Review: Sacred Thresholds: The Door to the Sanctuary in Late Antiquity, edited by Emilie M. van Opstall

Abstract

Emilie M. van Opstall, ed. Sacred Thresholds: The Door to the Sanctuary in Late Antiquity Leiden: Brill, 2018, 384 pp., 49 illus. $146 (cloth), ISBN 9789004368590 The term liminality has become so pervasive in the humanities that its overuse, or misuse, in studies of thresholds—whether real, imagined, or symbolic—often runs the risk of delegitimating the concept of a physical, material limen within architectural and art historical analysis. It is therefore refreshing to encounter a volume such as Emilie M. van Opstall's Sacred Thresholds: The Door to the Sanctuary in Late Antiquity , which explores the myriad ways in which doors to sacred spaces served as both physical objects and metaphysical conceits, and as conduits between human and divine experience. This edited volume is the product of a 2015 interdisciplinary conference held at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam titled “The Door of the Sanctuary: A Place of Transition.” The twelve essays in the book are divided among four thematic sections, with van Opstall's general introduction providing an excellent primer on the methodological approaches used by the contributing authors. More important, however, is the introduction's concise overview of the history of “liminality” in scholarship and of the principal theoretical models used to interpret the construction of sacred space and the role of doors in facilitating religious ritual. Following the introduction, van Opstall begins the first major thematic section of the volume, “Experiencing Sacred Thresholds,” with her own essay, “On the Threshold: Paul the Silentiary's Ekphrasis of Hagia Sophia .” Paul's sixth-century ekphraseis on the ecstatic, even euphoric, effects of Hagia Sophia's interior design are widely known. Rather than focusing on Paul's well-known observations regarding the church's interior, van Opstall draws attention to the church's so-called Imperial Doors and their ability to negotiate the multisensory experiences of the divine as described by Paul. This novel approach sets the tone for the essays that follow, which demonstrate that sanctuary doors not only function as permeable veils between the human and the …