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CHAPTER
AN AESTHETIC APPROACH
TO RELIGION
S. Brent Plate
Hamilton College
Preface
The cultivation and appreciation of art and beauty or aesthetics is integral to religious
traditions the world over. Nearly all religions reserve some form of art for devotional
purposes. Individuals are often inspired to create works of art to express their faith or
reverence for a sacred entity. Varied forms of music are employed by religions globally
as expressions of belief. Even the beat of a drum can serve as a call to faith or a means
to convey an affective desire. And many religions use certain carefully stylized physical
postures or movements to support spiritual experience
Material culture pulses with themes that evoke and provoke religious observance
and communicate much about belief. In North America, for example, religious symbols
pervade nearly every dimension of lived experience. Everywhere, the faiths of the world
are embedded in cultural customs that create or ascribe to human experience that which
might be regarded as beautiful. Aesthetics is inseparable from our human sensory experience and our cultural, social, and religious history. In this chapter, S. Brent Plate explores
the terrain of aesthetics in relation to religion and religious practices.
Chapter Goals
To introduce and reflect on aesthetics as a category of religious sensory encounter
To provide readers with the means to begin to consider aesthetics as an approach
to religion
To provide an opportunity for reflection on how the senses relate to religious practice
and religion generally
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INTRODUCTION
There are two popular, related understandings of
the word aesthetics (sometimes spelled esthetics).
The first is found in intellectual circles and tends
to relate to theories of art, often in attempts to
define beauty. The second is found in general
cultural environments and refers to ways of
altering the human body to make it more beautiful: stores specializing in aesthetics may offer
pedicures, manicures, facials, and so on, while the
more extreme aesthetic surgery beautifies the
body through cosmetic nips and tucks.
This chapter will touch on the common
understanding that aesthetics relates to beauty,
with a critical emphasis on the body, but will
expand the concept and apply it to religions. The
modern aesthetics comes from the Greek aesthesis,
which pertains to sensory perception. Aesthetics, as introduced here, is about the ways human
bodies sense their religious worlds particularly
through sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell.
While sometimes the sensual encounter enables
people to be touched by beautiful art, more
typically these aesthetic experiences occur on
an immediate and everyday basis: in the candle
lit before Sabbath prayer, in the incense smelled
upon entering the temple, in the bitter herbs
eaten at Passover, in the chanted call to prayer
of the Muezzin, in the watercolor portrayal of
the head of Jesus Christ, in the stroll through
the gardens of Kyoto. An aesthetic approach to
religion therefore pays attention to senses as they
engage with the material objects and activities
that comprise the religious experience.
By focusing on the vital role that materiality and the senses play in human experience,
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THE SENSES
In December 2005, the New York Times reported
new scientific findings on a strange and often
mythically imagined creature, the narwhal, a
smallish whale with a long tusk on its head,
looking something like a submarine unicorn.
Long thought to possess magical powers, the
tusk of this arctic dwelling mammal is now
understood to contain more than ten million
nerve endings that can detect subtle changes
of temperature, pressure, particle gradients and
probably much else. Beyond its mythology, the
tusk is, in strict terms, an extended tooth that
functions like a sense organ. The lead scientist
in the study suggests of the creature in its chilly,
aquatic environment: Of all the places youd
think youd want to do the most to insulate yourself from that outside environment, this guy has
gone out of his way to open himself up to it.1
The point here is to see how sense organs
operate as openings that connect an individual
creature and its surrounding world. Further,
those openings have adapted to fit particular
animals in particular places as a means of survival. They are not wide openings that allow all
forms of information to pass through. Instead,
they function in highly specialized ways, filtering
what goes in and out.
1. Quoted in William J. Broad, Its Sensitive. Really, New York Times, December 13, 2005.
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HEARING
Humans receive sonic vibrations through their
ears. We quickly learn to tell the difference
between a voice raised in anger and sweet whispers in the ear, between punk rock and J. S. Bach.
Sometimes sounds are harmonic, sometimes
melodic, sometimes spoken, sometimes screamed,
sometimes sung. Words, chants, and music are
all media of devotional expression, interhuman
communication, and religious revelation: God
2. William Paden, Religious Worlds (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), 51, 52.
3. Edward T. Hall, The Hidden Dimension (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966), 2.
SMELL
To understand local cultures and religious worlds
more broadly, it is necessary to attend to the aromascape. Smell is, admittedly, the most difficult
of the senses to discuss on paper. Nonetheless,
aromas subtlety for comprehending the ways
religions operate is all the more powerful because
of its potential to be literally overlooked.
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4. Hildegard of Bingen, Book of Divine Works with Letters and Songs, ed. M. Fox (Santa Fe, NM: Bear and Company, 1987), 130;
quoted in Constance Classen, The Color of Angels: Cosmology, Gender, and the Aesthetic Imagination (London: Routledge, 1998),
59. Many dimensions of this section are indebted to Classens work.
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TASTE
The crucial religious dimension of memory
ultimately connects with all the senses, though it
seems smell and taste have the strongest relations
to the past. Strangely enough, those two senses
are perhaps the most interlinked, even as they are
the most overlooked in religious studies.
Every spring, Jews around the world celebrate one of the oldest ongoing rituals, the
Passover Seder, which narratively and gustatorily
celebrates the Exodus of the ancient Israelites
from slavery in Egypt. The historian Yosef Hayim
Yerushalmi explains of this story and annual
ritual of liberation:
[I]n the course of a meal around the family table,
ritual, liturgy, and even culinary elements are
orchestrated to transmit a vital past from one generation to the next. . . . Significantly, one of the
first ritual acts to be performed is the lifting up of a
piece of unleavened bread (matzah). . . . Memory here is no longer recollection, which still preserves a sense of distance, but reactualization.6
5. Susan Rasmussen, Making Better Scents in Anthropology: Aroma in Tuareg Sociocultural Systems and the Shaping of
Ethnography, Anthropological Quarterly 72, no. 2 (April 1999): 69.
6. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1996), 44.
TOUCH
Though the human skin is the largest organ of
the body, touch is often the least valued sense
in modern religious discourse. As with all
the senses and especially with the sense of
touch religious philosophers and others often
contrast information received by the body to that
received by the mind. Touch is, in a real sense,
proof of what we know, and so it is contrasted
with true faith, which believes even if it does
not see. There are many indications that the
need for touch to verify truth is a sign of weak
faith, and so there ends up a paradoxical situation in which touch becomes confirmation, even
as it shows that the person touching is not a
true believer. The evidence needed by doubting
Thomas (see Jn 20:24 29) speaks to the human
need for felt evidence, evidence beyond that
which is seen. Yet the supernatural vision of the
Resurrection of Jesus is supposed to be enough
for all his followers: both Mary and Thomas see
the Resurrected Jesus, but each, in turn, are not
supposed to touch. Seeing provides evidence
enough, and to touch would be to diminish
faith. Still, I John 1:1 makes it clear that sensual
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VISION
Among modern Western religious believers,
vision is considered the most prominent sense,
and this arguably could be true for human
consciousness in general. Religious language frequently reflects the deep-seated nature of vision.
There are spiritual seers and visionaries;
religious people hold worldviews and perspectives as they await insight and clarity. Even
revelation and apocalypse are terms of sight. Of
course such language metaphorically points
beyond the readily apparent material world, and
yet these metaphors are based on the physical.
Religious seeing is a vital part of traditions around
7. Information on this practice is indebted to the research of Tunde M. Akinwumi, in an unpublished paper on wall-gecko
scarification motifs.
8. Diana Eck, Darshan. 3rd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 3.
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CONCLUSION
To understand religions, it is important not only
to study their sacred texts, rituals, doctrines, myths,
and symbols but also to understand how religious
worlds are constructed using the senses. Media
theorist Marshall McLuhan posits that there are
ratios of sense perceptions that differ from culture
to culture. Some religious worlds strongly emphasize hearing in their rituals, for example, while
others might emphasize touch in their mythology. Every religious world explicitly or implicitly
has a sense ratio that suggests certain senses are
more important than others in shaping their own
particular worlds. Such insights make analyses of
religions more complex and more complete.
As we have seen, material-sensual activities
should not be seen as somehow opposing the
supernatural realm; rather, it is through sensual
activity that humans participate in and experience religion, including its immaterial elements:
incense is a prayer, drums evoke gods, body scarification declares identity, drinking wine and eating bread invoke a shared past, and icons convey
supernatural power. Myths, rituals, and symbols
Muslims protested the printing of cartoon caricatures of Muhammad in the Danish newspaper
Jyllands-Posten in 2005. Likewise, many Christians protested Cosimo Cavallaros sculpture of
a crucifixion image of Jesus Christ made entirely
out of chocolate and entitled My Sweet Lord,
when it was displayed in a midtown Manhattan
gallery in 2006. The point here is that religious
authorities regulate the participation of adherents in sensational forms.9
To conclude, let us return to the arts. Artistic expressions are a conduit for innovation and
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Additional Resources
Carp, Richard M. 2006. Teaching Religion and
Material Culture. Teaching Theology and Religion
10, no.1: 2-12.
Chidester, David. 1992. Word and Light: Seeing, Hearing, and Religious Discourse. Urbana: University of
Illinois Press.
Classen, Constance. 1998. The Color of Angels: Cosmology, Gender, and the Aesthetic Imagination. New
York: Routledge.
Howes, David, ed. 2005. Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader. New York: Berg Publishers.
Lamothe, Kimerer. 2004. Between Dancing and Writing: The Practice of Religious Studies. New York:
Fordham University Press.
Meyer, Birgit, ed. 2008. Media and the Senses. Material Religion: The Journal of Objects, Art, and Belief.
Special Issue. Oxford, UK: Berg Publishers.
9. See S. Brent Plate, Blasphemy: Art That Offends (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2006).
Continued . . .
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Additional Resources
Morgan, David. 2005. The Sacred Gaze: Religious
Visual Culture in Theory and Practice. Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press.
Continued . . .
Seremetakis, C. Nadia, ed. 1994. The Senses Still: Perception and Memory as Material Culture in Modernity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.