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Chapter One

Bodies and Selves

The shift in sensibility that I have called “the material turn” was not limited to late ancient Christianity. The reconfiguration of the relationship between materiality and meaning was part of a wider cultural phenomenon, as several studies have shown. Beginning in the fourth century, there was an increase in appreciation for color, glitter, and spectacle, from public ceremonies to personal clothing.¹ This heightened appeal to the eye, variously characterized as a new theatricality and “a peculiarly expressionistic manner,” can also be seen in poetry and sculpture—a “jeweled style” based on preference for visual immediacy, which was achieved by emphasis on the part at the expense of elaborations of organic wholes.² Petitioning the visual imagination of the spectator also marked the biographical literature of this period, as authors invited readers to “see” holiness in the bodies of their heroes.³ As noted in the Introduction, an increase in the ability to “see more than was [literally] there” seems characteristic of the cultural scene that also witnessed a new appreciation for the role of both “things” and of the material imagination in understandings of self-identity.⁴

Central to the material turn was the use of the body as a tangible frame of selfhood, a phenomenon that was most strikingly manifested in Christianity and Neoplatonism. An example from Neoplatonism of this new function of the body as signifier of the self, particularly in terms of spiritual transformation, can serve to illustrate the import of this aspect of the material turn. In the late fifth century, Marinus of Neapolis wrote a biography of Proclus, his teacher and predecessor as head of the Neoplatonic academy in Athens. Midway through the biography, Marinus described Proclus as follows: “It was apparent that he spoke [under the inspiration of] divine thoughts, and from his wise mouth the words poured out like snowflakes. It seemed that his eyes were filled with a certain flashing, and further his face was suffused with a divine radiance.”⁵ According to Marinus, it was not only Proclus’s radiant face and snowflake-words that reflected his hero’s exalted self. Early on in his work he elaborated on characteristics of Proclus’s body. In this regard it is significant that Marinus, who organized the biography around the virtues, expanded the traditional Neoplatonic canon of four virtues (political, purifying, contemplative, and exemplary) by adding physical, ethical, and theurgical categories.⁶ In the context of the revalued material world in which Marinus was writing, it seems particularly significant that he could imagine a set of virtues that was specifically physical and revelatory of the relation of body and self. Proclus is accordingly described physically as having “a certain symmetry of organic members” and “the beauty of just proportions”; he possessed “an extreme delicacy of the senses that may be called ‘corporeal wisdom,”’ and “from his soul exuded a certain living light that shone over his whole body.”⁷ This, says Marinus, was the man “who was to achieve the presence of true being.”⁸ Proclus’s body was a walking advertisement of his philosophical prowess.

The phrase “corporeal wisdom” is a good example of the new emphasis on the body as a positive locus for the construal of the self in this period. This chapter sets the stage for the book’s focus on the material turn in late ancient Christianity by undertaking a comparative analysis of Christianity and Neoplatonism. In the following pages, thinkers who were participants in the material turn will be compared with thinkers from an earlier period in order to bring the new emphasis on materiality into sharper focus. Drawing on word-pictures of the self from the writings of each of these authors, I analyze a shift in ancient views of the embodied self, a shift from viewing corporeality as a mark of a self in disarray to viewing it as a site of religious and philosophical transformation. However, before addressing the issue of the body as signifier—that is, as a “thing” both negative and positive—it will help to explore briefly how the concept of “self” is being used here.

What Is a Self?

“Pleasures and sadnesses, fears and assurances, desires and aversions and pain—whose are they?”⁹ Although Plotinus had struggled with this poignant question for many years and indeed had found an answer to it, he was still, at the end of his life, trying to articulate a vision of an authentic self free from the emotional entanglements of the embodied human being, entanglements that distracted the self from its genuine powers of self-discernment.¹⁰ This worry about self-identity—“But we … who are ‘we’?”¹¹—arose in part from Plotinus’s recognition of the soul’s tendency toward fragmentation—its false tendency, that is, to define itself in terms of its attachment to cares and concerns of the moment. In his words, “all souls are all things, but each [is differentiated] according to that which is active in it; … different souls look at different things and are and become what they look at.”¹²

This concern about fixating distractions that alienate and diminish the self was not limited to the Platonic tradition to which Plotinus adhered. Almost a century earlier, the Stoic Marcus Aurelius had asked himself, “To what use am I now putting the powers of my soul? Examine yourself on this point at every step, and ask, ‘How does it stand with that part of me called the master-part? Whose soul inhabits me at this moment? Is it a little child’s, a youngster’s, a woman’s, a tyrant’s, that of a beast of burden, or a wild animal?’”¹³ Characterizing Marcus as “criticizing himself relentlessly, like a bug under glass,” Carlin Barton has argued that the “result of such a severe internalized critic” was “self-splitting,” and “the shared, blurred social identity that ideally molded and formed the personality was experienced as a loss of identity, an unsightly chaos of the self.”¹⁴

Worry about such a chaos of the self could also be found in Christianity. For Origen of Alexandria, an older contemporary of Plotinus, the “inner man” was unfortunately rent by demonic presences. Frequently interpreting images of beasts from Scriptural passages as figures for emotions, Origen interpreted them as fixating prisons—“serpent-man” and “horse-man”—and as grotesque masks.¹⁵ When caught in the grip of negative emotions and false attachments, “we wear the mask (persona) of the lion, the dragon, the fox … and the pig.”¹⁶ An unsightly chaos indeed.

Although Plotinus, Marcus Aurelius, and Origen did not share the same thought-systems regarding the composition and destiny of the soul, all three did reflect in similar ways about the phenomenon of the self in disarray. Yet this is only part of the story, since they also expressed a certain optimism about the self that was both personal and cosmic. This is a topic to which I shall return. For the moment, however, I want to observe that these ancient portraits of a self divided against itself, bewildered as to its identity, seem strikingly “modern,” I think seductively so, perhaps in part because the psychoanalytical traditions of the twentieth century appropriated ancient terminology such as “psyche,” “persona,” and words formed with autos (e.g., autism, autoeroticism) for their own understandings of the self. Although I have used the terms “soul” and “self” interchangeably in the instances of ancient thinking given above, there is in fact an interpretive problem in trying to reconcile an ancient terminology of “soul” with modern concepts of “self.”

One example of such a modern concept will help clarify the problem. In a cogent analysis of ways in which Freudian psychoanalysis altered conceptions of the self, Gregory Jay offers the following succinct description of the self in the wake of Freud: “The argument of psychoanalysis, of course, becomes that we are not what we are—that our empirical selves are actors in a script whose authorship is essentially unconscious, both on a personal and a cultural level. Human identity turns out to be a speculation par excellence, 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 go up in a puff of abstraction.”³⁶ In addition to the appeal to anecdotes, they borrow from the poet Ezra Pound “‘the method of the Luminous Detail’ whereby we attempt to isolate significant or ‘interpreting detail’ from the mass of traces that have survived in the archive.”³⁷ In this I will follow in their footsteps, although I will extend Pound’s notion of the luminous detail by adding to it his definition of an image as “that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time,” “a cluster of fused ideas endowed with energy.”³⁸ In what follows, then, “luminous details” will anchor my presentation of the imagination of “place” as a useful way to tap into ancient senses of “self.”

Plotinus and the Touch of the Transcendent: The Transparent Sphere

Graeco-Roman authors were alert to the dangers involved in sight.³⁹ The eye could wither, devour, de-soul, or bewitch another, but it could also bewitch or consume the self.⁴⁰ Nowhere is the self-consuming function of the eye more striking than in the myth of Narcissus, to which Plotinus alludes in the course of a discussion about how the soul can “see” intelligible beauty and, ultimately, the Good:

How can one see the “inconceivable beauty” [Symp. 218E2] which stays within in the holy sanctuary and does not come out where the profane may see it? Let him who can, follow and come within, and leave outside the sight of his eyes and not turn back to the bodily splendors which he saw before. When he sees the beauty in bodies he must not run after them; we must know that they are images, traces, shadows, and hurry away to that which they image. For if a man runs to the image (like a beautiful reflection playing on the water, which some story somewhere, I think, said riddlingly a man wanted to catch and sank down into the stream and disappeared) then this man who clings to beautiful bodies and will not let them go, will, like the man in the story, but in soul, not in body, sink down into the dark depths where intellect has no delight, and stay blind in Hades, consorting with shadows there and here.⁴¹

The tragedy of Narcissus, variously described by modern interpreters as an arresting self-fascination or as a conflictual splitting of the subject,⁴² was for Plotinus a cautionary tale about the fate of the soul that mistakes sensory for spiritual (i.e., noetic) realities. When the self is placed with respect only to the material world, it gropes blindly after shadows. Thus Plotinus too, like modern interpreters of Narcissus, used this story to picture the problem of misdirected sight, that is, a form of attention that fixates and fragments the soul into a congeries of its own grasping desires.

Plotinus often, of course, linked this kind of woeful particularity to human physicality. Forgetfulness, for example, is due to the “moving and flowing” nature of the body⁴³; the soul’s “fellowship” (ϰοινωνία) with the body is “displeasing” because the body hinders thought and fills the soul with negative emotions.⁴⁴ This only happens, however, to the soul that “has sunk into the interior of the body” and has forgotten that the body belongs to it, and not the reverse.⁴⁵ There is a question about the extent to which sheer physicality was really the issue in Plotinus’s presentation of the difficulties faced by the soul, since he admitted that “it is not evil in every way for soul to give body the ability to flourish and to exist, because not every kind of provident care for the inferior deprives the being exercising it of its ability to remain in the highest.”⁴⁶

Nonetheless, to the extent that the soul becomes “mixed up” with bodily stuff—“for every human being is double, one of him is the sort of compound being and one of him is himself”—it loses its proper focus and becomes “isolated and weak and fusses and looks towards a part and in its separation from the whole it embarks on one single thing and flies from everything else.”⁴⁷ Even though Plotinus was genuinely concerned about the negative impact of “body,” such passages can bear a more nuanced reading. As Stephen Clark has argued, for Plotinus the soul is not a “ghost in a machine.”⁴⁸ The most devastating split is not between body and soul but rather between two kinds of consciousness: the “compound being” that “fusses” is identified by Clark, quoting Plotinus, as the “restlessly active nature which wanted to control itself and be on its own”; “it did not want the whole to be present to it altogether.”⁴⁹

Despite this positive reading of the Plotinian view of the embodied self, which emphasizes problems in the soul’s orienting function rather than in the sheer fact of its physicality, there is a tension in Plotinus’s thought regarding the self in its earthly context. His frequent use of the place-markers “there” and “here” to designate a metaphysical world of intelligible reality (“there”) and its shadowy reflection in the material cosmos (“here”), when read anthropologically as the “there” of the soul’s true home and the “here” of its cramping particularity, seems undeniably dualistic. Taking seriously Plotinus’s language of “ascent,” Stephen Halliwell sees “an ambivalence in his system of thought as a whole, an ambivalence that keeps Plotinian philosophy caught between ultimately irreconcilable ideals of ‘flight’ from the merely physical and, on the other hand, a commitment to finding the echo of higher realities in what it continues to regard as the rich and multiform ‘tapestry’ of life itself.”⁵⁰

Other interpreters, however, suggest that Plotinus’s “here” and “there” should not be distinguished so sharply as a spiritual flight from the merely physical: as A. H. Armstrong has observed, “in the end we are left with the very strong impression that for Plotinus there are not two worlds but one real world apprehended in different ways on different levels.”⁵¹ Even when Plotinus occasionally imagined a time before time, as it were, when disembodied souls were “united with the whole of reality,” he was quick to redirect attention to human life as it is lived now: “we were parts of the intelligible, not marked off or cut off but belonging to the whole; and we are not cut off even now.”⁵² But because “another man, wishing to exist, approached that man, and when he found us … he wound himself round us and attached himself to that man who was then each one of us,” the task of the soul is to learn how to direct its attention to the whole—to detach itself, as Sara Rappe has argued, from “the narrow confines of a historical selfhood.”⁵³ What the Plotinian self needs, in other words, is a touch of transcendence that, as Rappe continues, “does not consist in a denial of the empirical self [but] allows the larger selfhood of soul to emerge from behind the veil of the objective domain.”⁵⁴

In order to perform its proper placing function with regard to spiritual reality, the soul must direct its vision inward: “Shut your eyes, and change to and wake another way of seeing, which everyone has but few use.”⁵⁵ Thus centered, the self expands. Plotinus developed techniques for achieving this kind of awareness, the so-called “spiritual exercises.” Perhaps the most famous of these is his image of the transparent sphere, which I will read as an anthropological image, a way of picturing selfhood in terms of place:

Let there, then, be in the soul a shining imagination of a sphere, having everything [in the visible universe] within it, either moving or standing still, or some things moving and others standing still. Keep this, and apprehend in your mind another, taking away the mass: take away also the places, and the mental picture of matter in yourself, and do not try to apprehend another sphere smaller in mass than the original one, but calling on the god who made that of which you have the mental picture, pray him to come. And may he come, bringing his own universe with him, with all the gods within him, he who is one and all, and each god is all the gods coming together into one.⁵⁶

In this image, according to Frederic Schroeder, “Plotinus is presenting us with a noetic universe in which there is no fixed point of observation: all is transparent to all.”⁵⁷ It is a picture of intense inward concentration that opens the soul outward as it is filled with the “real beings” of the noetic world.⁵⁸ Both the image and the self disappear into their own luminosity; this process, whereby the knower and the known become one, is described by Schroeder as an “iconoclastic moment,” a moment described further by Robert Berchman as a use of imagery and imagination “to the point of strain and shatter; at the moment of shatter, intelligible insight occurs.”⁵⁹

By engaging the image of the transparent sphere, the soul achieves self-knowledge, a knowledge that is distinct from the kind of objectivizing self- and world-awareness that Plotinus 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 word is made flesh eternally in the Scriptures in order to dwell among us.”⁸³ That dwelling is not only the literal presence of the book among 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, but on a secondary level and in a manner corresponding to our own worth.”¹⁰⁶ Contact with higher levels 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 in Eden, became distracted by the body and turned their attention toward it and away from God.¹²⁷ Now corrupted, “the body took center stage,” as David Brakke remarks, and he summarizes the function of the incarnation as follows: “According to Athanasius, the incarnation of the word made a successful ascetic life possible once again…. When the Word of God assumed a human body, and perfectly guided it, he divinized this body and made it incorruptible; through their ‘kinship of the flesh’ to the Word’s body, individual human beings can restore a proper relationship between their own body and soul and thus live a virtuous life.”¹²⁸ Those who came closest to this divinization of the flesh were those who, like the exemplary Saint Antony of the Life of St. Antony, practiced ascetic self-discipline.

In the wake of Athanasius’s hagiographical master-text, such holy persons—whether alive or dead—not only gave “human density” to the need to connect heaven and earth, they also came to be seen as conduits of spiritual power.¹²⁹ If the fourth century witnessed the rise of the holy man and the boom in hagiographical literature devoted to this figure, it also witnessed the burgeoning of another form of visible holiness, the cult of the saints and their relics. Like the body of the theurgist, the living body of the ascetic holy man and the dead body of the saintly martyr were seen as vehicles of transcendence, their “matter” charged with religious meaning.

The body parts that were venerated in the cult of relics were mostly from bodies of martyrs, who had not necessarily been practitioners of asceticism.¹³⁰ Yet the view of ascetic practice as the highest form of Christian spirituality and the veneration of relics were connected, since it was precisely ascetics (Ambrose, Jerome, Gregory of Nyssa, and Victricius, for example) who promoted the cult of relics.¹³¹ As forms of spirituality aimed at overcoming human instability, asceticism and the cult of relics were united by the need for a tangible locus of sanctity.¹³² Furthermore, they shared similar views of the nature of divine presence in the world insofar as both demanded sensory expression, whether in a living or a dead body, for their abstract belief in conduits of divine power. Treading a fine line between the touch of the real and the touch of the transcendent, they espoused a spirituality that embraced earthy contact while avoiding idolatrous materialism.¹³³

As one who developed a “radically incarnational theology” of relics, Victricius of Rouen, bishop from 385 to 410 C.E., is the only known theoretician of the cult of relics.¹³⁴ As his treatise De laude sanctorum shows, the performative as well as the religio-aesthetic dimension of “matter” was a feature of the Christian cult of relics as it was of the Neoplatonic animation of statues.¹³⁵ As part of his argument that “the truth of the whole corporeal passion [of the martyr] is present in fragments of the righteous,” Victricius wrote that a proper understanding of relics called for an imaginative use of sight as well as language: “Why, then, do we call them ‘relics’? Because words are images and signs of things. Before our eyes are blood and clay. We impress on them the name of ‘relics,’ because we cannot do otherwise, with (so to speak) the seal of living language. But now, by uttering the whole in the part, we open the eyes of the heart, not the barriers of our bodily sight.”¹³⁶ One can only understand how “blood, after martyrdom, is on fire with the reward of divinity” when one interprets with the “eyes of the heart,” not allowing “bodily sight” to be a barrier. This would seem to be a reversion to Origen’s doctrine of the spiritual senses were it not for the fact that Victricius and his congregation were in fact literally looking at fragments of human bodies. What Victricius hoped to accomplish was a retraining of physical sight, such that one could apprehend how “an animate body” (animatum corpus) had been converted by God “into the substance of his light” (ad sui luminis transferre substantiam).¹³⁷ Victricius shared with Proclus an ability to see more than was there as he developed this strategy for retrieving what was visually intractable, the presence of divine power in an earthy object.

It is difficult not to notice the similarity between the theurgist’s ἄγαλμα ἒμψυχον, the animated statue, and the relic venerator’s animatum corpus, the animated body. Writing about Augustine’s worry that agency might be attributed to the martyrs themselves rather than to God, Clark notes that “invocation of martyrs could too easily be assimilated to theurgy (which used ‘sympathetic’ physical objects to invoke divine powers) or, worse, to sorcery.”¹³⁸ Assimilation of the two is understandable, since both were material objects that centered divine power, giving it a place from which it could be communicated to human beings, thus drawing them into the network of relationships that they activated. Unlike animated statues, however, whose function was to impart divine wisdom, the major performative function of relics was healing: because martyrs, who “heal and wash clean,” are “bound to the relics by the bond of all eternity,” they bring “heavenly brilliance” into human life in the very concrete form of physical restoration.¹³⁹

Although Victricius mentioned healing at several points, recitation of miraculous cures was not part of his sermon. His main interest lay elsewhere, in explaining how such tiny bodily fragments can be so powerful. His argument hinged on his view of the consubstantiality of all bodies. Since the saints are entirely united to Christ and thus to God, and since God cannot be divided, therefore the whole is present in every part: “nothing in relics is not complete” and “unity is widely diffused without loss to itself.”¹⁴⁰ Bringing out the full incarnational thrust of his argument, Victricius stated that not only the souls but also the bodies of the martyrs are united with Christ: “They are entirely with the Savior in his entirety … and have everything in common in the truth of the godhead…. By righteousness they are made companions of the Savior, by wisdom his rivals, by the use of limbs concorporeal, by blood consanguineous, by the sacrifice of the victim sharers in the eternity of the cross.”¹⁴¹ Much like the theurgical view of the diffusion of the transcendent in special material objects, Victricius’s position was premised on the belief that “God is diffused far and wide, and lends out his light without loss to himself.”¹⁴²

Having established that “the martyr is wholly present—flesh, blood, and spirit united to God—in the relic,” as Clark observes, “Victricius preempts a shocked reaction: is he really saying that these relics are just what God is, the ‘absolute and ineffable substance of godhead’ (8.19–21)? His answer, apparently, is ‘yes.’”¹⁴³ Yes, but with an important qualifier: the martyr “is the same by gift not by property, by adoption not by nature.”¹⁴⁴ Relics, that is, retained enough of the human so that they could function as condensations of the ideal self that ascetics such as Victricius hoped to achieve. Not only are the martyr-saints advocates, judges, and associates of their venerators, but they are also teachers of virtue who “remove the stains of vice” in the human, body and soul.¹⁴⁵ Perhaps the most astonishing aspect of Victricius’s view of relics is their ability to remake human identity in their own image. When Victricius says, “I touch fragments,” he is touching the fiery rays of his own transformation.¹⁴⁶

In the presence of relics, one of the things that their venerators “see” is that the martyrs are “dwellers in our hearts” (habitatores pectoris nostri).¹⁴⁷ What relics put one in touch with, that is, are models of human identity toward which the soul strives. Victricius was fairly straightforward about this. In the following passage, in which he imagined the ceremonial entry of the relics into Rouen as a Christian adventus, he wrote:

There is no lack of things for us to admire: in place of the royal cloak, here is the garment of eternal light. The togas of the saints have absorbed this purple. Here are diadems adorned with the varied lights of the jewels of wisdom, intellect, knowledge, truth, good counsel, courage, endurance, self-control, justice, good sense, patience, chastity. These virtues are expressed and inscribed each in its own stone. Here the Savior-craftsman has adorned the crowns of the martyrs with spiritual jewels. Let us set the sails of our souls towards these gems.¹⁴⁸

One feature of this passage that deserves mention first is its description of the ritualistic character of the entry of relics into the city. Underlying Victricius’s imaginative portrayal is an important feature of the cult of relics: human body parts did not become the animate bodies that were relics apart from ritual practice, and in highly elaborate and aesthetically enhanced places that evoked the visionary atmosphere in which relics took their 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.