19. Januar
18.00 Uhr
Veranstalter:
Erich Auerbach Institute for Advanced Studies
Ort:
Bibliothek Erich Auerbach Institut
Weyertal 59 (Rückgebäude, 3. OG)
50937 Köln
Information:
Vortrag von Daniel Gonzáles Erices (Santiago de Chile) im Rahmen der Auerbach Lectures
This lecture explores how stones purportedly taken from the Holy Sepulcher, embedded in Western European and Byzantine contexts (late 10th-12th centuries), operated as agents capable of extending the sacred locus of Jerusalem, uniting affective and spiritual experiences. Far from being inanimate objects, these fragments mobilized ineffable holiness while enabling a material continuity that both demanded and produced intense relational connections between Christ’s tomb and its dispersed pieces, the faithful’s physical body, and the transcendent.
The first part examines how these stones, functioning analogously to corporeal relics and spolia, generated intertwined networks in which space, matter, and temporality converged. Rooted in late antique materialism, they reveal that transcendence and immanence in Christian culture were, in fact, hardly separable – a practice which, understood within its specific milieu, moderates dichotomic rather than rhizomatic readings of this phenomenon. Through these fragments, sacred presence was not merely represented but materially enacted, conferring spiritual authenticity upon their new placements. The second part focuses on affective experience. Practices such as touching, rubbing, and kissing the stones ‘sourced’ from the loca sancta – or their reliquaries – were somatic and emotional gestures that articulated the participation of the faithful’s body in the sacred. Yet, in some cases, these acts were mediated by grids that both delimited and facilitated contact. These grids functioned, consequently, as porous membranes: they evidenced the threshold in which the believer’s body, sacred matter, and the ineffable negotiated a shared territoriality.
Ultimately, grids are construed as more-than-human agents in a posthumanist sense – that is, as active elements in the intra-action of believer, relic, and sacredness. In certain reliquaries, these grids mirror the windows of the original Jerusalemite church, suggesting that the dissemination of fragments and replications of the Sepulchrum Christi might have operated in synecdochical or fractal terms. These physical and metaphysical distributions of holy matter point to a dynamic system – one that can be comprehended through a modest materialist metaphysics attentive to the relational character of the phenomenon under discussion. In this light, stones, reliquaries, grids, and bodies emerge as interdependent material forces in the making of medieval Christian experience.
Gäste sind herzlich willkommen!