The Spiritual Senses

With the kind permission of Professor Marcus Plested, here is an excerpt from his chapter in the Dumbarton Oaks Byzantine Symposia volume edited by Susan Ashbrook Harvey & Margaret Mullett, Knowing Bodies, Passionate Souls: Sense Perceptions in Byzantium (Harvard University Press, 2017), 301–312. 

“If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.

For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.”

—William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell—

William Blake is just one representative of the long history of the doctrine of the spiritual senses—the idea that there are within the human being faculties corresponding in some manner with the five physical senses, yet capable of direct apprehension of spiritual and divine realities. In Blake’s dazzling if decidedly sui generis mystical vision the cleansing of the doors of perception, the awakening of the spiritual senses, involves a shattering transformation of the physical senses which in and of themselves are profoundly limiting, affording “narrow chinks” of reality at best. As the same poem puts it: “How do you know but ev’ry Bird that cuts the airy way, / Is an immense world of delight, clos’d by your senses five?” For Blake, this process of cleansing involved a good deal of spiritual struggle and mental fight, a dimension of his teaching circumvented in some of his epigones—witness Aldous Huxley’s Doors of Perception or the eponymous Los Angeles rock group. But what is perhaps most significant in Blake for our purposes is his sense of the continuity between physical and spiritual perception—the spiritual senses are for Blake a kind of radical enhancement or unleashing of the physical senses, the kind of enhanced vision that enables one to see angels in the trees of Peckham Rye.

Blake’s affirmation of the essential congruity of the physical and spiritual senses may be contrasted with much of the western mystical tradition in which spiritual sensation seems to involve the cessation or closing down of physical sensation. This strand of reflection has a long pedigree within the western mystical tradition, being implicit in the root μύω(close the eye), from which we have μυέω(initiate into the mysteries). Within the context of mystical experience this closing of the physical eye is necessary in order to open up that inner sight capable of apprehending the supreme reality underpinning and sustaining all things—ready, that is, to perceive the fullness of the transformative vision and experiences offered in the mystery cults and other religious contexts of antiquity. But even here we need not assume that spiritual sensation involves the complete cessation and negation of physical sensation. Physical sight was presumably a necessary precondition of spiritual seeing in, for example, the mysteries of Eleusis—one had to see the sacred ear of corn physically before apprehending its inner and more divine nature. Having said that, it is a given within much of the classical mystical tradition that spiritual perception is infinitely superior to physical perception and that the physical senses, where they do not actively militate against the mind’s struggle to ascend out of the realm of materiality, serve at best as a kind of springboard or launching pad for the higher faculties of perception.

These non-Byzantine examples have been chosen not only to underline the fact that the notion of spiritual senses extends well beyond the realm of Byzantine theologoumena but also to flag some of the key questions that attend the notion, most notably the central question of the precise nature of the relationship between these two realms of perception. Questions attending the spiritual senses became a major area of interest and indeed contention within the Byzantine theological tradition. This essay serves as an attempt to discern the lineaments of the Byzantine understanding of the spiritual senses through a broadly diachronic discussion of some of the key expositors of the doctrine of the spiritual senses. But while focused perforce on explicit explorations of the subject at hand, this essay also aspires to give some hint of the all-pervading nature of theological considerations when it comes to understanding the Byzantine sensorium in all its fullness.

The doctrine of the spiritual senses is a constant within Byzantine theology and ascetic teaching. It is also deeply embedded within the liturgical and iconographic framework of the Empire. In the Byzantine world physical sense perception was only ever part of the story. Beyond the realm of the senses—separated only by the thin veil of materiality—lay a variegated world of heightened or transformed perception, a realm of divine encounter and struggle against the opposing powers. Robert Byron expresses this in inimitable fashion in his declamation, “in the eyes of the Byzantine, mortal life was a maze-like venture amid non-terrestrial forces, demoniac and divine, circling around him, imminent and overwhelming.”[1] With every sight of an icon, every touch of a relic, every taste of the eucharist, every hearing of scripture or hagiography, every sniff of incense, the Byzantine man or woman was called out of the realm of everyday sense perception and into another world. Without assuming that every Byzantine man or woman was willing or able to respond to that invitation, the nature of that invitation is a question that preoccupied the minds of some of the greatest theologians of the age.

The doctrine of the spiritual senses is not univocal.[2] Various opinions exist within the Byzantine tradition as to the relation between the physical and the spiritual senses (depending here very much on the underlying anthropology and the extent which a given author has grappled with the implications of the incarnation). Similarly, various views exist as to the number of spiritual senses, whether spiritual senses are to be transcended at a certain point, whether the spiritual senses require the extinction or at least the transformation of the physical senses, or whether they are best construed as an intensification of the physical senses. I shall in what follows attempt to give some idea of the Byzantine doctrine of the spiritual senses as it unfolded over time, taking the story from Origen up to the Hesychast controversy of the fourteenth century, a period which saw the spiritual senses gravitate to the heart of the dogmatic enterprise of the Byzantine Church.

Notes

[1] The Byzantine Achievement (London, 1929), 155.

[2] The seminal treatment of the doctrine of the spiritual senses in the modern era is A.-F. Poulain, Des grâces d'oraison: Traité de théologie mystique, 10th ed. (Paris, 1910), 93–125. His sources are, however, largely western (Dionysios the Areopagite being the chief exception).