Mediating verticality in community – Revd Joseph Simmons SJ

Nicholas of Cusa’s De Visione Dei helps us notice how the act of receiving a work of art is never done in vacuo (any more than its crafting was accomplished ex nihilo). I examine the famous account of Cusa gifting an icon (presumably of Christ) to the monks of Tegernsee, instructing them to hang it above while move around below, letting the eyes follow each as he wanders. Where an earlier aesthetic vision places the viewer in one predetermined point vis-a-vis the painting, Cusa’s vera icona of Christ inverts the gaze while allowing pluriform reception: the icon’s eyes mark the perspectival point of infinity, from and to which all gazing flows. Each wandering monk reports the icon’s eyes following him around the room at the same time. The infinite gaze remains graciously present to each monk in his quantum finitude, with each perceiver visually attuned back to the infinite. Importantly, understanding the whole (kath’holou) of this schema requires not only vertical (visual) but also horizontal (auditory) attunement: the monks are instructed to report what they see to one another. Cusa’s phenomenology (avant la lettre) of aesthetic framing demonstrates that attunement to a work of art happens in communities of reception and verification. I extend his analysis to see how phenomenology of religion likewise occurs in communities of reception.

Revd Joseph Simmons SJ is an American Jesuit, currently writing his doctoral thesis at Campion Hall, Oxford on writers of fiction ‘bothered by God’.

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