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CO-SPONSORED EVENTS HELD AT THE HUMANITIES CENTER
Image as Animation: Mysticism, Magic, and Poetry in Byzantine Christian and Islamic Religious Experience
Friday May 10, 2013 | 08:00 AM -05:00 PM | Stanford Humanities Center Board Room
In the Bible, when God created Adam and breathed life into him, he made him into an “eikon tou Theou” translated as “an image of God” (Gen. 2:7). A hadith reported in Bukhari and Ibn Hanbal states similarly that Adam was created in God’s image. The Qur’an tells of Jesus shaping a bird from clay and investing it with the Spirit with God’s permission to make it come alive (5:110). In these examples the concept of “image” does not conform to our standard definition of it as a pictorial form, but to an enactment of the descent of the Spirit in matter. The resulting entity participates in the divine through the presence of the Spirit in it. This process of embodiment of pneuma/ruh has its roots in gnosticism and ancient magic, and is manifested among other occurrences in the liturgy of Hagia Sophia in sixth-century Constantinople, Sufi thought, and Arabic and other Islamic poetic traditions. By simultaneously exploring Greek Christian and Arabic, Persian, and Turkish Islamic sources, this workshop will focus on the metaphysical dimension of “image;” the connections between “image-making” and magic; as well as “image” understood as a creation of the mouth, breath, and orality and manifested in the actions of the body such as prayer, the singing of psalms, or the recitation of the Qur’an and poetry. Similarly, we will explore the role of imagination as defined by Sufi texts in structuring the religious experience of “dwelling in the divine;” and seek parallels to these cultural phenomena in the Greek literature of ekphrasis and Anacreontic poetry, and in the multisensory aesthetics of the Constantinopolitan liturgy.
Image as Animation: Mysticism, Magic, and Poetry in Byzantine Christian and Islamic Religious Experience
Friday May 10, 2013 | 08:00 AM -05:00 PM | Stanford Humanities Center Board Room
In the Bible, when God created Adam and breathed life into him, he made him into an “eikon tou Theou” translated as “an image of God” (Gen. 2:7). A hadith reported in Bukhari and Ibn Hanbal states similarly that Adam was created in God’s image. The Qur’an tells of Jesus shaping a bird from clay and investing it with the Spirit with God’s permission to make it come alive (5:110). In these examples the concept of “image” does not conform to our standard definition of it as a pictorial form, but to an enactment of the descent of the Spirit in matter. The resulting entity participates in the divine through the presence of the Spirit in it. This process of embodiment of pneuma/ruh has its roots in gnosticism and ancient magic, and is manifested among other occurrences in the liturgy of Hagia Sophia in sixth-century Constantinople, Sufi thought, and Arabic and other Islamic poetic traditions. By simultaneously exploring Greek Christian and Arabic, Persian, and Turkish Islamic sources, this workshop will focus on the metaphysical dimension of “image;” the connections between “image-making” and magic; as well as “image” understood as a creation of the mouth, breath, and orality and manifested in the actions of the body such as prayer, the singing of psalms, or the recitation of the Qur’an and poetry. Similarly, we will explore the role of imagination as defined by Sufi texts in structuring the religious experience of “dwelling in the divine;” and seek parallels to these cultural phenomena in the Greek literature of ekphrasis and Anacreontic poetry, and in the multisensory aesthetics of the Constantinopolitan liturgy.
All events take place at Stanford University, unless otherwise noted.
The Calendar of Events lists events sponsored and co-sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center. For a more comprehensive listing of university-wide events, see the Stanford Event Calendar.
The Calendar of Events lists events sponsored and co-sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center. For a more comprehensive listing of university-wide events, see the Stanford Event Calendar.