Margaret Miles, Image as Insight,"Medieval Optics and the Evil Eye"

Margaret Miles, Image as Insight, "Medieval Optics and the Evil Eye"

The following is an excerpt from the introduction to Image as Insight by Margaret Miles. In this part of the introduction she's arguing for the value of visual hermeneutics in historical research and the use of religious images as historical evidence about the everyday experiences and practices of medieval Christians. tq

We must reconstruct on the evidence of the images themselves the spectrum of messages that were likely to be received by the worshippers who lived with them in vitally interested contemplation on a daily basis throughout their lives. Our job is thus complex and somewhat frightening, protected from guess-work only by an educated eye trained by long and patient looking. Moreover, we must be content with working hypotheses, suggestions, and the description of a range of probable interpretations rather than "proof" for a single meaning identical for all persons who had access to the image.

A further problem arises: The claim that historians must be prepared and equipped to involve ourselves with visual as well as verbal texts cannot be supported by a projection of the significance of modern experience of visual art. Medieval men and women's experience of religious images is far closer to modern experience of media images than to a modern person's visit to a museum. Both contemporary media images and historical religious images were experienced daily. Moreover, three major differences between the visual experience of modern people and that of historical people must be taken into account when we try imaginatively to reconstruct the role of religious images in the life and worship of historical people.

First, modern understanding of physical vision in its popular version differs significantly from the understanding of medieval people. In the theory of vision described by Augustine, the most influential christian author of the medieval and reformation periods, a fire within the body -- the same fire that animates and warms the body -- is collected with unique intensity behind the eyes; for an object to be seen by a viewer, this fire must be projected in the form of a ray that is focused on the object, thereby establishing a two-way street along which the attention and energy of the viewer passes to touch its object. A representation of the object, in turn, returns to the eye and is bonded to the soul and retained in the memory.

This strong visual experience was formulated negatively as the fear of contamination by a dangerous or "unsightly" visual object or positively as belief in the miraculous power of an icon, when assiduously gazed upon, to heal one's disease. Popular beliefs and practices support the conclusion that medieval people considered visual experience particularly powerful for one's good or ill. The persistence of belief in the "evil eye" from classical times to the sixteenth century and beyond is a good example. The evil eye was thought of as a maleficent visual ray of lethal strength. A person who had the evil eye reportedly could touch and poison the soul or body of an enemy. The only protections against the evil eye were making the sign of the cross, keeping one's body thoroughly covered against the baleful touch, and, especially, never meeting the eye of such a person; to do so would be to connect the two visual rays and allow the evil ray direct access to one's soul.

This heightened, even exaggerated, respect for the power, for good or evil, of visual experience is very far from modern understandings of what occurs in vision. Modern theories of vision concentrate on the mechanics of vision without attention to the psychological, moral, or spiritual effects of visual experience; or sociological studies attempt, thus far largely unsuccessfully, to document the effect of media violence or more subtly transmitted values on young people; or psychological studies attempt to identify the unconscious imagery that organizes individual and communal psyches. None of these approaches highlights the power of physical vision to affect the psyche.

Despite the constant bombardment of images for commercial and entertainment purposes, images that compete to catch the eye and thus are highly effective in catching the wallet, modern people prefer to think of themselves as disengaged voyeurs. This is a form of self-deception that makes it difficult for us to sympathize with what we think of as the "superstition" of medieval people who were very conscious of themselves. as powerfully and intimately affected by visual images.

Second, we must notice in our examination of significant differences between modern visual experience and that of medieval people that historical Christians experienced religious images in the context of public worship and devotional piety. The individual viewer confronted the image as a member of an interpreting community, and the image itself was also part of the architectural and liturgical presentation of an ordered cosmos of being, reality, and value. The position in the church building of the various depictions of Christ, the Virgin, saints, and scriptural events indicated their relative importance in the religious life of the community. Christ in Majesty, Christus triumphans, depicted in the half-dome of the apse and in the tympanum of the main portal of a Romanesque church informed the worshipper as she entered that the same Christ who presides over the cosmos is the "door" by which worshippers enter the liturgical gatherings of the faithful. In a series of traditionally placed images, the worshipper received information concerning the meaning and relative importance of the various figures and events.

In addition, religious images were interpreted verbally and reinforced by the liturgy of the churches in which they appeared. In the sacraments conducted in this setting, priests reenacted the same cosmically significant activity, the same paradigmatic events that worshippers saw around them on walls, doors, and windows. The dramatic hieratic quality of the scriptural scenes of the stained-glass windows, spoken and sung in the lectionary of readings and hymns, was reflected in the unity of word, object, and gesture in the sacraments. The field from which to begin to understand the meaning of any particular religious image to worshippers, then, is the occasion of public worship of the christian community.

Another difference between a religious image in use in a worshipping community and the same image in a modern museum is that the worshipper's perception of an image is not an aesthetic appreciation. Rather, the image is valued because of its power to move, to focus the senses and the mind, and to offer a mnemonic aid that gathers the worshipper's strongest and most fundamental ideas, emotions, and memories in an enriched present. An image deplored by an art critic or a theologian may nevertheless contain the power to carry the worshipper to the psychic place in which worship occurs. The taste of cultivated people may have little to do with the images most valued by a worshipper. Certainly, a good deal of the most powerfully moving religious art is also "great art" by the standards of the art connoisseur. But taste, a concept unknown before the Renaissance, does not explain why a particular image or subject was highly esteemed in one historical time and place but not in another. The prevalence of a subject or a style at a particular time and place must lead us to explore its relevance to the religious needs of a worshipping community.

The third major difference between modern visual experiences and those of historical people has already been suggested -- the tremendous increase in the quantity of images seen by a typical modern person. Pre-sixteenth-century women or men, depending on the social class to which they belonged, may have seen only the relatively few images in their local church throughout their lives. The visual, as well as the verbal, overload of modern people requires that all the senses, and especially vision, act much more as "data reduction agencies" than as windows. It is likely that our capacity for vision is -- or will shortly be -- congenitally fatigued by the sheer volume of images with which most modern people cope.

These three fundamental differences of assumptions and experiences constitute a challenge not only for understanding the historical importance of religious images in the life of the christian community but also for historical hermeneutics in general. Every student of history understands about another age only the meanings and values he is prepared by his own sensitivities and values to recognize. Historical interpretation reflects the perspective of the historian, and historians, as modern people, are usually not prepared -- either educationally or psychologically -- to give to historical visual evidence the same interest and attention that they give to verbal texts. Yet it is inadequate, to say the least, to attempt to understand a historic community entirely from study of the writings of a few of its most uncharacteristic members. Recognition that the full task of historical understanding involves the interpretation of both verbal and visual texts will have important results for the reconstruction of a usable history for many modern people who have not found their own situations and interests reflected in historical verbal texts. These texts, almost exclusively the product of culturally privileged, highly educated, male, and most frequently monastic authors, constitute the great bulk of the literary products of Christianity before the modern period.