1 On the Possible Role of the Study of the Senses in Religious Studies
The senses display a certain attraction for scholars of religious traditions.1 This is not least due to the possible reference not only to sensory but also to sensual religious experiences that make the study of religious phenomena considerably less dry and dusty than the study of doctrinal texts or theological tracts. “For far too long,” the editors of the journal Numen in their introduction to Religion through the Senses claim, “religion has been equated with doctrine, especially with those systematized doctrines known as ‘theologies’. […] [S]cholars have tended to study the normative, textual, versions of the traditions with which they have been concerned, in many cases disregarding the lived, physical components of those traditions.”2 Admittedly, the wording itself is highly suggestive, as the reference to life, such as in ‘lived’ tradition or religion, seems more attractive than the focus on ‘systematized doctrines’. The unspoken metaphorical opposition is, of course, the opposition between life or lived and death or dead (religion). Nobody, not even scholars, wants to be on the dead side of the matter. The question emerges, however, of whether the emphatic turn to the senses as a paramount field of study of lived religion is also a sensible one, given the strong demarcating restrictions the new sensory approach suggests—especially regarding former approaches to the common subject of religion.
Above all, the emphatic turn to the physical and the senses introduces a strong sense of opposition between the two ways of approaching the subject matter. On the one hand, an old, outdated, dry, and infertile approach; on the other hand, a new, promising, fresh, and fertile one. What is more, the new direction of research is introduced with the suggestion that previous scholarship has failed through its neglect of an obviously vital element of the subject in question—as one author put it, “By and large, we have failed to encounter, much less think about, other aspects of religion, particularly those that involve the senses.”3 As a consequence, the attitude of the new direction, which sets itself up as intending to atone for the injustices inflicted on the unfortunate helpless object, has a zeal that borders on the messianic. Hence, as a counter-project to such neglectful text-based approaches to the phenomenon of religion, the examination of the senses (sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell, but also other senses) has acquired considerable scholarly popularity. Every-day and vernacular religion, as the focus of lived reality, are placed at the cutting edge of the revitalized study of religion in general and lived material, lived experience, and bodily religion are at the very center of the field. Bodily sensation has been foregrounded as an object of study in the wake of yet another ‘turn’ in scholarship. As such, in correspondence with some object language ideas, the interest in the senses in scholarly work on religious phenomena is often guided by an attitude that considers the ‘mind as the adversary of the soul’.4 Under this approach, theoretical consideration somehow pollutes or even prevents the genuine sensory experience of the divine, a realm that is supposed to be the bodily reality of practitioners of everyday religion.5 In his stimulating introduction to a recent new series on the study of the senses in the study of religion, Graham Harvey categorically declares with the very first lines of his text the following truths to be self-evident when regarding his object of study:
Religion is sensual because it is corporeal and earthy. Religion is something that people (always bodies) do in the world (always physical). It is seen, heard, tasted, smelled and touched, and often involves senses of place, decency, awe, humour, value and honour. These and other senses work together (although not always successfully), and they are integral to corporeality and to engagement with the world.6
The most obvious objection here is that object language accounts of achieving certain mystical experiences are excluded from religion proper by this description. Harvey’s apodictic insistency notwithstanding, the important question remains: what is it that is seen, heard, tasted, smelled, and touched?7 Is the sensual perception process really quite as one-directional as his statement suggests? Are the senses merely sensing religion—or is perhaps also religion sensing—not least making sense of—the senses? Moreover, by employing a general concept, here, the concept of religion, the assertion may be in danger of falling prey to the ever-present fallacy of misplaced concreteness.8 “Why does incense smell religious?” Margaret Kenna asked about the role of smell in Greek Orthodoxy in her study.9 Is ‘religion’ smelled, or is there a sensation that is described as a religious experience? In other words, is the attribute ‘religious’ ascribed to the sensory experience with regard to certain criteria derived from religious (theoretical) doctrine?
It is very much the case that, as Harvey suggests, there are more senses to be found in religious discourse than the five traditional ones.10 One could also add a sense of balance, a sense of coordination, a sense of language, and so on.11 This fact in itself serves as a confirmation of the idea that religious ideas generate senses that, in turn, sense the religious as a normative prescript, for example, with regard to proper place or decency or value. Another indication is provided by the often-described phenomenon that the senses may be objects of voluntary impact and restructuring. In religious contexts, the senses are possible subjects of training or cultivation, perhaps in order to serve more elevated purposes. In turn, then, the senses must be defined by ideas about what an elevation could possibly mean. The corporeality and earthiness of the sensory engagement with the world in the context of religion presupposes a great deal of theoretical and transcendent assumptions.
Indeed, there is nothing wrong with the assertion that “Religion is the smelling, tasting, touching, hearing and seeing of the world in particular ways,” provided it is not made exclusive.12 Nevertheless, it is the ‘particular ways’ that qualify the perception of the world as religious that should be the subject of scholarly scrutiny. Something ‘particular’ is opposed to ‘usual’ or at least ‘other’ ways, and hence, we must ask, what makes the ‘particular’ particular?
1.1 Senses, Experience, and Meaning
In his analysis of the role of experience in religious studies, Matthew Kapstein has fittingly related the turn toward religious experience to the Cartesian quest for apodictic certainty, unspoiled by critical discussion of the route to achieving one’s religious ideas and convictions:
What was strange about invoking ‘experience’ as a protective strategy in this way was not the turn to experience per se; it was rather the emerging conceit that in the context of religious life experience belongs solely to the subject and so is immune to the criticism or even, in the final analysis, the understanding of others. My experience alone, in other words, comes to be regarded as an incorrigible epistemic authority. What is so odd about this is the ready acceptance such a paradigm requires of what is at root a skeptical, and not an empiricist, view of experience. Though Schleiermacher in part adopted the rhetoric of empiricism, his legacy to the later discussion of religious experience was thus an uneasy mix of that rhetoric with the post-Cartesian quest for apodictically certain grounds.13
A similar ‘protective turn’, towards “a sort of magic lantern show in a Cartesian theater with seating for one,” may be witnessed in the critical opposition that is now proposed between ideas of ‘theoretical’ religion and ‘lived’ religion. The interest in the senses in the study of religion is closely connected to the analysis of religious experience and, above all, religious experience as opposed to textual-based religious doctrine. In this regard, the senses are held to be closely related to the body. Scholars claim that the study of religion cannot be reduced to the hermeneutic examination of religious ideas as manifested in teaching, narratives, or doctrines; it also has to take sensory experiences into account. The senses in general, or some sense in particular, have triggered a huge amount of scholarship examining religious experience. “Certain visual images, sounds, and smells heighten our spiritual forces and evoke meaningful religious experiences.”14 That is true enough, but this is only the case if the experience in question is described as religiously relevant or meaningful, which happens on the basis of certain criteria. It is these criteria that make the sensory experiences truly particular or ‘certain’.15 Our bodily experience can be embedded in a religious sense, but not the other way around. Accordingly, Stephen S. Bush summarizes his considerations on experiences as follows: “They involve causal processes that extend beyond and outside consciousness, and whatever knowledge that people come to about their experiences, they only come to because of their social-linguistic capacities to respond to things that affect them by taking a normative status that their peers recognize. […] The term ‘experience’ refers to matters that are public and/or social: dispositions, normative statuses, and causal processes.”16 With reference to these matters, sensory experiences matter in religious communities or traditions, and they make a difference as they are so thoroughly situated in the local religious and social context.
However, the question of the possible role of the senses in a religious context must also be considered. What makes the senses an independent area of possible research on religious phenomena? There are a number of questions that inevitably arise with the assumption that the senses play a major role in religious experience. How do senses affect individual religious experience and the discourses between different religious groups? Are they a means of mediation of experience that has to be analyzed as such? If the divine, according to Birgit Meyer, “does not appear as a self-revealing entity, but, on the contrary, is always ‘effected’ or ‘formed’ by mediation processes, while resisting being reduced to mere human-made products,” the type of mediator making such an experience possible has to be carefully scrutinized.17 In philosophical terms, we must reflect on the conditions of the possibility (Bedingung der Möglichkeit) of reference to the senses in a religious context. Are sensory religious experiences a priori possible? Is there an independent status of sense experience in experiences described as ‘religious’?
The starting point of research on the subject of ‘religion and the senses’ has been discerned by Cuffel, Di Giacinto, and Krech in the following way: “Research on religion and the senses has to consider the facts that a) there is no direct access to sensual perception and b) sensual perception can have various meanings, among them religious ones. None of the senses or activities that evoke sensory experience are, in and of themselves, ‘religious’. It is the religious context which makes them so […].” Given the additional fact that senses allow interaction with the physical world and may “become symbolic building blocks for human imagining about the divine and demonic world,”18 it seems vital to refrain from following a one-sided approach, and thereby overestimating the role of either the conceptual or the physical side of sensate experience in religion.19
To qualify as religious, a sensory experience has to make religious sense.20 Sense, however, is a phenomenon of ascription;21 no experience makes sense as such; it is only certain judgments on the sensory experience expressed in linguistic assertions that can be meaningful and, therefore, make sense.22 Note that it is religion itself that ascribes religious sense, not the scholar: “Religion constitutes itself via the attribution of something as being religious […]. Action has to be observed and identified as religion in order to be religious; the same holds true for sense-perception communicated as religious experience, and an object is not relevant for religion unless a religious meaning is ascribed to it.”23 Suppose there are rituals or common practices designed to evoke certain sensory experiences or ‘spontaneous’ visions; the visual, acoustical, olfactory, haptic, or gustatory impression has to be accompanied by an ascription of religious sense. This ascription will necessarily follow certain criteria to distinguish it from normal or simply other sensory impressions. Hearing someone calling through loudspeakers does not make religious sense as such while hearing a muʾadhdhin calling believers to prayer does. Of course, one cannot expect religious traditions to use scholarly or ‘Western’ wording when ascribing religious sense to a sensory perception. However, there are other indicators that can be used. The criteria for ‘making religious sense’ are based upon the transcendence/immanence distinction, as they ascribe sense with regard to the tension between embodiment and existence in the physical world and the aspiration to reach a transcendent, disembodied divine sphere.24 The senses can only make religious sense if they are said to do so by the religious practitioners themselves. Thus, any attempt to separate religious narratives from sensory experience to gain insight into the phenomenon of religious experience is illusionary. Accordingly, religious meaning is assigned to sensory experiences.25 As Susan Ashbrook put it, introducing her study on the role of olfactory experience in the emergence of Christianity: “Christianity emerged in a world where smells mattered. They mattered for what they did. They mattered for what they meant.”26 In this sense, the matter of smell is meaning.
1.2 Senses as Hypotheses and Forms
Sensuous experience has been attributed a privileged position as a source for religious experience, and thinking over the basic questions above, that deserves further examination. Do religious traditions claim a genuine sense-making potential for sensuous experiences in religious matters? If the senses alone permit certain religious experiences, the senses themselves become the sensus numinis which is—according to Rudolf Otto—ultimately responsible for the very possibility of the homo religiosus.27 This would also hold true for the scholar of religion studying the senses: “The journey towards a richer and fuller sense of religion will entail a much wider notion of senses […] By sustained focus on the senses […] we will a greatly improved sense of what religion is and what religious people do.”28
What are the relations of mind and senses within the object language reflection, and does it make any sense here to distinguish between the senses and the mind as mediators of religious experience? It should be clear by now that I consider the distinction between senses and mind as merely analytical— even potentially dangerous if hypostasized into a ‘new’ scientific approach. Sensory religion is a meaningful concept only if it expresses the interrelatedness and the reciprocity of both parts. The idea of a possible description of pure religious experience via the senses, without taking into account the theoretical assumptions or intellectual superstructure ‘Überbau’, is on many levels, a chimera created by idealistic scholars who wish to place lived, material, and bodily religion at the definite center of the study of religion. What is more, the idealistic impetus cannot work on the object language level, which is comprised of the assertions of the religious. For instance, the basic act of ordering the senses in religious traditions presupposes classificatory principles that reflect broader religious ideas or interests.29 Moreover, sensory experience is vital for the understanding of religion as it connects humans to the physical world as well as to religious ideas. Concluding his study of the Masāʾil ʿAbdallāh ibn Salām, a religious dialogue between a learned Jew and Muḥammad that was probably composed between the ninth and tenth century CE, Ulisse Cecini takes issue with dualist thinking in religious studies. Cecini states that “The sensorial is intertwined with the intellectual and even when it is seemingly addressed by the discourse as a separate issue, nevertheless contains in itself traces or hints to the intellectual and the potentiality to surpass itself and transform into something which is more than sensorial, something we could call mystical, or just religious.”30
Moreover, any reference to the senses in religious traditions under study does not come out of the blue but is dependent on a tradition. The reference to that tradition can be performed in terms of demarcation or adaption. The nature of a tradition-based reference to the senses serves as the background or framework of a religious tradition’s attitude towards sensory experience.31 Accordingly, there is no ground zero for experience; in religions, nothing is ever experienced for the first time. With regard to the sense of smell, Mary Thurkill has pointed out that “Mediterranean and Middle Eastern cultures associated fragrance and sweet smells with Divine presence and sacrificial offerings. Evolving within those cultures, early Christians and Muslims assimilated these sensory cues within their own cultic practices while also adapting them to their unique theological and hagiographical purpose.”32
Instead of playing the senses off against theory (religious knowledge that is manifested in text), an approach is needed that takes the bipolarity of the dynamics of religions into consideration. In contrast to approaches that overemphasize either the mental or the material pole, I would like to propose considering the senses as hypotheses derived from traditional ideas for communication of religious experience.33 As a hypothesis, a sense generates certain data due to a given frame of reference; that is, it embodies a propensity.34 As such, the senses serve as interfaces between the collective or individual mind and the world. These are not naturally occurring interfaces but rather are culturally constructed, dependent on basic religious (‘dogmatic’) propositions.35 The oft-used metaphor of the senses as ‘gateways’ to the outside world, memory, and knowledge tacitly hints at the fact that such gateways are, in fact, the result of a building process guided by intentions and propositions.36 These propositions are expressed in religious concepts: “Thus, concepts […] are at the core of […] every experience […]; consequently, experience exceeds subjectivity and gets within socio-cultural patterns an objective meaning.”37 It is this objective, concept-based meaning that forms the possible subject of the scholarly study of religious experience derived from sensory perception.
In her seminal article Religious Sensations, Birgit Meyer introduced a most useful notion to describe the senses as religious hypotheses: sensational forms. To her, sensational forms make the transcendental ‘sense-able’. They are “relatively fixed, authorized modes of invoking and organizing access to the transcendental, thereby creating and sustaining links between religious practitioners in the context of particular religious organizations. Sensational forms are transmitted and shared; they involve religious practitioners in particular practices of worship and play a central role in forming religious subjects.”38 Sensational forms organize access to the religious, as determined by the close relationship of religion and the transcendence/immanence distinction. By doing so, they make common experiences related to organizations and institutions possible—thus forming both the objects and subjects of perception considered to bear religious sense. Accordingly, diverse religious organizations “may be characterized as having distinct ‘sensory regimes’39 that are, ultimately, responsible for “generating a sacred surplus.”40 Hence, comparative analysis is necessary for any further study.
Meyer defines ‘sensational’ as referring to feelings, while ‘sensory’ refers to the senses, although she acknowledges the close relationship between the two. However, in employing the concept of sensational forms, it is possible to take a further analytical step. In ascription processes underpinning religious meaning, the senses are sensational forms as well. Every ascription of sense allows for access to the transcendent. This permits a non-essentialist means of description: in a religious context, there is no sense (as such) behind the sensational forms, which are, accordingly, the sole carriers of religious meaning. Therefore, Meyer’s assertion regarding feelings is all the truer for the senses: they are defined by a (common) sense: “Sensational forms, though produced and in a sense ‘made up’ appear as situated beyond mediation exactly because they are—literally—incorporated and embodied by their beholders. These forms invoke and perpetuate shared experiences, emotions, and affects that are anchored in a taken-for-granted sense of self and community, indeed a common sense that is rarely subject to questioning exactly because it is grounded in shared perceptions and sensations.”41 Moreover, it is by working on the body and on the senses in the process of religious training that the culturally induced sensational forms are finally naturalized and embodied in and by the religious (believers).42 To adapt David Morgan, via sensational forms, the individual body is disciplined to participate in the social body. The body perceived and perceiving, guided by sensory hypothesis, becomes the very way in which individuals and groups practice belief: “The body in such cases does more than signify. More than passively enabling it, the body shapes, colors, tunes, tastes, and performs belief.”43
Sensational forms are subject to confirmation and rejection, as all things are subject to historical circumstances. They change, in short. This, in turn, leads to the introduction of a new hypothesis to adapt to the meaning constituted by theoretical consideration. It can be presumed, however, that situations of religious contact are the foremost historical events that induce the need to confirm or reject any hypothesis (or sense) in question.
1.3 Senses and Language
The senses, therefore, must be analyzed as equivalents of the basic theories that generate data that constitutes religious sense. Consequently, they must be expressed in language. There are no senses without language. In this context, I consider the oft-heard statement that some (sensory) religious experiences cannot be expressed in language as a rudimentary metalanguage consideration of language active on the object language level. Therefore, the statement that some religious experience cannot be expressed in language is a linguistic expression of a theoretical assumption—in this case, it displays an assumption based on a strongly specified transcendence/immanence distinction, i.e., the existence of a realm beyond the possibilities of language.44 This does not mean that sensuous experiences simply confirm religious assumptions, but rather that the mediation process between the senses hypothetically constructed by these assumptions and the assumptions nourished by experiences—the dynamic in-between—is the location where religious meaning emerges. In religion, there is no sense organ that is not shaped by basic theories or cosmological ideas, which anticipate the sense and the corresponding sensory experience.45 Sense-based religious experience is, therefore, a self-reinforcing process of generating meaningful data. It is here, in the hermeneutical circle internal to religion, that scholarly work on the senses has to start.
These self-reinforcing processes are at stake in situations of religious contact.46 In such instances, the senses as hypotheses for the generation of meaning are defined more clearly. For example, the saying repeatedly used in the Gospels Let them who have ears hear indicates a reestablishment of sense (sensory experience and meaning) in order to demarcate in a situation of contact. It serves to demarcate listeners from those who, for various reasons, are not able to have a certain sensory perception. On one hand, the internal dynamic of the tradition is altered through the challenge posed by a contact situation.47 On the other hand, it is the self-references of the religious traditions that meet in contact that allow for comparison.48 It is either a comparison between the traditions in question and/or a comparison on the metalanguage level as performed by the scholar examining situations of contact.
Therefore, the question of the senses in the study of religion is not physiological, psychological, or materialistic. Rather, the question concerns the tradition-dependent linguistic mediation of—supposedly religious—sensory experiences. It is precisely at this point where reductionist naturalistic approaches to the phenomenon of sensory religious experiences fail in their endeavor to contribute to the understanding of religions or religion in general. Though it may well be the case that, say, a visual experience of the divine may be precisely located in a certain part of the brain, the functioning of religion is in no way explained as the ascription processes behind religious sense-making are not taken into account.49
2 Object Language Examples of Ascribing Sense to the Senses
In the following, I analyze some object language examples of religious discourses with the intent of establishing a metalanguage to describe the phenomenon of the senses making religious sense. It is true, however, that all of these cases refer to persons who are commonly known and appreciated as philosophers. This is, above all, due to my personal training as a philosopher. However, all of them considered themselves to be religious agents—a missionary, a cardinal, and a bishop. Their dual roles provide a certain advantage in approaching their writings, for all these cases most clearly display religious object language, which was intended to develop a philosophical meta-language capable of describing its own sense-making of the senses.50
2.1 The Sense of Language and the Senses
Religious sense or meaning is a phenomenon of ascription. Accordingly, language is the most important means of mediation between the bodily senses and (religious) knowledge. In a nutshell, the linguistic process of mediation is known as religious experience.
The medieval polymath intellectual Ramon Llull (1232–1316), who combined language and the senses in a strict and significant manner, makes an intriguing case study, not least as his ideas are products of a contact situation of religious traditions and thus can be considered object language expressions of this contact. Llull, who hailed from the Mediterranean Kingdom of Majorca, was not a philosopher per se.51 Rather, he was a Christian missionary who employed philosophy, which he termed his ‘Great Art’, to irrefutably convince infidels of the truth of Christianity. Accordingly, Llull’s innovative proposals emerge in what may be termed a complex, multifarious contact situation. “In terms of language, then, Llull was a liminal figure in the culture of his time.”52 His thinking took place within the context of his overarching missionary efforts, which were directed at his non-Christian surroundings and, above all, at the Muslims. Contact with others, as the subjects of mission and potential converts, is therefore always a core part of Llullian theory design. Hence, Llull’s writings are a significant object language self-reflection on the communication of religious sense. Llull confirmed his thoughts through concrete actions. In his communicative crusade, Llull encouraged the establishment of missionary schools, most famously his ‘own’ monastery of Miramar, which focused on the teaching of languages and, above all, Arabic—a language Llull claimed to have mastered. Imagined or concrete contact situations are used to frame his thoughts on language. These are mostly situations in which communication between a Christian missionary and some public under the guidance of (and intended towards) the divine has to be prepared, started, and executed.53
Additionally, and most interestingly, Llull’s thought is yet another example of religion, in the form of an engaged religious agent, providing the scholar with a sense beyond the five traditional ones—although his choice might come as a surprise for those who categorically separate the physiological senses from the socio-cultural sphere. More specifically, Llull considered language to be a sixth sense, and he coined a proper name for it: Affatus/Afflatus. The notion itself may be traced back to Tertullian and Irenaeus, in whose thought man is denoted as the image of God and wherein afflatus is opposed to the divine spiritus.54 By introducing the notion, Llull also establishes a hierarchy of the senses, for it is the sense of language that coordinates the other senses in order to be able to generate meaning—to gain sense from experience.
To his later exegetes, Llull’s postulate of a sixth linguistic sense55 “arguably, the most unusual doctrine from his entire extraordinary career.”56 He even wrote a book on this additional sense, titled Lo sisè seny, lo qual apellam afflatus (The sixth sense called afflatus).57 The additional sense is presented as an exclusive discovery of his, for affatus est sensus incognitus, as Llull in his discussion of the senses in his Liber Proverbiorum states.58 Though not recognized as such, the affatus has vital capacities and tasks to perform. One of the most important is the development and establishment of notions and concepts.59 Affatus est potentia, quae manifestat conceptionem mentis. Objectum Affatus est manifestatio mentis et suum instrumentum est lingua.60 The creation of meaningful notions makes sense.
The creation of notions and concepts is closely related to sensory experience. According to Llull, this remarkable sense coordinates the other five senses and functions in many regards as a translator or mediator. On the one hand, it mediates the outer world and the inner senses; on the other hand, it transforms the outer world through being a sense that controls the human production of language.61 Affatus is language as a receptive, transforming, and productive sense, created from the imaginative parts of the human soul, transferring passions and thoughts to their linguistic expression.62 This capacity is of superior importance for a human being to cultivate the habitus of directedness towards God as one’s ‘first intention’.63 To Llull, man’s real intention is directed towards God; all other intentions serve only as a means to this primary intention. Accordingly, the importance of language is paramount, and above all with regard to religion. It is the affatus that allows humans to serve God in the first place; it is the affatus that turns a human being into a religious person, someone who is directed exclusively toward God.64 By controlling language, affatus is the sense that allows any human to get closer to the purpose they were created for, the praising of God.65 Thus, Llull’s thinking confirms the idea that “a structured process in which the senses are called upon and then tuned yields a habitus” that creates religious subjects.66
The affatus is the one medium of communication that connects the individual human being in a threefold manner. Firstly, it connects and orders internally, linking the individual’s sensory capacities. Secondly, the affatus connects the individual to God. Thirdly, it connects the individual to his fellow men. “Affatus comprises, then, a dual system of caritas verbalis and veritos verbalis, a medium for communicating the highest objects of desire and knowledge alike. Through affatus, human beings separated materially from each other and from God establish a spiritual link between themselves and their creator.”67 The affatus, as a religious sense, is, therefore, the interface that connects the human to the divine sphere, thus transcending human activity to a higher level of understanding that, in turn, might be communicated to others. With regard to the process of the communicatio idiomatum which takes place between the divine and the human sphere, the idea of the affatus, thus, allows the inclusion of Llull into a tradition of language philosophy.68 Llull strongly underlines the importance of the affatus for religious life, not least for its theological self-reflection: In hoc mundo non potes participare cum DEO sine affari.69 Affatus, therefore, provides the very basis for human beings to fulfill their primary intention. It is a means to serve God through its coordination of the senses.70 As such, affatus is the necessary condition for the very possibility of human communication, both vertically with a higher level as well as horizontally, with other human beings. In his Ars Brevis, Llull states that it is the affatus that provides the voice with meaning. Thus, that hearing might become understanding.
The sensitive faculty uses all the senses to sense objects, as when it uses sight to sense something colored, and hearing to sense a voice, using the afflatus to give it a name. For without afflatus the hearing cannot properly sense the voice, and therefore the intellect knows that the afflatus is a sense.71
Sense or meaning arises from the coordination of the senses via language. Mark D. Johnston describes the affatus as an indispensable mediator: “Thanks to its interoceptive nature, affatus functions chiefly as a means of communication among the powers of the soul. […] In this regard, affatus extends (and perhaps replaces) the mental language method mentioned so often in Llull’s earlier writings. In its communication with the higher faculties, affatus plays an instrumental role. That is, affatus serves as a mediator, conceiving imaginable or intelligible concepts and manifesting them in speech.”72 By doing so, the affatus is primarily instrumental for man’s first intention to know, honor, and serve God. It is further instrumental for the ‘second intention’, namely to know, honor, and serve God through his creatures—that is, through the experience of the communication process.73
To Llull, there is no sense in the senses apart from the sense provided by the sense of language. His example, thus, serves as a case of religious object language on the possible role of senses in religious experience. Only if mediated by the afflatus are the senses instrumental to religion, helping the individual achieve praise or directness towards God, which is their first intention. Ultimately, to Llull, this is being a religiosus.
2.2 Reciprocity: How to Taste and to See God?
I continue my considerations with another example of sensory religious experience as expressed in object language. The example specifies the criteria religious language uses to ascribe religious sense to sensory perceptions. The case also shows that religious traditions themselves are aware of the two- directional relation of the senses and the religiously meaningful object of perception. In this case, the meaningful object of perception is the divine.
The object language material examined here originates from fifteenth- century Western Europe, i.e. from Catholic Christianity and is a part of a philosophical and theological treatise that is often described as being ‘mystical’. It is taken from Capitulum V of Nicolas of Cusa’s De Visione Dei:74
Quod videre sit gustare, quaeri, miserari et operari
O quam magna multitudo dulcedinis tuae, quam abscondisti timentibus te; nam est thesaurus inexplicabilis, gaudiosissimae laetitae.
Gustare enim ipsam dulcedinem tuam est apprehendere experimentali contactu suavitatem omnium delectabilium in suo principio, est rationem omnium desiderabilium attingere in tua sapientia.
Videre igitur rationem absolutam, quae est omnium ratio, non est aliud quam mente te deum gustare, quoniam es ipsa suavitas esse, vitae et intellectus.
Quid aliud, domine, est videre tuum, quando me pietatis oculo respicis, quam a me videri? Videndo me das te a me videri, qui es deus absconditus. Nemo te videre potest, nisi in quantum tu das, ut videaris. Nec est aliud te videre, quam quod tu videas videntem te.
[God’s] seeing is His tasting, seeking, showing mercy, and working
O how greatly manifold is that sweetness of Yours which You have reserved for those who fear You! For it is an uncountable treasure of most joyous joy. For to taste of Your sweetness is to apprehend the sweetness of all delights—to apprehend it in its own Beginning and by experiential contact. It is to attain, in Your wisdom, to the Form of all desirable things. Therefore, to see Absolute Form, which is the Form of all [forms], is no other than mentally to taste of You, who are God; for You are the sweetness of being and of life and of understanding. O Lord, when You look upon me with an eye of graciousness, what is Your seeing, other than Your being seen by me? In seeing me, You who are deus absconditus give Yourself to be seen by me. No one can see You except insofar as You grant that You be seen. To see You is not other than that You see the one who sees You.75
An important clarification first: I wholeheartedly admit that Nicolas of Cusa (Cusanus) is one of my favorite philosophers, someone whose thinking I consider relevant even today. I even think that he and some of his medieval contemporaries saw things more clearly than some of the postmodern and postcolonial scholars of our own time. This, however, does not mean that I wish to apply his thought to the material of religious studies, but rather that I intend to read the text quoted above as an object language expression of a religious phenomenon to be described and analyzed by metalanguage. There is, however, a great advantage in the writings of this bishop, legate, and Cardinal of the Roman Church and failed organizer of a crusade that makes them suitable as a starting point on the considerations on the relation of notions (language) and senses.
Cusanus (1401–1464) wrote the book from which this short passage is taken in the year 1453, three years after he was appointed Cardinal and Bishop of Brixen (South Tyrolia). Thus, he had become a territorial ruler as well. This year saw the fall of Constantinople, forever changing the history of Christianity and its relationship to other religious traditions. It was also, and not by chance, the most productive year of Cusanus’ philosophical career. Two works must be highlighted in particular. On the one hand, the fall of Constantinople in May 1453 inspired Cusanus to write his famous ‘religious’ multilogue De Pace Fidei, which makes an argument for balancing religious differences by peaceful, rational means.76 All his writings from this year can be considered to have been written amid a situation of (violent) religious contact. However, following a request by the monks of the Benedictine abbey of Tegernsee in Bavaria, he composed a book many scholars consider his most beautiful and poetic; De visione dei.77 Among others, Kurt Flasch has interpreted these two works, De pace fidei and De visione dei, as intentional complements to each other.78 Thus, the seemingly poetic meditation of De visione dei is also a product of a violent situation of religious contact and of a profound challenge to Christianity brought by the Muslim conquerors, although this might be more subtle than in the case of De pace fidei. At the same time, the text was written during an interreligious debate concerning the status and possibility of mystical theology.79
The very title of De visione dei suggests its content will be sense-related. However, the turn to the senses, in this case to the sensory perception of vision, is surprising given the context from which Cusanus’ considerations emerged.80 Cusanus and the Tegernsee monks had been discussing the interpretation of the writings of Pseudo-Dionysus Areopagita (theologia mystica), particularly the question of whether the ascent to the divine is promoted by insight or by affection and whether insight is needed for the mystic union (unio mystica).81 Interestingly enough, Areopagita himself appears to have proposed the abolition of sensory evidence with regard to the question of mystical ascension. For Areopagita, in order to gain ‘mystical’ insight, we have to exclude sensory perceptions and sensory impressions in the first place. Cusanus, however, takes his point of departure from precisely this. Therefore, De visione dei primarily deals with the concrete religious experience of the monks as related to Viennese academic theology and mystical speculation, hence its relevance to the discussion of the senses.82 As a significant move, in his considerations, Cusanus mobilizes the sense which allows the most distance (seeing) and also the one that most requires closeness (taste). Cusanus, thus, conspicuously combines the most distinctive and the most threatening sense in a conceptual coincidentia oppositorum. That is, he implicitly uses his theological and philosophical concepts to qualify the sensory impressions as religious.83
To Cusanus, religious experience is related to the senses. In the text, he describes religious experience as ‘the taste of your sweetness’, further explicated as ‘the sweetness of being and of life and of understanding’. Although the text reports a concrete experience, perhaps as described by the Benedictine Monks, the language used to describe this experience cannot be considered incidental in any way, neither for the monks who had the experience nor for Cusanus. Cusanus’ writings combine quotation and tradition.84 As an object language writer, he reflects on the traditional object language he is familiar with in this short passage, intending to establish descriptive and explanatory metalanguage. The first sentence quotes Psalm 31:19, thus establishing a further reference to other Psalms passages such as 34:8–9: “O taste and see that the Lord is good; blessed is the man that trusteth in him. O fear the Lord, ye his saints: for there is no want to them that fear him.” The explication of the sensory experience as religious is not that original, though the experience itself might be an immediate impression. The taste to be expected is furthermore qualified and considered carefully with regard to its flavor.85 From Augustine onwards, the sweetness of God, as described in Psalm 134:3, had been a matter of intense theological consideration.86
By quoting these lines from the Psalms, Cusanus also evokes an exegetical tradition of the five spiritual senses that began in the work of Origin (sensus spiritualis/sensus interiores). This tradition uses the senses as metaphors to describe a special access to God through the loving desire for closeness. Origin uses his theory to solve the contradiction of God’s transcendence and the concrete sensory experience of God that can be performed by the spiritual senses.87 Cusanus’ text reads, “no other than mentally taste of You” (non est aliud quam mente te deum gustare). The five kinds of God’s perception correspond to the five senses. This idea is most prominently elaborated in Augustine’s Confessions (10:27), “I tasted and now I hunger and thirst for you” (gustaui et esurio et sitio).88 The reference to the senses and the explication of their perceptions thus provides an answer to a theological and philosophical problem, namely how to mediate between transcendence and experience, or between conceptual assumption and bodily experience. Without this reference to conceptual assumption, talking about the sensory experience of God would be religiously meaningless. Using the metaphor of taste illustrates the possible union with God in this world, which is only a preliminary stage to the vision of God in the other world beyond.89 This leads to an interesting etymology: they who tasted (sapor) God are therefore wise (sapiens).90
Cusanus evokes these intertextual devices in a seemingly paradoxical way, as they are intended to convey a message of immediacy. Through his choice of words and his semantics, Cusanus suggests that an immediate experience of God is possible, as the notion of the ‘sweetness’ of God indicates, where Cusanus invokes the sense that works on the smallest distance imaginable. The sense of taste is located at the turning point where proximity becomes unity, and thus, it introduces a direct communicative relation. Accordingly, it allows one to attain ‘non-abstract’ contact (experimentali contactu) with the principle (in suo principio, the moving force, processual dynamics), which is the very source of all joys. Through the experience of tasting, the perceiving and the perceived are so closely connected that on a very physical level, some degree of union is achieved.
Therefore, immediacy emerges as the one great theme expressed in religious language related to the senses, in this case, taste. To follow Birgit Meyer, this sense is a powerful sensational form that seeks to involve believers in such a way that they sense the presence of the divine in an apparently immediate manner.91 Religious sensory experiences of an immediate encounter with God do not happen spontaneously; rather, they are pre-figured by existing mediation practices that make it possible for believers to be touched by God in the first place.92 The ascription of immediacy renders the sensory experience into a religiously sensible one.
However, De visione dei is of additional interest in the field of media. This may be surprising given that it is really the case that the religious language of the senses contains this vital element of immediacy. The further discussion in Cusanus’ text is well known as the famous example of the coincidentia oppositorum, the most well-known idea of his work as a whole. When Cusanus sent his work to Tegernsee Abbey, he included a painting that is far more than a mere visualization of his ideas in De visione dei. If the slogan ‘Media is the Message’ is ever true, herein is a case in point.
Cusanus gave detailed advice on how to fix the picture to the wall, preferably a north wall, and how the monks should arrange themselves to behold it.93 The picture is a depiction of an ‘all-seer’, perhaps Christ himself, painted in such a manner that God’s eyes ‘follow’ the beholder who faces him directly. This could simply serve as a nice illustration of God’s capacity for absolute observation, but Cusanus is predominantly interested in something else. It is a more profound irritation but not an irritation of the senses. The beholder clearly sees God’s eyes seeing him. Hence, it is the beholder’s rational capacity that is troubled. This relates to the following paradox: the gaze follows a moving beholder while also at the same time fixing upon an unmoving one—so, a basic rule of logic, the law of non-contradiction, evidently does not apply. I am cutting a complicated story very short here, for it is not the argument itself we are interested in but rather the conclusions that might be drawn from the description of concepts of the senses in object language.94 Cusanus suggests that we directly see or experience something that human rationality a priori must deny; that is, the individually restricted senses may convey a religious truth that goes beyond rational, logical, or conceptual understanding—or at least indicates the way how to ascend in understanding. What one sees in the painting is the gaze of God, which is beyond contradiction. By seeing, the beholder is seen by God in his limited rational capacity. The beholder sees the contradiction complicated in God, thus sensing/experiencing the inadequateness of his own rationality in grasping these contradictions. These contradictions, however,—and that distinguishes Cusanus from pure mystics—may be, nevertheless, stated and explicated via an additional cognitive capacity, the intellect (intellectus). Thus, they, via a theologia affirmativa, lead to a higher yet still inadequate understanding. Accordingly, Kurt Flasch stresses the fact that in Cusanus, the human senses participate in the illumination of the intellect: “The objects of the senses are the books of the senses. Within them, the intention (intentio) of the divine intellect is inscribed in sensory figures, and the intention is the self-presentation of the creator.”95 Sensory perception with regard to the divine is basically scriptural, allowing perception of the intentions of the author of nature as a rationally readable language. This is Cusanus’ version of the sense-making of the senses: the sense of creation, thus, is that the creator is seen in His glory.96
However, there is another element that renders the sensory experience of De vision Dei a religious one. Let me again quote the last sentences of the text:
O Lord, when You look upon me with an eye of graciousness, what is Your seeing, other than Your being seen by me? In seeing me, You who are deus absconditus give Yourself to be seen by me. No one can see You except insofar as You grant that You be seen. To see You is not other than that You see the one who sees You.
Here, Cusanus explicitly alludes to the theologoumenon of the deus absconditus, thus referring to a conceptual tradition regarding the divine. A sensory experience for Cusanus only makes sense in terms of this tradition, which introduces a strongly specified transcendence/immanence distinction—namely, of the unrecognizable God who evades perception despite the fact of revelation.
“Nec est aliud te videre, quam quod tu videas videntem te.” What is important here is the reciprocity that the concepts of the relation of the senses and the divine indicate. Hence, in religious object language concerning the senses, the subject-object relationship is not a one-way street. In abstract terms, to be described as religious, sensory experiences must identify the relationship between a particular dichotomous pair (be it the relationship between seeing and the divine, or perhaps the immanent to the transcendent, subject to object) as a mutual and even processual one.97 This is not only true for vision but also for taste, as it establishes a relationship of immediate mutual acquisition. This dynamic reciprocity may lead to interesting conclusions concerning religious aesthetics (Wahrnehmen ist Wahrgenommenwerden, or perception is being perceived).98 Human and divine vision coincide in a blessed vision (visio facialis).99 It is this conceptual framework of immediacy and reciprocity that makes religious sense of the senses in question. The framework behind religious sensing is this mutual participation that thus establishes a dynamic, immediate relationship and fosters an impression or a semantic structure of unity. In the case of Cusanus, unity is elucidated by the senses’ most distinct and closest, vision and taste, indicating a reciprocal immediacy that can only be qualified as religious.
In short conclusion: ‘to taste and to see God’ (Psalm 34), as explicated by Cusanus, refers to the immediacy and reciprocity of religious sensuous experience. As a general thesis, one could say that if a sensory experience is ascribed as being religiously meaningful, the concepts used to describe it on the object language level evoke a logical-semantic form of reciprocal immediacy. At the same time, the sensory experience may also be described in object language as making religious sense as scriptural experience. In terms of metalanguage implications, the form of reciprocal immediacy might be interpreted as methodological advice but does not have to be. The examination of the senses may also reflect the scholar’s wish for an immediate approach to the material and to proceed in a dynamic relation with it; thus that research is not spoiled by conceptual presuppositions. It is its particular form that might turn this approach into a religious one.
2.3 Sensing the Author of Nature
The third example examined here are the writings of the Anglican Bishop of Cloyne, Dean of Derry, the Irish patriot George Berkeley (1685–1753), today mostly known for his philosophical works, but also a fellow and lecturer at Trinity College, Dublin and an ordained priest from 1709. As an Anglican clergyman in Catholic Ireland, struggling with upcoming free thinkers in the public arena, Berkeley hails from a diverse religious field characterized by religious contact—not only in terms of interconfessional contact but also in terms of the encounter between institutionalized religion and philosophical critique. As Scott Breuninger stresses, it is important to recognize the Irish context of Berkeley’s views, not only important for understanding his arguments on social and moral matters but also for his position as an object language religious writer.100 He was appointed Dean of Derry in 1724 and, finally, Bishop of Cloyne in 1734 as a representative of a ruling minority church in an overwhelmingly Catholic environment. For an academic teacher of his time, priesthood was obligatory, but Berkeley clearly had a strong vocation for it. In matters of belief, he was a man of tradition, struggling uncompromisingly against Deism and the movement of the ‘Free Thinkers’ (see his work Alciphron, or the Minute Philosopher, a defense of Christianity against the freethinkers—the ‘small philosophers’ as he calls them).101 Berkeley was even willing to travel abroad for the sake of faith. In line with Ramon Llull’s lifelong endeavor, he sought to establish a college for missionaries at the end of the world, the Bermuda Project, although he wound up in Rhode Island instead.102 He outlined this project in his text A proposal for the Better Supplying of Churches in Our Foreign Plantations, and for Converting the Savage Americans to Christianity, by a College to be Erected in the Summer Islands, otherwise Called the Isles of Bermuda (1724).103 With regard to this Prospero-like attitude, David Berman even argues that “[…] Berkeley’s deep religiosity was more extreme and radical than usually is accepted […] it was sometimes bordering on the messianic.”104 The plan, however, was not only devoted to missionizing Native Americans but also to tackling what Berkeley considered the moral, religious (and financial) decline, degeneration, and decay of Europe and of Britain in particular. He sought to revitalize the Protestant Christian faith in his home country or, failing that, in the New World.105
Berkeley’s extensive writings and texts dealing with the senses are, therefore, not least object language reflections on the role of the senses in experience, based on a sternly religious background. Owing to this, I shall analyze his writings as part of the religious discourse on the senses and not with regard to the validity of his arguments in the philosophical sense.
Stressing his profoundly religious background, Berkeley unambiguously limits the scope of his philosophical doubt and rationalism. To him, skepticism is never an option. On the contrary, “the corrosive influence of Scepticism represented the greatest threat to the traditions and values he cherished”:106
When I say I will reject all Propositions wherein I know not fully & adequately & clearly so far as knowable the Thing meant thereby This is not to be extended to propositions in the Scripture. I Speak of Matters of Reason & Philosophy not Revelation, In this I think an Humble Implicit faith becomes us just.107
For Berkeley, matters of revelation (and indeed religion) are not subject to philosophical demands concerning the language employed. He is also frank about the apologetic aims of his philosophical considerations. In his notebooks, the Philosophical Commentaries, written as a young man across the years 1708–9, he states:
My doctrines rightly understood all that Philosophy of Epicurus, Hobbs, Spinozá etc which has been a Declared Enemy of Religion Comes to the Ground.108
In his works, he deliberately places himself in opposition to the declared enemies of religion, ‘in opposition to Sceptics and Atheists’ as the subtitle of his Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous indicates. He even names the most notorious ones, culminating in the ‘prince of the atheists’, Spinoza. Accordingly, Berkeley’s writings can be situated within a situation of contact, as he took issue with the critical stance against religion that was personified by skeptic and even atheist philosophers.109 Therefore, his basic approach is framed by his religious and apologetic intentions. In his opposition, Berkeley turns to sensory perception to make his case—a universal method for countering false opinions.
At first sight, Berkeley’s sensory turn might seem a disappointment. Berkeley considers the question of the content of sensory experience alone. As such, the diverse sensory experiences are characterized by indifference and, accordingly, are basically senseless:
What I see is onely variety of colours & light. what I feel is hard or soft, hot or cold, rough or smooth &c what resemblance have these thoughts with those?110
[…] in a strict sense, I see nothing but light and colours, with their several shades and variations.111
Thus, the connection to the world provided by the senses is confusing rather than clarifying, as the perceiver is overwhelmed by the sheer variety of impressions. Even the most prominent sense, sight, does not per se produce a distinct, sensible picture. It, too, only causes confusion and is more likely to induce despair than anything else.
The senses, however, play a paramount role in Berkeley’s religious struggle. To abolish them to him would be inexcusable folly, unworthy of a truly enlightened mind. The “abject surrender to the Sceptics’ denigration of senses,”112 is a manifestation of the wrong turn modern philosophy has taken—with atheistic and nihilistic consequences.113 It is interesting to notice how Berkeley describes the figure of Prejudice, found within the mind of a ‘certain eminent free-thinker’, as
the figure of a woman standing in a corner, with her eyes close shut, and her fore-fingers stuck in her ears; many words in a confused order, but spoken with great emphasis, issued from her mouth. These being condensed by the coldness of the place, formed a sort of mist.114
Of course, despite all emphasis, the words of the figure cannot make any sense without the senses. This is an uneasy aspect of modern philosophy: Descartes shuts his eyes and ears and abolishes all other senses in order to concentrate on doubt,115 or rather, pure thought.116 What Berkeley argues for is the proper use of sensory perception and proper use of language, as opposed to prejudice that applies neither of these but abolishes the senses and replaces them only with meaningless emphatic babble. In his allegorical description of prejudice, Berkeley also combines the two elements he considers to be of importance for a proper method, namely sensory perception and orderly (systematic) language. These two, accordingly, are inseparable. As a religious man, Berkeley knew of the necessary connection required between the senses and language to make sense.
Therefore, the phenomena of nature that strike on the senses and are understood by the mind form not only a magnificent spectacle, but also a most coherent, entertaining and instructive Discourse; and to effect this, they are conducted, adjusted, and ranged by the greatest wisdom.117
It is not only merely a matter of being overwhelmed by the magnificent spectacle of nature that renders the individual religious. It is rather perceiving such phenomena as the sensory expressions of a speech, a discourse in language, that makes the sensory experience religious and thereby meaningful. Berkeley closely relates proper language to meaning, as to employ words and to mean nothing by them is an unworthy enterprise: “vocem autem proferre, & nihil concipere, id demum indignium esset philosopho.”118 However, the senses alone are not enough for a religious experience; the sensory phenomena rather have to say something as well, and they will have to say it rationally, coherently, and instructively. It is this manner of discourse that might bring the individual into religion.
The necessary connection between the senses and language on a religious basis finds full expression in Berkeley’s major writings. He carefully scrutinizes the nature of this connection in many of his works, seeking to define what makes a religiously meaningful sensory experience. His linguistic account of sense perception is one of the most central tenets of his philosophy, “so central, in fact, that his metaphysics stands and falls upon it,” and is also a sustained object language reflection on the possible religious sense of the senses.119 For us, the latter is of more interest, for it is another demonstration that the religious sense of the senses is closely connected to language.
In his first major work, Berkeley examines the sense most intimately related to contemporary natural science with its characteristic focus on optics sight. His Essay towards a new theory of vision (published in 1709, the final edition in 1733) relates sensory experience to script, defining the objects of vision as a language and introducing an author responsible for this language. Though they are repeatedly alluded to in earlier chapters, Berkeley introduces these ideas properly in section 147:
(147) Proper Objects of Vision the language of the Author of Nature
Upon the whole, I think we may fairly conclude, that the proper Objects of Vision constitute an universal Language of the Author of Nature, whereby we are instructed how to regulate our Actions, in order to attain those things, that are necessary to the Preservation and Well-being of our Bodies, as also to avoid whatever may be hurtful and destructive of them. It is by their Information that we are principally guided in all the Transactions and Concerns of Life. And the manner wherein they signify, and mark unto us the Objects which are at a Distance, is the same with that of Languages and Signs of Humane Appointment; which do not suggest the things signified, by any Likeness or Identity of Nature, but only by an habitual Connexion, that Experience has made us to observe between them.
Berkeley describes vision as a tool by which God can literally communicate with us, in effect, as a religious experience in itself.120 The sense of vision serves as the mediator or interface of a communication process that connects the individual to God. Moreover, the universal language constituted by the objects of vision not only tells a tale of the creator but also displays a prescriptive character, instructing readers of the language in what they should do. (“But I think it plain this optic language hath a necessary connexion with knowledge, wisdom and goodness. It is equivalent to a constant creation, betokening an immediate act of power and providence.”)121 It is, therefore, also a direct claim, an address, and a request for immediate embodiment. Sensory experience makes sense in subsequent regulated action that is necessary for the well-being of bodies. Thus, objects of vision by instruction put the attentive perceiver into a certain form—vision, accordingly, shapes the perceiver and their sensory apparatus. As such, “our life in the physical is a conversation with God”122 in so far as “our every interaction with the physical is a statement in an ongoing discourse with God himself.”123 It is, thus, a conversation that contains all aspects of human conversation: instruction, discourse, encouragement, and so on. Above all, it is a responsive language or even one specifically addressed to us. It reverses the idea that the senses perceive objects hence interactions with the physical world are mostly answers to the Author of Nature’s addresses.124 According to Berkeley, there is also a remarkable resemblance between human language and the signification of visual objects that allows further specification. An additional element is introduced, a habitual connection that renders visual perception sensible, something that, by strong analogy, might be described as language. As a consequence, it becomes clear that the chief purpose of the Berkeley’s theory is to give (religious) meaning to the world described by his immaterialist metaphysics, not least to save his philosophy from solipsism. He achieves his aim by introducing a meaningful language of sense perception.125
His 1733 explanation of his earlier work The Theory of Vision or visual language shewing the immediate Presence and Providence of a Deity Vindicated and Explained conveys his main message in the title: vision is a language that displays the immediate presence of the deity.126 The sensory experience of vision, to Berkeley, only makes sense as a language of self-revelation of the author of nature, rendering the sensory experience religious. A language is, according to Berkeley:
not the sound of speech merely as such, but the arbitrary use of sensible signs, which have so similitude or necessary connexion with the things signified; so as by the apposite management of them to suggest and exhibit to my mind an endless variety of things, differing in nature, time, and place: thereby informing me, entertaining me, and directing me how to act, not only with regard to things near and present, but also with regard to things distant and future.127
Visual phenomena are a system of signs representing touchable things. These signs, however, constitute a language “because they are arbitrarily connected with that which they signify; they inform us of an infinitely large variety of things; they enable us to regulate our lives in an orderly fashion; and they are perceived by the eye as is the written word.”128 As a kind of written language, an explanation is provided as to why human beings can understand the world and regulate their actions accordingly. Thus, the paramount importance of the scriptuality of the visual sense for Berkeley becomes clear: sensory perception confirms the authorship of the divine. “Berkeley often referred to the natural course of ideas as the language or handwriting of God. He wanted this to be taken very literally […]”129 To the religious, the visually perceived scriptural language is as well descriptive as prescriptive:
But this Visual Language proves, not a Creator merely, but a provident Governor, actually and intimately present, and attentive to all our interest and motions, who watches over our conduct, and takes care of our minutest actions and designs throughout the whole course of our lives, informing, admonishing, and directing incessantly, in a most evident and sensible manner. This is truly wonderful.130
Visual perception has an immediate self-assuring quality that is hard to deny.131 Language makes visual perception sensible; (written) language makes sense of the senses.132 As a consequence, Berkeley uses it as proof of God’s existence: God exists because he immediately speaks to us.133 Religion cannot be seen, but religion is sensorially evident.134 The validity of his argument is of no concern for religious studies.135 One can, however, draw conclusions with regard to the ascription of religious sense to sensory perceptions as described by religious authors themselves. The immediacy and reciprocity of religious sense appear in Berkeley as it did in Cusanus, and similarly, Llull’s close connection between the senses and language would not have been alien to him.136
Berkeley clarifies his concept of language as follows. Meaning arises from the interplay of senses as ordered by language:
(40) A great number of arbitrary signs, various and apposite, do constitute a language. If such arbitrary connexion be instituted by men, it is an artificial language; if by the Author of Nature, it is a natural language. Infinitely various are the modifications of light and sound, whence they are each capable of supplying an endless variety of signs, and, accordingly, have been each employed to form languages; the one by the arbitrary appointment of mankind, the other by that of God Himself. A connexion established by the Author of Nature, in the ordinary course of things, may surely be called natural; as that made by men will be named artificial. And yet this doth not hinder but the one may be as arbitrary as the other. And, in fact, there is no more likeness to exhibit, or necessity to infer, things tangible from the modifications of light, than there is in language to collect the meaning from the sound. But, such as the connexion is of the various tones and articulations of voice with their several meanings, the same is in between the various modes of light and their respective correlates; or, in other words, between the ideas of sight and touch.137
The endless variety of the modifications of light and sound in sensory perception are thus arbitrarily joined in a meaningful language, be it either artificial as in human speech or natural as established by the author of nature. A visual experience, therefore, serves as a sign to start a semiotic process by introducing connections, or rather, by linking sensational forms to semiotic forms.
Making religious sense is about making arbitrary connections in the physically perceived world via language. To Berkeley, the main fault of natural philosophers is that they tend to utter mere grammatical remarks on the language of the Author of Nature. But then, this is not what a wise man—and that to Berkeley, of course, is a Christian—does. His intention is to divine the sense of what he reads; his aim is to make religious sense of sensory perception:
As in reading other books, a wise man will choose to fix his thoughts on the sense and apply it to use rather than lay them out in grammatical remarks on the language; so in perusing the volume of Nature, it seems beneath the dignity of the mind to affect an exactness in reducing each particular phenomenon to general rules, or shewing how it follows from them. We should propose to ourselves nobler views, such as to recreate and exalt the mind, with a prospect of the beauty, order, extent, and variety of natural things; hence, by proper inferences, to enlarge our notions of the grandeur, wisdom, and beneficence of the Creator: and lastly, to make the several parts of the Creation, so far as in us lies, subservient to the ends they were designed for, God’s glory, and the sustentation and comfort of ourselves and fellow-creatures.138
3 Conclusion: the Dynamics of Sense-Making
The senses have the potential to allow religion, or religious meaning, to manifest itself in the immediate moment. However, this fact does not mean that concepts, specifically religious ideas and assumptions, play no role in religious sensory perception or the bodily religious experience. Rather, the senses embody religious sense. They are religious meaning, and they represent religious sense in the body.
No sensory experience is in and of itself religious. As the three case studies illustrate, it is quite clear that the senses alone, sensory perception as such, cannot make religious sense—at least on an object language level. Nevertheless, sensory perception does make religious sense when it is combined with certain concepts in a process of attribution or ascription, for example, in our case, the concepts of immediacy, reciprocity,139 and scriptuality.140 Sensory religious experiences are traditionally conventionalized experiences that start a semiotic process.141 Sensate experience is deemed to make religious sense if concepts that originate from a broader background context (tradition) can be employed.
Accordingly, there can be no immediate sensate experience of the religious, but rather, it is that the ascription of immediacy renders a sensate experience religious.142 As immediacy is a matter of ascription, the possibility cannot be excluded (in fact, it is rather likely) that religious experiences in scholarly analysis are mediated.143 Sensate experience does not privilege subjects, and it does not privilege itself as a path to turn to in the study of religion. Ascription is dependent on doctrinal ideas, and the ascription of immediacy is used to counter the perils of mediation.144 This can be seen in Buddhist visualization practices: “One appeal of iconization and visualization practices to those versed in emptiness philosophy, with its implicit critiques of language, was that the somaticization and concretization of doctrine could be seen as a way of circumventing some of the problems involved with trying to express the Dharma in words. Seeing had a magic that was more immediate than words. It was already indicated in sūtras that the vision of the Buddha, both in the sense of seeing him and seeing what he sees, could grant an immediate, intuitive understanding of the Dharma equal or even superior to merely hearing then it put forth in words.”145 Accordingly, a process of ascription of religious sense to sensory perception takes place if a religious tradition is challenged in one way or another.
Hence, we can supplement the explication of the senses as hypothetical sensational forms with the idea of semiotic forms.146 In order to be recognized as religious and to be attributed with religious sense, a sensory experience has to take a semiotic form (language) that makes it communicable as religious and ultimately communicated as religious.147 As such, a sensory religious experience triggers a semiotic process.148 By doing so, within our bipolar structure,149 the sensory experience dynamizes the religious material (context) via a conceptual process that, at the same time, meta-stabilizes the religious process in question.150
Cusanus serves as a radical example of a guiding concept of religious sensory experience. In his explication of a certain visual impression, Cusanus stresses immediate reciprocity151 to catalyze identification: for sensory data, the eye of the beholder (individual) is the eye of the Beholder (the divine).152 David Morgan generalizes the sense of vision to universal dignity with regard to religion: “The sacred is the experience of seeing and being seen as configured in a particular gaze, which may be understood as a current of feeling that flows among the components of a visual field.”153 Such concepts of reciprocity can also be observed in other religious traditions and, moreover, with regard to other senses. According to Shawn Arthur, the most crucial aspects of the relationship between humans and deities in Chinese religion are reciprocal: mutual trust and acting appropriately, both referring to believing that the prevailing “other party will uphold their ends of the bargain.”154 Accordingly, the truly “most fundamental religious act in Chinese culture,”155 the burning of incense, establishes a respectful and reciprocal relationship through sensory perception, in this case, scent, by emphasizing “reciprocal communication, cooperation and mutual respect.”156 In elaborating on the concept of darshan in his study on the printed image in India, Christopher Pinney fruitfully applied Merleau-Ponty’s concept of vision as being necessarily reciprocal or at least a ‘double-sensation’, for “he who sees cannot possess the visible unless he is possessed by it.”157 Accordingly, darshan as an information-generating reciprocal process can be described as “[…] ‘seeing and being seen’ by a deity, but which also connotes a whole range of ideas relating to ‘insight’, ‘knowledge’, and ‘philosophy’ […] Darshan’s mode of interaction […] mobilizes vision as a part of a unified human sensorium, and visual interaction can be physically transformative.”158 Likewise, Diana Eck summarizes, “The central act of Hindu worship, from the point of view of the lay person, is to stand in the presence of the deity and to behold the image with one’s own eyes, to see and be seen by the deity.”159
As such, the concepts of language, immediacy, reciprocity, and scriptuality serve as indicators of the fact that, within object language, some kind of the attribution or ascription of sense to sensory perception has taken place. That means that religious sense has been made of the senses, providing their evidence with religious meaning. Other concepts may perform the same function as determined by a particular religious context, but in all cases, meaningful concepts are present in the religious communication of the senses.
3.1 Sense-Making and Contact
Although sensory experience appears overwhelmingly personal, in religious contexts sensate experiences are predominately a matter of contact. The contact dimension is an indispensable factor in the discussion of the role of the senses in the study of religion. As Kapstein put it, “That religious experience, like other types of experience, is subject to contestation supports the contention that it is not in fact taken to be private and that within specific historical traditions, no particular authority stems from claims based upon the supposed incorrigibility of private experience alone.”160 Religious experience, thus, is always in the public area; its status as religious can be open for contestation. When challenged, religious traditions tend to claim both a special sensitivity for and a special affinity to sensory perception. Sensory perception, thus, becomes both a matter of contestation and a matter of distinction, distinguishing one religious tradition from its inadequate other. To give a notorious example from the history of Jewish-Christian relations: in Christian iconography, the ‘synagogue’, represented as a blind maiden, does not perceive what the triumphant church, the maiden ‘ecclesia’, perceives, recognizes, and ultimately embodies, the ‘true’ religion. This tendency manifests in many ways. On the one hand, sensory perception relates a religious tradition in question more closely to the divine sphere. This sensory perception, then, is qualified by immediacy, reciprocity, and scriptuality based on the close relationship between perception and language.
A discourse concerning religious sound between Christians and Muslims in medieval Spain, as analyzed by Olivia Remie Constable, exemplifies this idea.161 Here, a certain sense is ascribed to a certain sound, in this case, the call to prayer (adhān). The adhān was not only seen as a noisy disturbance but, due to the wording of the call, which names Muhammad the ‘Prophet of God’, was also seen as making a religious assertion: “It, thus, appears that it was not merely noise but also the public announcement of faith, expressed in words, that bothered Christian listeners. Beyond simple auditory intrusion, there would have been concerns about proselytization, conversion, and—in case of converts to Christianity—the lure of a return to Islam.”162 Heard in a still contested territory, the sound, though, was no mere political signal of territorial control and a sign of conquest but was also given sense as a statement of the relation to the divine.163 By producing a certain kind of sound, Muslim communities claimed immediacy to the Divine over the heads of other communities, and mutual recognition between the two spheres took place. So, the public proclamation of the name of Muḥammad in the adhān “posed an overtly religious threat to Christian listeners.”164 It challenged and questioned their own immediate relation to the divine—an attitude that was mirrored in the attitude of Muslim rulers who usually forbade the public ringing of church bells in their lands.165 As a consequence, the very sound of the adhān was made subject to strict legislation and punishment mandated for those who dared perform it in public. Following the demands of the bishop of Tarragona, the king of Aragon, James II, 1318, imposed the death penalty on Muslims in the Kingdom of Valencia, who “publicly invoked or otherwise extolled the name of Muhammad in a loud voice in a mosque or other location.”166 Hearing the sound of the name was considered religiously offensive. Apart from the concrete wording, it was also the sound itself that was considered as religious or religiously threatening due to its volume and reach: “It appears that it was the volume of Muslim prayers, and the consequent disruption of the acoustic environment, that especially irked Christian hearers.”167 In 1498, the very connection between sounds and words was polemically denied by King Ferdinand of Aragon, but not the religious sense ascribed to the sound. Ferdinand expressed his astonishment that in the city of Tortosa, Muslims were permitted “to ululate [Lat. ululare] and to venerate the festivals and things required of them by the Mahometan sect and diabolical custom.”168 Though the sounds heard were unrecognizable as human language, to the King, perfect (offensive) religious sense was associated with the ‘diabolical customs’ of the ‘Mahometan sect’.
On the other hand, sensory perception allows for any challenger to be more clearly perceived as something—in many cases, as something different, conspicuous or annoying. Reference to the senses and the sensory data gained by it due to doctrinal assumptions, thus, becomes a matter of discourse and, hence, of polemics that may cover the full scope from strict demarcation to embracing absorption of the other tradition.169 For example, the otherness of the religious other is clearly marked if religious minorities are forced to wear particular clothing, distinguishing them from the majority. Likewise, certain characteristics of the minority can be perceived as depraved, ugly, and appalling or as offensively smelly—thus inflicting pain on the perceiver, who is, of course, inclined by their own preconceptions to sense in that particular way.
There are also sensory markers that are perceived as religiously desirable, such as certain colors (Islamic green), sounds (ringing of church bells, the adhān, singing of songs, recitation of the Qurʾan), smells (roses), tastes (sweetness), and so on. All of these sensory data provide an immediate relation to the divine that, in turn, addresses the individual who perceives via certain sensory data. Accordingly, the main struggle between religious traditions is less about controlling sensory data defined as religious but rather about defining sensory perception (generating certain data) as such. It is less reflection on the sensory data that renders a sensory experience religiously appealing or appalling but the hypothetical construction of the sense in question which transmits that data that does so.
As the example of Berkeley shows, if a religious tradition is challenged by (philosophical) atheism, immediate sensory perception can be called on to immediately confirm the existence of God. Accordingly, the religious position is impossible to reject on its own terms—at least not with reference to any meaningful usage of words.170 To dispute what is clearly seen cannot be anything but the ill-willed voluntary introduction of meaningless words in the form of philosophical banter. Daring to dispute the immediately evident, one might well be accused of having a bad intention—that is, to function as the diabolus.
Finally, the order and even the hierarchization of senses in religious contexts also seem to be prominently a result of a situation of religious contact.171 Taxonomies of the senses differ greatly across the history of religions.172 Such hierarchization is naturally a matter of self-reflexive theological consideration, depending on ideas of what suits the religious best.173 The senses are “ordered in hierarchies of social importance and reordered according to changing circumstances.”174 The circumstances most likely to trigger a reordering of the senses are the situations in which the values attached to them, as (dogmatic) conceptual assumptions, face challenges. Moreover, the prevailing impressions of each sense are themselves classified and ordered due to religious priorities.175 Which sense is preferred and which sense is neglected is typically a result of a comparison between religious traditions. For example, the fides ex auditu idea can be described as a result of opposition to the more visual-based religious experience of other traditions, such as those of late antiquity or in the times of the Reformation. A contact-based comparison may even induce the religious to highlight one sense at the expense of the others, or perhaps can even lead to the introduction of another ‘religious sense’ to counter the treachery of our other sense.
The emphatic turn to the senses that has been seen within the scholarly field is not completely hollow. In order to make the sensory turn in scholarship more fertile, the study of the senses in the study of religions has to take into consideration the dynamic interplay of the mental and the physical pole of sense-perception. This is an interplay of sense and meaning. In the religious field, the senses, sense perception, and sensate experience are not at all mere subjective events. A religious individual perceives via the hypothesis of the senses that render the sensate experience religiously meaningful. The religious meaning of the senses and sensate experience is shaped via situations of religious contact, which trigger reflection on the theoretical assumptions that motivate ascriptions. Various notions, such as immediacy or reciprocity, indicate that the ascription of religious sense to sensate experiences has taken place.
See the extensive review on current research on religion and the senses by Alexandra Cuffel, Licia Di Giacinto, and Volkhard Krech, “Senses, Religion, and Religious Encounter. Literature Review and Research Perspectives,” Entangled Religions 10 (2019).
“Religion through the senses,” Numen 54 (2007): 371.
Meredith B. McGuire, “Individual sensory experiences, socialized senses, and everyday lived religion in practice,” Social Compass 63 (2016): 162 (Abstract).
The soteriological impetus connected to the sensory turn in the study of religion is in many regards prefigured in corresponding approaches in philosophy about forty years earlier. In a volume on a ‘postmodern aesthetics’ the editors claim: “Dabei sind die Sinne vor der Moderne immerzu für paranormal gehalten worden. Was sie vermögen, ist auch heute keineswegs klar. Schon deshalb müssen sie freigelassen werden aus der Übermacht einer zynisch gewordenen Vernunft. Wenn es nicht enden soll bei der entstrukturierten Schwere, jener grassierenden, fallsüchtigen Depression […], dann muß es zu einer ‘Blickwende’ kommen. Eine Umwendung des Blicks, eine Relativierung des Auges allein könnte das beschleunigte Geschehen verlangsamen und kurz vor Schluß der Geschichte mithelfen, wieder Zeit zu gewinnen.” Dietmar Kamper and Christoph Wulf, “Blickwende. Die Sinne des Körpers im Konkurs der Geschichte,” in Das Schwinden der Sinne, eds. Dietmar Kamper and Christoph Wulf (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1984), 17. One could even go so far as to claim that the emphatic turn to the senses in scholarship follows a distinctly Christian theological pattern: “The ancient Christian valuation of sense perception as a mode of religious knowing yielded a vivid commitment to the human person as an embodied and sensing being created by God for just that purpose. Here lay the basic core of Christian identity: what the Christian sensed was God, known through every aspect of the believer’s existence, body, mind, and soul, here and hereafter.” Susan Ashbrook Harvey, Scenting Salvation. Ancient Christianity and the Olfactory Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 239.
See the example of the Bishop of Cloyne discussed later in this chapter.
Graham Harvey, “Series Foreword,” in Sensual Religion. Religion and the Five Senses, eds. Graham Harvey and Jessica Hughes. Religion and the Senses (Sheffield/Bristol: Equinox, 2018), VII.
See for instance Harold D. Roth, Original Tao. Inward Training (Nei-yeh) and the Foundations of Taoist Mysticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 154–155, also see the quotation from the Chuang Tzu with the disturbing advice to forget practice, body, senses, and material objects in order to have a mystical (religious?) experience, ibid., 156: “Just settle yourself in nonaction. And things will naturally transform. Drop away your body and members. Spit out your eyesight and hearing. Forget your relationship with things. And you will merge in the totality of the boundless.”
See chapter on Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness.
Margaret E. Kenna, “Why does Incense Smell Religious? Greek Orthodoxy and the Anthropology of Smell,” Journal of Mediterranean Studies 15 (2005): 51–70.
To Jütte, it was a combination of the usefulness of theological allegoresis plus the authority of Aristotle that made the number five for the senses canonical in Christian, Jewish, and Islamic contexts (Robert Jütte, Geschichte der Sinne. Von der Antike bis zum Cyberspace (München: Beck, 2000), 65–67).
The sense of balance was discussed in the KHK following a presentation by Reinhold Glei. Compare Cuffel, Di Giacinto, Krech, “Senses, Religion, and Religious Encounter,” 10.
Harvey, “Series Foreword,” VIII.
Matthew T. Kapstein, “Reconsidering Religious Experience. Seeing the Light in the History of Religions,” in The Presence of Light. Divine Radiance and Religious Experience, ed. Matthew T. Kapstein (Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press, 2004), 270.
McGuire, “Individual sensory experiences,” 154.
Here, one cannot expect clear-cut ascription processes like scholarly definitions, but rather we are confronted with fuzzy, subcutaneous, and mostly unreflected everyday ascriptions, especially when it comes to concrete religious practice. One does not, however, find religious experiences without those ascriptions conveying religious meaning. As David Morgan has pointed out: “Meaning is not only abstract and discursive, but embodied, felt, interactive, and cumulative. This means that the Cultural construction of reality is not a wispy evocation of words about objects, but a concrete process that invites us to take a careful look at objects.” David Morgan, “The Materiality of Cultural Construction,” Material Religion 4 (2008): 128. Or as Thomas Tweed reminds us regarding the experiences of other (and, in particular, religious) people: “We do not have access to those ‘states’ or ‘experiences’. We have only narratives, artifacts, and practices of religious women and men.” Thomas A. Tweed, “On Moving Across: Translocative Religion and the Interpreter’s Position,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 70 (2002): 256. Sadly enough, as Tweed quite justifiably laments in the following, this near-to truism has to be reaffirmed because most academic studies of religion do not make this clear.
Stephen S. Bush, Visions of Religion: Experience, Meaning, and Power (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 154.
Birgit Meyer, “Introduction: Media and the Senses in the Making of Religious Experience,” Material Religion 4 (2008): 127.
Cuffel, Di Giacinto and Krech, “Senses, Religion and Religious Encounter,” 31.
With reference to Peirce’s semiotics, Gesche Linde shows that experience and interpretation are always interrelated, see Gesche Linde, “Experience as Interpretation. A Peircean Approach to Practical Theology,” in Religion: Immediate Experience and the Mediacy of Research. Interdisciplinary Studies, Concepts and Methodology of Empirical Research in Religion, eds. Hans-Günter Heimbrock and Christopher P. Scholz (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2007), 166.
See Kapstein, “Rethinking Religious Experience,” 281: “[R]eligious experiences are whatever experiences are imbued with religious value for the subjects of the experiences in question, and their objects are the objects, of whatever kind, to which such value is attributed.” I am not sure about the notion of ‘value’ here, as it leads to merely further discussion of the relationship between validity and value. The notion of sense is broad enough to cover both possibilities.
In her pathbreaking book on Religious Experience Reconsidered, Ann Taves has carefully analyzed the processes of ascription as differentiated into attributions and simple and composite ascriptions to and as things deemed religious, or rather, religions, see Ann Taves, Religious Experience Reconsidered. A Building-Block Approach to the Study of Religion and Other Special Things (Princeton/Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2009), 8–9. The element of sense, however, seems to be somewhat neglected, either on the level of the senses as the mediators of experience or on the level of meaning-providing sense. Ascription phenomena as assertions (‘This and that is religious’) convey and express processes of sense-making. An experience is thus not deemed to be religious, but rather deemed to make religious sense. This can be quite different from both object language and metalanguage common sense, not least as regards causality.
In the case of the sense of smell James McHugh points out that South Asian religious experts in their analyses “all have one thing in common—that some, if not all, of the fundamental qualities of odors (for example, ‘fragrant’) are what we would think of as value-laden aesthetic terms, implying an aesthetic judgement.” James McHugh, “The Classification of Smells and the Order of the Senses in Indian Religious Traditions,” Numen 54 (2007): 379.
Volkhard Krech, “How to make sense of the senses?,” (unpublished KHK Paper, 2016), 1. On this aspect more generally see Volkhard Krech, Wo bleibt die Religion? Zur Ambivalenz des Religiösen in der modernen Gesellschaft (Bielefeld: transcript, 2011), 13: “Religiös bestimmt und vereindeutigt werden Sachverhalte, Ereignisse und Objekte erst durch die entsprechende Zuschreibung innerhalb rekursiver religiöser und sich als solche bewährender Kommunikation.” In a 2015 article, Krech states laconically: “[…] religion is always a result of ascription.” Volkhard Krech, “From Religious Contact to Scientific Comparison and Back: Some Methodological Considerations on Comparative Perspectives in the Science of Religion,” in The Dynamics of Transculturality, Transcultural Research—Heidelberg Studies on Asia and Europe in a Global Context, eds. A. Flüchter and J. Schöttli (Cham: Springer, 2015), 63.
“The effusive smell of roses wafting from a Christian corpse confirms the saint’s location between heaven and earth: the corporal form still bound to this world while the spirit is present in paradise. Both Christian and Muslim audiences recognize the bodies of martyrs and saints—tied to both this world and the next—after smelling glorious odors symbolic of their virtue and sanctity.” Mary Thurkill, “Odors of Sanctity: Distinctions of the Holy in Early Christianity and Islam,” Comparative Islamic Studies 3 (2007): 134.
Meredith McGuire asks an impressive set of questions in her attempt to prove that religious practices are as closely linked to people’s bodies as to cognition: “For instance, imagine how you would arrange your physical environment if you wanted to reach a profoundly prayerful or meditative state. Where would you choose to be? What postures and gestures would you find conductive to deeper religious experience? Kneeling? Standing? Lying prostate? Sitting on the ground? Eyes closed or open? Head bowed of upright? Hands clapping? Folded on your lap? Uplifted? Holding the hands of others? Arms swaying? Body rocking? Breath slow and drawn out? Breath rhythmic and in time with a drum beat or music? What physical connection to others do you imagine? Does a human touch promote your spiritual depth or does it get in the way? Do you need to be alone or in a group? And so on.” McGuire, “Individual sensory experiences,” 154. The obvious answer to every single one of these questions is, however, dependent on the prevailing theoretical/ doctrinal idea about what is religious—to an ascription of religious sense.
Harvey, Scenting Salvation, 1.
See Rudolf Otto, Das Heilige. Über das Irrationale in der Idee des Göttlichen und sein Verhältnis zum Rationalen (München: Beck, 1997), 7.
Harvey, “Series Foreword,” IX.
See for the case of Indian religions McHugh, “The Classification of Smells,” 376.
Ulisse Cecini, “Body, senses, and gender-related questions as gates to the transcendent. A new reading of the Masāʾil ʿAbdallāh ibn Salām,” in Religious Boundaries for Sex, Gender, and Corporeality, eds. Alexandra Cuffel, Ana Echevarria, and Georgios T. Halkias (London/New York: Routledge, 2019), 126.
See chapter on Attraction.
Thurkill, “Odors of Sanctity,” 136.
See Karl Popper, Objective Knowledge. An evolutionary approach (Oxford: Clarendon, 1979), 145: “The tentative solutions which animals and plants incorporate into their anatomy and their behavior are biological analogues of theories; and vice versa: theories correspond […] to endosomatic organs and their ways of functioning. Just like theories, organs and their functions are tentative adaptions to the world we live in. […] All this holds also for sense organs. They incorporate, more especially, theory-like expectations. Sense organs, such as the eye, are prepared to react to certain selected environmental events—to those events which they ‘expect’, and only to those events. Like theories (and prejudices) they will in general be blind to other events: to those which they do not understand, which they cannot interpret […]” So, it is only as hypothesis that sensory organs can generate meaningful data—if taken as such, sense organs only provide and undifferentiated chaotic impressions i.e. their ‘blindness’ is less about seeing too little, but rather, about seeing (or rather, experiencing) too much.
See chapter on Attraction.
This holds true for non-Eurasian religious traditions and supposedly underrated senses in the context of religious practice. In her discussion of the African Luba people, Mary Nooter Roberts claims with regard to the sense of touch that the Luba “[…] create objects that are touched for mimetic purposes as well as spiritual mediation, validation, and empowerment. […] Touch and tactility participate in culturally specific sensory epistemologies, and people and spirits engage with, wield, and are affected by objects through ontological constructions of ‘thing-ness’. Beliefs are materialized through objects meant to be touched, held, caressed, worn, or otherwise perceived haptically.” Mary Nooter Roberts, “Tactility and transcendence. Epistemologies of touch in African arts and spiritualities,” in Religion and Material Culture. The Matter of Belief, ed. David Morgan (London/New York: Routledge, 2010), 80.
See Gábor Barna, “Senses and Religion. Introductory Thoughts,” Traditiones 36 (2007): 9.
Krech, “How to make sense of the senses,” 6. As an example, the sensory impression of odors is, as Mary Thurkill has shown, in early and medieval Christianity associated with the concept of transformation, whereas in Islam it is closely connected to the concept of purity (Thurkill, “Odors of Sanctity,” 135).
Birgit Meyer, Religious Sensations. Why Media, Aesthetics and Power Matter in the Study of Contemporary Religion (Amsterdam: Vrije Universiteit, 2006), 9. Also compare Birgit Meyer, “Picturing the Invisible. Visual Culture and the Study of Religion,” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 27 (2015): 338.
Meyer, Religious Sensations, 22.
Meyer, “Picturing the Invisible,” 338.
Meyer, Religious Sensations, 20. In general, it seems worthwhile to scrutinize phenomena of emotion that appear as a mode of particular situations of contact. Emotional strategies, as Tarantino and Zika argue, contribute to the formation and maintenance of stereotypical claims of difference, but also of similarities, that permeate daily life and culture and are, thus, indispensable elements to be taken into consideration in the description and analysis of situations of religious contact. These claims follow particular patterns that serve as model forms of dealing with the challenges connected to other religious traditions (Giovanni Tarantino and Charles Zika, “Introduction. Feeling exclusion, generating exclusion, Feeling Exclusion. Religious Conflict, Exile and Emotions in Early Modern Europe,” eds. Giovanni Tarantino and Charles Zika (New York: Routledge, 2019), 2).
See Meyer, “Media and the Senses in the Making of Religious Experience,” 129.
Morgan, “Materiality, social analysis, and the study of religions,” 59.
See chapter on the Transcendence/Immanence Distinction; compare for example the theologoumenon of the theologia negativa. See also Cecini, “Body, senses, and gender-related questions as gates to the transcendent,” 121: “That is to say that perception and senses can be a way to speak the unspeakable and to convey something that transcends the words. Moreover, perceptions and senses have the power to transcend themselves, being but just the door which opens to more profound experience, which are hinted at by the sensorial, but can result in intellectual speculation or even an ecstatic state.”
David Morgan’s considerations of sight can be easily adapted to the other senses as well: “[…] [S]eeing is an operation that relies on an apparatus of assumptions and inclinations, habits and routines, historical associations and cultural practices. Sacred gaze is a term that designates the particular configuration of ideas, attitudes, and customs that informs a religious act of seeing as it occurs within a given cultural and historical setting. A sacred gaze is the manner in which a way of seeing invests an image, a viewer, or an act of viewing with spiritual significance.” David Morgan, The Sacred Gaze. Religious Visual Culture in Theory and Practice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 3.
As a survey of the role of the senses in current research see Cuffel, Di Giacinto and Krech, Senses, “Religion and Religious Encounter,” 20–30.
See chapter on Dynamics and Stability.
See chapter on Tradition.
On this point, see Webb Keane, “The evidence of the senses and the materiality of religion,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 14 (2008): 114. An encounter with the Virgin Mary may well involve identifiable cognitive processes, but the question remains “[W]hat makes these respectively a vision, a prophetic experience, and a case of spirit possession rather, than, say, fantasies, dreams, psychotic episodes, the effects of drugs or a sudden head injury? They are instances of categories that are recognizable to other people. This is not an automatic business; even in places where shamanism or spirit possession are well accepted, in any given instance local communities have to decide whether they now have a case of possession, or, say, madness, fraud, or error. […] Cognition may provide some raw materials, but the socially relevant outcome results from the irreducible conjunction of a potentially open-ended set of things such as micro-politics, recent precedents, kinship ties, currently available concepts, and so forth.”
See chapter on Object Language and Metalanguage.
On Majorca as a preeminent place of religious contact, see David Abulafia, A Mediterranean Emporium. The Catalan kingdom of Majorca (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). See also Roger Friedlein, “Ramon Llull. Der Islam von Mallorca aus gesehen,” in Romanische Inseln im Mittelmeer. Traumbilder und Wirklichkeiten, eds. Thomas Bremer et al. (Halle an der Saale: Stekovics, 2000), 9.
Fernando Domínguez, “Works,” in Raimundus Lullus. An Introduction to his Life, Works and Thought, eds. Alexander Fidora und Josep E. Rubio (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), 125.
“All his plans for missions among unbelievers and for moral regeneration of Christian society depend inherently on the effective exercise of verbal communication. The arts of language are surely central to the Llullian Great Art. It is hardly surprising that virtually every page of his oeuvre mentions some problem of signification, communication, interpretation, translation, or persuasion. Indeed, the importance of language for Llull’s enterprise perhaps explains why his accounts of communication offer some of his most innovative proposals, like the reduction of all logical fallacies to one, recognition of speech as a sixth sense, or arrangement of discourse by degrees of dignity.” Mark D. Johnston, The Evangelical Rhetoric of Ramon Llull. Lay Learning and Piety in the Christian West Around 1300 (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 24. On Llull’s thoughts on notions and language see my monograph: Knut Martin Stünkel, Una sit religio, 125–226.
See Eric Osborn, Tertullian, first theologian of the West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 100. In this context, afflatus is a pneumatological notion, designating ‘breath’ (ibid. 164).
See Roger Friedlein, “Modellierung von Kommunikation in der Theorie und textuellen Praxis der Religionsdisputation (Ramon Llull: Libre de contemplació, cap. 187),” in Zwischen Babel und Pfingsten. Sprachdifferenzen und Gesprächsverständigung in der Vormoderne, ed. Peter von Moos (Berlin: Lit, 2008), 256. Also, compare Johnston, The Evangelical Rhetoric of Ramon Llull, 66f.
Mark D. Johnston, “Affatus: Natural Science as Moral Theology,” Estudios Lulianos 30 (1990): 3.
The Catalan version of the text is edited by Josep Peranau i Espelt, “Lo sisè seny, lo qual apel.lam afflatus, de Ramon Llull,” Arxiu de Textos Catalans Antics 2 (1983).
Raymundus Lullus, Opera, ed. Ivo Salzinger (Mainz: 1721–1742, reprinted Frankfurt 1965), MOG VI, 397.
See Johnston: Affatus, 15.
MOG VI, 397.
Friedlein, “Modellierung von Kommunikation,” 257.
“Die im imaginativen Seelenteil wahrgenommenen Leidenschaften und Gedanken (concepciones) setzt der Affat in Sprache um.” Friedlein, “Modellierung von Kommunika- tion,” 257.
“Unde benedictus sis, Domine, qui voluisti, quod prima intentione hominis sit ad amandum et honorandum Te et ad servientum Tibi et ad cognoscendum tuam Nobilitatem et tuam Bonitatem; et secunda sit ad possidendum bona, quae descendunt per merita primae intentionis.” Lullus, Liber contemplationis, MOG IX, 96.
In Llull’s thought, there is, accordingly, also an object language example of the basic directedness that makes religious attraction (see chapter on Attraction).
Friedlein, “Modellierung von Kommunikation,” 257.
Meyer, Religious Sensations, 23.
Johnston, Affatus, 157.
See Friedemann Fritsch, Communicatio idiomatum. Zur Bedeutung einer christologischen Bestimmung für das Denken Johann Georg Hamanns (Berlin/New York: De Gruyter, 1999).
Lullus, Liber proverbiorum, MOG VI, 397.
Johnston, Affatus, 140.
Selected Works of Ramon Lull (1232–1316), ed. and trans. Anthony Bonner (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 610.
Johnston, The Evangelical Rhetoric of Ramon Llull, 67.
See Johnston, Affatus, 150.
Nicolai de Cusa, De visione dei, ed. A.D. Riemann. Opera omnia VI (Hamburg: Meiner, 2000), h VI, 13, 2–14.
Translation by Jasper Hopkins, Nicholas of Cusa’s Dialectical Mysticism. Text, Translation, and Interpretive Study Of De Visione Dei (Third Edition) (Minneapolis: The Arthur J. Banning Press, 1988).
On De Pace Fidei see Markus Riedenauer, Pluralität und Rationalität. Die Herausforderung der Vernunft durch religiöse und kulturelle Vielfalt nach Nikolaus Cusanus (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2007).
Kurt Flasch, Nikolaus von Kues. Geschichte einer Entwicklung (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2001), 385–386.
Flasch, Nikolaus von Kues, 389.
See Meredith Ziebart, “Laying Siege to the Walls of Paradise: The Fifteenth-Century Tegernsee Dispute over Mystical Theology and Nicholas of Cusa’s Strong Defense of Reason,” Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures 41 (2015).
On the concepts of vision within Cusanic philosophy, see Christian Kiening, “‘Gradus Visionis’. Reflexionen des Sehens in der Cusanischen Philosophie,” Mitteilungen und Forschungen der Cusanus-Gesellschaft 19 (1991).
Flasch, Nikolaus von Kues, 384.
Flasch, Nikolaus von Kues, 384.
Rachel Fulton, “‘Taste and see that the Lord is sweet’ (Ps. 33:9): The Flavor of God in the Monastic West,” The Journal of Religion 86 (2006): 170.
David Morgan rightfully points out that: “[t]o see is to enter in a long history of seeing, to submit to the discipline of visual structures that mediate the authority of a teacher, ruler, institution, or saint. The sacred, in this way of thinking, is constructed within particular configurations of image, viewers, archive, and setting. Each of these elements form varying networks of relations. The archive plays a special role in the recognition of the sacred by linking the viewer to tradition, which the image updates or brings to life.” Morgan, The Embodied Eye, 59.
On the communicative nature of this (communion) event, see Cuffel, Di Giacinto and Krech, “Senses, Religion, and Religious Encounter,” 4: “Thus, while eating may be an act of incorporation and transformation, the flavor itself is what communicates the nature of this transformation and contact between the spiritual and human realm.”
See Fulton, “‘Taste and see that the Lord is sweet’,” 177–180.
E. Scheerer, “Sinne, die” in Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, Vol. 9: Se–Sp, eds. Joachim Ritter und Karlfried Gründer (Darmstadt: WBG, 1995), 837.
On Augustine’s expression, see Georgiana Huian, “‘Gustaui et esurio et sitio …’: Augustine and the Spiritual Taste,” in Homo Viator. Perspective ecumenice în antropologie, ed. Alin Tat (Cluy-Napoca: Napoca Star, 2018), 75: “The passage depicts an overabundance assaulting and overwhelming human receptivity. At first glance, this overabundant experience seems to allow for the pouring of the divine endlessness (‘excess’) in the treasury of interiority, without ever consuming the infinity of the divine, and also without satiating or tiring the human desire for the divine. The spiritual senses are here most eclipsed and most brilliant, most hidden and most visible, most secret and most overt. Not even named as perceptive pathways of the divine (eyes, ears, nostrils etc. of the heart), they become the pure medium of transparency, translucency, effulgence, being completely filled with and united to what they perceive (call or cry, radiance, fragrance, taste, touch).”
See Astrid von der Lühe, “Schmecken,” in Wörterbuch der philosophischen Metaphern, ed. Ralf Konersmann (Darmstadt: WBG, 2007), 344.
See Fulton, “‘Taste and see that the Lord is sweet’,” 192 on Bernard’s musings on the Song of Songs: “sapientia (wisdom) is derived from sapor (taste) because when it is added to virtue, like some seasoning (condimentum), it adds taste (sapidam) to something which by itself is tasteless (insulsa) and bitter (aspera).”
Meyer, “Sensational Forms,” 11.
Meyer, “Sensational Forms,” 16.
On the arrangement see Kiening, “Gradus Visionis,” 262–263.
On an explication of the diverse stages of the sensory perception of vision involved in the process see Holger Simon, “Bildtheoretische Grundlagen des neuzeitlichen Bildes bei Nikolaus von Kues,” Concilium medii aevi 7 (2004): 59–64.
Kurt Flasch, Nicolaus Cusanus (München: Beck, 2001), 70.
Flasch, Nicolaus Cusanus, 73.
See Morgan, The Embodied Eye, 73: “The reciprocal gaze is the opposite of the unilateral gaze inasmuch as it structures a two-way iconic colloquy between viewers—human and divine.”
In other traditions, some ‘objects of religiosity’ might ‘look back’ and transform the beholder as well, see Julie Gifford, Buddhist Practice and Visual Culture: The Visual Rhetoric of Borobudur (London: Routledge, 2011).
See Kiening, “Gradus visionis,” 245.
See Scott Breuninger, Recovering Bishop Berkeley. Virtue and Society in the Anglo-Irish Context (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 7.
Berkeley also took issue with other confessions: “Berkeley’s theory is greatly concerned with denying the legitimacy of other kinds of religious activity, and other churches […] for Berkeley enthusiasm is as unacceptable as freethought.” Philip Kohlenberg, “Bishop Berkeley on Religion and the Church,” Harvard Theological Review 66 (1973): 219.
Arend Kulenkampff, George Berkeley (München: Beck, 1987), 12.
On the religious and ideological background and the eventual execution of this plan see Scott Breuninger, “Planting an Asylum for Religion: Berkeley’s Bermuda Scheme and the Transmission of Virtue in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World,” Journal of Religious History 34 (2010).
David Berman, “Berkeley’s Life and Works,” in The Cambridge Companion to Berkeley, ed. Kenneth P. Winkler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 25. See also Harry Bracken, “Bishop Berkeley’s Messianism,” in Millenarism and Messianism in English Literature and Thought, ed. R.H. Popkin (Leiden: Brill, 1988).
Breuninger argues that Berkeley even hoped to fulfill the goal of facilitating the transfer of learning and religious values to the New World, following the translatio tradition of empire and learning (Breuninger, “Planting an Asylum for Religion,” 424).
Gerald Hanratty, “A Voice in the Wilderness: Berkeley’s Response to Enlightenment,” Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie 32 (1990): 323. In his thinking, Hanratty argues, Berkeley sustainedly shows “his resolve to vindicate human knowledge and to expose the fallacies and absurdities in the arguments of the Sceptics” (ibid., 323).
George Berkeley, “Notebook A (720),” in Philosophical Works including the Works on Vision, ed. Michael R. Ayers (London: Everyman, 1996), 393. If not otherwise noted, references to Berkeley’s works refer to this edition.
Berkeley, “Notebook A (824),” 405.
In his Dialogues, Berkeley characterizes his predominant field of (victorious) encounter and struggle as a decidedly religious: “You may now, without any laborious search into the sciences, without any subtlety of reason, or tedious length of discourse, oppose and baffle the most strenuous advocate for atheism. Those miserable refuges, whether in an eternal succession of unthinking causes and effects, or in a fortuitous concourse of atoms; those wild imaginations of Vanini, Hobbes, and Spinoza; in a word the whole system of atheism, is it not entirely overthrown by this single reflection on the repugnancy included in supposing the whole, or any part, even the most rude and shapeless of the whole world, to exist without a mind? Let any one of those abettors of impiety but look into his own thoughts, and there try if he can conceive how so much as a rock, a desert, a chaos, or confused jumble of atoms; how anything at all, either sensible or imaginable, can exist independent of a mind, and he need not go farther to be conceived of his folly.” Berkeley, Three Dialogues, 202–203 (213).
Berkeley, “Notebook B (226),” 329.
Berkeley, Essay towards a New Theory of Vision (130), 55.
Hanratty, “A Voice in the Wilderness,” 324.
Berkeley shares his trust in the senses with authors such as Tertullian, who blames the questioning of sensory perception for the rise of heresy: “To question the senses, Tertullian explains, is to question our ability to know ourselves, to know our world, and to know the truth of Christ who heard the Father’s voice and saw Satan falling as lightning. Tertullian continues, ‘We cannot, I insist, impugn the validity of the senses, for thus we will be denying that Christ really saw Satan cast down from heaven; that He ever heard His Father’s voice testifying to Him.’ Further, Tertullian explains that questioning sensory perceptions is precisely what led to the heresy of Marcion and his denial of Christ’s real body.” Emily R. Cain, “Tertullian’s Precarious Panopticon. A Performance of Visual Piety,” Journal for Early Christian Studies 27 (2019): 619.
George Berkeley, “The Pineal Gland (continued),” in The Works of George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne, Vol. VII, eds. A.A. Luce and T.E. Jessop (London: Nelson 1967), 188.
See the famous introductory sentence to Descartes’ third meditation “Claudam nunc oculos, aures obturabo, avocabo omnes sensus, imagines etiam rerum corporalium omnes vel ex cogitatione mea delebo, vel certe, quia hoc fieri vis potest, illas ut inanes et falsas nihili pendam, meque solum alloquendo et penitius inspiciendo meipsum paulatim mihi magis notum et familiarem reddere conabor.” René Descartes, Meditiationes de prima philosophia/Meditationen über die Grundlagen der Philosophie, ed. Lüder Gäbe (Hamburg: Meiner, 1992), 60.
See Berkeley’s preface to his Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous: “Upon the common principles of the philosophers, we are not assured of the existence of things from their being perceived. And we are taught to distinguish their real nature from that which falls under our senses. Hence arise scepticism and paradoxes. It is not enough that we see and feel, that we taste and smell a thing. Its true nature, its absolute external entity, is still concealed. For, though it be the fiction of our own brain, we have made it inaccessible to all our faculties. Sense is fallacious, reason defective. We spend our lives doubting of those things which other men evidently know, and believing those things which they laugh at, and despise.” Berkeley, Three Dialogues, 157.
The Works of George Berkeley, Vol. V (Siris), 121 (254). Pearce comments: “The greatness of God is communicated in the creation by rational demonstration, but this demonstration is not presented dryly, but, rather, in such a way as to truly inspire confidence in the greatness of its creator.” Kenneth L. Pearce, “The semantics of sense perception in Berkeley,” Religious Studies 44 (2008): 267.
The Works of George Berkeley, Vol. IV, (De motu), 18 (29).
Pearce, “The semantics of sense perception in Berkeley,” 249.
Berman, “Berkeley’s Life and Works,” 25. Pearce stresses the preeminence of vision in Berkeley’s theory: “Berkeley’s theory is a theory of vision as language; other perceptions are also signs, but lack the requisite level of sophistication to be properly called language.” Pearce, “The semantics of sense perception in Berkeley,” 251. Compare, however, the often-stressed interrelation of sight and touch in Berkeley, for example in the Principles of human knowledge, section 44; i.e. an interrelation provided by God: “[V]isible ideas are the language whereby the governing spirit, on whom we depend, informs us what tangible ideas he is about to imprint on us, in case we excite this or that motion in our own bodies.” Berkeley, Principles of human knowledge, 105. Here, the reciprocity of the senses again comes into view: in a religious context, to touch means to be touched (or rather, imprinted) by the divine via its special language.
The Works of George Berkeley, Vol. III (Alciphron), 159.
Pearce, “The semantics of sense perception in Berkeley,” 254.
Pearce, “The semantics of sense perception in Berkeley,” 256.
Cassirer characterizes the reversion of sensory perception performed by Berkeley as follows: “Um uns des göttlichen Seins zu versichern, brauchen wir nicht über die Welt der Phänomene hinauszugehen, es genügt, den Inhalt jeder Einzelwahrnehmung vollständig und bis zum Ende zu analysieren, um auf ihrem Grunde den Begriff Gottes unmittelbar zu entdecken. Die Zeichensprache der Natur, die wir in der Wahrnehmungstheorie als den eigentlichen Grund aller unserer Erfahrungsschlüsse kennen lernten, lernen wir nunmehr als die Zeichensprache Gottes zu begreifen: Gott ist es, der unserem Geiste die mannigfachen sinnlichen Impressionen in bestimmter Ordnung und Folge einprägt und der dadurch das Bild der empirischen Wirklichkeit in ihm entstehen läßt.” Ernst Cassirer, Das Erkenntnisproblem in der Philosophie und Wissenschaft der neueren Zeit. Zweiter Band (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1994), 309.
See Pearce, “The semantics of sense perception in Berkeley,” 252.
This is all the more interesting with regard to the fact that Berkeley excludes all essentialist metaphysical theories that claim that something ‘real’ is ‘behind’ the immediately perceived. Karl Popper has coined the term ‘Berkeley’s razor’ for the act of eliminating such ideas from physical sciences. It may be added that the razor also works for religion: for Berkeley, due to the immediacy of God, there is no hinterwelt behind the perceived, and, as a consequence, the Christian believer willing to accept this fact, is the opposite of a hinterweltler in the Nietzschean sense. Meanwhile the natural philosopher who proposes a reality beyond the immediately perceived is precisely that, compare Karl. R. Popper, “A Note on Berkeley as Precursor of Mach and Einstein,” in Conjectures and Refutations. The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (Oxon/New York: Routledge, 2002), 231.
The Works of George Berkeley Vol. III (Alciphron), 149 (IV, 7).
E.G. King, “Language, Berkeley, and God,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 1 (1970): 116.
J.O. Urmson, Berkeley (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 63.
The Works of George Berkeley, Vol. III (Alciphron), 160 (IV 14). (III, 160). Alciphron also discovers that it is not impossible to imagine that “[…] we saw God with our fleshly eyes as plain as we see any human person whatsoever, and that He daily speaks to our senses in a manifest and clear dialect.” The Works of George Berkeley, Vol. III (Alciphron), 159 (IV 14).
The conspicuously high degree of rationality Berkeley claims in his philosophical apology of religious truth (see Kulenkampff, George Berkeley, 122) is, thus, justified by the close connection of sensory perception and language.
On the close connection of language and truth in Berkeley, see also Kohlenberger, “Bishop Berkeley on Religion and the Church,” 235.
See King, “Language, Berkeley, and God,” 114.
“Religion, I say, is no such speculative knowledge which rests merely in the understanding. She makes her residence in the heart, warms the affections and engages the will.” The Works of George Berkeley, Vol. VII (Sermon on Religious Zeal), 16.
On this point, see Michael Ayers, “Divine Ideas and Berkeley’s Proofs of God’s Existence,” in Essays on the Philosophy of George Berkeley, ed. E. Sosa (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1987), or Ekaterina Y. Ksenjek and Daniel E. Flage, “Berkeley, the Author of Nature, and the Judeo-Christian God,” History of Philosophy Quarterly 29 (2012).
Therefore, Cassirer’s characteristics of Berkeley’s thinking is accurate, though there may be some doubt about his evaluation: “In der Geschichte der Religionsphilosophie bildet die Lehre Berkeleys eine der originalsten Erscheinungen. In eigentümlicher Art wird hier das sinnliche und das geistige Sein ineinander verwoben, wird die Erfahrung, ohne durch einen fremden Zusatz verfälscht und ihrer selbständigen Eigenart beraubt zu werden, unmittelbar an ein ‘intelligibles’ Sein geknüpft.” Cassirer, Das Erkenntnisproblem in der Philosophie und Wissenschaft der neueren Zeit, 315.
Berkeley, The Theory of Vision Vindicated and Explained, 293 (40).
Berkeley, Principles of human knowledge, 132 (109).
On the relation of immediacy and reciprocity see Morgan, The Embodied Eye, 153: “A reciprocal gaze denies the viewer the comfort of looking from afar—one is seen seeing those one looks upon, and thus made present to them. The reciprocal gaze levels viewer and those one views to a common moral plane.”
Perhaps these concepts may be interpreted as examples of simple ascriptions in the sense of Ann Taves that may cluster to composite ascriptions that allow the overarching concept of a ‘religion’, compare Taves, Religious Experience Reconsidered, 17.
As Gesche Linde put it, ‘immediacy’ is “a later abstraction born by theory,” Gesche Linde, “Experience as Interpretation,” 167.
On the systemic connection of media and religion see Linda Simonis, “Einleitung. Medien und Religion—Ansätze zu einem interdisziplinären Forschungsprogramm,” in Medien und Religion. Ansätze zu einem interdisziplinären Forschungsprogramm, ed. Linda Simonis (Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2019), 7: “Religiöse Vorstellungen und religiöse Erfahrungen sind auf Medien angewiesen; sie bedürfen der Vermittlung durch Medien, um sich überhaupt konstituieren und zur Geltung bringen zu können. […] Dort, wo sich religiöses Denken und erleben artikuliert, werden vielmehr immer schon mediale Verfahren als implizite Bedingung der betreffenden Vorgänge oder Erfahrungen mitgeführt. […] Wo Menschen mit Göttern oder Geistern kommunizieren oder überhaupt mit einer Sphäre des Unsichtbaren oder Übernatürlichen in Relation treten, sind immer schon Medien im Spiel.”
The paradox of ‘mediated immediacy’ in religious experience only occurs if the conceptual pole of sensate experience is not taken into account. Birgit Meyer has described the intertwinement of mediation and ascription of immediacy as follows: “While media, by virtue of their technological properties, play a central role in bringing about such links, to the participants they are not present ‘as such.’ These media rather seem to vest the mediation in which they take part with some sense of immediacy, as if the use of microphones or film would yield some extraordinary experience that brings people closer to the divine. […] Practices of religious mediation appear particularly able to invoke a sense of the immediate presence of the divine, as in the case of the first two vignettes in which the Holy Spirit is invoked, or to incorporate the medium of film in such a way that it can be harnessed so as to produce an actual religious revelation. Thus, though it may be counterintuitive in the first place, the vignettes suggest that mediation and immediacy do not belong to two opposing realms, but are intertwined.” Birgit Meyer, “Mediation and Immediacy: Sensational Forms, Semiotic Ideologies, and the Question of the Medium,” in Companion to the Anthropology of Religion, eds. Janice Boddy and Michael Lambek (Chichester: Wiley, 2014), 312.
See Kenna’s interpretation of the sense of smell, triggered by incense, as mediating the immediacy of the divine in a certain place (the church) in Greek Orthodoxy: “On these occasions incense is used to sharpen the believers’ attention and indicate that they are going to get in touch now, this particular moment, with something which is always there, such as at the moment of consecration (when the bell and censer are used). Outside the church, however, believers are back in a fallen world, where there is a distinction between sacred and profane, and […] it is in this everyday, profane, world that incense does indeed mark transition. Generalising from the example of Greek Orthodoxy, my argument is that incense, or any other fragrant smoke, is both a medium of inter-connectedness with the transcendent world and a symbol of it, a symbol of the underlying unity of what westerners would separate as the natural and the supernatural worlds.” Kenna, “Why does Incense Smell Religious?,” 64. Moreover, the meaning ascribed to the sensate experience is likely to synchronize all the senses to a common experience described as the immediate experience of the divine, in this case, heaven on earth: “Within the church-as-transformed-world, all the senses are offered input. The eyes see icons and candlelight […], the ears hear the chanting of the priest and the singing of hymns and chants (without the accompaniment of any musical instruments), the chanting of prayers, the ringing of bells adorning the chains of the censer; the nose smells incense; and while only a few experience taste through taking communion, most members of the congregation will eat prosforo (the blessed but unconsecrated bread) after the service. Lips press kisses onto the surface of icons, fingers grasp the wax of candles and trace the sign of the cross from forehead to chest, shoulder to shoulder. As Ware writes, ‘Worship, for the Orthodox Church, is nothing less than “heaven on earth”’.” (ibid., 61).
David L. McMahan, Empty Vision. Metaphor and Visionary Imaginary in Mahāyāna Buddhism (London: Routledge, 2002), 176. Hearing, thus, is not a suitable means for reasons of epistemology: “Hearing is often associated with the word and language in Buddhism, which was intrinsically linked to conceptual thought, whereas the paradigmatic sense capacity in Buddhist thought, vision, represented unmediated knowing. Even though hearing was, of course, perception as well, the primary thing to be heard was language, which requires inference, conceptual thinking, and processing and is, therefore, inevitably prone to delusion. Perception, represented by vision, is used to express the simple and direct access to what is there. Thus the act of seeing becomes prototypical of the act of knowing—not just knowing facts, but apprehending truth in the sense of awakening” (ibid., 51).
See Keane, “The evidence of the senses,” 114.
To Cecini, contemplating the early medieval religious dialogue Masāʾil ʿAbdallāh ibn Salām, sensorial issues “[…] appeal to the understanding of a language not made of words, through which the human heart can understand transcendent realities and religious messages. The senses work in this text, almost paradoxically, as gate to the transcendent, as a language whose words are feelings and perceptions, which speaks to the intellect through the heart and the soul. The senses enhance the capacity of analogy and imagination and are thusly a universal language that every human being can relate to, not only the theologian and the expert.” Cecini, “Body, senses, and gender-related questions as gates to the transcendent,” 126.
On the semiotic processes involved in sensate experiences in the context of Christian- Muslim encounters in medieval times, see Nikolas Jaspert, “Zeichen und Symbole in den christlich-islamischen Beziehungen des Mittelalters,” in Religiosità e civiltà. Le comunicazioni simboliche (secoli IX–XIII), ed. Giancarlo Andenna (Milano: Vita e Pensiero, 2009), 342: “Unbestreitbar dürfte sein, dass neben sichtbaren Bedeutungsträgern wie etwa Kreuz und Koran, Kirchturm und Minarett die Rolle des Auditiven und Performativen für die Geschichte interreligiöser Kommunikation und Symbolizität im Mittelalter herausgestellt gehört. Der Klang der Glocke und der Ruf des Muezzin, aber auch die vermeintliche Macht der Prozessionen, der Liturgien und anderer Leib- und Zeitsymbole wirkten stark auf Fremdwahrnehmung und Selbstverständnis von Christen wie Muslimen des Mittelalters. Diese den Symbolen zugeschriebene Wirkmächtigkeit wiederum erklärt das Bemühen um deren Kontrolle, das sich nicht nur während der Kreuzzüge und anderer militärischer Auseinandersetzungen, sondern auch im diplomatischen Verkehr und weiteren Formen friedlicher Interaktion niederschlug. Der Transfer solcher Bedeutungsträger aus dem Mittelmeerraum in die Binnenländer Lateineuropas trug wesentlich dazu bei, nicht nur die heiligen Stätten Palästinas, sondern auch den Islam und die Muslime im Bewusstsein der Christen präsent zu halten, mithin den Symbolen ihre Fähigkeit zur Transzendierung zu sichern.”
See chapter on Dynamics and Stability.
See chapter on Dynamics and Stability.
It seems that this kind of immediate reciprocity also works with other senses. Susan A. Harvey describes the olfactory experience described in Origin’s Commentary on the Song of Songs as follows: “When Origin more often concerns himself with biblical intertextuality (cross-referencing texts), or with ethical activity, here he pauses to reflect on the nature of physiological experience as it can illuminate the human-divine encounter. Olfaction sets in motion a sequence of reactions in the believer that turns the human-divine relationship away from alienation and toward intimate union: the scent of the Bridegroom’s fragrance initiates first recognition, then longing, and then embracing of the divine. All this, as Origin marvels, from the sense of smell alone.” Harvey, Scenting Salvation, 173.
This idea is also to be found in later theological writings, such as in the Swabian pietist Friedrich Christian Oetinger’s notion of the sensus communis. This sense is an organ of immediacy, which deletes anything mediating between the perceiver and the perceived, and, thus, allows to perception of God via the senses, compare my article Knut Martin Stünkel, “Hoc est Corpus meum—Body talk in ‘orthodox’ Lutheran Protestantism in the eighteenth century,” in Religious Boundaries for Sex, Gender, and Corporeality, eds. Alexandra Cuffel, Ana Echevarria, and Georgios T. Halkias (London/New York: Routledge, 2019), 91–92.
Morgan, The Embodied Eye, XVII.
Shawn Arthur, “Wafting Incense and Heavenly Foods: The Importance of Smell in Chinese Religion,” in Sensual Religion. Religion and the Five Senses, eds. Graham Harvey and Jessica Hughes (Sheffield/Bristol: Equinox, 2018), 49.
B.J. ter Haar, “Teaching with Incense,” Studies of Central and East Asian Religions 11 (1999): 5.
Arthur, “Wafting Incense and Heavenly Foods,” 49.
Christopher Pinney, ‘Photos of the Gods’: The Printed Image and Political Struggle in India (London: Reaktion, 2004), 194.
Pinney, ‘Photos of the Gods’, 9.
Diana L. Eck, Darśan: Seeing the Divine Image in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 4. Eck continues as follows: “Since in the Hindu understanding, the deity is present in the image, the visual apprehension of the image is charged with religious meaning. Beholding the image is an act of worship, and through the eyes one gains the blessings of the divine.”
Kapstein, “Reconsidering Religious Experience,” 272. Private, here, means, above all, uninfluenced by culturally determined sensual forms of experience; See ibid., 276: “Hence, any meaningful discussion of experience, religious or otherwise, must concern itself with contentful and hence essentially effable experiences, experiences that may be engaged intersubjectively and so are not, in any relevant sense, private.”
See Olivia Remie Constable, “Regulating Religious Noise: The Council of Vienne, the Mosque Call and Muslim Pilgrimage in the Late Medieval Mediterranean World,” Medieval Encounters 16 (2010).
Constable, “Regulating Religious Noise,” 68–69.
Compare Jaspert, “Zeichen und Symbole,” 311–312: “Auf der christlichen Seite wurde der Ruf des Muezzins (Adhān) immer wieder in pejorativen Farben geschildert und etwa mit dem Jaulen von Hunden verglichen. Der Hintergrund all dieser Versuche, im ‘Konflikt des Klanges’ die Oberhand zu gewinnen, war jenseits des religiösen Symbolgehalts nicht zuletzt auch die Tatsache, dass die Reichweite des Läutens bzw. Rufens zugleich die räumliche Geltung von Herrschaftsrechten zum Ausdruck brachte und die Glocken unter anderem dazu dienen konnten, im Gefahrenfall Waffenträger zusammenzuziehen.”
Constable, “Regulating Religious Noise,” 89.
The twelfth-century hisha text of Ibn ʿAbdūn of Seville is quoted in Constable, “Regulating Religious Noise,” 91.
Decree of James II quoted in “Constable, Regulating Religious Noise,” 77.
Constable, “Regulating Religious Noise,” 76.
Quoted in Constable, “Regulating Religious Noise,” 82.
Of course, this is also relevant in intrareligious contexts for example the acoustic distinction between the silent inner circle of the priestly cult in times of Second Temple Judaism as opposed to the singing and loudly praying outer circles, thus separating the sacrificial cult (see Peter Wick, Die urchristlichen Gottesdienste. Entstehung und Entwicklung im Rahmen der frühjüdischen Tempel-, Synagogen- und Hausfrömmigkeit (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2003), 78).
“Berkeley thus invoked the spontaneous and direct realism of the ordinary person as the most effacious antidote to the contrived principles and arguments of those who doubted the existence of sensible objects.” Hanratty, “A Voice in the Wilderness,” 324.
On the hierarchy of senses see Jütte, Geschichte der Sinne, 74–83. Compare on the supposed epistemic preeminence of vision as immediate perception Jean-Pierre Wils, Die Moral der Sinne (Tübingen: Klöpfer & Meyer, 1999), 43–47.
Cuffel, Di Giacinto, and Krech, “Senses, Religion and Religious Encounter,” 3.
The primacy of vision in Buddhism seems to be closely connected to the ascription of immediacy: “This paradigmatic place of vision among the other senses has to do in part with the Indian understanding of visual perception as immediate. Visual perception is often considered by different intellectual traditions to have an immediacy that is absent in audition, particularly the hearing of words. Greek, European, and Indian thought have often claimed, on the basis of widely divergent theories of perception, that vision has a direct access to its objects, while hearing is mediated. An object of vision is directly disclosed to the eye, but hearing discerns activities of things. The hearing of words involves further mediation, conceptualization, and processing. While contemporary cognitive science has revealed the high degree to which visual perception is also mediated, what is important here is how vision is understood phenomenologically in this case, by Mahayana Buddhists, but perhaps cross-culturally as a more immediate disclosure of the world than that given in auditory experience. This apparent immediacy of visual perception—the implicit facticity of the seen—contributes to the structuring of Buddhist discourse, and it is from this structuring that we can begin to discern the place of vision in this discourse.” McMahan, Empty Vision, 51.
Barna, “Senses and Religion,” 13.
See McHugh, “The Classification of Smells,” 378 on the ‘constant dialogue’ on the difficulties surrounding the sense of smell among the Indian religious traditions. See also 374 and 377: “Depending on the sectarian context, and also on the emphasis in classification, the place of smell in the order of the senses could change quite radically.”