Aisthesis: Theology and the Senses

Abstract

Aisthesis: Theology and the Senses Stefanie Knauss Aesthetic theology deals by definition with the senses, with the knowledge of God and religious experience derived from sensory perception in the encounter with the arts, with the beautiful. With this paper, I would like to tease out what it means that homo religiosus is always a homo aestheticus and to bring aesthetic theology back to its senses, contributing to its development in two respects. On the one hand, a focus on the sensory experience of works of art helps to overcome the tendency to intellectualize the aesthetic experience. On the other hand, it broadens the horizon of aesthetic theology by showing that theologically relevant aesthetic, or better “aisthetic,” that is, meaningful sensory experiences can be made not only through “high art” (Mozart's operas, Rembrandt's paintings, etc.), but there are many more forms of “art” that address the senses in manifold ways: taste in the art of cooking, smell in the art of perfumery, or touch in the art of textiles and design. I use the term “aisthetic” here to remind ourselves of the meaning of the Greek aisthesis, to perceive with one's senses, in order to underline the sensory dimension of aesthetic experiences over against the traditional focus on intellect and metaphysics in aesthetic theory. Thus, the following can be read as a theological companion piece to Brent Plate's recent publication “The Skin of Religion,” in that it attempts a reflection on how human beings live their relationship with God through their senses and in their bodies, knowing‐sensing God in a unique way. After a brief sketch of the (Western) cultural history of the senses, I will discuss their treatment in the Christian theological tradition in order to conclude with some thoughts on what I would call an aisthetic theology. A cultural history of the human senses Although all human beings are sensory beings by nature, this does not mean that sensations are perceived and understood in the same way across cultures: Senses and sensory perception are both culturally constructed and construct culture. While the system of the five senses (vision, hearing, smell, taste, touch) is typical for the Western context, other cultures have widely different sensory systems, including, for example, senses that can perceive the moral character of a person or a ghost. But even within Western culture, the number, organization, and hierarchy of the senses, how they function and their tasks have been conceptualized in many different ways: A history of the senses is always also the history of a culture and a society. The reduction in the multiplicity of sense perceptions to five, motivated by their connection to the visible sense organs, has a long tradition from Antiquity up to today as the result of a need to bring order to the chaos of perception. But the idea of a “sixth sense,” or other senses for equilibration, magnetism, proprioception, etc., as well as theories of a common sense, a kind of meta‐sense that perceives and organizes the processes of perception themselves, or yet the postulate of a universal sense shared by all persons, show that the system of the five senses is not quite sufficient to capture the complexity of sensory reality. And yet, over the centuries, it has proven to be robust enough to serve at least as a partial and generalizing systematization of sensations. As often happens, a hierarchization of the senses comes along with their systematization, illustrated, for example, by the fact that insurance companies pay more in case of loss of sight than of hearing. Traditionally, the senses have been differentiated in superior senses of distance (vision and hearing) and inferior senses of proximity (touch and taste). Smelling takes on a middle position because it allows a sensory perception at a certain distance, but is still more “bodily” than the distant senses: Thus, Kant sees smell as a sense of taste “at a distance” and thus groups it with the subjective senses (the senses of pleasure, as he defines them), while touch, vision, and hearing are for him senses that transmit objective information. The distant senses are generally perceived to be superior, nobler, because they are less physical, more...