A Clash of Theories: Discussing Late Medieval Devotional Perception

• Autores: Pablo Acosta García
• Localización: Touching, Devotional Practices, and Visionary Experience in the Late Middle Ages / Pablo Acosta García (ed. lit.), David Carrillo Rangel (ed. lit.), Delfi-Isabel Nieto Isabel (ed. lit.), 2019, ISBN 978-3-030-26029-3, págs. 1-17
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • 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. 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. Therefore, facing devotion may be coherently understood as studying human perception in its relationship with a multimedial contextual frame. 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. 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.