Wonderfully Unaware: Sensory Disabilities, Contemplation and Consolation

Abstract

The issue of the five senses belonged to philosophical or psychological discussions already in antiquity.¹ Aristotle was known as the first influential author who explained the functions of the sense organs in his De anima and in De sensu. His influence was strong in Renaissance studies, which dealt with the human mind and defended the usefulness of the senses. In Liber de anima (1540), Philip Melanchthon wrote, by reference to Plato, that sight was the most valuable of the senses and it helped men to learn Divinity (p. 72). Another important context for these observations was medieval and religious ethics, which identified the senses as potential threats to men’s morals, seeing the eyes as windows, gateways and passages through which not only good impulses and the doctrine of faith, but also different vices, temptations and the seven deadly sins could reach the soul (Schleusener-Eichholz 1985, pp. 884–91; Vinge 1975, pp. 47–70). Satirical disease eulogies made use of several of the commonplace images and arguments found in such works as the tenth book of Augustine’s Confessiones, Vincent of Beauvais’s Speculum morale, Jacopone da Todi’s thirteenth-century poetry and Caelius Rhodiginus’s early sixteenth-century compilation entitled Lectiones antiquae, all of which included discussions of the senses. The topic of perception also belonged to rhetorical exercises in which orators disputed the merits of the five senses (Claren 2003, p. xix, n. 25; Esser 1961, p. 144).