The Corporeal Imagination. Patricia Cox Miller
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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