The Corporeal Imagination. Patricia Cox Miller
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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