I was intrigued by the concept of this collection of essays: a series of short, inter-linked meditations on various pieces of (mostly) medieval and Renaissance Christian artworks written by a devout Muslim. I'm not a believer, but as someone raised Catholic in a country in which most people are Christians, it's impossible for me to approach this art as an outsider in the way that Navid Kermani can.

Wonder Beyond Belief certainly challenged me in some respects—how to grapple with the ideas of someone who says that he loves and admires Christianity but who rejects ecumenical pablum (fair enough) and states flat-out that Trinitiarianism is a pagan concept and that Christianity is heresy? I'm an atheist who has profound issues with the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, and yet I found myself with knee-jerk emotional responses to some of what Kermani wrote—there's something for me to sit with there. I'm sure that Kermani is writing in part to induce such responses—in the acknowledgments he says that sometimes in discussing artworks he "intentionally preferred interpretations or views that are controversial (to say the least) in the pertinent academic fields" because he is "often more interested in believed truth, and in aesthetic truth, than in what is considered historically true". Fair enough—even if an approach that my historian self fundamentally can't enter into.

But for me, what turned out to be my biggest problem with this book, and something that Kermani doesn't seem to consider at all, is gender: how the fact that he's a guy shapes how he views art depicting female subjects. Is there a strong strain of eroticism in Catholic art? Undeniably! Do we have medieval and early modern accounts of responses to that art which mingle the sacred and the sexual in ways which make many modern readers uncomfortable? Sure! But to refer to a fairly innocuous depiction of St Ursula as showing a "gold-tressed, plump-cheeked, buttonnosed pouter", or to Mary holding her cloak as "pressing her fingers moreover on the point just above or at the edge of her pubes, depending how wide Mary’s pubes [...] are [...] a manifestation of the Devil perhaps, her body slightly turned, her feet in a sidestep, her hips slightly tipped, her genitals practically held out towards poor Bernard"? There's being irreverent about sacred cows and then there's just being weird about women. Throughout this book there's a distinct strain of the latter. ( )

This book is a series of essays, mostly on works of Christian art, by a Moslem, born and raised in Germany. (He holds both German and Iranian citizenship.) Kermani is better read in the Bible and Christian theology than many Christians, but his readings of the artworks are also shaped by his knowledge of Islam.

The final essay is about St. Francis of Assisi. ( )