The sacred, (in)visibility, and communication: an inter-religious dialogue between Goethe and Hāfez
Dialogue between religions cannot merely be dialogue between doctrines. As soon as religions are considered not only as abstract systems of beliefs but also as embodied practices of faith, their aesthetic dimension becomes prominent. Dialogue therefore involves the sphere of sensibility. How do beli...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic/Print Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Routledge
2010
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| In: |
Islam and Christian-Muslim relations
Year: 2010, Volume: 21, Issue: 4, Pages: 373-384 |
| Further subjects: | B
Islam
B Goethe,Johann W. von |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (doi) |
| Summary: | Dialogue between religions cannot merely be dialogue between doctrines. As soon as religions are considered not only as abstract systems of beliefs but also as embodied practices of faith, their aesthetic dimension becomes prominent. Dialogue therefore involves the sphere of sensibility. How do believers of different faiths weave the fabric of religious experience? Through which senses, signs, and forms of signification and communication does it find expression? Furthermore, how can different religious aesthetic attitudes be encompassed in the same dialogue? This article does not answer these questions through theoretical investigation. Rather, it offers an example of religious ‘aesthetic hospitality’. In one of his poems devoted to Hāfez, Goethe invents a metaphor that opens a space of dialogue between Christian and Islamic aesthetic sensibilities. This metaphor, based on the Christian tradition of acheiropoietai (not-made-with-hands) images of Jesus' face, allows Goethe to bridge two religious semiotics: the Christian one, rather centred on the visibility of the sacred, and the Islamic one, rather centred on its invisibility. Through historical contextualization and semiotic analysis, the article retraces the sources of the Christian imaginaire of acheiropoietai images of Jesus in order to pinpoint the semantic efficacy of Goethe's metaphor. In conclusion, quoting and examining a poem by Hāfez, the article suggests that Goethe's offer of ‘aesthetic hospitality’ is actually a reciprocation, since it responds to a similar offer made to Christianity by his ‘Oriental twin’ in one of his poems several centuries earlier. |
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| ISSN: | 0959-6410 |
| Contains: | In: Islam and Christian-Muslim relations
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1080/09596410.2010.529664 |