Interreligious Aesthetics: From Dialogue to the Senses

Abstract

Interreligious Aesthetics: From Dialogue to the Senses S. Brent Plate Those of us with scholarly, clerical, and other commitments to interreligious life like to talk and use our words. We have meetings to discuss upcoming plans, we write essays, we host conversations, and we edit journal issues on the topic. “Dialogue” has been the primary activity of interfaith and interreligious work, and verbal language is the primary medium through and in which we connect. In the modern age, language increasingly became foundational for philosophical, psychological, sociological, anthropological, and religious constructions of reality itself. After millennia of using language in what seemed like natural ways, humans began turning their newly discovered scientific gaze on the ways this base communication system was itself constructed through social, technological, and biological means. By the twentieth century, scholars made note of this “linguistic turn” and the ways it affected many fields of study, arguing that objective reality is not accessible outside of language systems. Language is so important to us moderns that we use it as a metaphor for many other human processes that do not actually involve language. Seventeenth‐century astronomer and mathematician Galileo Galilei compared the universe to a book, indicating that the universe “cannot be understood unless one‐first learns to comprehend the language in which it is written.” The eighteenth‐century anti‐Catholic philosopher Voltaire said that “tears are the silent language of grief.” In the twentieth century, Jewish philosopher Martin Buber observed in I and Thou that “an animal's eyes have the power to speak a great language” and psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan stated that the “unconscious is structured like a language.” When we cannot comprehend a phenomenon or experience, we use metaphorical language about language to bring it home to us. Humans are familiar with the ways language works, and so inexplicable things like the universe, grief, animal intelligence, and the unconscious are all compared to languages to make them more explicable. Or so we are led to believe. Interreligious work has also relied heavily on language and has often been built around dialogue. When one religious group does not understand the ways and means of another, these groups revert to language to make the cognitive leap. “Oh, I understand now!” exclaims the Sikh after the Buddhist carefully delineates the real meaning of dukkha, the prevalence of discontentment and suffering in life. Or the Muslim wonders if eating kosher food is similar enough to halal, so she may go and ask around for a verbal confirmation. Or an outsider might question how similar Buddhist meditation is to Christian contemplative prayer, and so ask for verbal accounts from practitioners of each tradition, comparing the terminology of each. Language offers an exceptional linkage and is useful for navigating the complex play of similarity and difference. Aesthetics With the gravity of language and the centrality of discourse in mind, what happens if we shift our interreligious emphasis from “dialogue” to “aesthetics”? That is, from using language about religious traditions, their similarities and differences, to highlighting the performances, material objects, and sensual dimensions of differing traditions as they are enacted through food, architectural design, music, images, poetry, the arts, smells, and bodily interactions? What if we do not use language as the literal or metaphorical grounding for an interreligious engagement? What if we begin our approaches to interreligious connection through the basic religious activities of bodies, their encounters, and interactions? What if the Christian, in seeking to understand the Islamic fasting practices of sawm, actually fasts during the days of Ramadan, and not only asks doctrinal questions about it? How would this bodily knowledge be different from conceptual knowledge? In its ancient Greek meanings, as used by Aristotle and others, “aesthetics” (Gk. aisthesis) was about sense perception, about the ways human bodies perceive the world through smell, hearing, vision, taste, and touch, among many other sensual confrontations. This was generally in contrast with noesis, knowledge gained through the intellect. Aesthetics was, as the literary theorist Terry Eagleton described it, “born as a discourse of the body.” Aristotle's aesthetics were deeply entwined with the soul (psyche), and while many Western, often Christian, thinkers would occasionally draw on these body‐based aesthetics, it would...