same image.’”⁷⁶

      That the self is capable of such metamorphosis is due in part to its ability to read Scripture properly so as to discern the spiritual metanarrative encrypted within it. Proper reading was, for Origen, allegorical reading, which spiritualizes the material realities of the text, its “sensible aspect,” and at the same time spiritualizes the reader, who learns how to distinguish between “the inner and the outer man.”⁷⁷ Learning how to make this distinction is crucial, because an allegorical reading of the biblical text “reveals a surprising and total isomorphism with the very structure of spiritual reality,”⁷⁸ a reality that is not only cosmic but also central to authentic self-identity as Origen understood it. In a passage in his Commentary on John devoted precisely to what he there calls “elevated interpretation,” Origen wrote that “the mind that has been purified and has surpassed all material things, so as to be certain of the contemplation of God, is divinized by those things that it contemplates.”⁷⁹ As Robert Berchman has argued, the purpose of this form of textual contemplation is “to foster the potential of intellectual self-awareness and so orient the self upon a path of self-knowledge that eventually leads to consciousness of the Logos.”⁸⁰

      As the book becomes spirit, so the person becomes book: one of Origen’s most powerful images of the self in relation to Scripture is presented as one of the figural meanings of Noah’s ark in the Homilies on Genesis: “If there is anyone who, while evils are increasing and vices are overflowing, can turn from the things which are in flux and passing away and fallen, and can hear the word of God and the heavenly precepts, this man is building an ark of salvation within his own heart and is dedicating a library, so to speak, of the divine word within himself…. From this library learn the historical narratives; from it recognize ‘the great mystery’ which is fulfilled in Christ and in the Church.”⁸¹ This “library of divine books” is the “faithful soul” who, by internalizing the word, begins to realize a touch of transcendence in the self. As Dawson has observed, “the allegorical reader’s necessary departure from Scripture’s literal sense parallels her resistance to the fall of her soul away from contemplation of the logos into body, history, and culture. But the equally necessary reliance of the allegorical story on the literal sense parallels the reader’s salvific use of her soul’s embodiment (by virtue of the prior, enabling self-embodiment of the divine logos).”⁸² Although by directing the attention of the soul away from temporal reality (“the things in flux”) and toward the divinity within Origen envisioned the self’s proper place as a cosmic one (“the heavenly precepts”), this does not mean that embodied life has no value. When the soul is “placed” in the context of a divine library, it is also placed with regard to the incarnation, as Dawson indicates briefly in the quotation above.

      The full import of the image of the divine library can be seen in a remarkable passage from the Philocalia, in which Origen argues that “the СКАЧАТЬ