Christian devotional practices are of a very ambiguous nature, they encompass the passage from the realms of the body to the realms of the mind, and, in the case of involved revelatory phenomena, even to the states beyond the intellectual.1 In Late Medieval Christianity, these practices can initially be described as conscious, culturally oriented performances that use different media in order to mobilize the devotee’s affect (affectus ) through the use of her/his senses.2 Therefore, facing devotion may be coherently understood as studying human perception in its relationship with a multimedial contextual frame.3 If this perspective is right, the initial question may be: how can processes that are hardly documented and which, by definition, involve the devotee’s inexpressible experience of the sacred, be approached and done justice? From a modern critical perspective, every conception of the human sensorium is mediated by cultural assumptions in which the number of senses, their supposed hierarchy and their possible interactions related to religious practices, present great variation, depending on the source used to interpret them.4 Therefore, recreating processes from the past that encompass perception, experience and/or a revelation is an extremely problematic issue, at least from the point of view of historical hermeneutics. For instance, the precise, critical significance of ‘affection’ in religious contexts that imply the aforementioned passage from the physical to the numinous must be discussed. When the expression ‘affective practices’ is inserted into the academic discourse, are we emphasizing the media used to cause the experience, the effects of these media on the user, the experience itself or the whole process? Pointing to this affective character could be, but should not be, a sympathetic method with which to approach our understanding of meditative processes in a scholarly but patronizing way. In fact, most of the times, the synchronic perception of the devotee conveys the idea that what s/he underwent was a real, sacred experience, wheter it was caused by an external input or caused by the process itself.
From the point of view of modern scholarship, the most common avenue for recovering a precise functioning of the senses from a religious standpoint is to reconstruct the conceptions of intellectually oriented texts, which, in the case of Late Medieval devotion, were usually authored by (mostly male) theologians.5 These are the first theories traditionally faced by literature in a quête for the functioning of religious processes: frequently complex discourses used to frame historical depictions of devotional living practices or to fit the function of a devotional tool into a certain system of references. Again, some questions arise here: how do these texts, mostly written by upper-class intellectuals, help us to understand actual devotional practices, mostly undertaken by lay, frequently illiterate, people? Were they used by devotees? If so, following what channels? Are the links normally established by scholars between, for example, Saint Augustine’s classic passage on the three types of vision and later visionary experiences such as that of Angela of Foligno modern links constructed ad hoc or links actually known to devotees?6 These questions point to what I call a first clash of theories.
Frequently when a scholar faces theological discourses on the senses and the sacred, the main issues are not only to establish a concrete hierarchy and to define specific interactions between different senses, but also to establish a coherent, systematic vocabulary that works for the study of devotion in Late Medieval Christianity. And this is far from being an unambiguous task. For example, it is easy to understand the extreme complexity that characterizes Christian exegetical tradition just revisiting the chapters contained in the 2014 volume titled The Spiritual Senses: Perceiving God in Western Christianity, which chronologically reviews the concept in a variety of Christian authors. As its editors, Paul Gavrilyuk and Sarah Coakley, put it in the introduction to the volume, the only way to produce a book like this is to use the expression ‘spiritual senses’ like an ‘umbrella term’ or, in other words, as an operative concept that covers different uses (in fact, very different uses) in different systems of thought from different periods of time; that is to say that the medieval theoretical approaches to the senses could not only be diverse, but also contradictory.7 Following this, the approach used in this volume, on the one hand, separates the vocabulary taken from a variety of modern, interdisciplinary hermeneutical frames from the constructions of the theological exegetical practice of the period and, on the other, studies very specific devotional practices from the complex perspective of the performer of those practices.
Regarding the terminology of modern hermeneutics and the construction of devotion as a historical category, we need to review the boom of visual studies during the 1990s, especially in the fields of Art History, Anthropology and Cultural Studies, which rapidly developed a strong branch in the History of Christian Devotion.8 Ground-breaking works such as those by Hans Belting or Jeffrey F. Hamburger, on ‘images’ as necessary visual media to lead the devotee from the material to the immaterial, opened a wide range of new avenues for understanding not only religious acts, but also the conception of the artistic objects used to accomplish contemplation.9 These studies were also extremely useful in beginning to grasp the life of the religious ‘stuff’ not exclusively as works of art, but rather as very functional tools designed to be used in specific environments and as part of a visual culture that achieved meaning through the way in which their users interacted with it.10 From the 1990s onward, the contextual frame is seen as an integrated part of the performance and, therefore, of the meaning-in-use of the object. Although these perspectives have been enormously important, lately it has been pointed out that they reinforce a tendency in Western thought to focus on sight as the primary sense in the theory of knowledge. In this way, what is a naturally complex process of bodily and cognitive functions is reduced to the perception of just one sense: sight. This is what has been called ‘ocularcentrism’, a term that highlights a Eurocentric preconception that understands sight-as-the-main-sense-to-know as a universal, anthropological characteristic of every civilization.11 This position has been widely contested. In fact, the conceptual metaphor ‘understanding/knowing is seeing’ should also be reviewed in Christian anthropology.12
For my discussion, let me use the example proposed by Éric Palazzo in his L’invention chrétienne des cinq sens dans la liturgie et l’art au Moyen Âge. There, he states that it is ‘essential to think about the biblical foundations of the Christian sensorial culture’ (my translation).13 When he starts to discuss the hierarchy of the senses, he quotes directly from the famous beginning of the passage of the First letter of John 14:
That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and our hands have handled, of the word of life. For the life was manifested: and we have seen and do bear witness and declare unto you the life eternal, which was with the Father and hath appeared to us.
As Palazzo states, this is the typical biblical quotation that medieval theologians used to value human perception, thereby establishi...