In this post I examine the introductory chapter of Mircea Eliade’s The Sacred and the Profane, in which the author uses the same terminology as Émile Durkheim to note a dualism between “two modes of being in the world” (Eliade, 14).
Although both authors use the words “sacred” and “profane”, Eliade’s goals are different from those of Durkheim. In Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, he refers to a “collective effervescence” (Durkheim, 226) which is mistaken by humans for some form of transcendence. In other words what is thought of as “sacred” is merely a social construction, and is viewed in opposition to the profane because humans demarcate it as apart from other objects. In Durkheim’s words “religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden” (Durkheim, 47).
In contrast, Eliade views the sacred and the profane as two ways of seeing the world, which means that the very same objects or acts can be viewed as either sacred or profane depending on an individual’s point of view. He explicitly states that he does not want to confine his discussion to the history of religions or sociology, but also to include phenomenology, philosophical anthropology, and psychology (Eliade, 15). On the whole Eliade is concerned with “the possible dimensions of human existence” (Eliade, 15) by which he means the way an individual regards herself in relation to the cosmos.
Given Eliade’s different definition and approach to the sacred and the profane, it is fitting that he references the work of Rudolf Otto for context rather than Durkheim.
Rather than reduce the idea of the Divine to an anthropological projection like Feuerbach or purely a sociological construct like Durkheim, Eliade references Otto’s work on religious experience.
The key point of emphasis for Eliade is that despite his background as a Theologian, Otto distinguished between the “living God” for the believer, which is to say the believer’s experience of God, from abstract philosophical notions or rational proofs of God’s existence (Eliade, 8). Otto studied religious experience of God which he termed “numinous” experience, in which the Divine presents itself as “wholly other” (Eliade, 9). Characteristic of this experience are the three characteristics of mysterium tremendum et fascinas.
Eliade explains that when one has a numinous experience “the other” that is encountered is perceived as “like nothing human or cosmic” (10), and therefore, regardless of which words one uses there is simply a “human inability to express the ganz andere” (Eliade, 10). By including Otto’s work as part of his introduction, Eliade orients the reader towards a phenomenological perspective of the sacred. Once this understanding is in place, Eliade is able to introduce his goal which is to discuss a broader scope of sacred experience of the world. Rather than simply considering a numinous experience sacred, Eliade wants to explore the individual’s way of being in relation to the world as a result of her sacred attitude. He refers to this as the “sacred in its entirety” (Eliade, 10), which gives the individual the potential to view the entire cosmos as the sacred rather than only through an isolated experience. Eliade’s goal in sum for his book, which he states in the introductory chapter is to “present the specific dimensions of religious experience, to bring out the differences between it and profane experience of the world” (Eliade, 17). The sacred therefore, refers less to an isolated religious experience and more towards a religious way of experiencing the world.
At this point it would be useful to further discuss Eliade’s definition of the sacred, especially since it is difficult to convey given that it is beyond the scope of the symbolic nature of human language. Eliade uses the word hierophany to denote the manifestation of the sacred. A seemingly ordinary object such as a tree, for instance, would be a hierophany if it was perceived as a “manifestation of something of a wholly different order… a reality that does not belong to our world” (Eliade, 11). Eliade acknowledges the paradox that by the nature of the individual’s perception, the object both “becomes something else” but also “continues to remain itself” (12). To make sense of this contradiction one could say that it depends on the the individual’s point of view. From the perspective of the profane the object is merely a tree, whereas from the perspective of the sacred it is a manifestation of a ‘supernatural’ reality. In other words, “the sacred is saturated with being” (13). Eliade goes as far as to say that with a sacred viewpoint the entirety of the cosmos can become a hierophany.
Eliade’s interest in examining the manifestation of the Divine is to “bring out the specific characteristics of life in a world capable of becoming sacred” (15). He wants to examine the behavior of what he calls homo religiosus, which means one with a sacred view of the world (18). Therefore, Eliade uses examples of the sacred from a variety of different societies from different historical periods and cultures. His aim is not to suggest that they are identical in terms of the specific nature of the phenomena, but rather to show that on the whole all these examples indicate a different attitude or way of being in relation to the world compared with the profane. To illustrate this, Eliade explains that there are specific characteristics of religious experience and an attitude towards the world as Divine in the same way that many different cultures have variations of the “poetic phenomenon” (16). Therefore, the phenomenological perception for an individual from a “primitive” society who regards a tree as sacred, has something in common with the more “supreme” manifestation of the Divine such as in God made manifest in Christ (Eliade, 11). Similarly, Eliade acknowledges that different peoples will have “differences in religious experience explained by differences in economy, culture, and social organization” (17) however, the common factor is that in each case the individual lives in “a sacralized cosmos” (17). Eliade notes that in contrast to this sacralized view of the cosmos is the existential situation of modern man who “finds it increasingly difficult to rediscover the existential dimensions of religious man in the archaic societies” (13). We can find a specific instance of the difference between a sacralized and profane view of the cosmos in that the “modern individual views everyday activities as the profane, or as an organic phenomenon” (14). On the other hand for the “primitive” these acts such as food or sex can become a communion with the sacred (14). These approaches describe “two existential situations” (14), and in this way Eliade takes a psychological and phenomenological approach to the sacred experience of human life.
Above, I have detailed the methodological orientation and overall aim of Eliade’s introductory chapter in The Sacred and the Profane as well as the difference in his approach from Durkheim’s. Below, I explain why Eliade’s exploration of the sacralized cosmos is significant in contemporary society. Eliade generalizes that in the modern age the cosmos is not viewed as sacred which according to his definition means that it is not viewed as “saturated with being” (13). Eliade does not make it clear to the reader in his introductory chapter whether he views the Divine as a social construction, a transcendental encounter, a ontologically valid plane of reality, or simply a description of phenomenological experience that Otto studied. The merit of the approach Eliade outlines in the introductory chapter is that it allows for the fruits of the sacred experience of the world, without necessarily needing to say what the cause of that experience is. Eliade addresses that the profane view of the world takes the mystery of existence of granted. Thus rather than focusing on what the word Divine is a pointer to, he focuses on the modality of the perception itself. While Durkheim claims that “men believe themselves transported into an entirely different world from the one they have before their eyes” (226), Eliade’s approach means that the world is actually transfigured in the sense that the subject perceives it as sacred. Thus Eliade gives room to explore the qualities of experiencing the world with a sense of wonder, awe, and mystery without needing to make claims about the meaning of such experiences, although he does acknowledge that people throughout history tend to view them as more ‘real’. Especially since Eliade considers the overall view of the cosmos as sacred rather than simply confined to a temporal numinous experience, he focuses on the qualitative difference in the experience of living. Moreover, if the entire cosmos is viewed as a manifestation of the supernatural one is left to wonder what the supernatural denotes. If one regards the entirety of the ‘natural world’ as ‘supernatural’ these opposing definitions cease to make sense, apart from saying that the natural is a pointer to something beyond itself. Yet, I posit that Eliade’s approach gives room for one to view all of existence as “sacred” without necessarily believing that the world is literally a pointer to something beyond itself. Thus the difference in the modalities of the sacred and the profane does not lie in words or definitions but rather depends on the subjective experience of how the world is perceived by the individual. Does the individual view the cosmos as sacred or as merely the natural world? The natural world in this case is defined as profane by the word merely rather than the word natural. The adverb is more descriptive than the noun since it is describing a way of being in and seeing the world. Does the individual view the world as merely existing (without significance) or as saturated with being (significance)? Thus there is the potential for secular society to have a sacred view towards the cosmos, not because it is a pointer to another ontological plane of existence or supernatural deity, but simply because the experience of ordinary life itself can be perceived as profound and because a scientific materialist view of the world does not explain Ultimate questions. Ordinary phenomena are mystical in the sense that the sacred and the profane are ways of seeing. The profane takes things for granted, while the sacred acknowledges this limits of human epistemology. Thus the religious attitude is the act of perceiving seemingly ordinary phenomena with wonder. However, social conditioning dictates these occurrences as unremarkable or profane, because we use scientific or even dogmatic religious terminology to explain them away. Thus Eliade’s approach to the two way of being in the world leaves room for the profane rather than the sacred to be viewed as merely a social construction created by what Huston Smith might call the tunnel of scientific materialism (Smith, 20), because the world prior to this explanatory construction is a great mystery. In this way existence in and of itself can be perceived as sacred, with no opposite.
Note: This post is adapted from an essay I wrote for a class at Princeton.
Works Cited
Durkheim, Emile, and Joseph Ward Swain. The elementary forms of the religious life. Courier
Corporation, 2008. Harvard
Eliade, Mircea. The sacred and the profane: The nature of religion. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt,
1959.
Smith, Huston. Why religion matters. HarperCollins World, 2001.