“It is clear to what a degree the discovery- that is, the revelation- of a sacred space possesses existential value for religious man; for nothing can begin, nothing can be done, without a previous orientation- and any orientation implies aquiring a fixed point. It is for this reason that religious man has always sought to fix his abode at the “center of the world.” If the world is to be lived in, it must be founded- and no world can come to birth in the chaos of the homogenuity and relativity of profane space.”
“To whatever degree he may have desacralized the world, the man who has made his choice in favor of a profane life never succeeds in completely doing away with religious behavior… even the most desacralized existence still preserves traces of a religious valorization of the world.”
– The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion by Mircea Eliade
Eliade’s clasic and profound history of the nature of religion doesn’t claim to do this, but I think my most honest assessment would say that he has afforded me one of the most powerful arguments for not just the truth of religion, but of Christianity.
Eliade’s aim is essentially explore the premise that one cannot understand modern man without understanding those parts of him that are and remain deeply religious, even in a secularized, or what he terms “profane” world. This is as much a part of us as our material bodies- we are a religious species indebted to the history of our development.
There are two elements of this historical movement, the first being the modern West and its adherence to the Judeo-Christian Tradition. The second would be the backdrop from which the Judeo-Christian Tradition emerges (the broader primitive mythic state of the world), including the later developing Eastern religions. What’s fascinating about this is that every chapter ultimately ends up in the same place- at the Judeo-Christian Tradition marking a specific kind of revelatory turn in the historical landscape. This becomes a common refrain throughout the book- the mythic world once had this shape, and then it was recontextuzlied through the Judeo-Christian Tradition. So much so that this becomes the measure for the shape of religious and world history.
Which is simply to say, What Eliade is picking up on is that the shared stories of our mythic history find their unifying shape in the specificity of a revelatory moment. One that has the power to make sense of all the world’s stories (to borrow from Tolkien).
What differentiates the Sacred from the Profane is that the Sacred is noted for its differentiation, whereas the Profane is noted for its homogenuity. Meaning, the sacred is built on the notion that reality is more than simply our observations of the profane. By its nature it finds something in the world, it speaks of spaces that are set apart from the profane, it pulls us towards mystery rather than mere explanation. The profane on the other hand, or the secularized world, is by its nature singular. Reality cannot be more than the same, material properties manifesting itself in different ways and capacities. Whatever it is that we find, it can be reduced to this singular plain.
There is another element at play here though, and that is the role of the Sacred in sanctifying the profane. This is why the mythic language begins, as Eliade points out, with a cosmological story before fleshing out its origins stories. The sacred assumes an orientation, a center from which all else flows. If this is, in the mythic world, things like ladders and trees and mountains, it eventually gets reconstituted in temples. The temples act as the space where the sacred and profane meet and communicte and interact. It is also what we do when we participate in these sacred spaces- we are reactualizing this center, this act of creation, in the profane. This is how the sacred flows out into the world.
“Every world is the work of the gods, for it was either created directly by the gods or was consecrated, hence cosmicized, by men ritually reactualizing the paradigmatic act of Creation.”
We know the true shape of the world by conforming it to its sacred shape. Or as Eliade writes, “The world becomes apprehensible as world, as cosmos, in the measure in which it reveals itself as a sacred world… Where the sacred manifests itself in space, the real unveils itself.”
The subsequent chapters of the book narrow in on the sacreds relationship to time, nature, and humanity. As Eliade suggests, Sacred time is “a primordial mythical time made present”… and “by its very nature is reversible.” The past made present. On the other hand, for those who adhere to the profane, time is part of the material fabric of reality. It occupies the same thing as all matter and reality, and thus is devoid of mystery or break.
More profound is looking at the distinct way the Judeo-Christian narrative breathes into the story of sacred time this notion of historical time (profane time) being sanctified, or made sacred through the person and work of Jesus Christ. Here the whole of history becomes a theophany, to borrow from Hegel. And the implications of this is that time, in the Jewish sense, frames the familiar cyclical perspective within that which affords it a beginning and an end. It is in this way, that one succeeds in “living in the universal”, and in this way that experiencing the sacred becomes an experience of a continuous moments of eternity.
For me, this makes so much sense of the world I know, the world I experience and inhabit. This notion that we cannot create the sacred, we can only find it and discover it, was especially monumnental to me. We cannot fomulate these spaces, we can only happend upon them as we understand the profane to open the world up to its necessary mystery. As Eliade writes,
“Religious man’s profound nostalgia is to inhabit a divine world, is his desire that his house shall be like the house of the gods.
By which he means, this isn’t just part of a primitive and archaic past. Its a part of the true shape of reality, of this world. It is what shapes our desire, our longings, our restlessness. Even in a secularized, desacralized world, we intuitively know this to be true. The world is not singular, it is wanting. It is not without a center, it is shaped by a center that continues to flow outwards, informing the whole of history. to be without mystery is to be less than true, less than human- it is to be subsumed by the homogenous, the lifeless material shape of reality. To be informed by mystery is to have life, to be sacred and to live in the sacred spaces that define this worlds true nature.
The Stories of my Life 