Page 122 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

Image 105

viewers. None of the letters mentioned the colt, but it is difficult to imagine
that any child would have missed it or failed to identify with it. The two
may operate in a coupled fashion, pairing pity for the colt with sadness
at the mare’s humiliation. The one incites revulsion at the decaying body,
while the other engenders hope in the survival of the soul—the child’s own.
Children needed to be taught that they had souls and that souls were not to
be confused with bodies. The illustration drove that home in no uncertain
terms. Images such as those in Figures 1 and 2 instrumentalized the body as
an imperfect, finite receptacle for something ontologically superior, and they
charged the child’s imagination with a sharp jolt to reinforce the distinction.
Fear, revulsion, and pity put the body and soul in a characteristic relation to
one another.

Visual epistemologies

The exchange of letters in the pages of The Well-Spring, simple and informal
as they are in one respect, nevertheless reveals the outlines of tectonic shifts
in the American understanding of children, education, the body, and the
operation of the mind, all of which had enormous implications for the new
mass media of religion and instruction. Images appealed to the imaginations
of children and contributed directly to the formation of their taste and
moral feeling, using feelings and the senses to discipline the body. Taste was
itself a faculty of discernment that Protestants since the eighteenth century
had recognized as a mark of distinction and moral sensibility. Imagination
had gone from the frivolous and untrustworthy nature of mere fancy to
the status of an epistemological faculty, which charged images with greater
purpose and recognized in them a concomitant risk. Images had become in
the Idealist philosophies of Immanuel Kant and others and in Romanticism a
medium of cognition and had therefore to be taken seriously for the influence
they exerted. According to Kant, for example, the mind assembles a visual
norm from particulars. The imagination is able, he wrote in his Critique
of Judgment (1790), to “let one image glide into another; and thus, by the
concurrence of several of the same kind, come by an average, which serves as
the common measure of all” (Kant 1951: 70). The idea of a beautiful human
figure, he asserted, is not deduced from rules but compiled from a thousand
figures by the intuitive powers of the imagination.
Though it is often said that Protestantism exercised no patience for images,
regarding them uniformly as idolatrous in the domain of religion, matters
varied considerably among different Protestant groups. Both Martin Luther
and John Calvin taught that images acted as a medium for human cognition.
In response to those who insisted that images must be forcibly removed from
churches and destroyed, Luther countered that he was unable to hear of the