The Corporeal Imagination. Patricia Cox Miller

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СКАЧАТЬ an image formed as a reflective compromise between wishes and defenses that engage in a ceaseless struggle for ascendancy.”¹⁷ This staging of the self in terms of ambivalence, that is, in terms of a constant conflict between desire and repression, makes any attempt to formulate a stable autobiography impossible. “In autobiography psychoanalytically read,”Jay continues, “the undecidable question, as Jacques Lacan pronounces it, is ‘Who speaks?’”¹⁸

      In light of such a definition, it is somewhat problematic to use the word “self” for ancient understandings of human identity expressed as “soul.” Plotinus, for example, did not think that the question “Who speaks?” was finally undecidable. At the end of the very treatise that he opens by asking to whom the emotions belong, he again asks a series of self-definitional questions: “What is it that has carried out this investigation? Is it “we” or the soul? It is “we,” but by the soul. And what do we mean by “by the soul”? Did “we” investigate by having soul? No, but in so far as we are soul.”¹⁹ Despite his worries about the soul’s proclivity for errancy, Plotinus believed that the soul was a principle of self-cohesion anchored in a stabilizing transcendent reality.²⁰ Origen, too, despite his bestial scripting of the soul’s debased desires, did not understand human identity to be a compromise formation premised upon ceaseless struggle; instead, he located the true self in an inner logos, incorporeal and changeless, through which a sustaining relation to the divine mind is established.²¹

      Nonetheless, given the marked tendency of classical and late ancient authors to view soul as the locus of human identity,²² I think that the term “self” can be used to characterize what ancient thinkers meant by “soul” as long as it is used to describe not actors in an unconscious script, but an orientation to context. When conceptualized as an orientation to context, the self-as-soul is not an entity that one “has.” As Frederic Schroeder has observed, “the noun ‘self’ is prima facie embarrassing to the philosopher, since it seems to be little more than a hypostatized version of a reflexive and intensive pronoun. We may well ask, What is the difference between myself and my Self? How is either of these to be distinguished from me? The ancients were perhaps wiser in not rendering the equivalent Greek pronoun autos, or the Latin ipse, a substantive.”²³ Given the virtual equivalence of autos and psyche, especially (but not only) in Platonic traditions,²⁴ soul is likewise not a substantive. In other words, as a term that describes the self, “soul” is a placing function that serves to orient the self in a network of relationships that are both material and spiritual.

      The Self and Images of Place

      The broad topic that this chapter addresses is a shift in the ways in which the self was represented in Neoplatonism and Christianity, moving from Plotinus and Origen in the third century to theurgists and theorists of relic-worship in the late fourth and fifth centuries. I intend this comparison of ways of thinking about the self, somewhat distant in time from each other, to serve as what Simon Goldhill, in another context, calls “paradigmatic moments”; as he explains, “these moments are not chosen because of any commitment to Foucauldian ‘rupture’ but in order to maximize difference for the sake of rhetorical clarity.”²⁵ My argument focuses on the orienting function of soul insofar as it comes to expression in word-pictures of the self in relation to place, and the shift that occurs in such images of self-placement will be plotted along a continuum whose two poles I designate as “a touch of the transcendent” and “a touch of the real.”²⁶ What I mean to specify by these phrases appropriated from the New Historicism is an aesthetics of self-identity that “places” the self by using cosmic imagery—“a touch of the transcendent”—that gives way to an aesthetics of self-identity that “places” the self by using material imagery—“a touch of the real.” Furthermore, the word “touch” is important to this distinction because the distinction is not an absolute one but rather a matter of shifting emphasis concerning the relation between, and reconciliation of, idea and materiality, or the abstract and the concrete.

      A picture of this argument regarding the shift in self-understanding as conveyed by images of place can be quickly drawn by considering how two Christians, Origen in the third century and Epiphanius in the late fourth, interpreted that notable feature of biblical geography, the heavenly waters that became the rivers of Paradise.²⁷ Commenting on God’s creation and dividing of the waters in the first chapter of Genesis, Origen distinguishes between two kinds of water and immediately sees in them an anthropological image: “Let each of you, therefore, be zealous to become a divider of that water which is above and that which is below. The purpose, of course, is that, attaining an understanding and participation in that spiritual water which is above the firmament one may draw forth ‘from within himself rivers of living water springing up into life eternal.’”²⁸ Origen is so eager that his reader “relate [the passage] to ourselves” that he opens out the self to encompass not just the “rivers of living water” but all of the features of the place that God creates: the seeds, the stars (“the heaven of our heart”), even the birds are all features of the human soul.²⁹ The force of Origen’s interpretation is centrifugal, as the human heart is enlarged to encompass a spiritual geography.

      This was, of course, the kind of allegorizing interpretation that irked Epiphanius, a major instigator of the Origenist controversy and famously critical of Origen’s spiritual flights of fancy.³⁰ Wanting to have none of Origen’s metaphorizing of Paradise in terms of the human, Epiphanius denied the validity of what he considered to be Origen’s too-spiritual understanding: “In the beginning God made heaven and earth, which are not to be understood allegorically, but can actually be seen. And scripture says [that he made] the firmament, and the sea, plants, trees, pasture, grass, animals, fish, birds, and everything else which, as we can see, actually came into being.”³¹ This emphasis on seeing was also part of his attack on Origen in the Panarion, where he complained that Origen had deprived both the spiritual and the anthropological orders of seeing (the Son could not see the Father, the Holy Spirit could not see the Son, the angels could not see the Spirit, and human beings could not see angels).³² The real clincher to his argument, however, was his personal experience of two of the rivers of Paradise: “I saw the waters of Gehon, waters that I looked at with these bodily eyes…. And I simply drank the waters from the great river Euphrates, which you can touch with your hand and sip with your lips; these are not spiritual waters.”³³ Taking in the waters of Paradise with eyes and mouth, the “I” of Epiphanius is located in terms of a much more visceral, “this-worldly” geography than Origen’s spiritually expansive geographical self.

      Although it is clear that Epiphanius was not overtly theorizing human possibility as Origen was, it is also clear that there is more to this clash than a disagreement about scriptural interpretation. As Jonathan Smith has observed, a total worldview is implied in an individual’s or a culture’s imagination of place: “it is through an understanding and symbolization of place that a society or individual creates itself.”³⁴ Epiphanius’s tangible imagination of place signaled a shift in the role that “the real” might play in formulating human possibility. Peter Brown has remarked about the Palestinian monks who heard and approved of Epiphanius’s rejection of Origen’s view of Paradise that, for them, “paradise was not some supra-celestial, spiritual state, from which their souls had fallen on to the dull earth. Paradise was close to hand. It had always been on earth…. Paradise was within their grasp.”³⁵ Hence Epiphanius’s materialist appropriation of scriptural images of place was also a form of spirituality, but one that was more “centripetal” than Origen’s in its this-worldly orientation. It is this shift from a transcendent to an earthy aesthetic that I will explore as a shift in ancient senses of the self, drawing upon an approach advocated by the New Historicism.

      New Historicists Gallagher and Greenblatt describe their interpretive procedure as routing “theoretical and methodological generalizations through dense networks of particulars,” and they defend their use of anecdotes in historical explanation in terms of their reluctance “to see the long chains of close analysis СКАЧАТЬ