The Corporeal Imagination. Patricia Cox Miller
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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