Abstract
In the thirteenth century, following Neoplatonic and Patristic trends, art and aesthetic experience were still treated as symbolic, as “vestiges” or “echoes” of the divine that lead us to it. However, in the early fourteenth century, attitudes to concrete sensory/aesthetic experience begin to shift and theologians adopted the model of concrete phenomenal observation of sensory experience. Concrete sensory-aesthetic experience is endowed with a much higher value: seeing something is not the same as imagining it, recalling it, or thinking about it. This new approach results in some heterodox views about our phenomenal experience and debates about the exact status of “intentional” (phenomenal) appearance. These debates lead to profound observations about the nature of aesthetic-sensory experience of art objects and a re-evaluation of the status of the artistic image, which is now seen as much more than the platonic “copy of a copy”. In other words, starting with the fourteenth century, theologians start to pay attention to concrete aesthetic (sensory) experience and use their observations to make conclusions about various cognitive and perceptual issues that could be relevant to a discussion of the divine. That is, quite separately from theoretical theological observations, art and aesthetic experience now provide independent approaches to the divine or spiritual via the experience of aesthetic wonder as a starting point. It is now our concrete experience of sensory and aesthetic objects that starts the train of thought, at times leading to some unorthodox conclusions that contradict the doctrine (such as the skeptical point of view). The intellectual shift in treating sensory and artistic objects in the fourteenth century invites some parallels with the current discussions of the experience of aesthetic wonder in “post-secular” thought.
Highlights
In the thirteenth century, following Neoplatonic and Patristic trends, art and aesthetic experience were still treated as symbolic, as “vestiges” or “echoes” of the divine that lead us to it
Quite separately from theoretical theological observations, art and aesthetic experience provide independent approaches to the divine or spiritual via the experience of aesthetic wonder as a starting point. It is our concrete experience of sensory and aesthetic objects that starts the train of thought, at times leading to some unorthodox conclusions that contradict the doctrine
The intellectual shift in treating sensory and artistic objects in the fourteenth century invites some parallels with the current discussions of the experience of aesthetic wonder in “post-secular” thought
Summary
In European scholarship, both Western and Eastern, much has been attributed to the supposed “secularization” of religious art in Western Christianity after Carolingian theologians reject both its sacred status and the iconoclastic position in the Libri Carolini (790) and at the Frankfurt Council (794): the position that supposedly both protected the use of art in religion and at the same time liberated it from its sacred-symbolic role and its rigid traditional iconographic types employed by Eastern Christianity. There are many historical reasons for that, such as that many Eastern iconographers fled to Italy during iconclastic persecutions, and that Franciscans during the period of the Crusades had icon workshops in the Holy Land and the Latin Empire of Constantinople, which were directly impacted by local iconographers This does not explain the persistence of rigid iconographic types in the West, since Western Christians supposedly had a choice not to follow these practices or not to employ Eastern-style iconographers. Bonaventure’s schema in the mid to late thirteenth century still reflects the traditional view of art formulated in Christian Patristic theology His position on the role of images in churches is reminiscent of John Damascene’s standard opinion against iconoclasts: they serve as “visual scriptures” for the illiterate, excite affection, and assist memory; the honor paid to the picture goes back to the prototype. It seems that to Franciscan theologians from the fourteenth century, sensory and aesthetic experiences were the source of a genuine intellectual wonder that triggered further insights into the nature of our perception of what we call “reality”: an important preliminary step in any medieval commentary on the Sentences prior to embarking on an exploration of the divine
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