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Chapter One Bodies and Selves The shift in sensibility that I have called ‘‘the material turn’’ was not limited to late ancient Christianity. The reconfiguration of the relationship between materiality and meaning was part of a wider cultural phenomenon , as several studies have shown. Beginning in the fourth century, there was an increase in appreciation for color, glitter, and spectacle , from public ceremonies to personal clothing.1 This heightened appeal to the eye, variously characterized as a new theatricality and ‘‘a peculiarly expressionistic manner,’’ can also be seen in poetry and sculpture —a ‘‘jeweled style’’ based on preference for visual immediacy, which was achieved by emphasis on the part at the expense of elaborations of organic wholes.2 Petitioning the visual imagination of the spectator also marked the biographical literature of this period, as authors invited readers to ‘‘see’’ holiness in the bodies of their heroes.3 As noted in the Introduction, an increase in the ability to ‘‘see more than was [literally] there’’ seems characteristic of the cultural scene that also witnessed a new appreciation for the role of both ‘‘things’’ and of the material imagination in understandings of self-identity.4 Central to the material turn was the use of the body as a tangible frame of selfhood, a phenomenon that was most strikingly manifested in Christianity and Neoplatonism. An example from Neoplatonism of this new function of the body as signifier of the self, 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 vir- Bodies and Selves 19 tues, 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...

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