Picture, Image, And Subjectivity in Medieval Culture

Picture, Image, and Subjectivity in Medieval CultureAuthor(s): Stephen G. NicholsSource: MLN, Vol. 108, No. 4, French Issue (Sep., 1993), pp. 617-637Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2904954 .

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Picture, Image, and Subjectivity in Medieval Culture

Stephen G. Nichols*

Introduction

Had the role of the image been less central to medieval culture, it might have produced less trauma. For how else can we interpret the ongoing controversy, the impassioned denunciations and defenses of the image throughout our period except as betokening cultural stress? Whether in visual form as picture or sculpture, or in linguistic form as figurative description deployed in historical or poetic discourse, the image preoccupied philosophers, theologians, ecclesiasti- cal councils, not to mention the role it played in secular politics. While the roots of this ambivalence reach far back in antiquity, as we know all too well, I want to talk about a peculiarly medieval form of the question that links the conception and production of pictures and verbal images to the perception and shaping of human consciousness.

This connection between image theory and the ethic of existence required by the individual to realize his/her potential as an imago dei, an image of what was variously entitled the Good, Beauty, or the One, is what I shall call here the anthropology of the image. Because it would be a vast topic, I shall not deal with the theological ramifica-

* I would like to express my thanks to my research assistant Ms. Tracy Adams for her help in procuring research documents and for reading various drafts of the manuscript.

MLN, 108 (1993): 617-637 ? 1993 by The Johns Hopkins University Press



618 STEPHEN G. NICHOLS

tions of the question. Instead, I want to begin by evoking vernacu- lar French literature and the manuscript art associated with its production, and then focus on classical and late antique image theory, paying particular attention to the anthropology of the image in Plotinus's Enneads. Although very fruitful, particularly as concerns the problematics of subjectivity and the representation of the body, the link between these two poles of philosophical and artistic activity is not obvious, nor has it been much studied in the ways I shall be suggesting today, despite the extraordinary currency of Plotinian thought throughout the Middle Ages.

From the beginning of secular art around the tenth and eleventh centuries, we find verbal and visual image production intimately linked to the representation of subjectivity and exemplary modes of existence in a variety of artistic contexts. Think, for example of medieval romance from the early Roman de Tristan with its name- changing, self-disguising hero Tristan/Tantris, to Chr6tien's ro- mances whose heroes must earn their names or win back the right to bear them, and whose heroines often find their ontological status equally problematized. Marie de France's heroes transform them- selves from princes to birds or noblemen to mythical beasts as a matter of course, while her heroines undergo trials usually reserved for men.

On a more immediately philosophical level, one thinks of allegori- cal epic quests like the thirteenth-century Queste del saint graal, or Le Roman de la Rose, or a fortiori Dante's Divina Commedia. Each of these works in different ways focuses attention on the disjunction between the body as a physical measure of existence within a specific code of courtly conduct and a spiritual existence very much out of sympathy with the prevailing social mode. The point is that both the physical and the spiritual modes are somehow conceived as visible, as etched on the body by the acid of experience.

These texts, and others one could cite, problematize the body. Some do it in terms of age as a function of self-knowledge acquired through the prism of an experience that profoundly alters the subjectivity of the hero, like the five year difference between the twenty- five-year-old poet of the Roman de la Rose and his twenty-year-old lover-persona. Chretien's Perceval makes the trajectory from a naive Welsh bumpkin at the beginning of the Conte du graal to a courtly and accomplished knight in serious need of religious consciousness and counsel at the point where his part of narrative breaks off.

Indeed, Perceval's appearance mounted, in full armor on Good Friday, the day when Christians were supposed to throw off worldly



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garb and walk barefoot symbolizes for all to see the spiritual disarray of his soul. Chretien marks the contrast strongly:

Au chief de ces .V. anz avint Que il par un desert aloit Cheminant, si com il soloit, De totes ses armes armez. S'a trois chevaliers acontrez Et avec dames jusqu'a .X., Lor chi6s en leur chaperons mis, Et s'aloient trestuit a pie Et en langes et deschaucie. De celui qui armez venoit Et la lance et l'escu tenoit Se merveillerent molt les dames, Et por sauvement de lor ames Lor penitance a pi6 faisoient, Por les pechiez que faiz avoient.1

[Five years had passed when it happened that [Perceval] was going his way through an uninhabited region, as was his wont, armed from head to toe. He chanced to meet three knights and with them as many as ten women, all with their heads covered by their hoods, and all were walking, barefoot, wearing simple wollen robes. Seeing he who was coming towards them holding his lance and his shield, the women marvelled great- ly, since for the salvation of their souls, they were doing penance on foot to atone for past sins.]

Similarly, the "mezzo del camin di nostra vita" of Dante's younger pilgrim self in the Divina Commedia marks a metaphoric dividing line in the poet's autobiography as he turns from worldly preoccupa- tions to spiritual renewal. Like Perceval, the metaphoric disjunction between material existence and spiritual well-being appears physi- cally inscribed on the Florentine.2

Other works problematize the body as a phenomenon of what Plato calls indeterminacy, by which he means a problem of perception requiring precise deciphering.3 This approach casts humans as part of the one-and-the-many syndrome. We see and think of a person in one way as having a particular identity and subjectivity,

1 Chretien de Troyes, Le Conte du Graal ou le Roman de Perceval, Edition du manu- scrit 354 de Berne, edited by Charles Mela, Lettres Gothiques (Paris: Livre de Poche, 1990): w. 6164-6178.

2 See for example, Inferno 1:28-30 & 2:37-48. 3 Plato, Philebus? 16-e where Socrates discusses the dialectical relationship be-

tween limit (peras) and indeterminacy (apeiron) as a function of the problem of the one-and-the-many.




only to be told by a third party that the first person is something very different from what we thought. In other words a person, the person we see and form an opinion of, can be construed as a virtual narrative or as history, an enigma awaiting decipherment. This is the indeterminacy of being postulated by the one-and-the-many concept described by Protarchus at Philebus 14d: "Surely you don't mean the claim that I, Protarchus, am one by nature, but am also many Protarchuses, which are even opposed to one another?"

Socrates impatiently dismisses Protarchus's question. Perhaps too quickly, at least in so far as the literary works of twelfth and thirteenth-century Europe are concerned. There we often do find the question of identity-as-social category at issue, a conundrum posed precisely via the body.

In the epic such issues assume metaphysical proportions from the earliest texts, as we recall from the Chanson de Roland, where the narrative postulates diverse and often opposing perceptions of such key characters as Roland, whom we want to be the hero, and of Ganelon who ranks high on our traitor index. But while the text may weight these emotions toward Roland and against Ganelon, it indisputably offers divergent viewpoints that continue to fuel schol- arly disagreement.

Think also howJean Renart's thirteenth-century Roman de la Rose ou de Guillaume de Dole deliberately makes a mystery, as well as a romance out of the rose-shaped birthmark carried by the heroine, "La belle Lienor," high on the inside of her thigh. This red rose- "qui n'en est pas une"-inspires conflicting stories as to which male protagonists may or may not have actually seen this symbol/image of Lienor's femininity. A trial by ordeal near the end of the work resolves the question from a purely narrative viewpoint, certifying that no male protagonist has seen the birthmark. The rose-symbol does not belong simply to plot, however, so the closure sought by the ordeal cannot deal with the more problematic psychological role of the rose. At no point does it have physical or material status in the poem, serving rather to motivate male erotic fantasy, oneiric reveries projected onto the screen of Lienor's body.

The elusive image of the rose in this romance consequently serves to remind readers how conflicting narratives focus on the body and condition of female protagonists. The "story of the rose" tells no one story, but rather asks how many Lienors, how many stories are there? Lienor unveiled and read, or Lienor whose body remains enigmatic, indeterminate? Her true story untold. The rose symbol, by allegoriz-



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ing considerations of the body and thus of identity, shows that if narrative at least attempts, however unsuccessfully, to provide closure and a rational conclusion, images resist such strategies. The image question remains open in Jean Renart, for we never really discover just what it means to be La Demoiselle de la Rose.4

The Roman de Tristan, especially in its distilled version in the two Folie Tristan manuscripts, repeatedly demonstrates how the body is both the scene of multiple narratives and the screen deflecting determinate readings of the proposed narratives. In the Folie Tristan of Oxford, Tristan effectively disguises himself as a fool to gain access to King Mark's court so he can meet with Iseut without detec- tion. Having so successfully put his identity in doubt that Iseut cannot even penetrate the analogy with his previous disguised identity as Tantris, Tristan asks the bewildered Iseut: "Ne sui je fo? Ke vus est vis?" "Am I not he? How does it appear to you?"5

But literary narrative was not the only venue for presenting images of this sort in the twelfth century. If one contemplates the prevalence of verbal images in the form of rhetorical figures, like the descriptions (ekphrases) of the female body and artworks, dur- ing this period, one gets a better sense of why, beginning in the late twelfth century, there was an ever more pervasive tendency to incor- porate pictures, illuminations, in the midst of the columns of writing on the manuscript folio. Frequently, if not always, these pictures represented a person or scene described as a verbal image in the surrounding text. Simply at the most literal level, the two kinds of images can be taken as yet another manifestation of the one-and-the many problematic, yet another dimension offered on the enigmatic perception of a character.

These pictures may be taken as so many windows in the space of the verbal narrative that direct the gaze on questions of subjectivity and the representation of the body. Indeed, sometimes the illuminations represent portraits of poets or authors whose writings appear on the same page. At such moments, the portraits stand for, substitute for the absent author, but they also present a picture of the body while the poem images the working and production of

4 For an historical study of Jean Renart's recourse to the ordeal in the context of the period see my colleague John Baldwin's forthcoming article, "The Crisis of the Ordeal: Literature, Law, and Religion in Twelfth-Century France."

5 La Folie Tristan d'Oxford, publiee avec commentaire par Ernest Hoepffner. 2e edition revue et corrigee. Publications de la Faculte des Lettres de l'Universite de Strasbourg. Textes d'Etudes, 8. (Strasbourg, 1943): 1. 366.




inner constituents of subjectivity like desire and intellect. I have discussed elsewhere the portraits of Envy in illuminated manuscripts of Guillaume de Lorris's Roman de la Rose, at the section where the poetic text describes the portraits of the anti-courtly vices on the outside wall surrounding the Garden of Pleasure.6

As I have shown, these illuminations, besides being a picture of the picture of Envy described in the surrounding text, also represent the poet as voyeur indulging his libido in spying on the lovers he has created. The illumination thus represents a problematic of desire for illuminator, poet or scribe, and reader alike, a desire that motivates the production and reception of word and picture. In so doing, illumination implicates the verbal image it supposedly illustrates, showing how both picture and text participate in the same mental activity for reasons that have their roots deep in classical and medieval image theory. Let us now look at some of those roots.

Plato and Classical Image Theory

The dual presence of writing and illumination in the manuscript enacts rather dramatically Plato's description of the soul as a book in which events are inscribed in two media: words and pictures. In the first instance, memory and perception collaborate to "write words in the soul." At the same time, Socrates says, there is "another member of the soul's work-force ... an artist, who turns the secre- tary's words into images in the soul."7

Language and picture bring together the body and the mind via memory and aisthesis (sensual perception) to produce the beliefs and judgments that constitute an individual's view of self. Although not much remarked in connection with image theory, so far as I can tell, Philebus 38c-e, the passage just before Socrates's observation of the soul-as-book-with-word-and-picture, actually offers an excellent description of one way in which images help us to understand the world before us while showing how the images that arise in our mind undergo discursive dilation in language. There he recounts what goes on in the mind when trying to make out an object far off in the distance.

6 "Ekphrasis, Iconoclasm, and Desire," in Re-Reading the Roman de la Rose, ed. Kevin Brownlee and Sylvia Huot (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992): 133-66.

7 Plato, Philebus ?38c-38e.



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The scene is pastoral, the viewer on a slight rise looking down the valley. Some distance away, he spies a tree and a large rock; under the tree, next to the rock he sees a vertical object that he can't quite make out, but he takes it for a person. It's a logical inference his memory suggests, for it's about the right height relative to the tree and the rock, and the pastoral venue suggests it may be a shepherd, or perhaps-less probable, but one never knows-the statue of a shepherd. What Socrates describes as a process of perception, image production, and interrogation may be taken as nothing short of a dialogic image theory that begins with the glimpsing of an indeterminate form in the world that leads the viewer to postulate from memory a series of likely forms that could explain the image.

A comparative method of critical evaluation thus emerges that takes the viewer deep into his or her own psyche and memory, always by means of a dialogic and critical process. While the process interiorizes perception and engages mental activity, it also stimu- lates intersubjective dialectic. Should a friend happen to be present, the thoughts which in the first scenario the viewer only thinks to himself, would then be formulated as language and articulated as statements. The second person plays a crucial role here, for with a competing subjectivity looking at the same scene, the social conse- quences of belief and judgment leading to debate and controversy come into play.

This whole section belongs to an argument Socrates engages about the way true and false beliefs come into being. The fact that they exist as image and as word, even images and words etched on the soul, suggests just how indespensable a role this double dialectic plays in the formation of everyday subjectivity. Plato, obviously, is concerned not just with mental activity, but with the implications of that activity for the way the individual lives, his/her status as a good person. He stresses, accordingly, the interiorization of perception as played out between psyche and the senses.

Aristotle and the Invention of Energeia

No matter how plausibly Plato illustrates the double dialectic of the visual and verbal working together in the same space he does not address the question of the creative force, the agent common to both kinds of images. What was the element that produced the mental imaging requisite for both word and picture? Aristotle rather than Plato addressed this question. In an early work with Platonic




overtones, the Protrepticus, Aristotle coined a new term for the intense activity of mind necessary to generate the forms or images we've been discussing. The word, of course, is energeia. Although /vppycta is usually translated as "actuality" in Aristotle's works, closer examination of the etymology of this neologism, as well as a detailed examination of the contexts in which it appears, argues strongly for a more kinetic meaning. Aristotle seems to have coined the word by combining:

;v- meaning "in" and -Tpycta, the noun from ;pydiv... a rather rare active form of the common verb Tpyac-Oat, a middle deponent with the active meaning of "to do" or "to act." ... the active [form] is used to strengthen the notion of intensity of activity ... Since the middle form would have occurred naturally to Aristotle, it may be assumed that in choosing the active form he intended to stress the notion of activity. And so etymologically the word would seem to mean "inward activity," indeed, the power of inner activity. .. .8

Energeia, then, from its earliest invention in Aristotle connoted an active making or doing within the psyche. Intimately bound up with the intellectual activity thought to form or shape psyche, energeia was very close to the processes of thinking and seeing, if not exactly the same.9 He insisted on the kinetic sense of energeia as movement stemming from "the doing side of the word."1' Through the conception of potency and act, energeia is the agent that instills in matter the "power" to "do" form, where the activity of the "doing" of matter is energeia.11 If the "doing" here means intense mental activity, the result of that activity will take material form in speech, writing, and pictures.

Medieval grammars and poetics conceived of energeia as power, strength, action, oratorical vigor, and the power of imagination. We

8 George A. Blair, "The Meaning of 'Energeia' and 'Entelechia'" in Aristotle, International Philosophical Quarterly (1967): 106.

9 Ibid., p. 109. 10 Ibid., p. 107. 11 Ibid., p. 109. "It would seem that he is trying to say that form is what matter, in a

sense, does, since motion is the primary sense of &v/pyeta.... But this means that matter is 'power' not in the passive sense of ability to receive a form, but rather in the sense of the ability to 'do' form.... And that form is a 'doing' is perfectly consistent with what was seen in the Protrepicus where 'to live' and 'to be' are equated- provided that there is no distinction between essence and existence in Aristotle.... Obviously the 'doing' which is form is not activity in exactly the same sense as seeing or thinking. . ."



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can get an idea of its importance as a generative force from such commentaries as Sergius's Explanationum in Artem Donati. In Book One, under the heading, De partibus orationis, the section begins with a simple, but incredibly rich-for our purposes-two-part definition. Oratio dicitur elocutio, quasi oris ratio, "Expression (oratio) is called diction (elocutio), a kind of reason of the mouth, as it were."12 Both parts of this statement relate to the post-Aristotelian evolution of energeia and the conception of discourse as participating in an anthropology of the image, as "doing" forms, particularly those bearing on character and social harmony.

First, by defining oratio as elocutio, Sergius launches a double movement linking "oratio" to directed mental activity. Initially, oratio the first instance, it is equated to "elocutio," the third division of rhetoric as ars.13 Elocutio was the branch of rhetoric that shaped the language of oratory, that gave, as it were, a recognizable identity, a style that could, as Karl Vossler and Benedetto Croce believed, provide a picture of the mind of the author. Elocutio or diction dealt with three main categories: (1) the choice and collocation of words; (2) the theory of the three genres of style, and (3) figures of speech.14

Ornate style, as Curtius reminds us, was the highest aim of the verbal artist from Quintilian (VIII, 3) to the eighteenth century. Dante earned the coveted title of poeta, reserved for the five great classical poets-Homer, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, and Lucan-and a status as the sixth among them by his skill with ornate language (Inf. 4: 94-102). Virgil's description in Inferno 2 of Beatrice's visitation to him to explain why the Queen of Heaven and Saint Lucy wish to rescue Dante is cast in an elegant rhetoric intended to illustrate just why Dante should merit such compassion. By way of letting us know that his poetry could be heard and his rhetorical images seen even in heaven, Dante has the Virgin Mary exhort Beatrice:

Disse:-Beatrice, loda di Dio vera, che non soccorri quei che t'am6 tanto, ch'usci per te de la volgare schiera?

12 Sergii, Explanationum in Artem Donati, Liber I, "De Partibus orationis." Heinrich Keil, Grammatici Latini, vol. 4: Probi Donati Servii qui feruntur De Arte Grammatica Libri. (Leipsig: B. G. Teubner, 1864): 487, 23.

13 The five divisions are: inventio (invention), dispositio (disposition, "layout"), elocutio (X?t;, diction), memoria (memory), and actio (delivery). For a helpful synop- sis of classical rhetoric as ars, see E. R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trs. Willard R. Trask (New York: Pantheon, 1953): 68-78.

14 Curtius, ELLMA, p. 71.




Non odi tu la pieta del suo pianto, non vedi tu la morte che '1 combatte su la fiumana ove '1 mar non ha vanto-?

(Inf. 2:103-108)

[She said: "Beatrice, true praise of God, why do you not succor him who bore you such love that for you he left the vulgar throng? Do you not hear his pitiful lament? Do you not see the death that assails him on that flood over which the sea has no vaunt?"]

The women of heaven recognize in Dante's poetry not simply a pleasing style, their approbation signals the successful mixture of reason and speech, ratio et oratio, a witness to the power of energeia to produce harmony in the world. That is in fact, the second part of the opening sentence in Sergius's commentary on Donatus: "Oratio dicitur elocutio, quasi oris ratio." "As though a reason of the mouth" yokes speech and reason to the dynamo of energeia to "do forms," in this case the harmony that can be imparted to society and human behavior by rhetoric. Sergius defines "energian" as an open-ended creative power, "id quod facit" (p. 487:27) more important than the grammatical categories that he treats in his commentary.

Cicero's De Officiis, 1,50, identifies rhetoric as an agent of energeia whose power it extends to society at large. Rhetoric thus becomes a key factor in the anthropology of the verbal image by placing speech, the reason of the mouth, under the aegis of reason. Togeth- er, reason and speech-ratio et oratio-shape society to reflect the harmony of forms of good and virtue apprehended in the intellect and transmitted through the individual human by reason. Rhetoric, viewed from this perspective, conceives the human as a performer of the union of reason and speech; the performance conveys the image of the harmony that must ensue when speech, governed by reason, extends the power of operatio into the world. Through this power or activity that "does" images, rhetoric postulates community as the one individual obeying the civilizing rules of rhetoric becomes many individuals all adhering to the norms of oratio et ratio.

In the Metalogicon, John of Salisbury calls rhetoric "the beautiful and fruitful union between reason and expression;" through harmony, it holds human communities together."15 Hugh of Saint Victor's Didascalicon (12th century) makes energeia, identified as "the power of mind and reason," the third and highest of the powers of the

15 Quoted by Curtius, ELLMA: 77.



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soul. I want to quote Hugh's description, since it illustrates a twelfth- century conception of energeia that makes image production a central focus of mental activity but one subordinate to the power of thinking with images, of reasoning from images, and of hypothesiz- ing deductively about things the mind cannot see, but whose image it may conjure.

Rooted entirely in the reason, the third power of the soul exercises itself either in the most unfaltering grasp of things present, or in the understanding of things absent, or in the investigation of things unknown. This power belongs to humankind alone. It not only takes in sense impressions and images which are perfect and well-founded, but, by a complete act of the understanding, it explains and confirms what imagination has only suggested. And, as has been said, this divine nature is not content with the knowledge of those things alone which it perceives spread before its senses, but, in addition, it is able to provide even for things removed from it names which imagination has conceived from the sensi- ble world, and it makes known, by arrangement of the words, what it has grasped by reason of its understanding .. .16

The last clause, "and it makes known by arrangement of words, what it has grasped by reason of its understanding," invokes the coupling of oratio and ratio necessary for effective rhetoric. Hugh thus shows in this passage the inward workings of the psyche by which rhetoric acquires its authority to convey the image of the mind in perfect balance or harmony with itself. Hugh's passage thus shows exactly how the connection between the inner workings of energeia as an intellectual and formative power in the individual psyche and the shaping of an harmonious community was understood in the twelfth century.

But its emphasis on the visual image, and the thinking with visual images it describes, reminds us that there is yet another side to the equation. The whole point of energeia is that it allows for the same mental activity, the same text to generate two distinct kinds of material images, verbal and visual. If rhetoric and elocutio can produce a new conception of the verbal image, then there must be an equally strong theory of energeia in conjunction with the visual image. That theory receives its fullest early elaboration in the work of Plotinus in a theory of the human image-what it means to participate in evolving as an individual towards an ideal form. This theory actually

16 Hugh of Saint Victor, Didascalicon, Lib. 1, kap. 3. Translation byJerome Taylor and Lester Little, pp. 49-50.




requires the individual's intellectual forces and psyche to create a self-identity by suppressing the body and all the material conditions we associate with the physical life.

Plotinus sketches a theory whose praxis seems to consist in the renunciation of making in the material sense to permit the individual to devote energy to evolving a dialectic of inner vision. What is truly interesting here is that Plotinus makes energeia and the production of images central to his philosophical anthropology at the same time that he works to dissociate the "doing of forms" from the material connotation that classical rhetoricians, as we have just seen, were investing in the term. Plotinus's strategy does not contradict Aristotle, but it does construe his conception of energeia in a more Platonizing way.

The problematic of the body begins with the allegorization of Plotinus's own body and subjectivity. It is the first thing we learn about Plotinus in Porphyry's Life of Plotinus, our principle source on the philosopher's life. "Plotinus, the philosopher of our times," Por- phyry begins, "seemed ashamed of being in the body."17 This somatic aversion extended to his unwillingness to ascribe to it a gene- alogy, race, or country of origin: "As a result of this state of mind he could never bear to talk about his race or his parents or his native country." On the one hand, Porphyry takes Plotinus's reticence as a mark of his philosophical rigor and consistency, while at the same time setting about providing a rhetorical substitute for the self- image Plotinus refuses. Indeed, as though to compensate for his mentor's fastidiousness, Porphyry tells us rather more than we want to know about the philosopher's body, and in terms vivid enough to make us understand why Plotinus was body-shy. After beginning the Life in chapter 1 with instances of Plotinus's avoidance of the body, Porphyry leads off the very next chapter with a description of his mentor's body so graphic it qualifies as hypotyposis, one of the figures rhetorically classed under energeia:

2. He often suffered from a disease of the bowels, but would not submit to an enema, saying that it was unsuitable for an elderly man to undergo this sort of treatment. He refused also to take medicines containing the flesh of wild beasts, giving as his reason that he did not approve of eating the flesh even of domestic animals. He kept away from the bath and had

17 Porphyry, On the Life ofPlotinus and the Order of his Books 1.1-2. In Plotinus, edited with an English translation by A. H. Armstrong, 7 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard Univer- sity Press, 1966-89), 1:3.



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himself massaged every day at home. When the plague broke out and his masseurs died he gave up treatment of this kind, and soon contracted acute diphtheria ... his disease increased so much in violence ... that his voice lost its clearness and sonority and his throat grew worse, and his sight became blurred and his hands and feet ulcerated.18

Of course, Porphyry's description invokes allegory as much as sober historical reporting since it dramatically renders the very cor-

ruption of the body that provides the principal evidence for Plotinus of the qualitative difference between body and soul. Plotinus's last words in the deathbed scene recounted a few lines later confirm this since his words evoke the soul returning to god, while the body slithers back to the earth in the form of a snake:

Then, he said, "Try to bring back the god in us to the divine in the All!" and, as a snake crept under the bed on which he was lying and disappeared into a hole in the wall, he breathed his last. It was the end of the second year of the reign of Claudius, and according to Eustochius he was sixty-six years old. [Eustochuius was another biographer actually present at the scene from whom Porphyry obtained this description.]19

Between the opening sentence of chapter 1 asserting the theme of somatic aversion, and the deathbed scene with its metamorphosis of the corrupt body slithering back into the earth, Porphyry tells an anecdote about attempts to make a picture of Plotinus. Presumably Plotinus's pupils sought to have his portrait painted before he contracted the disease that fatally disfigured him and has usually been

diagnosed by modern clinicians on the basis of Porphyry's description and an even more lurid one by Eustochius as diphtheria and

leprosy (elephantiasis Graecorum), although more recent work by Dr. Mirko D. Grmek suggests that tuberculosis, not leprosy, more accu-

rately fits the presenting symptoms described by Porphyry.20

18 Life, 1.2.1-16. 19 Life, 1.2.25-32. 20 Note 1, pages 4-5 of Armstrong's text. For the revisionist view see Mirko D.

Grmek, "Les maladies et la mort de Plotin," in Porphyre, La Vie de Plotin, ed. by Luc Brisson et al. Tome II (Paris: J. Vrin, 1992): 335-53. I would like to thank Walton 0. Schalik III for apprising me of the medical discussion and making a copy of Dr. Grmek's article available. Mr. Schalik's own comments (letter of 2/27/93) are ger- mane: "This latter diagnosis [of Tuberculosis] is perfectly plausible, though Grmek does indicate even ergotism is possible. I would only add, from my own experience with the difficult and often dimly viewed program of retrospective diagnosis, that several separate, but simultaneous, disease entities are possible, though less likely. If Grmek is correct, then the "diptheria" does easily relate to the other systemic effects, because Tuberculosis actually affects all these organ systems."




Immediately following the opening assertion of the Life, already quoted, and as though to confirm Plotinus's rejection of the body in any form, Porphyry tells us that in response to the urging of a companion that he sit for a sculpted or painted portrait, Plotinus responds: "Is it not enough to have to carry the image in which nature has encased us, without your asking me to agree to leave behind me a longer-lasting image of the image, as if it was something genuinely worth looking at?"21

The exchange offers insight into the picture-image dichotomy in Plotinus's thought: at issue is a portrait or icon (eix6v). An icon, of course, is an image given material form, a body as it were, just as a rhetorical figure is an image couched in the form of language. As though rejecting the term cix6v as a misleading subterfuge, cre- ating the impression that an image given material form has some claim to reality, Plotinus uses the term ei'6oXa three times in a very interesting sequence.

First he uses c't'coa to refer to the body qua external appearance: ". .. the image in which nature has encased us." In other words, the body does not represent the authentic individual; it is "6Ctg; c?T6- c0ov," nature's image, the reality or subjectivity of the individual lying elsewhere, in the soul which like beauty is adventitious to the body.22 With the body, then, as c't6o;a of the true being, a picture of the individual can only be a tautology or repetition: "an image of the image (cit'66Lu Eit'coov)."

Does that mean, then, that there cannot be a picture of the philosopher, an etxov? We need to answer that in two different ways; first by seeing what Plotinus seems to be getting at here, and secondly, by understanding how he conceives the role of energeia. At the very least, we must admit that Plotinus harbors many more reser- vations about having the image assume material form as picture than do his counterparts among the rhetoricians as regards the verbal image. The difference, of course, lies in the relative difficulty in accessing the two kinds. One must be literate even to gain access to the written image, and then mental activity comes into play to sort and reconstitute the description as image. Plotinus does not expressly condemn the picture per se in this passage, he simply voices disgust with the body and astonishment that one would possibly

21 Life, 1.1:7-10. 22 Ennead 1.6.2.22-24. "So beauty rests upon the material thing when it has been

brought into unity, and gives itself to parts and wholes alike ...."



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want to record so transient and insignificant a part of one's self. He's worried less about the concept of picture, than about its use. Should it be taken as standing for him, as an ikon, where bodily likeness might be construed as substance, then no, no picture (cix6v). For reasons that will be evident in a moment, it's not at all clear that for Plotinus, there can or should be a material image. He seems at best uninterested in the question, if not downright con- temptuous.

But his theory leads inexorably to image production (ei'6woa), so it is both paradoxical and finally unrealistic to take so uncom- promising a stance. As though to offer a critical reaction to their mentor's radical anti-materialism, Porphyry tells us that Plotinus's friends conceive a plan to obtain the icon in spite of him, and they do so in a way that illustrates how his theory works for image production.

Porphyry tells us that faced with Plotinus's refusal to collaborate in the portrait project, friends sought out a painter, "Carterius, the best painter of his time," and brought him to hear Plotinus's lec- ture. Day after day, Carterius sat listening to Plotinus then returned to his studio to draw the mental image he had formed of the philosopher. Amelius, a disciple of Plotinus and Carterius's patron, "helped him to improve his sketch to a closer resemblance." This collaboration "gave us an excellent portrait of Plotinus without his knowledge."23

The two portrait schemes could not be more different, and, in the contrast, lies a key point about the tension as well as the link between picture (Etx6v) and image (ci'6coa) in Plotinus's aesthetic theory. The first project would simply represent the body, the appearance of a motionless Plotinus-the term "to sit for" recurs. Carterius would transfer directly to canvas his impressions of this sitting subject. The "likeness" would be less a "doing of the form" of Plotinus, than something like a simple problem of draftsmanship and coloring. Worse, the scenario of vis-a-vis where the painter first peers intently at his subject for long periods of time and then the subject returns his own gaze while studying his portrait, smacks suspiciously of the Narcissus syndrome that Plotinus condemns in Ennead 1.6.8:9-16, "On Beauty."

For if a man runs to the image and wants to seize it as if it was the reality (like a beautiful reflection playing on the water, which some story some-

23 Life, 1.1.17-20.




where, 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.

Reflection, self-reflection, even the mirror all play important roles in Plotinus's concept of image production. For him to evoke and condemn the Narcissus myth so strongly, making it an archetypal negative example (he'll evoke it again at Ennead V.8.2.35-6), tells us how important to him it was to convey the difference between perception and image production. There is no energeia in the Narcissus moment, only mistaken identity. Ovid sums up the problem at Meta- morphses 111:417 when he says of Narcissus: spem sine corpore amat, corpus putat esse, quod umbra est ["He loves hope without a body, for he thinks a body what is but a shade"].24

The Middle Ages will not dismiss so readily as does Plotinus the Narcissus conundrum, coming back to it repeatedly, in a variety of situations and from a number of viewpoints. Yet from a Plotinian standpoint, the problem is straightforward: Narcissus simply mis- takes refraction for thought; he projects sensual desire onto insub- stantial semblance. Notoriety, but neither true subjectivity nor identity can emerge from such a fantasmal episode. The Narcissus anecdote enacts a popular misconception about the image, one that locates meaning in the material artifact.

But for Plotinus the eit6o&a can never be exterior, nor can it exist

24 Plotinus, who began teaching at Rome when he was forty, long before he began to write down his philosophy (Life, 3.23-4, and 4.1-7) may well have been thinking of Ovid as the unnamed author, especially given Ovid's problematic of forms and the question of illusion and reality of the body and its images. Of course the more obvious account he would have known (and one that conforms more accurately to the story as he tells it) is that found in Pausanius: Pausanius, Guide to Greece, 2 vols., tr. Peter Levi (New York: Penguin Books, 1971). "Narkissos's river is there; they say Narkissos looked into this water and not realizing he was seeing his own reflection fell in love with himself, and died of love beside the spring. This is absolutely stupid-a boy old enough to fall in love not knowing a human being from a reflection: but there is another story about him less well known (though one does hear it), that Narkissos had a twin sister; they were exactly the same to look at with just the same hair-style and the same clothes, and they even used to go hunting together. Narkissos was in love with his sister, and when she died he used to visit the spring; he knew what he saw was his own reflection, but even so he found some relief in telling himself it was his sister's image. I think the earth grew the flower of the narcissus before his time, at least if we should believe the verses of Pamphos. [IX, 31, pp. 376-377]" I am indebted to my colleague, Milad Doueihi, for this reference and for much good discussion on this topic.



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without an investment of the subject's intellectual and aisthetic energy. Consequently, there can be no txo6v or picture, which will be exterior and material, without a pre-existing c?6wcoa. That's hardly news; indeed, the whole point for Plotinus lies in the work the image must do in shaping the inner life, the qualities of the soul of the individual. His anthropology of the image exists to guide the Phidias within, not the connoisseur without.

How then can you see the sort of beauty a good soul has? Go back into yourself and look; and if you do not yet see yourself beautiful, then, just as someone making a statue which has to be beautiful cuts away here and polishes there and makes one part smooth and clears another till he has given his statue a beautiful face, so you too must cut away excess and straighten the crooked and clear the dark and make it bright, and never stop 'working on your statue' till the divine glory of virtue shines out on you, till you see 'self-mastery enthroned upon its holy seat.'

This quotation, from the very first essay Plotinus wrote and the basis for his aesthetics, offers a demonstration of energeia in action, though he will define it more precisely in later essays. The idea of the Phidias within, the sculpter of the soul that we must all develop as the root of our identity and subjectivity, forms the rationale for the c't0o6a in Plotinus's theory. Seeing this, his disciples look to make it the rationale for the Etx6v or picture as well.

Porphyry's account of Carterius's making of the portrait of Plotinus begins not with the philosopher stiffly seated, posing, but with the philosopher in his school doing philosophy. Before Car- terius can paint Plotinus, he must comprehend his identity, his method and his thought. Crucial to the process of representation is the dialectical role of memory, the absence of the distracting body. For it is not the image of the body he paints, so much as the image of the philosopher-of a subjectivity and of an identity.

The description of the portrait process involves a dialectic first with Carterius's own psyche and memory and then with his patron, Plotinus's friend, Amelius. We see enacted here, in fact, the scenario described by Socrates in Philebus quoted earlier, particularly the stimulus to one's formulation of the image when forced to put our thoughts into words. In this case we see how the second person, bringing another perspective onto the problem of capturing Plotinus's identity qua likeness, contributes to the success of pro- ducing the picture. But whereas Plato left the creative force vague,




in this case we have a context that seeks to spell out not only how energeia works to produce an txo6v, as a social production, distinct from an ei'tcoa, but also why one should do this.

The clue lies in the philosopher's own metaphor. Does he himself not invoke the portrait sculpture by way of making his point? Al- though metaphorically transformed into an image of the soul, the root image of the sculpture nevertheless remains. Porphyry's story or allegory of Carterius's portrait of Plotinus, seems intended to demonstrate that an icon produced in the right way and in an appropriate context provides a necessary complement to philosophical discourse proper. Plotinus describes how the soul should be modelled like a portrait sculpture. What does that mean to the person who has never seen a portrait bust? What standard of beauty, of form, of symmetry do his analogies invoke? Plotinus describes the process of "doing forms" very well, but his argument here, and indeed frequently when he discusses aesthetics, depends upon a knowledge and appreciation of fine arts.

Porphyry's allegory of Plotinus's portrait builds upon this current in the master's work to show that properly understood, the ctxov illustrates the kind of self-portrait we must focus our own energeia to produce. Like Plato's insistence on the scribe and the painter in the soul both working to produce complementary representations, Plotinus's portrait offers a material example to help readers understand the image theory so crucial to his philosophy, the image theory he urges them to emulate.25

We can best see how the portrait might be intended to serve as a heuristic by connecting it with his philosophical exposition of energeia in Ennead IV.5.6-7. In these chapters he develops two principles that form the basis for a critical and theoretical thinking with images that, in its implications, constitutes a radical shift in the way in which visual and verbal images may be juxtaposed and utilized in a variety of formats.

The first equates the principles of energeia responsible for shaping the individual human subject with the principles of energeia used in visual and verbal representation. This means, in effect, that the same principle is used by the human being to shape subjectivity-to sculpt the soul, as it were, as in making a picture. At Ennead IV.5.6.24-31, Plotinus says that Light, Life, and the Soul are all ener-

25 In passing, we must remember that the portrait bears an emblematic relationship to Porphyry's own Life of Potinus. But that's another story.



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geia. These principles shape the soul as eit6o&a, thereby also defining the individual's image as a specific identity and subjectivity within a given historical, social, religious, and political horizon. But we have also seen that the eit6oka of the individual human subject can, by the same principles of energeia be extended to the icon (ctxov).

With this first theoretical principle of energeia, Plotinus establishes not only an anthropology of the image, but also a rigorously ethical theory of art criticism which will play an important role in the icono- clastic controversy, notably in Saint John of Damascus's treatises defending icons.

Secondly, he develops a mirror theory of representation. Plotinus urges the mirror as an allegory for the critical dialogue between the ideal forms produced in the soul and the disparate, contradictory bits of information about the self fed to the memory and sense perception by the eyes and ears as visual and verbal images. The body serves as the ground for the mirror that reflects not so much the inner on the outer, but rather shows obverse and reverse, the continuum of being and consciousness.26

Plotinus avoids an "inner-outer" dichotomy of the mind-body problem by his picture theory of being and subjectivity. Just as Car- terius gradually discovered the true likeness of Plotinus by watching the body in action as a speaking, thinking being, so individual identity and subjective consciousness evolve as the ct6coka of virtual being gradually becomes the cfx6v of the individual living being. Subjectivity arises from perceiving the "weaving through" of soul in body. The self begins where thought begins as it processes and pictures the motion of intellectual and sensory stimuli.

From these forms [that the soul contemplates], from which the soul alone receives its lordship over the living being, come reasonings, and opinions, and acts of intuitive intelligence; and this precisely is where "we" are. [...] "we" in our presidency over the living being, are what extends from this point upwards.27 The mirror also becomes the figure for the critical contemplation

that constitutes an essential constituent for Plotinian subjectivity. The soul, then, is the mirror "pictured as being present to bodies since it shines into them and makes living creatures, not of itself and

26 Ennead I. 1, "What is the Living Being?", develops the concept of body and soul as continuum rather than as dichotomy, using language like the "weaving through" of body and soul.

27 Ennead I.1.7, "What is the Living Being?"




the body, but abiding itself and giving images of itself, like a face seen in many mirrors."28 Energeia, the "doing of images," undergirds the mirror allegory lending it the force both to generate the dialectical image play so necessary to Plotinian subjectivity and to high- light the tension between apeiron and peras, indeterminacy and limit, that marks the contingency of consciousness.

Finally, we should not ignore the way Plotinus's mirror allegories continually evoke the double dialectic of word and image. "In the soul," Plotinus says, "sight directed towards intellect is wisdom, theoretical and practical."29 Wisdom, the goal of philosophy, must be obtained in part, at least, by means of dialectic, "the purest part of intelligence and wisdom."30 So verbal image, picture, and subjectivity, like the continuum of body and soul, interweave in a perpetu- al motion in an unceasing quest for understanding.

By way of illustrating these issues, I would like to evoke a well- known literary scene from the high Middle Ages that combines both principles of Plotinian energeia, (1) the ethical symmetry between the human image and the material picture it makes of itself, and (2) his mirror allegory. We find these illustrated succinctly in the inscription over the portal of Hell at the beginning of Canto III of Dante's Inferno.

The inscription enumerates, practically point-by-point, the Ploti- nian definition of energeia with Life, Soul, and Light Christianized as they had been since Augustine's time as Divine Justice, Divine Pow- er, and Supreme Wisdom. It's worth noting that most editions of Inferno continue the manuscript tradition of printing the inscription as it would have been carved, in formal capitals. The inscription actualizes Plotinus's mirror principle of representation by a principle according to which each sinner's punishment reflects his or her sin in life now mirrored by the punishment that governs his body and soul in Hell.

What the condemned souls discover as they cross into the mirror of Hell is that sin is less a particular vice than a general perversion of the energeia or activity by which they should have sculpted their soul and thus their identity and subjectivity in the world. This captures exactly Plotinus's thought that ". . . each thing that exists has an activity, which is a likeness of itself, so that while it exists that like-

28 Ibid., 1.1.8. 29 Ennead 1.2.7, "On Virtues." 30 Philebus 58D6-7, quoted by Plotinus at Ennead 1.3.5, "On Dialectic."



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ness exists ..." (IV.5.7.17f). It is the likeness of their true soul that the damned are condemned to contemplate and to explain eter- nally:

PER ME SI VA NE LA CITTA DOLENTE, PER ME SI VA NE L'ETTERNO DOLARE, PER ME SI VA TRA LA PERDUTA GENTE.

GIUSTIZIA MOSSE IL MIO ALTO FATTORE; FECEMI LA DIVINA PODESTATE, LA SOMMA SAPIENZA E 'L PRIMO AMORE.

DINANZI A ME NON FUOR COSE CREATE SE NON ETTERNE, E IO ETTERNO DURO.

LASCIATE OGNE SPERANZA, VOI CH'INTRATE.

(Inf., III, 1-9) THROUGH ME YOU ENTER THE WOEFUL CITY,

THROUGH ME YOU ENTER ETERNAL GRIEF, THROUGH ME YOU ENTER AMONG THE LOST.

JUSTICE MOVED MY HIGH MAKER: THE DIVINE POWER MADE ME, THE SUPREME WISDOM, AND THE PRIMAL LOVE.

BEFORE ME NOTHING WAS CREATED IF NOT ETERNAL, AND ETERNAL I ENDURE.

ABANDON EVERY HOPE, YOU WHO ENTER.

The John Hopkins University



Documents

Picture, Image, And Subjectivity in Medieval Culture