Grapho-Relics: Lutheranism and the Materialization of the Word

Religions are historically specific ways of investigating what cultures take to be the supernatural. But how do beliefs resolve into gestures, habits, and temperament, ingrained by rituals of spiritual preparation, communication, or of learning? 1 Religious identities hinge on practices, which embody and build up specific ideals about the way in which communities of believers locate themselves on earth in relation to the divine. In Lutheranism they implicate the religious self physically as well as intellectually, because ideas are always embodied or materialized in verbal and non-verbal communication or objects. They are spoken and performed, written down, inscribed, or visualized. As they merge with the body through the modulation of a voice, posture, or gesture, or with matter, such as a desk, ink, and paper, and thereby proclaim particular ideals of writing, they become part of a display which is embedded in cultural assumptions about how ideas are represented as truthful and as leading to salvation. It is therefore misleading to think of Lutheranism as a disembodied, interiorized religion of the word, located in a ‘rationally reasoning’ mind, in contrast to an equally generalized ‘sensuous Catholicism’. 2 The problem before us is to reconstruct just how the senses were implicated in different ways in Protestant traditions. How did Lutherans, in particular, invest word-related practices with spiritual meaning and emotional resonances to provide accounts of a truthful religion? 3