Writing the Sublime: Visual Hagiography and the Promotion of Interreligious Understanding

Abstract

Writing the Sublime: Visual Hagiography and the Promotion of Interreligious Understanding Lucinda Allen Mosher Some years ago, the Interfaith Center of New York (ICNY) commissioned a gallery exhibition entitled Writing the Sublime: The Art of Calligraphy in the Religions of Abraham. Then a staff‐member of ICNY myself, thus present for the exhibition's gala opening in November 2003, this intensely dialogical project by esteemed letter‐artists Karen Gorst, Neil Yerman, and Mohamed Zakariya triggered memory of my own faith's narratives of encounter with the holy as it provoked questions about the holy as understood in other traditions—and raised possibilities for simultaneous lessons in aesthetics, ethics, comparative theology, hagiography, and promotion of positive interreligious understanding. Here, I offer thoughts on that interplay, making connection from sacred calligraphy through iconography to visual hagiography as modes of narrative theology, methods of doing the beautiful by “writing the sublime” valuable to promotion of interreligious understanding. As a theologian who attends to interreligious concerns, I embrace a notion, prominent in Abrahamic thought, that beauty is God's very essence. I define beauty as the good that claims us by its attractiveness. The characteristics of beauty, says Aristotle in his Metaphysics, are “orderly arrangement, proportion, and definiteness.” Thus, beauty is a close cousin to “the mathematical sciences.” In that vein, a classical Islamic maxim calls calligraphy (from the Greek for “beautiful writing”) “a spiritual geometry produced by a material instrument.” For each of the contributors to the Writing the Sublime exhibition, scribing is a devotional act—a discipline of ambassadorship for the text, of being “written through.” For them, each element—the ink, the quill, the writing surface, the letters themselves—manifests the divine. Noting that they were collaborating “at a time when the world's actions are guided by mistrust,” they prayed that they might “be God's hands in the troubled world.” Of their collaboration, they said: “in our quiet way, we are taking a stand.” In addition to individual offerings, Gorst, Yerman, and Zakariya created collaborative works especially for the New York show. Several were the work of two scribes; the exhibition's most exquisite and most controversial opus was the work of all three—a scribing of the biblical and Qur'anic accounts of Moses’ direct experience of the presence of God by means of an encounter with a mysterious fire. Yerman wrote out the story of Moses and the Burning Bush in the Hebrew of the Torah; Gorst, in Vulgate Latin; Zakariya, in the Arabic of the Qur'an. Their work could have taken the form of three distinct panels—each displaying the text of the story as if a freestanding page from a book, then displayed as a triptych. Instead, the three scribes took the novel approach of working jointly on a single piece of goatskin. All materials had to be both halal and kosher. Script styles were chosen to relate historically one to the other. Then, Yerman scribed the story in Hebrew down the center third of the surface, using black ink only. Gorst added the Latin version in the left‐hand column, illuminating the initial letter with red and gold. Finally, Zakariya wrote the Qur'anic account in the right‐hand column—mostly in black ink; but in portions of the text, using red ink or kalemu’z‐zeheb (the golden pen—i.e., script written in gold leaf or with ink made from gold pigment); and, as needed, inserting gold durak (small rosettes) and other ornaments, some with touches of red. “Each calligraphic piece is a record of the spiritual journey of the scribe while writing the piece,” Gorst remarked; and creating this exhibition was a journey she and her calligrapher‐colleagues had chosen. However, the process of executing Moses and the Burning Bush had indeed challenged them. It challenged their audience, too! At the exhibition opening, it seemed to me that some viewers were as off‐put and upset by the juxtaposition of Hebrew and Arabic—by the scribing of a portion of the Bible and portion of the Qur'an side by side on the same as piece of parchment—as others were fascinated and delighted. The trio mounted a similar exhibition...