The Materiality and the Perception of the Representations of the Sacred

Abstract

The question of Christian (im-)materiality is the focus of both books under review, Apostolic Iconography and Florentine Confraternities in the Age of Reform and The Spiritual Senses: Perceiving God in Western Christianity. Both books, approaching the topic from different disciplines, attempt to understand how Christians understood or experienced the sacred through material objects in the material world. The materiality is carefully studied in the first book, while in the second, the (im-)materiality of the perception itself becomes the question. Such materiality can be explained as the cultural embeddedness that decides how objects are perceived in the material world. Philip D. Arnold, for example, defines materiality broadly as either ‘‘water, stones, mountains, and trees’’ used as ‘‘the referents for religious activities’’ or ‘‘the ritual process’’ through which ‘‘the meaning of material life is actively engaged’’ (Arnold, 10048). Arnold points out that although ‘‘In its recent past,’’ the discipline of the history of religion ‘‘was dominated by the quest for understanding the ‘sacred’ in all of its manifestations ..., such an enterprise is not probable now because of an almost universal affirmation of the cultural embeddedness of our understanding’’ (Arnold, 10048). He argues that now ‘‘The pressure exerted by an approximation of other meaningful orientations to material life ... generates a critical faculty within the history of religion’’ (Arnold, 10049). Such a critical awareness does help critics to become aware that any perception of religious beliefs and practices may be biased and that they need to examine the materiality through which faith is embodied and perceived. However, critics should also be aware that a study of any Christian belief or practice still needs to be evaluated by its truth value exactly because to take the cultural embeddedness seriously means, in such a study, to examine why Christians of different groups perceived the materiality of religion differently, how they decided whether to accept or reject one particular perception, and how they tried to justify their reformation, Vol. 19 No. 2, November, 2014, 168–178