Touch is the Most Religious Sense: Pope Francis

A lot of the time, we tend to think of faith in terms of hearing (e.g., Rom 10:17; Gal 3:2, 5) and the immediate presence of God to us in the next life in terms of sight (e.g., 1 Cor 13:12; 1 Jn 3:2; the term “beatific vision”). You could say we privilege these two senses when describing religious experiences. We like to talk about hearing. We like to talk about seeing. But in non-magisterial discussions, Pope Francis has actually spoken of touch as “the most religious of the five senses,”[1] perhaps “the most human.”[2] He has said that it is “the best form of communication.”[3] This is something that has drawn my attention over the past year of personal reflection, and it seems to be a good topic on which to pause as the year winds down.

I think that, on the whole, for an incarnational theology, Pope Francis’ idea makes a lot of sense. After all, consider how much Mary and Thomas want to touch the risen Jesus in John’s Gospel (20:17, 25, 27). I have a general intuition that there’s something of value in thinking about faith life in these terms. The Holy Father’s instinct is one that I can share.

At the same time, all this perhaps isn’t completely obvious, and I wanted to spend a little time hashing out some thoughts and implications.

Sources for Pope Francis?

I have the professor’s instinct for tracking down sources. That doesn’t make me great at it. But the tendency is there. So I wonder where Pope Francis got his ideas about tactile religiosity or how they were formed.

Partly, the question has already been answered. When the Pope notes that touch might be “the most human” of the external senses,[4] he remarks that he is quoting “a German writer” he read when “studying philosophy” in his late 20s. I’m not entirely sure who this writer is, so I can’t track down the particular reference. But I think there might be some other precedents among the authors that we know to have influenced Jorge Mario Bergoglio to a considerable degree. I don’t claim that the Holy Father has these sources explicitly in mind. Probably he doesn’t. But these are some background noises that he might also be processing when he talks about the humanity, religiosity, and communicative value of the tactile sense.

The first source dear to the Pope that comes to my mind is Saint Thérèse. We can read in her autobiographical manuscripts how she and her sister would touch everything on pilgrimage through Italy (Ms A, 66r–66v; LT 263).[5] The young saint had an instinctive recourse to this basic sense, and she applied herself to it, well, religiously.

Another source that strikes me, based on some recent reading, is the Little Brother of the Gospel whom Jorge Mario Bergoglio seems to have met personally when in Argentina, Arturo Paoli. In one of his most challenging books, the Italian priest writes:

A trust in human beings like Jesus’ trust—the trust that the poor have spontaneously because all they have to do is touch their neighbor’s hand to feel its warmth is the fruit of a true conversion, when we have it, and the sign of contemplation. Contemplation comes by way of the dark night, by way of the complete loss of trust in self, in one’s own ability, in one’s own toil.[6]

There is just something about the tangible in Paoli’s writing, here in particular, which I think is intuitively right for Pope Francis. In this particular passage, we see a connection between humanity, communication, and religiosity, too, even if it’s not drawn out in so many words by Father Paoli. Contemplation is even thrown in for good measure.

I’m sure there might be other background sources behind Pope Francis’ affinity for touch as a keystone of human beings, communication, and a religious sense, but in my own overlap of background with the Pope, these are a couple that stand out for me. If you have knowledge of others, do share in the comments sections, too!

The phenomenology of contemplative prayer

If touch is so human, so communicative, and so religious, then I think this should also have an impact on how we envisage the phenomenology of contemplative prayer. The images we use are often—as for faith and the afterlife—focused on hearing and sight. But contemplation is nothing if it’s not a communication between God and a human being. It’s nothing if it’s not fully and truly human. And it better be religious, or else I have no idea what it is at all. Can Pope Francis offer us a new way of describing the experience of Christian contemplation here?

In the first place, it should be evident that the standard phenomenology of vision and hearing won’t just disappear, even if touch is so fundamental. Pope Francis himself has spoken about the dual metaphors of seeing and hearing regarding faith (Lumen Fidei 8–9, 29–33). He invokes Mary in the combined title of “Virgin of listening and contemplation” (Evangelii Gaudium 288). A recently posted collection of quotes on the loving gaze of contemplation emphasizes the image of sight. The Catechism of the Catholic Church mentions both the gaze of faith and the metaphor of hearing through faith (CCC 2715–2716).

So, among the two “bigger” senses that we usually rely on to explain faith and prayer, there is a certain polarity at work. We can’t decide that one metaphor, or way of understanding and living contemplation, is better than the other. Seeing, as Pope Francis notes, pertains mostly to an instantaneous snapshot or a vision of the whole, while hearing includes a dimension of time, for words unfold one by one (LF 29). Thus, on the one hand, sight is preferable, for it is the only way to behold the big picture at once. On the other hand, the instantaneous is frozen, and, as Pope Francis insists, “time is greater than space” (LF 57; EG 222–225). Depending, then, on how we look at it, now one sense, and its reflection in contemplative prayer, is the better, now the other. We have to be “both/and,” not “either/or.” The word of the Lord is sometimes “Blessed are the eyes that see what you see” (Lk 10:23 NRSV), but sometimes too it expands and moves among polarities: “Blessed are your eyes because they see and your ears because they hear” (Mt 13:16 NRSV).

But the metaphors shouldn’t actually restrict themselves to these two poles. At least one other time the visual and the auditory are paired up in the New Testament, the tactile comes along for the ride, too. The first letter of John opens speaking of “what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands” (1 Jn 1:1 NRSV). In the author’s case, of course, this isn’t a metaphor. It’s not a phenomenology of prayer life. He means the actual physical senses. He’s testifying to the Incarnation and Resurrection themselves. But assuming our experience of life in faith is supposed to be analogous, let’s not stop with framing things in terms of vision and hearing.

We can’t ignore the other senses altogether. Something can be gained from rooting our understanding of this Christian phenomenon in our larger bodily experience.

Contemplative prayer is a personal act. The whole person must be involved in Christian contemplation. Maybe there is scope for acknowledging that it reaches deep down and engages the entirety of who we are. This needn’t deny that vision could be called, as Thomas Aquinas would have it, “the most spiritual, the most perfect, and the most universal of all the senses.”[7] But it should see things as integrated, even all the way to the depths. Touch, even though or perhaps because it is the most material, is “the foundation of the other senses.”[8] Foundations are never disconnected from a building. Roots are never removed from a plant.

I wonder what contemplation would look like if we tried explaining the experience—if we tried doing the phenomenology of contemplative prayer—from a basis in the sense of touch?

It’s not as if there are no precedents. The “transverberation” of Saint Teresa of Avila comes to mind (cf. Life 29.17). This is hardly an unknown part of the history of contemplative prayer; after all, the statue of the “Ecstasy of Saint Teresa” by Bernini, found in Rome’s Santa Maria della Vittoria, is based on this event in the saint’s life, and it’s very famous.

I also think right away of the poem The Living Flame of Love by Saint John of the Cross. The second stanza has those dark words: “O sweet cautery, / O delightful wound!”[9] And the sanjuanist commentary is just as captivating:

For you, O divine life, never kill unless to give life, never wound unless to heal. When you chastise, your touch is gentle, but it is enough to destroy the world. When you give delight you rest very firmly, and thus the delight of your sweetness is immeasurable. You have wounded me in order to cure me, O divine hand. (Living Flame 2.16)[10]

I am aware, too, of this beautiful English-language piece (of which there is a French original), “The Presence of God,” by Raïssa Maritain:

When we feel Your Presence invade us 
        Submerge us,
We know that You alone can hold 
        Heart and bone together.
This inrush of knowledge, free from image 
        And abstraction, 
Divine, divine in nature, 
Would suddenly break our substance apart 
If You did not weld us into unity.

How to subsist in such a knowledge 
And not be free to join You for ever.[11]

For my own part, I’ve also tried my hand at treating contemplation phenomenologically as a tactile event in a poem not in any way consciously inspired by Raïssa Maritain’s.

I’m open to keeping the effort up. I think there are plenty of reasons to give it a chance. Thinking about tactile images reduces the cognitive value away from the high-fallutin’ realms of words heard and objects seen. Yet it keeps the intimate link between persons. That’s not exactly a bad thing. Contemplation always has words and images as pillars on which to raise oneself to the heights, but once in the clouds, it has moved beyond any particular pillar. There must be ways to explain this Christian experience as human, communicative, and religious, like Pope Francis says, and root it in our understanding of, not just auditory or visual experience, but also the other senses, especially that root, foundational, basic experience of touch.

The great deviation that is physical or sexual abuse in a religious context

I have been planning on writing this post for quite some time. But I was never going to be comfortable doing so until I had made a considerable effort towards tackling the abuse crisis.

The fact of the matter is, if the tactile sense is the most human, the most communicative, and the most religious, at least in some senses of the terms, then clerical abuse broadly construed is an utter abomination—and doubly so when the sense of touch is directly impacted, as in physical and sexual abuse. If the phenomenology of touch can play such an important role in our understanding of faith and prayer, then what kinds of wounds are felt when people who ought to teach or encourage faith and prayer treat the tactile dimension of the human being so crassly and grossly, violate its proper boundaries, and discard its proper functioning? It’s a horror. We just can’t think about the good potential of treating our tactile sense as a foundation for thinking about the experience of faith and prayer, without also realizing just how perverted it is to take this human dimension and trample it under foot.

At the same time, contemplation—conceived along tactile lines—may be one of the arms of healing for survivors. I think here of the experience of Marcel Văn. A victim of abuse that touched his body, he gets a spontaneous, mystical “anointing of the sick” from little Jesus (Conv. 593–594, 622–623).[12] Essentially, in a prayer experience, Jesus “touches” different parts of Marcel in order, declaring something about them good, sometimes proclaims that it belongs to him, and gives it a kiss. One after the other, Jesus “anoints” Marcel’s eyes, mouth, nose, ears, heart, hands, feet. That is, Jesus declares as sanctified all the external senses of Marcel (sight, taste, smell, hearing, touch), his heart, and the limbs that represent action in the place one is (hands) and can go to (feet). He declares them good. He declares them his. Maybe there is something more general lurking here. Contemplation may contribute something to the healing of tactile experience and the injury that fixes itself into the body.

At any rate, I want to move forward with treating tactile experience as part of the metaphors and phenomenology of Christian contemplation. Absolutely—there are risks. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to separate this discussion from an awareness of just how distorted things have been made for some. But—I want to move on, knowing the potential for evil and the potential for good.

This blog, though, has always been about contemplation in the mud—so, that’s where we always are here.

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[1] Jorge Mario Bergoglio–Pope Francis, Nei tuoi occhi è la mia parola. Omelie e discorsi di Buenos Aires 1999-2013 (Milan: Rizzolo, 2016), xv, trans. Massimo Borghesi, The Mind of Pope Francis: Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s Intellectual Journey, trans. Barry Hudock (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2018), 229.

[2] Pope Francis with Dominique Wolton, A Future of Faith: The Path of Change in Politics and Society, trans. Shaun Whiteside (New York: St. Martin’s Essentials, 2018), 119.

[3] Ibid., 167.

[4] Ibid., 119.

[5] All references to Saint Thérèse of Lisieux using the system in Œuvres complètes (Paris: Cerf / Desclée de Brouwer, 2023), with translations my own.

[6] Arturo Paoli, Gather Together in My Name: Reflections on Christianity and Community, trans. Robert R. Barr (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Book, 1987), 180.

[7] Thomas Aquinas, ST I, q. 78, a. 3.

[8] Ibid., q. 91, a. 1, ad 3; a. 3, ad 1.

[9] The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross, 3^rd ed., trans. Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 2017), 52.

[10] Ibid., 663.

[11] Œuvres complètes de Jacques et Raïssa Maritain, vol. 15, ed. Jean-Marie Allion, Maurice Hany, Dominique and René Mougel, Michel Nurdin, Heinz R. Schmitz (Fribourg: Éditions Universitaires, 1995), 753.

[12] Conv. = Marcel Van, Conversations, trans. Jack Keogan (Complete Works 2; Versailles: Amis de Van Éditions, 2017).