From Animating Statues to Animating the Universe: Plotinus on the Intelligible as Living Sacred Space

Plotinus actively engages with the notion of sacred space and mystical initiation (Enn. 1.6.7–9). He presents the individual soul as a self-sculpted statue in the temple of the One. He returns to the temple/statue imagery to explicate its ontological syntax: the One as the god inside the temple; Intellect as the first statue in the temple’s precinct; the intelligible as living temple, Soul as constructing images of gods in the sensible world; finally, the individual soul as a sculptor and a statue. The series of references presents the intelligible itself as a self-animated divine complex. For Plotinus, animation is the top-down process of emanation which results in self-animation. Because animation is embedded in the ontological fabric of the universe itself, theurgy and ritual animation of statues are, for Plotinus, ontologically superfluous.