Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Religious experience and the perception of value
- 2 Love, repentance, and the moral life
- 3 Finding and making value in the world
- 4 Emotional feeling: philosophical, psychological, and neurological perspectives
- 5 Emotional feeling and religious understanding
- 6 Representation in art and religion
- 7 The religious critique of feeling
- Bibliography
- Index
6 - Representation in art and religion
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Religious experience and the perception of value
- 2 Love, repentance, and the moral life
- 3 Finding and making value in the world
- 4 Emotional feeling: philosophical, psychological, and neurological perspectives
- 5 Emotional feeling and religious understanding
- 6 Representation in art and religion
- 7 The religious critique of feeling
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
I entered the little Portuguese village … It was evening and there was a full moon. It was by the sea. The wives of the fishermen were going in procession to make a tour of all the ships, carrying candles and singing what must certainly be very ancient hymns of a heart-rending sadness … There the conviction was suddenly borne in upon me that Christianity is the religion of slaves, that slaves cannot help belonging to it, and I among others.
Here Simone Weil writes of how she came to an appreciation of the real import of Christian teaching – and her own Christian identity – in an affectively toned experience of music. At the time of this episode, Weil was of course already familiar with the credal claims of Christianity; so in the terms I have been using, this seems to be a case of feeling building upon a prior doctrinal understanding, so as to provide a deeper, more integrative, more self-involving understanding of what was previously grasped in purely verbal or ‘notional’ terms. Weil makes no reference to the meaning of the words of the hymns. So the revelatory force of the music does not depend, it seems, upon any verbal mediation. Nor is its religious suggestiveness evidently the product of a religious context: the sense that the women's behaviour bears a religious meaning is presumably given, at least in large part, in the music itself.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Emotional Experience and Religious UnderstandingIntegrating Perception, Conception and Feeling, pp. 149 - 178Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005