The Corporeal Imagination. Patricia Cox Miller

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СКАЧАТЬ proper place.¹⁴⁹ Spectacle was as much a part of the cult of relics as it was of theurgical animation of statues.

      Participants in such spectacles were confronted with spiritual objects to which they were not only related (as Victricius insisted, there is only “one mass of corporeality”)¹⁵⁰ but in which they could see the “spiritual jewels,” as it were, of their own selves, body and soul, touched by transcendence. When Victricius urged his congregation, whom he had extolled from the outset for its ascetic valor, to “set their souls towards these gems,” he offered those spiritual jewels as an image for how soul “places” the self in regard to its own ethical ideals, since the gems represent virtues whose realization was the goal of the ascetic life. As an image of self-identity in the context of relic-veneration, “spiritual jewels” flirts with erasing the boundary between the material and the spiritual; however, the inescapable “touch of the real” in this form of devotion ensured that “body” would remain as a locus of religious meaning.

      Toward an Embodied “I”

      Two paradigmatic moments in the history of self-understanding in late antiquity have been presented in this chapter, each represented by striking word-pictures drawn from texts by the Neoplatonic and Christian thinkers upon whom the discussion has focused. My wager has been that these images—Plotinus’s transparent sphere, Origen’s divine library, Proclus’s animated statues, and Victricius’s spiritual jewels—can function as expressions, in condensed form, of their authors’ views of self-identity and its relation (or not) to human corporeality. Following Jonathan Smith’s argument that a worldview, as well as a view of the self, can be discerned through a culture’s or an individual’s imagination of place, I chose these particular images not only because of their vividness as figures or metaphors of place, but also because they reveal how each author thought that the self could best orient itself with respect to the spiritual and material aspects of human life. These “luminous details”—to recall the phrase borrowed by New Historicists from Ezra Pound—are active in that they recommend a way of being-in-the-world religiously.

      Each of these images not only envisions a place but also recommends a practice whereby proper placement can be achieved. Both Plotinus and Origen drew on images of actual places—a globe teeming with life and a library of sacred books—that are metaphors of interior dispositions from beginning to end. They turned these figures of place into images of a self transformed by the knowledge that the empirical, historically conditioned world is not the locus of true identity and can even hinder connection with the divine realm. Further, both are spiritual exercises that teach the reader how to turn vision inward; they both model a form of intense inner concentration that opens the self out to structures of spiritual reality that are the soul’s true home.

      By contrast, the images in the texts of Proclus and Victricius both begin and end in actual places—temples with animated statues, cathedrals and martyria with relics.¹⁵¹ In a sense they provide snapshots of the self engaged in forms of practice that orient the soul to sources of divine power. But they are also figurations of self-identity and not simply descriptions of ritual behavior, since animated statue and relic are used to describe not only the object of practice but also the identity of the practitioner. In these images as well as the earlier ones, an imagination of place implies a view of the self.

      When compared, these two sets of images, and the cultural preferences that they imply, demonstrate a shift in conceptions of the self with respect to materiality, broadly construed to include both the physical world as well as the human body. By plotting this shift as a movement from a religious orientation of the self that emphasized “the touch of transcendence” to one that emphasized “the touch of the real,” I have not wanted to suggest that views of the self in the earlier era of the third century were somehow more spiritual than they were in the later era. Orienting the self in relation to the divine remained a constant. Rather, the shift involved a change in views of the soul’s ability to make contact with the god or gods.

      One way to describe the change is to consider how these two groups of authors thought about loss. For Plotinus and Origen, so confident that intense inner contemplation could bring about realization of the self’s divine core, distraction was a major problem; loss of attention diminished the soul’s consciousness of its expansive identity, and this loss was often attributed by them to the particularity of the material world and the body’s involvement with it. For Proclus and Victricius, living in an age when the high gods had become more remote, loss was expressed as a loss of immediacy and as a diminished view of the human capacity to make contact with the divine by using the self’s inner powers. This loss of cosmic optimism concerning the makeup of the self, together with the felt need for figures who could mediate divine presence, eventuated in a new appreciation precisely for particularity. Now the sensible world, including human sense-perception, the body, and objects in the material realm, could be viewed not as distractions but as theophanic vehicles. This was the basic shift, and it entailed a re-formation of the viewing subject, who was newly dependent on rituals of transformation in order to see spiritual animation in the world and the self. Perhaps not surprisingly, when the tendency to suppress materiality as a locus of meaning was revised, the fully embodied “I” could see both more, and less, than in an earlier age.

      Chapter Two

      Bodies in Fragments

      One aspect of the material turn in late antiquity was the development of an aesthetics that emphasized the visual and tactile immediacy of the part—a piece of bone, a single mosaic tile, a word in a poem—at the expense of the whole. In literature and art, compositional techniques such as juxtaposition and repetition were used precisely to highlight fragments rather than wholes. By virtue of these techniques, such fragments became “things” in the sense conveyed by Bill Brown’s “thing theory,” in which objects took on surplus value and stood out against their contexts as magnets of attraction.¹ When aesthetically wrought, these fragments took on force as presences both sensuous and metaphysical, and they both induced changes in the human subject’s habitual perception and effected a virtual re-education of the senses. In this chapter, a wide spectrum of ancient arts—sculpture, poetry, ekphrasis, collective hagiography—will be surveyed in order to characterize the aesthetics of the fragment, which will be explored in more detail with regard to relics in the chapter that follows.

      In his “thing theory,” Brown does not discuss linguistic “things,” but I think his argument concerning the metamorphosis of mere object into meaningful thing can illuminate the visionary power of verbal images as well as of actual physical objects. Images, too, can assert themselves as “things.” Indeed, the affective appeal of figurative language was one of the forces that helped shape the tangible piety of the material turn. Hence the “things” in this chapter have a double referent, indicating not only concrete things like relics and holy men but also their linguistic images and the kind of narratives in which they were embedded. In terms of the aesthetics of the fragment, such image-things are both fragments of the whole and emblematic of the whole, where the whole is both a literary structure as well as what I call a narrative line.

      An amusing example of the idea of a narrative line comes from Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium. Calvino wrote in a chapter in this work entitled “Quickness” that he “would like to edit a collection of tales consisting of one sentence only, or even a single line.” He narrates a story by the Guatemalan writer Augusto Monterroso as one that he would include in this collection of narrative lines. Here is that story in its entirety: “When I woke up, the dinosaur was still there.”² Like Calvino, I too am interested in narrative structures of a particular type, like his collection of one-liners, in which the genre of the collection is just as important as what it contains. Part of my interest in this chapter is in narrative “lines”—strategies of narration—that operate on the basis of two functional criteria: one, they leave out unnecessary details, and two, they emphasize repetition.³ By omitting unnecessary details, such narratives foreground the objects—the СКАЧАТЬ