The Corporeal Imagination. Patricia Cox Miller

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СКАЧАТЬ us but also the transfigured presence of Christ in us. Scripture embeds the incarnation in the world, but it also transfigures that world, as Origen went on to say: “those who are capable of following the traces of Jesus when he goes up and is transfigured in losing his terrestrial form will see the transfiguration in every part of Scripture” and will be transfigured themselves, since they have the key to the wisdom hidden in the text.⁸⁴ No longer divided, then, the Origenian self is as expansive and as embracing of a transcendent structure of reality as the Plotinian self whose “head strikes the heavens.”

      Origen’s connection of the Incarnation with Scripture and, by extension, with the reader whose self encompasses a divine library, would seem to dignify the body; indeed, Dawson argues vigorously that “his celebration of allegorical transformation of identity is a spiritualization, not a rejection, of the body.”⁸⁵ Such a spiritualized view of human materiality, however, is hard to reconcile with a valorization of the embodied human being, the historical self: as Peter Brown remarks, for Origen “the present human body reflected the needs of a single, somewhat cramped moment in the spirit’s progress back to a former, limitless identity.”⁸⁶ And, even though “body” would remain for Origen a marker of identity, it did so only as it was transformed into a spiritual body “gradually and by degrees, over the course of infinite and immeasurable ages.”⁸⁷ Origen may have had a “heady sense of the potency and dynamism of body,” as Caroline Walker Bynum argues; but as she goes on to observe, his theory of the body “seemed to sacrifice integrity of bodily structure for the sake of transformation; it seemed to surrender material continuity for the sake of identity.”⁸⁸ Thus although Origen shared with Plotinus a sense of a self touched by transcendence,⁸⁹ he went one step further in spiritualizing the self by allowing even the body an eventual touch of transcendence.

      From the Touch of Transcendence to the Touch of the Real

      As I noted earlier, the ways of conceiving of the self that are the focus of this discussion can be located along a continuum, with the views of Plotinus and Origen representing a paradigmatic moment when the self is oriented toward the spiritual, sometimes at the expense of the material world. The later Neoplatonists and Christians to whom attention will now shift also privileged spiritual knowing as a central and defining feature of the self, but they did so with greater emphasis on, and valuation of, the this-worldly or material realm. Whereas Plotinus and Origen directed the gaze inward in order to orient the self “outward” to a transcendent spiritual structure, later thinkers did the reverse, directing the gaze outward in order to achieve inner vision.

      The focus will continue to be on images in texts that can be read as pictures of how a particular author orients the self. As with Plotinus and Origen, the soul is placed by such textual imagery, but that imagery also recommends a form of practice—spiritual exercises in Plotinus’s case, and introspective reading and interpretation in Origen’s. However, unlike the rather intellectual and even ethereal images and practices seen so far, those to which I now turn—the animation of statues and the devotion to relics—involve a kind of material engagement not characteristic of the earlier forms of self-construal. In fact, from the standpoint of the earlier perspective, the later use of the material to enhance the spiritual will seem paradoxical.

      Proclus and the Touch of the Real: Animated Statues

      Although, in the wake of Plotinus, achievement of a “self glorified, full of light”⁹⁰ continued to be the goal of later Neoplatonists, the means for achieving that goal, as well as the cosmology and psychology upon which those means were premised, had changed. The earlier tendency to suppress materiality as fundamental to self-identity was revised when the orienting function of the soul shifted with regard to the spiritual value of the sensible world. This shift toward a sacramental view of the world—a view, that is, that invests the sensible world with divine presence rather than seeing the sensible as a shadowy reflection of the divine—was already evident in the psychology of Iamblichus, whose views of the soul Proclus largely followed.

      Unlike Plotinus, who argued that part of the embodied soul never descended but remained always in the intelligible realm, thus linking human identity permanently to a kind of transcendent consciousness, Iamblichus thought that the soul descended entirely.⁹¹ No part of the Iamblichean “I” is untouched by embodiment.⁹² This has been viewed as a kind of demotion and even self-alienation of the soul, and indeed Iamblichus argued that the soul could not recover its own divinity by itself but needed help from the gods.⁹³ Embodiment, however, was part of a larger cosmogonic process: reading the Timaeus’s description of the creation of Forms and matter as simultaneous rather than as sequential, Iamblichus argued that “the separation of corporeality from its principles was an impossibility that could occur only in abstraction, not in actuality.”⁹⁴ Thus even though the embodied soul suffered dividedness—in Iamblichus’s words, “the sameness within itself becomes faint”—the material world provided it with resources for the recovery of its divine nature, since traces of the divine were infused throughout the world.⁹⁵

      Theurgy, a ritual process whose goal was self-unification and illumination by the gods, was based on this view of the material world as theophany.⁹⁶ As Iamblichus wrote, “the abundance of power of the highest beings has the nature always to transcend everything in this world, and yet this power is immanent in everything equally without impediment.”⁹⁷ This power was present in the form of divine “tokens” (συνθήματα and σύμβολα), those “godlike stones, herbs, animals, and spices” that the theurgist combined and consecrated in order to “establish from them a complete and pure receptacle [for the gods].”⁹⁸ By this ritual use of matter, an altered sense of self-identity was performed and actualized, as the divine in the self was united with the god by the god’s own action: theurgical “ascent” was not an escape from the material world but rather a deification of the soul through a unifying process that eventuated in what Iamblichus called “putting on the form of the gods.”⁹⁹ Shaw has put the matter succinctly: “theurgic rites transformed the soul from being its own idol, in an inverted attitude of self-interest, into an icon of the divine, with its very corporeality changed into a vehicle of transcendence.”¹⁰⁰

      This theurgical view of the self was inherited and developed further by Proclus, whose view of the religious import of materiality was, if anything, even more emphatic than that of Iamblichus. Because, as Proclus argued, “all things are bound up in the gods and deeply rooted in them,” everything in the sensible world is linked by lines of sympathy with the god appropriate to it.¹⁰¹ Indeed, according to the principle expressed in Proposition 57 in his Elements of Theology, whereby the earlier members of a causal series have greater power and so extend throughout all the levels of being that they illuminate, the divine is directly present in matter. John Dillon has observed that “the theory speculates that, in a powerful sense, the lower down the scale of nature an entity is situated, the more closely it is linked with higher principles. This provides excellent philosophical justification for making use of stones, plants, and animals in the performance of magical [i.e., theurgical] rituals; they are actually nearer to one god or another than we are, being direct products of the divine realm.”¹⁰² “Some things,” remarked Proclus, “are linked with the gods immediately [ἄμεσος], others through a varying number of intermediate terms, but ‘all things are full of gods,’ and from the gods each derives its natural attribute.”¹⁰³

      Despite this rather ecstatic affirmation of “the touch of the real,” Proclus, like Iamblichus, had a diminished view of the human capacity to realize its connection with the divine world by using its own powers. No part of the soul remains above, and it does not have the intelligible realm within.¹⁰⁴ Indeed, its knowledge “is different from the divine sort” due to our intermediate position in the cosmos.¹⁰⁵ Hence, Proclus continued, “it is while remaining at our own rank, and possessing images of the essences of all Beings, that we turn to them by means of these images, and cognize the realm of Being from the tokens of it that we possess, not coordinately, СКАЧАТЬ