The Corporeal Imagination. Patricia Cox Miller

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СКАЧАТЬ of reality can only be made through their effects, and even those effects—the tokens or traces of the divine sown in the material world—are irradiations from the divine and not the gods themselves.¹⁰⁷

      In one sense, then, the Proclean self had no choice but to remain “someone,” having lost Plotinus’s heady view of the possibility of coming to identity with the divine.¹⁰⁸ In another sense, however, that same self was oriented in a world dense with divine power, and in a religious tradition that provided the techniques for making contact with that power. The network of relationships in which Proclus’s theurgical self was placed continued, as in earlier Neoplatonism, to be both spiritual and material, but it now presupposed a realignment of perception and the senses with regard to the divine. Seeing more than was (visibly) there, the theurgist looked out at the physical world in order to fill the self with divine images.

      In terms of orienting the self in the world theurgically, Proclus is probably best known for the practice of the animation of statues, a practice that Iamblichus eschewed.¹⁰⁹ Proclus thought that statues were, in effect, aesthetic elaborations of the gods: “through their shapes, signs, postures, and expressions,” as Shaw notes, “theurgic statues revealed the properties of the gods.”¹¹⁰ Furthermore, when the material symbola proper to a specific god were inserted into hollow cavities in the statue, the statue was “animated” or activated with the divine power channeled through the levels of being by those symbola, revealing divine wisdom in the form of oracles and enabling human participation in that wisdom.¹¹¹ In his treatise On the Hieratic Art of the Greeks, Proclus listed examples of these material tokens: the bel stone, the lotus, the heliotrope, the lion, and the cock each make present a particular aspect of the sun god and ultimately of Apollo.¹¹² The religio-aesthetic basis for this practice was stated straightforwardly by Proclus: “for a theurgist who sets up a statue as a likeness of a certain divine order fabricates the tokens of its identity with reference to that order, acting as does the craftsman when he makes a likeness by looking to its proper model.”¹¹³

      This way of conceiving of animated statues, which shifts the relation of the spiritual and the material in a positive direction by affirming the likeness between them, brought a touch of the real into the area of human identity as well. There are passages in Proclus’s writings that suggest that the animated statue functions as an image of the self in both implicit and explicit ways. The implicit connection between statue and human being is in Proclus’s discussion about the three ways in which the cosmos, considered as the entire visible order, is related to the Forms. Defining these three modes as participation, impression, and reflection, Proclus then offered the following example of “the three kinds of participation interwoven with each other”:

      The body of a good and wise man, for example, appears itself handsome and attractive because it participates directly in the beauty of nature and has its bodily shape molded by it, and by receiving reflections from the beauty of soul it carries a trace of ideal beauty, the soul serving as a connecting term between his own lowest beauty and Beauty itself. So that the reflection reveals this species of soul as being wise, or courageous, or noble or a likeness of some other virtue. And the animated statue, for example, participates by way of impression in the art which turns it on a lathe and polishes and shapes it in such and such a fashion; while from the universe it has received reflections of vitality which even cause us to say that it is alive; and as a whole it has been made like the god whose image it is.¹¹⁴

      In this passage, the human being, body and soul, is placed in apposition with the animate statue; at the very least, they are analogous as icons of a sacralized world.

      Elsewhere, however, Proclus brought statue and human being together more explicitly: “the theurgist, by attaching certain symbols to statues, makes them better able to participate in the higher powers; in the same way, since universal Nature has, by creative corporeal principles, made [human] bodies like statues of souls, she inseminates in each a particular aptitude to receive a particular kind of soul, better or less good.”¹¹⁵ Here human body and statue relate in the same way that the human soul and symbola do. In another passage, this time from his fragmentary Commentary on the Chaldean Oracles, Proclus united divine tokens, human souls, and bodies in a single image: “the soul is composed of the intellectual words (νοεϱοὶ λογοί) and from the divine symbola (θεῖα σύμβολα), some of which are from the intellectual ideas, while others are from the divine henads. And we are in fact icons of the intellectual realities, and we are statues of the unknowable synthēmata.”¹¹⁶

      The Proclean “we” is as full of divine energy as an animated statue; indeed, it is itself a “statue” capable, when guarded by ritual, of being illuminated by the divine.¹¹⁷ The qualifier regarding ritual is important. Since for Proclus the self was always in a world marked by division, it could not activate its own channels of connection to the divine apart from the material world and the ritual procedures whereby elements of the world provided pathways of spiritual communication. This was, of course, a “spiritualized world,” as Rappe notes; but it was a world none-theless.¹¹⁸ Proclus’s image of the self as an animated statue is a view of the self touched by the real, oriented to the divine world in such a way that materiality took on new meaning. A bit theatrical, perhaps, and even “peculiarly expressionistic,” to recall Matthews’ phrase, this expression of self-identity addressed the human being’s lowered cosmic status with a kinetic sense of the tangible presence of the transcendent.

      Victricius of Rouen and the Touch of the Real: Spiritual Jewels

      In Contra Celsum, Origen had written, “In order to know God we need no body at all. The knowledge of God is not derived from the eye of the body, but from the mind which sees that which is in the image of the Creator and by divine providence has received the power to know God.”¹¹⁹ A century later, many Christians disagreed. Indeed, the fourth-century literature that describes desert ascetics provides ample testimony to a (literally) visual organization of meaning whereby observers of ascetic practitioners claimed to see with their own eyes men living a heavenly life, men whose bodies were illuminated with flashes of angelic light.¹²⁰ In this period, Christianity was, with Neoplatonism, “equally prepared to look for transformed persons,” as Peter Brown has observed.¹²¹ As he succinctly puts it, underlying the conviction that holiness could be seen was “the notion that body and soul formed a single field of force, in which what happened in the one had subtle and lasting effects on the other…. Somehow, the body itself was the companion of the soul in its effort to recover the ‘image of God.’”¹²²

      This alignment of the body with spiritual attainment, together with an increased emphasis on seeing the touch of transcendence in human physicality, also signaled that a shift had occurred away from Origen’s perceived tendency to privilege mind as the most essential aspect of human identity. In late fourth-century views of both the creation of Adam and the resurrection, body was an integral, if troubling, part of the human being.¹²³ Viewed as embodied from the beginning, the self was now in greater need of mediating channels to establish connection with the divine, since a gulf had opened between the uncreated God and the embodied created order.¹²⁴ Origen’s view of the soul’s contemplative ability to bring itself into accord with an inner logos gave way, especially in ascetic thought, to concentration on the salvific role of the incarnate Christ in making possible a restoration of humanity’s relationship with the divine.¹²⁵ Curiously, as the body became more central to human identity, it became more dangerous, needing a fully divine Christ to assume it so as to make possible its divinization. Commenting on the Christology of the Nicene Christians of this era, Virginia Burrus has argued that “the assertion of the Son’s absolute divinity and the divinization of humanity anticipated in his incarnation register their historical effect in the rigid discipline of fourth-century bodies resisting their own carnality.”¹²⁶

      The thought of Athanasius is a case in point. In his view, Adam and Eve, having at first lived a life of ascetic self-control СКАЧАТЬ