“So, what is it they believe?” As a sociologist of religion, I’m used to getting some variant of this question when colleagues, students, or curious friends want me to describe a religious community I happen to be studying. And, as a cultural sociologist, I’m sympathetic to this line of questioning. Cultural scholars of religion have long argued that, in order to fully understand how religion shapes human behavior, we need to pay attention to and take seriously the powerful role that religious meanings play in the lives of adherents. Religious symbols, as the famous anthropologist Clifford Geertz noted, instill some of the fundamental “moods and motivations” by which worshippers experience and act in the world. What better way to understand the power of such meanings than to learn about their beliefs—what they believe about God, the nature of the universe, the purpose and meaning of life?
Yet, as sympathetic as I am to the “What do they believe?” question, it can also limit our understandings of religious meaning and experience. The question presumes that once we know the basic ideas or concepts behind a religious individual or community’s most important symbols, we’ve gotten to know something essential about them. In this view, what it means to “be religious”, either at the individual or group level, is acceptance of and adherence to a set of abstract doctrines—that there is no God but Allah and that Muhammad is his Messenger, for example, or that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and born of a Virgin.
Such beliefs are certainly central to any thorough understanding of a religious individual, community, or tradition, but focusing too heavily on these aspects can also give us a disembodied, dematerialized, and even asocial understanding of religious meaning and experience. This is because to be religious isn’t only about accepting specific doctrines. It is also about entering into a specific kind of sensory environment, one that materially engages and organizes individual and collective bodies in particular ways. It is to feel the wooden pews, prayer rugs, or carpeted floors under your backside; to taste the bread at communion or the dates at the end of the day’s fast; to see the magnificence of the massive arches and stained glass windows at St. Paul Cathedral or the simplicity of a prayer circle at a Quaker meeting; to hear the sounds of hymnals, scriptural recitations, or ecstatic worship. Taking seriously these embodied and material aspects of religious life allows us to begin to understand that when someone says, “I believe that Jesus Christ is Lord” or that “There is no God but Allah and Muhammad was his Messenger” or “The Goddess resides within each of us,” what we are hearing is only the tip of a much vaster and deeper structure of cultural meaning and experience. Submerged beneath explicit statements of belief are a lifetime’s worth of bodily engagements with the literal “stuff” of religious life—the familiar feel of hands folded and head bowed in evening prayers, the taste of dates after breaking the Ramadan fast with family, the look in a favorite saint’s eyes during a time of crisis, the sounds of chanting during a pilgrimage.
Religion, of course, is only one area of social life where cultural sociologists do their research. But a focus on the aesthetics of religious culture is relevant for any researcher interested in how particular cultural meanings become important—even sacred—for different social groups. Nationalist symbols like an American flag, for example, generate meanings not only from ideas about patriotism and national myths, but also from sensory engagements within concrete social communities. Growing up in the United States, many of us were socialized into patriotic beliefs by pledging our allegiance, not an abstract belief but a collective practice that involved complex social relationships between material locales and objects (school desks, chairs, white stars and red and white stripes) bodily comportments that engaged the senses (standing up, eyes on the flag, with hands over hearts), and, of course, other people (students, teachers, fellow citizens). Religion, then, is just one very interesting social microcosm in which to explore what social theorist Raymond Williams termed the “structures of feeling” undergirding cultural life as a whole.
Seeing and Believing
For my own part, the importance of the aesthetic side of religious culture became very apparent when I began a recent research project on Eastern Orthodox Christianity in the contemporary United States. While not as widely known as the Protestantism and Catholicism in the U.S., the Eastern Orthodox Church is actually the second largest Christian body in the world today, with some 225–300 million adherents worldwide (about 1.2 million in the U.S.). Walk into a Russian, Greek, Serbian, Syrian, or any of the other sixteen churches that make up the Orthodox Christian communion on a given Sunday morning, and you’ll be exposed to a vibrant religious culture that extends back to the founding first century of the Christian faith.
Bodily engagements with material objects and artifacts are essential to this tradition. During rites, incense fills your nostrils, the chanting of priests and deacons performing the Divine Liturgy ring in your ears and, perhaps most strikingly, the faces of saints, the Virgin Mary (or Theotokos, as the Orthodox often call her, using the Greek for “God-bearer”), and Jesus Christ, the religion’s savior and son of God, seem to stare from all corners of the church. Painted on flat wooden panels with extraordinary color and detail, the holy iconography of the Eastern Orthodox tradition adorn the walls and ceiling of the church. Both abundant and aesthetically intricate, the icons are impossible to ignore.
For Orthodox Christians, icons are much more than decoration. They are said to literally make present holy figures. Those who interact with icons are allowed tangible access to an otherwise invisible relationship with the figure portrayed in the image. The subject of the icon is also, in some sense, at one with the icon; it has a spiritual presence beyond but also within the material object. In common Orthodox parlance, these icons are “windows onto heaven,” and they extend the presence of holy persons into devotees’ everyday lives.
On one hand, we could simply say that the Eastern Orthodox believe that icons make holy figures literally present to the faithful. This would certainly be true. On the other hand, sticking strictly to the language of belief, while at least giving attention to these material objects, still misses how icons are active partners in the creation and maintenance of belief. Orthodox Christians don’t just believe things about icons, they believe through them—they pray with them in times of contemplation, they kiss them in moments of gratitude, they venerate them as a matter of admiration and respect, they implore them in times of frustration and despair. Icons are not mere placeholders for already existing religious beliefs. They are aesthetic mediators of social relationships and cultural meaning. They are matter that matters.
A Cloud of Witnesses
“Since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every earthly care and … run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith …” (Hebrews 12:1–2).
Emile Durkheim, one of the founding fathers of the sociology of religion, noted long ago that religious objects often serve as a symbolic representation of the larger community. They help a group imagine and commemorate itself as a collective. Contemporary scholar of religious images David Morgan elaborates that material images like icons create “…visual situations in which viewers assume a position within a set of relations.”
For Eastern Orthodox communities, icons are a constant reminder that humans are positioned in a set of social relations that span the divides between life and death, heaven and earth. Icons represent a great cloud of witnesses who commune with the faithful. Even within the entrance to the church (the narthex), icons surround you. They often depict Christ, the Holy Trinity, Mary, and important saints such as John the Baptist and St. John Chrysostom. The faithful stop to venerate these icons, which consists of looking the depicted figure in the eyes, crossing one’s self, bowing before the revered figure, and then kissing and sometimes lightly touching the icon (usually near where the hands or feet of the holy figure are depicted).
This cycle of crossing, bowing, and kissing continues as church members enter the main hall (the nave). Here, an icon depicting the patron saint of the church often stands at the entrance. This icon is venerated first, followed by an icon of Christ and then other saints depicted near the iconostasis—a veritable wall of iconography that separates the nave, where lay persons worship, from the sanctuary and the tabernacle, areas where the Eucharist—the mixture of bread and wine believed to be the body and blood of Christ—is located and where only priests are allowed until the taking of communion at the end of the liturgy. Above the tabernacle hangs a crucifix—a depiction of Christ on the cross, an image that shows the faithful their savior dying for their sins. Higher still, an even larger depiction of Christ inside the church’s dome looks down upon all who have congregated there.
During the liturgy itself, the icons also feature prominently. Several times during the two-hour ritual, which includes the collective singing of hymns, reading of biblical scriptures, prayers, and communion, icons are carried by clergy and the faithful again venerate the saints as they pass by.
For newcomers, the physical adoration of these objects may seem strange. The Orthodox faithful, who have seen an influx of inquirers and even a sizeable number of converts to their churches in recent years, understand. “I know that it’s probably very strange for them at first,” a woman named Marjorie told me one Sunday at coffee hour after the liturgy, “seeing all of these pictures of these strange-looking people, and all of us Orthodox kissing them and crossing ourselves in front of them. But I take it as my job to make it un-strange for them. I just say, ‘I want to introduce you to some of my dear friends.’”
Being introduced to a saint or other holy figure through an icon is, in fact, a way in which people are brought into this larger Church community. Established Orthodox members often give icons to new members as gifts, selecting a saint with whom the new worshipper might share some kind of affinity. Peter, a life-long member of an Orthodox Church in Saint Paul, Minnesota, explains:
I’ve been fortunate enough to be a sponsor for several of the new members of our church. And, with a lot of the new converts, I try to give them or lead them to icons that they might feel a connection with. You know, like I’ve given icons of Christ the Teacher and St. John Chrysostom [the patron saint of letters] to people who are educators, or icons of Mary or Joseph to people I know are really doting and fretful parents—God knows, there are plenty of those! Or, you know, maybe something even a bit more personal if the person has confided in me that they struggle with a particular problem in their life, because we all do. Because the amazing thing about the saints is that they were people, just like us. They weren’t perfect. In fact, many of them started out their lives as really damaged, sinful people. So they have their human flaws and foibles, just like we do. But, through their icons, they also let us see that, if you turn toward God and the Church, you can overcome your sins.
In and through the exchange of icons, people like Marjorie and Paul encourage new members to look at the icon and see not a strange picture of a long-dead saint, but a fellow community member, a friend—someone kind of like themselves. Further, in and through the circulation of icons—in liturgical ritual and as sacred gifts—the cloud of witnesses manifests itself in collective practice.
Taking the Virgin Mary for a Drive
Icons not only fill the churches of Eastern Orthodox Christians. Their portability allows the saints to tag along with worshippers into the seemingly mundane spaces of everyday life: homes, workplaces, and even cars.
At home, Orthodox Christians invariably keep what is called an “icon corner”, usually a small shelf or table placed in the east corner of a room (see images for a typical example; icon “corners,” as shown, can also grow to be as large as entire rooms). These spaces have at least one icon of Jesus and the Theotokos, popular saints, and favored saints of the individual and their family members. Worshippers go to the icon corner to offer their daily prayers and devotions, whether in the morning, evening, or both. As a man named Alex told me:
I look over at my icon corner and see that I’m never really alone, that there is this larger community around me all the time, praying along with me and encouraging me to keep going along the path I’ve taken.
Icons, in other words, act as material mediators of religious community. Their presence outside the church space allows even seemingly individual prayers to be experienced as collective.
The aesthetic dimensions of icons also simply demand attention. To put it bluntly, icons look weird to modern eyes, let alone to the non-religious. In most of our interactions with artworks, for example, we are used to viewing the images with a linear perspective: figures that are farther away are depicted as smaller, giving the viewer the illusion of a naturalistic, three-dimensional image. More geometrically, in most of the art of the past 700 years or so, parallel lines are either shown or could be drawn that would converge at what is called a “vanishing point”. It gives a sense of distance. Icons, however, reverse this perspective, in effect closing distance between religious worshippers and their saints. In traditional Orthodox iconography, figures are enlarged as they go into the distance, diverging against the horizon. The vanishing point is, instead, outside the painting, right where the viewer stands. The effect is an expanding and unfolding toward the viewer.
Moreover, the holy figures are depicted with disproportionately large eyes and ears and small noses and mouths. These features have theological significance, to be sure, but they have profound sensory effects as well. The combination of the large eyes and the inverted perspective produces a feeling that, when you are looking at the icon, it is looking back at you. For worshippers, this is a materialized invitation to greater piety and concentration. As a woman named Kim told me, showing me one of her favorite icons of the Virgin Mary:
One of the things that—and I’m sure you’ve noticed this too—one of the first things that people notice about icons are the eyes. They’re usually very big, very round, and it can even look distorted and off-putting at first…. I think that they are there to draw your own eyes to them…. Like, with this icon of Mary, I focus my eyes on hers, and I feel like she focuses hers on mine, and I feel like that keeps the rest of me—my brain and my heart—focused where it should be while I’m praying, on God. Because where the eyes go, the rest of you will follow.
While icons are an established part of most every Orthodox home, some saints are not content with being homebodies. In my research, I regularly witnessed Orthodox Christians taking an icon or two to work. “Keeping a Christian mindset is difficult to do on your own,” said Charles, a finance executive in downtown Minneapolis, Minnesota. One morning I asked Charles about an icon of Christ on his office wall. He smiled, stood up, and walked me out of his office. He closed the door behind us. Then, almost immediately, he opened the door and led me back in:
My wife gave me that after we joined the Church together. And I put it here because it is the first thing that I walk past everyday when I come into this room and, even if I don’t look at Him, I know that He is always watching me…. In my business, as I’m sure you probably know from the news right now, people can be tempted to do some pretty unscrupulous things. And that [he points to the icon, for emphasis] is there to remind me of who I’m really called to be like. Because, at the end of the line, I’m not going to be judged on how much money I make for my clients—or for myself, for that matter—but on if I’ve lived a Christ-like life.
In addition to home and work spaces, smaller, travel-sized icons also allow Christ, Mary, and the saints to go on long trips and daily commutes. Showing me a small, book-like icon (a diptych) of Christ and the Theotokos (see photo), Hannah told me that she hung an almost identical version from her car’s rearview mirror, “I keep this icon in my car because I tend to get very impatient and angry when I drive,” she told me, “so my daughter and husband gave me this to help.” Examining the detail of the small piece, I asked if it worked. “Well, sometimes,” she laughed, “but sometimes not at all. But it does always remind me to ask for forgiveness right after [laughs]…. It’s so bad, but I’ve probably asked Jesus and the Theotokos for forgiveness in that car more often than I have in a confessional!”
“The saints,” one Orthodox priest relayed to me, “are with us everywhere.” Now I was seeing how true his words were. Through icons, the saints can be—and regularly are—taken just about anywhere. In taking up icons for their own everyday purposes, the faithful also submit themselves to meaningful forms of icon-mediated bodily discipline. When Charles, for example, placed his icon of Christ in his office, he was submitting not only his gaze but, ideally, all his daily actions to the scrutiny of God. Engaging the eyes of the icon, as Kim so aptly put it above, was also a matter of disciplining the body, mind, and heart.
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The role of icons in the lives of Eastern Orthodox Christians demonstrates just one way aesthetic culture matters in the production and experience of religious meaning. If religion, as scholar Robert Orsi, puts it, is in large part a practice of making the invisible visible, then belief statements alone just won’t get the job done. Leaps of faith are real, but usually not blind. In most religions, people also seek a felt connection with a sacred reality: the supernatural needs to somehow be made empirical, available to be seen, heard, smelled, tasted, and touched. Aesthetic culture, the embodied and material dimensions of religious life, is the often overlooked domain in which this happens.
Recommended Readings
Jeffrey C. Alexander, D. Bartmanski, and B. Giesen. 2012. Iconic Power: Materiality and Meaning in Social Life. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. A recent collection on the cultural power of icons, religious and secular, in shaping contemporary social life.
Omar McRoberts. 2004. “BeyondMysteriumTremendum: Thoughts Toward an Aesthetic Study of Religious Experience,”The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 595: 190–203. An acclaimed ethnographer of urban religion ponders how sociology can better understand religious experience through a focus on the aesthetics of worship.
David Morgan. 2012. The Embodied Eye: Religious Visual Culture and the Social Life of Feeling. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Demonstrates how religious ways of seeing are profoundly embodied social practices that vary across religious communities and traditions.
Robert Orsi. 1996. Thank You, St. Jude: Women’s Devotion to the Patron Saint of Hopeless Causes. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press. Studies the important role one saint, Jude Thaddeus, has played in the lives of countless American Catholic women.
Geneviève Zubrzycki. 2013. “Aesthetic Revolt and the Remaking of National Identity in Québec, 1960–1969,” Theory and Society 42:423–475. A cultural sociologist of religion and nationalism examines how icons of and rituals surrounding Saint John the Baptist have shaped French-speaking Canadians’ national identity.
All pictures courtesy and © John Winchester, 2014.
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