of course, linked this kind of woeful particularity to human physicality. Forgetfulness, for example, is due to the “moving and flowing” nature of the body43; the soul’s “fellowship” (ϰοινωνία) with the body is “displeasing” because the body hinders thought and fills the soul with negative emotions.44 This only happens, however, to the soul that “has sunk into the interior of the body” and has forgotten that the body belongs to it, and not the reverse.45 There is a question about the extent to which sheer physicality was really the issue in Plotinus’s presentation of the difficulties faced by the soul, since he admitted that “it is not evil in every way for soul to give body the ability to flourish and to exist, because not every kind of provident care for the inferior deprives the being exercising it of its ability to remain in the highest.”46
Nonetheless, to the extent that the soul becomes “mixed up” with bodily stuff—“for every human being is double, one of him is the sort of compound being and one of him is himself”—it loses its proper focus and becomes “isolated and weak and fusses and looks towards a part and in its separation from the whole it embarks on one single thing and flies from everything else.”47 Even though Plotinus was genuinely concerned about the negative impact of “body,” such passages can bear a more nuanced reading. As Stephen Clark has argued, for Plotinus the soul is not a “ghost in a machine.”48 The most devastating split is not between body and soul but rather between two kinds of consciousness: the “compound being” that “fusses” is identified by Clark, quoting Plotinus, as the “restlessly active nature which wanted to control itself and be on its own”; “it did not want the whole to be present to it altogether.”49
Despite this positive reading of the Plotinian view of the embodied self, which emphasizes problems in the soul’s orienting function rather than in the sheer fact of its physicality, there is a tension in Plotinus’s thought regarding the self in its earthly context. His frequent use of the place-markers “there” and “here” to designate a metaphysical world of intelligible reality (“there”) and its shadowy reflection in the material cosmos (“here”), when read anthropologically as the “there” of the soul’s true home and the “here” of its cramping particularity, seems undeniably dualistic. Taking seriously Plotinus’s language of “ascent,” Stephen Halliwell sees “an ambivalence in his system of thought as a whole, an ambivalence that keeps Plotinian philosophy caught between ultimately irreconcilable ideals of ‘flight’ from the merely physical and, on the other hand, a commitment to finding the echo of higher realities in what it continues to regard as the rich and multiform ‘tapestry’ of life itself.”50
Other interpreters, however, suggest that Plotinus’s “here” and “there” should not be distinguished so sharply as a spiritual flight from the merely physical: as A. H. Armstrong has observed, “in the end we are left with the very strong impression that for Plotinus there are not two worlds but one real world apprehended in different ways on different levels.”51 Even when Plotinus occasionally imagined a time before time, as it were, when disembodied souls were “united with the whole of reality,” he was quick to redirect attention to human life as it is lived now: “we were parts of the intelligible, not marked off or cut off but belonging to the whole; and we are not cut off even now.”52 But because “another man, wishing to exist, approached that man, and when he found us … he wound himself round us and attached himself to that man who was then each one of us,” the task of the soul is to learn how to direct its attention to the whole—to detach itself, as Sara Rappe has argued, from “the narrow confines of a historical selfhood.”53 What the Plotinian self needs, in other words, is a touch of transcendence that, as Rappe continues, “does not consist in a denial of the empirical self [but] allows the larger selfhood of soul to emerge from behind the veil of the objective domain.”54
In order to perform its proper placing function with regard to spiritual reality, the soul must direct its vision inward: “Shut your eyes, and change to and wake another way of seeing, which everyone has but few use.”55 Thus centered, the self expands. Plotinus developed techniques for achieving this kind of awareness, the so-called “spiritual exercises.” Perhaps the most famous of these is his image of the transparent sphere, which I will read as an anthropological image, a way of picturing selfhood in terms of place:
Let there, then, be in the soul a shining imagination of a sphere, having everything [in the visible universe] within it, either moving or standing still, or some things moving and others standing still. Keep this, and apprehend in your mind another, taking away the mass: take away also the places, and the mental picture of matter in yourself, and do not try to apprehend another sphere smaller in mass than the original one, but calling on the god who made that of which you have the mental picture, pray him to come. And may he come, bringing his own universe with him, with all the gods within him, he who is one and all, and each god is all the gods coming together into one.56
In this image, according to Frederic Schroeder, “Plotinus is presenting us with a noetic universe in which there is no fixed point of observation: all is transparent to all.”57 It is a picture of intense inward concentration that opens the soul outward as it is filled with the “real beings” of the noetic world.58 Both the image and the self disappear into their own luminosity; this process, whereby the knower and the known become one, is described by Schroeder as an “iconoclastic moment,” a moment described further by Robert Berchman as a use of imagery and imagination “to the point of strain and shatter; at the moment of shatter, intelligible insight occurs.”59
By engaging the image of the transparent sphere, the soul achieves self-knowledge, a knowledge that is distinct from the kind of objectivizing self- and world-awareness that Plotinus linked with discursive thought.60 The sensible world is not so much abandoned as it is turned into light—a process of substraction that adds insofar as the soul is oriented in a nexus of relationships rather than in an “opaque” world of discrete objects. In order to be free from the attractive tug of particularity, especially in its material forms, the soul “must see that light by which it is enlightened: for we do not see the sun by another light than his own. How then can this happen? Take away everything!”61
What kind of self emerges in the light of the transparent sphere? When Plotinus directs the eyes of the soul inward, the vision that emerges is starkly different from the internalized self-watcher of Marcus Aurelius. A certain cosmic optimism pervades his thought, as “the levels of reality become levels of inner life, the levels of the self.”62 As “our head strikes the heavens” and becomes the transparent sphere, the illusions of personality and individuality vanish, revealing a “self” that is essentially divine.63 Thus centered in the divine, the Plotinian self is, in Rappe’s words, “infinitely expansive”; “no longer circumscribed by its historical, temporal, and emotional limitations, the Plotinian self embraces a vast domain whose boundaries extend to the fullness of what is encountered in every knowing moment.”64 Skittish to the end concerning the dangers posed by materiality, and especially by the human body (considered as a “hindrance”: we must “cut away all the other things in which we are encased”), Plotinus offered a self touched by transcendence, a “self glorified, full of intelligible light—but rather itself pure light—weightless, floating free, having become—but rather being—a god.”65
Origen and the Touch of the Transcendent: The Divine Library
As for Plotinus, so also for Origen, human corporeality could be troubling, a mark of a self in disarray. Commenting, for example, on Matt. 7:6 (“Do not give what is holy to dogs; and do not throw your pearls before swine”), Origen remarked, “For I would say that whoever is constantly muddied with bodily things and rolls around in the filthy things of life and has no desire for the pure and holy life, such a person is nothing but a swine.”66 Origen sometimes thought of human embodiment as the result of spiritual defect; the body in itself is not only “dead and completely lifeless” but is also “opposed and hostile to the spirit.”67
Yet despite his sometime disparagement of the body, Origen seemed more concerned with how the soul orients itself with regard