The look of sympathy: religion, visual culture, and the social life of feeling

Abstract

Religions are powerful communities of feeling, compelling ways of experiencing connections with others. As such, they structure human relations in patterns that rely on media and the arts to accomplish significant cultural work such as nurture children, disseminate information, and order forms of association by arousing and managing common sentiments. A textual and visual discourse in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe and North America considered “sympathy” or fellow feeling to be the basis of moral conduct and the glue of social life. Images have played an important role in mediating sympathy by promoting moral causes, acting as propaganda, and eliciting deeply felt reactions to injustices. Yet the felt-life of religion exhibits a tension between compassion and solidarity. By scrutinizing how images were used to generate sympathy, we are able to see how the sense of community depends on both feeling for some (sympathy) and feeling against others (antipathy). Moreover, investigation of the relationship between the felt-life of religion and visual practices shows that the study of visual culture should not be isolated from other forms of sensation and representation. Seeing is part of the embodied experience of feeling, and therefore is properly understood as a fundamental part of many religious practices.

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