VISUAL CULTURE

Suzannah Biernoff, ’Carnal relations: Embodied sight in Merleau-Ponty, Roger Bacon and St Francis’ , in the Journal of Visual Culture, Vol. 4.1, April 2005 [cont’d]

We can imagine a disembodied mind having visual experiences but not tactile ones. Sight does not require our being part of the material world in the way in which feeling by touching does. – G. N. A. Vesey, ‘Vision’, The Encyclopedia of Philosophy

True philosophy consists in re-learning to look at the world, and in this sense a historical account can give meaning to the world quite as ‘deeply’ as a philosophical treatise. – Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception

Vision is often imagined (L. imaginare, ‘to picture to oneself’) as an intellectual act, and ocular metaphors dominate our accounts of knowledge and understanding. I’ll say ‘I see what you mean’ if I’ve understood you, or I might question the clarity of your ideas (from the Greek idein, ‘to see’). Seeing and knowing are linguistically and symbolically entwined in Indo-European cultures (Tyler 1984). The mind has its own ‘eye’ with which to inspect and to speculate (L. specere, ‘to look at or observe’) and I can try with this interior ‘eye’ to put things ‘in perspective’: to take a step back, remove myself from the scene, and survey the situation more ‘objectively’.

This ancient constellation of metaphors helps to explain why sight has so often been characterised as the least bodily of the senses. In the Aristotelian tradition vision was associated with cognition, while touch was the sense most fundamental for survival (On the Soul 3.13.435a-b; Sense and Sensibilia 1.436b-437a). There is almost an evolutionary logic to the classical sensory hierarchy, with sight representing the human potential for knowledge, the capacity to transcend the particular through reason; and touch, the primordial sense, signifying the animal nature we share with the beasts. Keller and Grontkowski summarise the epistemological formula of Western philosophy in a sentence: vision ‘connects us to the truth as it distances us from the corporeal’ (1983: 209).

This paper aims to complicate recent accounts of ocularcentrism or the primacy of vision by comparing two moments in a more intimate and distinctly corporeal history of vision: one pre-modern, the other modern – albeit with a postmodern afterlife (for example Dillon, 1991; Busch and Gallagher, 1992; Foti, 1996). The resonances between medieval visual theory and Merleau-Ponty’s account of embodied vision are not evidence of a continuous history, and scientific developments during the intervening centuries produce very different ideas about the nature of visual ‘contact’. Nevertheless, remarkable similarities emerge from the encounter imagined here: most importantly, a relational understanding of vision, embodiment and subjectivity; and the role of the flesh in figuring these relationships.

My first set of examples is drawn from the later medieval period in Western Europe, beginning around 1200. In terms of the broader histories of vision and visuality, the thirteenth century is interesting because scientific attention to optical theory and empirical observation coincided with a more general re-orientation and discursive elaboration of sight, as a perceptual process but also as a means of social communication and spiritual communion. To paraphrase Umberto Eco, one might speak of a perceptual shift from symbolism to naturalism during this period: instead of looking through the visible world towards a higher, invisible reality, many people (among them scientists and artists) looked attentively at nature (Eco, 1988: 141; Caviness, 1991). They also looked at God. As Gothic churches were being adorned with painted altarpieces, crucifixes, fresco cycles and liturgical objects, devotional practices were becoming increasingly focused on the visual perception of the sacred as well as on techniques of interior visualisation. An emphasis on private devotion from the thirteenth century onwards provided the impetus for the production of illuminated manuscripts; small, affordable devotional paintings and sculptures; and the construction of family chapels. The later Middle Ages also saw the popularisation of ‘indulgence images’ associated with the remission of sin, and a proliferation of miracle working images.

Visual metaphors and ocular desires pervade thirteenth-century scientific and theological texts, sermons, folklore and the literature of courtly love. Sight is celebrated as the foundation of empirical knowledge and the means by which Christians can understand God’s divine nature as well his humanity. A look could harm or caress; it could reveal the mathematical structure of a walnut or the mystery of the sacred wounds; it could serve the spirit or the flesh, idle curiosity or philosophical reflection. All of these beliefs and practices might be described as ocularcentric, but this would be to suggest that the privileging of sight amounted to a coherent discourse rather than a set of ideas and behaviours that were often in conflict. W. J. T. Mitchell is right to question some of the assumptions that have informed recent discussions of ocularcentrism, particularly its association with modernity. He maintains, and I agree, that the ‘notion of vision as hegemonic or non-hegemonic is simply too blunt an instrument to produce much in the way of historical or critical differentiation’ (2002: 174). Instead of a unified ‘regime’ of vision, one finds in the Middle Ages a deep ambivalence towards vision and the visible and also, unsurprisingly, an ambivalence towards the body. It is this particular nexus of vision and embodiment that I wish to explore here. In the heterogeneous texts and images that bear traces of medieval ways of seeing and knowing, two distinct tendencies or traditions can be discerned, and each is articulated in relation to the body or flesh.

[Fig. 2: Diagram of the eye from Roger Bacon’s Opus majus. London, British Museum MS Royal 7. F.viii fol. 54v. TRANSPARENCY & PERMISSION TO FOLLOW]

The more familiar tradition – to which I have alluded already – privileges empirical observation and intellectual insight. Roger Bacon’s Perspectiva, one of the most influential western medieval texts on optics, opens with the claim that optical science is ‘the flower of the whole of philosophy’. Through optics, ‘and not without it, can the other sciences be known’ (1962, 2: 420). Bacon (c. 1214-92) studied at Oxford and Paris, and joined the Franciscan order in 1257. By the time he began his major works in the 1260s, he had access to translations of a wealth of Arabic material on optics that had not been available to his predecessors, and it is the synthesis of Greek and Arabic learning for which he is most famous (Lindberg 1976: 104-16; 1983: xxxv-liv). Optics was to be the key that would unlock the natural world. As well as being an object or field of study, perspectiva was a way of seeing, a discipline in both senses of the word: the verb perspicere means to survey or scrutinise, to investigate thoroughly, to ‘see through’. Geometrical abstraction functioned something like an x-ray, enabling the ‘perspectivist’ to discern the underlying structure of the natural world. If this sounds like a chapter in the progressive rationalisation of sight, it is worth pausing over some of the affinities between medieval science and theology. Steven Goldman (1982) has argued that modern science shares with medieval Christian thought a certain symbolic or ‘iconic’ tendency. Instead of displacing the symbolising sensibility of Augustine and his medieval followers, geometrical optics could be said to have extended that mentality into the equally symbolic language of mathematics. Well practiced in reading nature as ‘a book whose author was God’ (Goldman, 1982: 10), medieval scholars like Bacon were fluent when it came to the elaboration of physical or geometrical ‘allegories’. Seen in this way, scientific naturalism – like its pictorial equivalent – must be regarded not in fact as natural, inevitable and universal, but as cultural and semiotic.

The other reason to be sceptical of allusions to a singular (objectifying, disembodied, dispassionate) ‘scientific gaze’ is that medieval science paradoxically contributed to a broader cultural investment in bodily experience. This happened largely through the influence of Aristotelian thought from around 1200, with its valorisation of the body as the foundation of knowledge. Following Aristotle, Bacon insists that sensation occurs in the organs of sense: the eyes, the nerves of the skin and surrounding flesh, the internal organs of the brain. In the Aristotelian Middle Ages there was no mind-body ‘problem’ (Putnam and Nussbaum, 1994). The images of the visible world reproduced in the eyes and brain are, for Bacon as for Aristotle, material images. The idea of a disembodied mind having visual experiences is an oxymoron in this context because the sensitive soul is embodied; its perceptions and emotions ‘enmattered’ (Aristotle, On the Soul: 1.1.403a25).

[Fig. 3: Giotto di Bondone, St Francis of Assisi Receiving the Stigmata, Louvre. TRANSPARENCY & PERMISSION TO FOLLOW]

This Aristotelian understanding of the body-subject coincided with a new devotional emphasis on the bodily (especially visual) experience of an increasingly human God. As with the abstractive, ‘symbolising’ tendency in medieval religion and science, this seemingly contradictory privileging of material bodies and images suggests a cross-fertilization of medieval science and spirituality. I will focus on just one point of confluence here: the theory of sensible species and its significance for the devotional ideal of imitatio Christi. From a modern point of view the theory of species is one of the more peculiar details of pre-modern science. The term comes from the Indo-European spek: ‘to see’. In its archaic sense, it simply meant ‘aspect, form, or exterior appearance’ (Lindberg, 1983: liv), but by the later Middle Ages species had become the foundation of neo-Aristotelian physics. Following Aristotle and his Arabic commentators, Bacon claimed that species radiated from everything in the physical world to produce effects (Lindberg, 1983: lv). Sensible species were responsible for perception. Sight, said Bacon, occurs when the species of an object ‘impresses’ its form on the responsive matter of the eye and brain: not in the superficial way that a seal is reproduced in wax, but a deeper impression that produces a transformation ‘in the interior of the recipient’ and not just ‘in a surface’ (Bacon in Lindberg, 1983: 45). When we talk of being affected or ‘moved’ by something, we are using a figure of speech that derives ultimately from this Aristotelian principle that sensation is a ‘qualitative alteration’ (Aristotle, On the Soul 2.4.415b). To perceive or sense (there is no distinction between sensation and perception for Aristotle or Bacon) is to be materially altered.

The medieval phenomenon of imitatio Christi shares a number of basic principles with Bacon’s optics, most importantly the conviction that sight entails a physical transformation of the spectator. St Francis of Assisi’s conversion before the crucifix ‘proved’ that seeing was not only believing, but being assimilated with Christ’s flesh and blood through a visual interaction. In the official biography of St Francis, Bonaventure’s Legenda maior, the saint’s identification with Christ is described in the most detailed and naturalistic terms. Written between 1260-63, the Legenda was used by Giotto for his frescoes of the life of St Francis in the upper church at Assisi. Francis’s flesh becomes ‘wax’, moulded into the image of the crucified Christ: bq.[A]s the vision disappeared, it left in his heart a wondrous glow, but on his flesh also it imprinted a no less wondrous likeness of its tokens. For his hands and feet seemed to be pierced through the midst with nails, the heads of the nails shewing in the palms of the hands, and upper side of the feet, and their points shewing on the other side; the heads of the nails were round and black in the hands and feet, while the points were long, bent, and as it were turned back, being formed of the flesh itself, and protruding therefrom. The right side, moreover, was – as if it had been pierced by a lance – seamed with a ruddy scar, wherefrom ofttimes welled the sacred blood, staining his habit and breeches’ (1904: 139-40).

The ‘image’ of Christ received by St Francis is more than a pictorial likeness; it is a sculptural reproduction. In fact Bonaventure mixes his metaphors. God is the divine sculptor, fashioning the image of Christ out of flesh (1904: 155); but he is also the Word, writing his creation into existence. St Francis bears the marks of the crucifixion ‘written on his members of flesh by the finger of the Living God’ (1904: 141). This ambiguity surrounding the mode of representation (writing or sculpting) is not confined to theological discussions of imitatio Christi. Mary Carruthers (1990) has shown that metaphors of writing/reading and picturing/viewing were central to medieval discussions of memory. Whether written and read or pictorially represented and viewed, memory was conceived as a physical process; a bodily imprint as real as St Francis’s stigmata. In this sense, the devotional practice of identification with Christ mirrors (and no doubt exploits) the medieval ‘art of memory’, with its emphasis on bodily sight, interior visualisation, and the mnemonic articulation of memory images (see Bennett, 2001). To gaze, like Francis, at a crucifix, or to meditate on scenes from the Passion would have been to enter into this fabric of associations and expectations.

It seems axiomatic to say that vision is crucial to visionary mysticism. Little, however, has been written on the subject beyond the observation that religious images frequently served as a stimulus and focus for visions (for example Hamburger, 1990: 162-67 and 1992: 120 ff; Ringbom, 1969: 160-62). Julian of Norwich’s ‘showings’ are typical in this respect. Completed in around 1393, the diary of her sixteen revelations is marked by the seemingly ubiquitous presence of a crucifix. The Second Revelation for example begins with the words: ‘. . . I looked with bodily vision into the face of the crucifix which hung before me, in which I saw a part of Christ’s Passion . . .’ (1978: 193). Jesus appears before her bodily eyes, and it is his corporeal, visible presence which precipitates her own physical and emotional ‘passion’. It is possible to explain St Francis’s encounter with Christ in terms of an intense psychological identification or read Julian’s visions as hallucinations, her pains and paralysis as psychosomatic symptoms. The alternative is to approach visionary literature in its historical context: to ask why imitatio Christi was so plausible and compelling as a spiritual goal. Julian and Francis would not have explained the changes in their bodies in psychopathological terms, but they would certainly have thought of sight – ordinary or miraculous – as a physical interaction. My argument is that miraculous visions and mystical revelations merely amplify the corporeal effects of ordinary sight as understood by Bacon and his commentators. Similarly, the functions and significance of medieval images (both mental and extramental) reflect a specifically medieval understanding of vision.

[Fig. 4: Imago Pietatis. Manuscript illumination, Franciscan prayer book. TRANSPARENCY & PERMISSION TO FOLLOW]

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