Gesture and Liturgical Gesture

Abstract

The usual interpretations of gestuality presuppose that a gesture accompanies the expressive action, whereby it itself almost disappears, in order to make way for what the person gesturing wants to show as appertaining to his or her interiority. The intention of the present paper is to demonstrate how a gesture cannot be considered as something extraneous to thought, but belongs to the human posture in its beingin-the-world, and thus seamlessly gives rise to the manifestation of the self in the symbolic framework of reference to a common meaningful horizon. The gestuality of liturgy serves as a particularly noteworthy example of such a phenomenological hermeneutic interpretation of gesture.

Keywords

• gesture
• liturgy
• romano guardini
• play
• symbolic field