The Corporeal Imagination. Patricia Cox Miller
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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