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