Touch and Transport in the Middle Ages

Touch is trouble in medieval accounts of the five senses; but it is touch that also tenders the most extravagant promises: promises of transcendence, higher knowledge, eternal fame, miraculous cures to mortal ailments, joyous couplings with supernatural bodies. The trouble is traceable to Aristotle; the extravagant promises to the Gospels. The two meet in high medieval culture, with momentous consequences for the subsequent cultural history of the West.

Aristotle had, of course, elevated the senses to a lofty role: that of gateways for all forms of knowledge, each sense clearly separable from the next and rationally ordered.¹ As in Plato, the order in question was hierarchical, with sight, physically the coolest and cognitively the most intellectual of the senses, at the top of the pyramid, followed by hearing, smell and taste, with touch at the bottom and hot point of the cognitive pyramid. According to Aristotle (and on this point he was followed by Cicero, Alan of Lille, and the illustrator of Herrade von Landsberg's Garden of Delights [Hortus deliciarum], among many others), this hierarchy is directly mapped onto human anatomy:

. . . if the facts be at all as here stated, it is clear that—if one should explain the nature of the sensory organs in this way, i.e. by correlating each of them with one of the elements—we must conceive that the part of the eye which sees consists of water, that what is perceptive of sound consists of air, and that the sense of smell consists of fire. . . . This also helps us to understand why the olfactory organ has its proper seat in the environment of the brain; for cold matter is potentially hot. In the same way must the genesis of the eye be explained. Its structure is an offshoot from the brain, because the latter is the moistest and coldest of all the bodily parts. The organ of touch consists of earth, and the faculty of taste is a particular form of touch. This explains why the sensory organ of both touch and taste is closely related to the heart. For the heart, as being the hottest of all the bodily parts, is the counterpoise of the brain.²

(Sense and Sensibilia 438b17-439a3)

Eyes, ears, nose, throat, skin: such is the sequence of organs extending downward from head to toe in a diminuendo indicative of the cognitive rank of the associated sense. Perched atop the head nearest the inner senses, the eye draws man upward, away from the soil towards the celestial spheres. Located near the heart, the organ of touch exercises the opposite pull: earthwards, through the feet, towards the realm of creatures. Whereas tactile sensations are said to congregate near the heart, visual ones are shielded from the heart's passionate disturbances, which makes them cool and lucid yet oddly distant from the very organ where Aristotle had located thought processes. Why should such a separation exist and why the uncanny anatomical closeness between touch, the most creatural of the senses, and thought? Shouldn't this closeness render touch the highest (not the lowest) of the senses? The usually confident Aristotle is unsure.

Galen, a sharper observer of the human body than his Peripatetic peer, had the good sense to designate the brain as the organ of thought. Even so, he was no more able to resolve the other problems confronted by Aristotle. If taste, as indicated in the passage already cited, is but a particular manifestation of touch, then can touch truly be conceived of as a single sense? Or is it, rather, some sort of multiple or hybrid sense, or even the sense that subtends all the other senses? Then there is the related question of whether one can truly claim that tactile sensations are ascribable to a single organ, given that, unlike the other four senses, operations of touch are dispersed over the body's entire surface. If so, is this organ on the surface or below the surface of the body? Why, unlike its counterparts, does it alone elude the scrutiny of anatomists whereas sight is clearly located in...