In Between: The Holy Beyond Modern Dichotomies 9783666604416, 9783525604410, 9783647604411

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© 2011, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen ISBN Print: 978-3-525-60441-0 — ISBN E-Book: 978-3-647-60441-1

Research in Contemporary Religion

Edited by Hans-Günter Heimbrock, Daria Pezzoli-Olgiati, Bryan P. Stone, Heinz Streib, Claire Wolfteich, Trygve Wyller In Co-operation with Sunhee Ahn (Seoul, Korea), Bärbel Beinhauer-Köhler (Frankfurt/Main, Germany), Wanda Deifelt (S¼o Paolo, Brazil), Jaco S. Dreyer (Pretoria, S. Africa), Mehmet Emin Köktas (Izmir, Turkey), Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore (Nashville, USA), Siebren Miedema (Amsterdam, The Netherlands), Bradd Shore (Atlanta, USA), David M. Wulff (Norton, USA), Margaret Yee (Oxford, UK), Dale P. Andrews (Boston, USA), Hanan Alexander (Haifa, Israel), William Storrar (Princeton, USA), Carla Danani (Macerata, Italy) Volume 6

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Espen Dahl

In Between The Holy Beyond Modern Dichotomies

Translated by Brian McNeil

Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht © 2011, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen ISBN Print: 978-3-525-60441-0 — ISBN E-Book: 978-3-647-60441-1

First published as Det hellige. Perspektiver, Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 2008. This translation has been funded by NORLA and The Research Counsel of Norway (NFR).

Espen Dahl The Faculty of Theology University of Oslo

Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http://dnb.d-nb.de abrufbar. ISBN 978-3-525-60441-0 ISBN 978-3-647-60441-1 (E-Book)  2011, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen/ Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht LCC, Oakville, CT, U.S.A. www.v-r.de Alle Rechte vorbehalten. Das Werk und seine Teile sind urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung in anderen als den gesetzlich zugelassenen Fällen bedarf der vorherigen schriftlichen Einwilligung des Verlages. Hinweis zu § 52a UrhG: Weder das Werk noch seine Teile dürfen ohne vorherige schriftliche Einwilligung des Verlages öffentlich zugänglich gemacht werden. Dies gilt auch bei einer entsprechenden Nutzung für Lehr- und Unterrichtszwecke. Printed in Germany. Druck- und Bindung: l Hubert & Co., Göttingen. Gedruckt auf alterungsbeständigem Papier.

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Contents Foreword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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1. The Return of the Holy and Late Modernity . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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2. The Holy and Modern Dichotomies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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3. The Profane Revisited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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4. Taboo and Impurity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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5. The Sacred, the Uncanny, and Sacred Violence . . . . . . . . . . . .

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6. Manifestations of the Holy : The Symbol, the Sacrament, and the Sublime in Art . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115 7. Interstice and Weak Holiness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157 Index of Names . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163

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© 2011, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen ISBN Print: 978-3-525-60441-0 — ISBN E-Book: 978-3-647-60441-1

Foreword This book could not have been written without valuable help from others. I should like to thank Hege Gundersen, the editor responsible for the Norwegian edition of this book, who patiently followed the production of the manuscript throughout the whole writing process. Sigurd Hjelde and Otto Krogseth read through the manuscript and made valuable suggestions. Finally, I am grateful to the editors of Research in Contemporary Religion (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht) for suggestions about improvements. Most notably, adjustments are made in chapter 1, and a completely new concluding chapter is added.

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1. The Return of the Holy and Late Modernity An encounter with something that transcends one’s possibilities of comprehension, where one is left speechless and full of wonder in the presence of a “something” for which words are lacking, a trembling impression that one is approaching the unapproachable – is such an experience of the holy still accessible to us today? Despite the innumerable declarations of the death of God and of the victory of secularization, it seems that this type of experience continues to form part of the register of our experiences. Several scholars have pointed out that in recent years, religious motifs have occurred with ever growing frequency in art, philosophy, and popular culture; others maintain that the age in which we live must be understood as “post-secular,” since the decline of religion has been replaced by its return. For Christianity, as for other religions, traces of the holy are always important, if the abstract doctrinal systems are to be anchored in living experience. Experiences of the holy are included as raw material in religious symbols and are staged in various rituals. People continually relate to holy scriptures, holy words, holy things, holy persons (“saints”), the Holy Land, holy wars – and even to holy (or “sacred”) cows. Although the holy possesses an unmistakably religious value, it is not only found safely confined within the frameworks of institutionalized religion. Its expressions are also found outside such frameworks, today perhaps more than ever before. Many have encountered the holy in churches and have been filled by the holy atmosphere that is found in cathedrals. Some are moved solemnly in the presence of the mystery that takes place in the eucharist, while others experience the holy in great abstract paintings or in powerful music. Sometimes, one is suddenly struck with wonder at the most everyday things – a sudden feeling of strangeness vis--vis something with which one is profoundly familiar, perhaps a photograph from a half-forgotten past; a sudden shift in the weather which opens up the landscape anew; an encounter with another person which moves us strongly. These and similar experiences tell us that the holy has not yet abandoned us. The holy can make itself known in a vague and indistinct manner, but it can also be given a clearly demarcated place within religious systems. It is therefore anything but easy to define the holy once and for all. Nevertheless, we tend to have a rough idea of what it entails – at any rate, before we are asked to offer a definition. Let me suggest, as a first pointer, that the holy prompts an experience of something more and different in our otherwise familiar environment. This experience bears within itself a more or less clear religious value and elicits particular types of response in human beings. The word

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“response” here denotes specific ways of approaching the holy, such as the observation of particular rituals or the use of symbols and rituals. The intention of this book is to shed light on central aspects of the holy. As a theoretical topic, this is no unplowed field; it belongs to an area, which has attracted many commentaries in the course of the last hundred years or so. Many of the classic theories about the holy come from the period between the close of the nineteenth century and the 1960’s. After a slack period, this topic has begun to attract renewed attention. Many of the older theories are profoundly marked by the period in which they were formulated – a period which is no longer our own. This means that one must continually assess whether older theories continue to be relevant to our own understanding of the holy, after their date-stamping has expired. Nevertheless, it is my impression that people often rush rather too hastily past the classical texts, without allowing them to speak on their own terms. One aim of this book is enter into a dialogue with several of the classical twentieth-century theories. Such a dialogue has two partners: the theories in question must be allowed to speak, but we must also hear the objections and criticisms. The goal of the dialogue between various texts is always to increase the understanding of what the holy entails for us theoretically today. This study of the holy is envisaged as a discussion of the most important aspects of the holy, employing a variety of approaches. Such an investigation, however, is not carried out from some “point of nowhere” where the phenomena can be known in a neutral and objective manner. The only approach that we human beings have to the phenomena is via a limited hermeneutical perspective. My perspective is marked by my religious (i. e. Christian) stance, and by my academic background in the philosophy of religion. It is perfectly clear that certain concepts and theoretical ways of grasping the phenomenon – what appears important or less important; which concepts are employed and which are excluded – will be colored by these two circumstances. And the fact that most of the theoreticians whom I shall study give priority to the Jewish-Christian tradition means that this tradition will dominate the account I give. This, however, does not mean that the present book about the holy can be fully understood only by those who share my understanding of life or my background. On the contrary, I have endeavored to let a wide and inclusive horizon be reflected in the presentations: a limited perspective is not the same thing as a narrow horizon. It would be nave to believe that everyone, irrespective of the culture and religion to which they belong, will nod appreciatively at everything I have written; but anyone who wants to describe a dimension of reality must attempt to present matters in a way that is representative of as many people as possible, while well aware that not everyone shares the same perspective. In this way, I invite the readers to a voyage of recognition and discovery – beyond this, there are no “proofs.” It is only by meeting one another halfway that the theoretical dialogue about the

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holy can be pursued. Total agreement cannot be achieved in this area, but such agreement can have a regulative function, indicating the direction to be taken by the presentation. Accordingly, we must hold fast to two ideas at once, viz. the limitation of the starting point and the breadth and inclusiveness in the goal of this study, which is the open horizon for the understanding of the holy. When I present and discuss theories from the science of religion, philosophy, theology, and psychology in the following chapters, a prominent position will be given to phenomenology. This is surely a fruitful point of departure for an investigation of the holy, not only because its branches are already found in academic disciplines such as philosophy, the science of religion, theology, and psychology, but also because the best way to do justice to the object of this book – the holy – is by means of a theoretical school of thought which seeks to let experience be the lodestar of its approach. Phenomenology attempts to preserve and describe the phenomenon as it shows itself to us. But the way in which it shows itself is formed by an interplay, which has its origin in two sources. First of all, the holy makes itself known to experience, as something foreign, something different and more, something that transcends my own self and my well known environment; secondly, however, it is also something whose appearance we ourselves help to form through a well known language, including cultural praxis. This praxis links that which is foreign to something with which we are familiar. It is the distinctive collaboration between the foreign and the familiar that gives the holy its specifically ambiguous and fleeting character. Such an understanding of phenomenology is very broad. As far as our knowledge is concerned, the encounter with the holy begins in experience, but a linguistic element of interpretation must also be integrated. There is nothing new in the affirmation that phenomenology almost lives in a symbiotic fellowship with hermeneutics; but in our investigation of the holy, hermeneutics too must be understood very broadly. Following Paul Ricœur’s model, I believe that the hermeneutical circular movement towards a deeper understanding has its starting point in phenomenology. This movement can include several stages, where various academic perspectives fill in aspects, which are not illuminated by phenomenology. The goal is not to get “behind” phenomenology, but to return to the phenomenon itself with an informed eye, where (to borrow Ricœur’s concepts) we have moved from the first navet to the second navet.1 Accordingly, I shall begin with (religious) phenomenology and deepen its understanding through investigations relating to the science of religion, theology, philosophy, and psychology. All these factors work “in the wings” when the holy manifests itself. These various perspectives are essential for another reason too: it is a fundamental supposition of this book that the holy is a complex phenomenon and that it must therefore be

1 Ricœur employs this model in several passages, e. g. in Ricœur: 2004 and Ricœur: 1967, 351 ff.

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looked at from a variety of perspectives. The different aspects will emerge clearly only when we alternate between various academic approaches. A short book like this cannot offer a comprehensive presentation of the central aspects of the holy on the basis of a broad spectrum of theoretical approaches, and this means that one must exclude certain things. Analyses of specific sacred scriptures, cultic feasts, and divinities in various religions from the perspective of the science of religion cannot find space in a book, which attempts to reflect on general problems. The secondary literature comments on questions linked to holy places, to playing and to liturgy ; I do not discuss these here. Nor do I intend to offer a detailed discussion of sacred actions – rituals – although this matter is closely linked in many ways to my concern in this book. The research field of “ritual studies” is quite simply too vast to be presented in the space of a few pages.2

The Holy and Late Modernity It may be true that we no longer live in the age of the great religious systems, or in a sacral universe where special times, places, and objects unfailingly manifest holiness; and presumably the time is also past when scholars thought that the holy was the very core of all the world religions. In many ways, the twentieth century has brought a very meager soil for the religions in our western world. Nevertheless, the holy keeps on coming back – perhaps no longer with the same self-assurance and vociferousness as in earlier ages, but often as small traces or signals from something “more” and “other.” Dietmar Kamper and Christoph Wulf, who have published an anthology on this subject, recall one of the well known prophecies uttered at the start of the twentieth century about the “past” character of the holy : “With regard to the holy, there is the thesis, adumbrated by Max Weber and subsequently repeated again and again with emphasis, that a disenchantment of the world has taken place through science, so that the holy has become a pre-modern matter.” Although this kind of prophecy has had enormous repercussions and has formed the perspective on the holy held by several generations of scholars, the time has now come to ask whether the prophecy still holds good. Kamper and Wulf 2 One further distinction must be drawn. In my earlier book Phenomenology and the Holy (Dahl: 2010), I attempt to prepare the ground for the holy on philosophical premises. By means of a detailed analysis of Husserl, I endeavor to show how one can get beyond certain problems that are a consequence of the classical way of understanding the holy, especially in Rudolf Otto. The present book is not primarily a religious-philosophical analysis, nor is it addressed to readers with a special interest in Husserl’s phenomenology. Rather, I wish to address a broader audience, elaborating a more comprehensive understanding of the holy in a dialogue with related academic disciplines, which also make a contribution to the understanding of the holy. The limitation of Phenomenology and the Holy is that it is content with a formal indication of the place for the holy ; the present book is an attempt to develop a more substantial understanding of the holy.

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continue with the following thesis: “The holy is not something that belongs to the past. Rather, it certainly belongs to the present, as something that is relocated, concealed, suppressed, and forgotten.” (Kamper/Wulf: 1997, 1. Eng. trans.: B.McN.). Weber formulated his celebrated thesis as long ago as the beginning of the twentieth century. Today, one cannot simply act as if the thesis about the disenchantment of the world was unjustified, or as if it were not still justified in part. It is still the case that central societal institutions in the West lack a religious legitimation, and that the natural sciences, the human sciences, and even many theological disciplines get by perfectly well without “the hypothesis of God.” At the same time, however, Kamper and Wulf indicate that disenchantment is no longer – and perhaps has never been – a completely precise description. The holy still exists, but it turns up under different conditions, displaced, disguised, and perhaps in league with new phenomena. What has happened? The short answer is that a cultural shift of climate has taken place. At least since the 1990’s, there has been talk of a “return of religion” in culture, in the visual arts, in literature, and in philosophy. Such a return can best be understood on the basis of changes which have occurred in our way of organizing our existence, a change from a modern to a late modern age. Let me sketch some aspects of this change. Weber’s thesis is in many ways typical of the entire modern self-understanding from the seventeenth-century Enlightenment onwards. At that period, the human person’s self-confidence intensified, above all thanks to trust in the human person’s hallmark, viz. reason. With the help of reason, tradition and religious authorities were seen in a new light. Reason found expression in Immanuel Kant’s vision of the selflegislating and mature subject, in the ideas of equality, liberty, and fraternity in the French Revolution, or in the confidence in science and technology – the confidence in progress itself. Since what Kant called “pure reason” was realized in society, a rationalization took place on the principle of a clear division of labor. The division of labor corresponded to a division of the societal sphere into various sectors. This so-called differentiation is an important characteristic of modernity ; it entailed the detachment of various aspects of human existence from the religion, which had once included within itself our understanding of reality as a whole. Politics, science, and art – which had all been more or less closely linked to religion in earlier periods – were now established as self-sufficient sectors with their own internal logic. Ideally, all this looked like a huge cake, where each slice was neatly cut and inserted into a well rounded-off totality. Religion, which in earlier times had been the overarching and integrating factor, was reduced to one sector among others, and a sector which was gradually pushed more and more to one side. This increasing displacement of religion from the public sphere is often called secularization. Although several theoreticians from Weber’s days until the 1960’s and 1970’s grieved over the

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loss of an integrating religious dimension, there was no doubt that the development of society was going in one direction: religion would be obliged to yield ground to the exercise of the pure reason in society. What I will call a typically modern dichotomy developed between the religious and the secular, where it was believed that the religious was under pressure from the secular. It is indeed true that private religiosity and various religious groupings have existed in all historical periods, but these were regarded as marginal phenomena devoid of any influence on the overarching structures of public life. Such theories of secularization were predominant at least until the 1980’s. In the course of recent years, a new understanding has won acceptance. Let me mention some factors, which have made this necessary. Over a lengthy period, the conservative forces have made progress, both among Christians and among Muslims. Today, Christian charismatic religion is the form of religion, which is growing most strongly on a global basis, especially in Latin America. Through the media, such forms of religious expression have entered the public domain in a confrontational manner. The holy is no longer banished to private rooms as a purely personal concern. It has become much more visible in the society to which we relate on a day-to-day basis. Concepts such as “holy war” are not an echo from a remote and unreal past, but have forced their way into society through terrorist actions; there can be no doubt that the most spectacular of these up to now was the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers in New York on September 11, 2001. When a caricature published in a Danish newspaper in 2006, and later also in Norwegian periodicals and newspapers, portrayed Muhammad as a terrorist, this was a transgression of holy taboos connected to the prohibition of images, and these taboos were at any rate one of the components in the detonation, which unleashed holy wrath in many places in the world. Similar examples can be found in recent popular culture. Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code (2003) is a detective story about how the truth about the Holy Grail has been suppressed for almost two thousand years. Conspiracy theories doubtless satisfy many readers’ dislike of obligatory dogmatic systems and of a powerful institution like the Roman Catholic Church. Nevertheless, it remains remarkable that such an unambiguously sacral – indeed, Christian – theme should suddenly interest a surprisingly large portion of the book-reading world. Popular culture is not alone here: a broad stream of intellectuals also speak of “the return of religion.” Trendsetting American, British, and French philosophers can now plume themselves on their religious orientation, while only one generation ago it was unthinkable, or at any rate unacceptable, to bring God into philosophy. I could have presented a different, and no doubt a longer, list of examples, but the point is only to show that the map, which was drawn up by the theoreticians of secularization is no longer a good match for the terrain. Once again, the question is: What has happened? Some theoreticians speak of a resacralization, as a reaction to Weber’s

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disenchantment; others speak of the post-secular age, which has replaced the secular era. Peter Berger, who was one of the standard-bearers of the theory of secularization in the 1960’s and 1970’s, speaks today of desacralization in a global context. He avers straightforwardly that the theory of secularization was simply erroneous, and that we live in a world which is “as furiously religious as it ever was, and in some places more so than ever” (Berger : 1999, 2). Berger believes that scholars of religion earlier supposed that the European scholar and other like-minded persons were representative of the situation of religion. It is true that religion has come to play a smaller role in the life of a western, well-educated man than in the past; but Europe is not representative in the global religious context. Rather, Europe is the exception. The rest of the world, in Asia, Africa, and South America, has not gone through a correspondingly deep process of secularization. Accordingly, when we speak of the return of religion, this can give the wrong impression – as if religion has been away and is suddenly returning. Is it only the theoretical eye that has suddenly become aware of religion? It may indeed be the case that the “return of religion” reflects a more acute theoretical eye; but it also reflects new structures, which have made our own age more sensitive to the presence of the holy beyond the modern dichotomies. Berger points out that the process of modernization, which has produced secularizing tendencies, has also produced the same amount of countersecularizing tendencies. Such double movements – contra-secularization as a response to secularization – doubtless possess an explanatory value, not least in relation to the emergence of Christian and Muslim fundamentalism. But we can go even further and ask whether there has not been a shift in the very basic understanding of the modern period. The concept “post-modern” made its way into the general vocabulary at some point in the 1980’s, and became firmly established in the following decade. By now, however, the “post-modern” has become so emptied of meaning that it no longer indicates a clearly demarcated content. There is also a certain scepticism about seeing our own age as contrasting so strongly with the preceding “modernity,” as the concept “postmodern” invites us to do. As I see it, what we are experiencing at present is rather a late phase of modernity itself, where it is more appropriate to speak of late modernity.3 We may summarize this situation by saying that doubts have been sown in late modernity with regard to what we might call modernity’s “cake model.” Is there really a universal and unified order under which all human activity and experience can be classified? It may be that experiences of other cultures have come so close to us that it is not so easy to forget how foreign they are, and it may be that we have become much more sensitive to the abnormal, the alien, and the irregular within our own cultural order. Similarly, the idea that there 3 The principal work in post-modern theory remains Lyotard: 1984 (French original 1979). The most prominent critic of the post-modern is Habermas: 1981.

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are clear and sharp borders between the sectors has become problematic, for when confidence in the universal order withers, this also entails a change in the understanding of the relationships between the sectors. The sectors glide into one another just as much as they glide apart; the clean-cut slices in the modern “cake model” intersect, and the interfaces have become more indistinct. With an allusion to the differentiation of modernity, one can speak of a certain dedifferentiation, in which connections across the sectors assume a renewed importance. Religion does not remain untouched by changes, which take place in culture and society. Science has not succeeded in expelling religion, and the public political sphere cannot close its eyes to the public role of religion. The American sociologist Samuel Huntington believes that future conflicts and wars will be waged between civilizations; and since religion is the most important characteristic of the civilizations, it is difficult to deny the political dimension of the holy (Huntington: 2005, 4). In a completely different manner, Jürgen Habermas has underlined the public significance of religion as a source of morality, identity, and fellowship, provided that citizens who are religious believers allow their insights to be translated into a language, which is universally accessible (Habermas: 2006, 10). In short, politics, science, and religion are once again woven into each other. Irrespective of whether we speak of more indistinct borders in the order of the “cake model,” or of a shift to new models (“network” and “labyrinth” have been proposed), late modernity entails changed conditions for the holy. The modern dichotomies between the religious and the secular, the holy and the profane, appear less unambiguous. On the premises of modernity, the holy found it difficult to legitimate its domain, and suffered under continuous pressure from adjacent spheres. However, a weakening of modernity’s unified basic structure and it’s clearly differentiated sectors does not mean a return to the pre-modern sacral cosmos. The uncritical embrace of the holy power, the symbols, and the myths of the universe as the only true account and explanation of reality can be maintained only as an obstinate protest or as a hidebound fundamentalism. It appears that today, the holy dwells just as much in the interstices, the overlappings and points of intersection between the spheres which once were separate. Religion does not exist in a pure form, but is always to a greater or lesser extent woven into other cultural and social fields. One example is the way in which modern abstract painting, which has long since detached itself from ecclesiastical institutions and has no explicit references to religious symbols, nevertheless can hint at a holy presence. Another example is how something as prosaic as a scientific explanation of a biological process can kindle wonder, indeed almost a religious reverence for nature. It is not possible to define unambiguously how far this is an aesthetic experience, a scientific explanation, or a religious wonder – the holy is located in between all these. The experience in this interstice may perhaps be more modest, taking the

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form of hints and traces rather than of powerful manifestations. The holy has become weak. In a similar manner, the Italian philosopher Giovanni Vattimo has spoken of “weak thinking.” He claims that the history of western thought has undergone a considerable weakening. In the past, the reason laid claim to the strong and pure structures, but now it has become more reserved and modest. This applies likewise to people’s relationship to systems of religious doctrines. Vattimo says that he himself has a weak faith, a belief, which believes that it believes (Vattimo: 1999, 69). Often, the holy appears today in a way that allows a different approach which lies beyond the classic options of either dogmatic atheism or unwavering theism. Here, one can glimpse the connection between a weak holiness of this kind and the interstice: for it is precisely because the holy falls between the stools of clean-cut ideological or conceptual systems (so to speak) that it has also become more vulnerable, weaker. Alongside the interstice, the idea of weak holiness will be a leitmotif in this book. Reality, however, is complex. On the one side, there are much more insistent experiences of the holy, as in strongly expressive, conservative, or indeed fundamentalist invocations of the holy. It has been pointed out that religious fundamentalism can be understood as an active resistance to the withering of the authority of religion which has been one consequence of secularization (Brekke: 2007, 18 ff). The late modern experience is open and flexible, but the price that must be paid is a lack of clarity and certainty. In this perspective, fundamentalism of various kinds (both Christian and Muslim, both political and religious) appears as a form of compensation for the loss of identity and certainty in the modern period (Krogseth: 1998, 204 f). At the other extreme, we find the indeterminate neo-religious ideas of holiness. Perhaps it is possible to see neo-religious movements too as a compensation for a fragmented reality, as one way of attributing to the self a feeling of spiritual identity, despite everything. An open movement like New Age does not in any way attempt to absolutize dogmas and moral precepts. Rather, it attempts to develop a deeper contact with the authentic self – the holy self – and with the great totality to which the self belongs. In contradistinction to fundamentalism, several neo-religious movements have created a flexible notion of holiness where each one can make use of the freedom and openness to put together spiritual universes with elements drawn from various traditions and religions. In the center are the self which chooses and which realizes itself, and the experiences it has. This self is no longer willing to submit to divine authorities or institutional structures.4 Late modernity is thus a climate in which religious tendencies point in various directions at once. Some indicate a weakening, others a consolidation of the secure structures; some religious voices say yes to openness and plurality, 4 Cf. Heelas/Woodhead: 2005, 6 f, building on Taylor : 2002, 80; 100 f. The theme is further developed in Taylor’s most recent book (Taylor : 2007, ch. 13 – 14).

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others seek to combat them. This complexity in itself points beyond the demand for clarity, which was made by the modern model.

The interstice. Preliminary Signposts The holy becomes visible in very different contexts, e. g. in art, in the religious room, in everyday things. Is it possible to say something more general, something that embraces such varied manifestations? I have not offered any definition in the strict sense, but I have drawn attention to some decisive traits of the holy : It manifests something “other” and something “more.” It entails special human responses (symbols, rituals, precepts, etc.). I have also drawn attention to the religious value of the holy. This last point is both very central and very much a matter of dispute. For how are we to understand the relationship between the holy and the institutionalized religions? One answer, which was predominant throughout most of the twentieth century, regarded the holy and religion as isomorphic realities. In other words, the tendency was to regard to holy as the common core of all religions, as the essence of the religions. Today, there are not many historians of religion who would be tempted to put forward such a claim without reservations. Greater weight is attached today than in the past to plurality and to the differences between the religions. The centrality of the holy varies in the different religions, and the meaning attached by the various cultures to this concept need not always be identical. Some scholars of religion, such as Richard Fenn, go to the other extreme and regard the holy and religion as mutually exclusive realities, at least in the contemporary situation. Fenn claims that the holy is an uncontrollable power which can no longer be held bound by institutionalized religion, and that this is why the holy seeps out into all the other spheres of society (Fenn: 2001, 9 f). The problem with Fenn’s position is that it does not take into account how the holy can still become visible within established religious frameworks. My starting point in this book will be an intermediate position: The holy is a religious phenomenon, which, especially in recent years, also becomes visible outside the traditional domain of religion. Although the holy continues to be primarily a religious phenomenon, it keeps on finding new forms of expression. The holy is “captured” in various ways in Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism, but it also finds expression outside these religions, in art, in important human encounters, and in memories. If the holy is not the essence of religion, and if the holy itself does not possess any essence at all, is there then basically anything that unites the various experiences of the holy? Ludwig Wittgenstein endeavored to remind us that theoretical concepts too belong to the complicated network or “game” in everyday language. Instead of “essence,” Wittgenstein introduced the useful concept of family resemblance. A family can have characteristic facial features,

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even if the son most strongly resembles his mother and the daughter most strongly resembles her father. In the same way, the unity of a concept can be sought in “a complicated network of similarities overlapping and crisscrossing” (Wittgenstein: 1967, §66). The same is true of the holy. The basis of all that we call “holy” is not some absolutely immutable core, but a set of crisscrossing similarities, which constitute a loose unity. This makes it more difficult to demarcate the holy once and for all; at the same time, however, the holy becomes more interesting, as a complex and mobile phenomenon. And it has been claimed that one of the enduring insights in Rudolf Otto’s epochal book Das Hellige (1917) is that the holy is a complex phenomenon (Colpe: 1997, 53). The holy is both puzzling and present, both attractive and repellent. There are different branches of the family resemblance that make up the complexity of the holy. Let us begin with something that seems selfcontradictory. On the one hand, wonder at the holy appears as something devoid of language. The holy presents itself as something foreign to the language which is available in our culture. On the other hand, it is clear that the understanding of the holy changes in the course of history and is therefore indebted to the cultural formation and the linguistic expression, which it receives. Is it possible to unite these two affirmations – the holy as both alien to, and nevertheless dependent on, culture and language? Perhaps it is precisely this inherent tension that can help us discover a very central characteristic of the holy, viz. that it is both foreign and familiar, or more precisely, that it is the interstice between foreign and familiar. If it is possible to indicate the experiential content of the holy, this must be something more than the accustomed and familiar ; at the same time, however, it cannot be completely detached from what it is possible to experience.5 Now, however, we must take a further step and ask: How does the holy become visible here? The space between, or the interstice, gives us at least a first pointer. The interstice challenges the typically modern dichotomies, where concepts are united by means of their mutual antithesis (holy/profane, religious/secular, pure/impure, etc.). More specifically, my suggestion is that the holy comes into play in the interstice that lies between three poles, namely the holy as different and other, the profane, and what I would call the sacral. The interstice is neither the one nor the other : it is neither completely familiar nor completely foreign. What place does such a concept find in research literature? Although such an understanding of the holy is not traditional, it clearly has precursors, not least in dialogue philosophy, which emphasizes the space between, that which cannot be reduced to either “I” or “thou,” since it demands both of these. In the “I–thou” relationship, there arises something qualitatively different and new, something more than the sum total of individual persons (Buber : 2002, 241). But although Buber articulates

5 This is the central argument of my Phenomenology and the Holy (Dahl: 2010).

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important aspects of the interstice here, I believe that an investigation of the holy cannot be limited exclusively to the dialogical experience. On the basis of completely different premises, Derrida’s post-structuralist thinking has come close to the interstice in his use of concepts such as diffrance, trace, and aporias. The point of such concepts is to clear the path for structural interstices, which are not completely integrated into the systems of philosophical thought (Derrida: 1973). Derrida’s approach does not exhaust the holy, because the method remains too formal and is not sufficiently sensitive to the phenomenological material. The interstice, as a decisive characteristic of the holy, is neither a self-contradiction nor an aporia, neither a conceptual leftover nor an element, which disturbs the logic: it is the concrete manner in which the holy occurs, usually right in the heart of our lived life. In this regard, Kristeva’s reflections on feminine holiness have come closer, since they are open to the experiential dimension. Here, the interstice plays an important role (Clment/Kristeva: 2001, 27, 97). But although (as we shall see later) Kristeva has made important contributions to the understanding of the holy, the present book is not guided by the same gendertheoretical interests. In my context, the interstice is understood as a phenomenological description of how the holy becomes visible. My starting point will be in Martin Heidegger’s description of the openmouthed wonder : “Bereft of all knowledge, wonder stands in a between, between that which is most ordinary, the existent, and its unordinariness, the fact that it ‘is’.” In this interstice of wonder, the human person is put into “the confused indecision of the ordinary and the unordinary” (Heidegger : 1984, 168 f. Eng. trans.: B.McN.). Doubtless, many people still have childhood memories of the wonder they felt at the first snowfall in winter, as it covered gardens and streets: everything is the same, and yet everything is changed. Or one may think of how the holy sacraments in church are based precisely on such a connection between the ordinary and the unordinary : for the believers, ordinary bread and wine, when put into a liturgical context, awaken the sense of Christ’s presence. More specifically, I wish to emphasize how the holy occurs in the force field between two other central poles, viz. the profane and the sacral. The holy entails something foreign. None of the classic theories with which we shall shortly become acquainted doubts that the appearing of the holy is linked to the appearing of something foreign, something mysterious and different. But this foreign element must also become visible within the field of human vision, for otherwise it does not concern us. This is why a link must also be established in some way or other between the holy and the life we lead from day to day. On the one hand, the holy is not transformed into something profane, into which it would be completely absorbed; but on the other hand, it cannot be completely separated from the everyday sphere. This kind of interweaving of the foreign and the familiar in the everyday sphere illustrates not only the “interstice” as a characteristic of the holy, but also weak holiness. The

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everyday manifestations of the holy are not marked by an otherworldly revelation, but are weak manifestations of something “other” and “more” right in the midst of our everyday activities. The holy is sometimes associated with that which is ethically good and estimable – a holy life, a holy calling – but one need not look long before one finds examples of another side to the phenomenon, which paint a much more somber picture. In what follows, the destructive aspect of the holy will be called the “sacral.” In customary usage, the “sacral” is synonymous with the holy, but for want of a better expression, I reserve this term for the dark side of the holy. Although it is possible, and sometimes necessary, to draw a distinction between the sacral and the holy, the sacral must not be separated or detached from it: the sacral is one pole, which forms part of a more comprehensive entity, viz. holiness.6 This dimension includes not only the sinister atmosphere, which can be linked to an overwhelming and foreign power, but also the potential of the sacral for violence. I have already mentioned the holy war ; another example is the scapegoat, to which demonic qualities have been ascribed, thus legitimating violence. The persecution of the Jews is only the most obvious expression of this sacral logic, as Ren Girard has pointed out. Traditionally, it has often been thought that the distinctions between the holy, the profane, and the sacred are kept in place by means of taboos and purity regulations which function (to put it simply) as control mechanisms which ensure both that the holy is not besmirched by the profane, and that the sacral is kept outside both the holy sphere and the profane sphere. I shall argue that the reality is not so unambiguous, since the holy itself appears to entail an “impure” exchange between holy and profane, holy and sacral, because it is precisely in this interplay that the mystery of the holy comes into force. One must be open to the possibility that the profane order can be perforated by the holy and the sacral, and that the holy can be besmirched by the profane and the sacral.

6 For a similar distinction between holy and sacral, see Levinas: 1990a, 141.

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2. The Holy and Modern Dichotomies The first and most fundamental question which this book as a whole will ask is: What is the holy? One obvious way to answer this question is to attempt to describe typical traits of experiences of the holy. For example, one can start with one’s own self, paying attention to one’s own experience, and then attempt to offer as exact as possible a description of this experience. If one wants to extend the investigation to cover more than one’s own private experience, one must explore other people’s experience of the holy. If one wishes to broaden one’s insight even further, one can go to other cultures and see whether similar experiences of the holy are to be found there. If one identifies characteristic traits, which possess a general validity, one has broadened one’s knowledge of the holy. Simplifying somewhat, we can say that these and similar approaches were the path taken by the phenomenology of religion at the beginning of the twentieth century, a path that was to lead to some of the most important contributions to our understanding of the holy. The most prominent and influential representatives of the phenomenology of religion are perhaps the German historian of religion and theologian Rudolf Otto and the Rumanianborn historian of religion Mircea Eliade, whom we shall study in the present chapter. Although their theories must be regarded as classical contributions to the theoretical debate about the holy, it is important to grasp the limitations of these theories. In particular, I shall look at how they are dominated by the modern dichotomies that I mentioned in the previous chapter, especially by the dichotomy between the holy and the profane. One central question is how the separation between the holy and the everyday or profane is presented. This separation plays a decisive role for both Otto and Eliade, although they treat it in different ways. These two scholars occupy a relatively weak position in today’s research. Nevertheless, I wish to underline what remains valid in their contributions, especially by showing how a philosophical phenomenology can come to their aid. But before we come to that point, it will be useful to form a picture of what is entailed by employing the phenomenology of religion as a methodology. Phenomenology of Religion and its Background The phenomenology of religion played a decisive role in the science of religion in our part of the world between the end of the nineteenth century and the 1970’s. The “phenomenology of religion” is not, however, a univocal concept, partly because its leading spokesmen have developed their academic

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discipline in various directions, and partly because that which goes by this name has its origin de facto in a variety of roots. The presupposition of the experience-based wing of the phenomenology of religion, which became predominant in the first half of the twentieth century, was the work of Edmund Husserl, the founding father of philosophical phenomenology. The other wing, with its structural orientation, seeks to classify the various aspects of religion, in order to develop structures and typologies; this tends not to have any link to philosophical phenomenology.1 We shall see a confluence of the two wings –both the experienced-based wing and the structurally oriented wing – in some phenomenologists of religion, such as Eliade. But since both Otto and Eliade basically belong to the first wing of the phenomenology of religion, it is this wing that is the center of our attention here. In order to grasp what is entailed by the phenomenological approach, we must first look at its background, at the fundamental models on which it builds, and not least at what it turns its back on. A fruitful starting point is offered here by mile Durkheim’s epoch-making study of the basic forms of religious life, published in 1912, both because this work so clearly articulates the distinction between the holy and the profane, a distinction which is later developed within the phenomenology of religion, and also because it launches a sociological explanatory model – which the phenomenologists of religion unambiguously oppose. Durkheim sees religion as an explicitly societal phenomenon. He is indeed acquainted with mysticism and the religious individualism of Protestantism, but he claims that individualistic forms of faith like this are derived from a more basic collective origin. Religion must be understood as a unitary system within a religious collective, where actions and rituals take place, which correspond to mythical ideas (Durkheim: 2001, 46). The religious understandings of faith and praxis presuppose the existence of two fundamental spheres of reality which are separate, and which indeed have an antithetical relationship: the spheres of the holy and the profane. The relationship between the holy and the profane is not that of a fluid transition like that between the higher and the lower in a hierarchy. The relationship consists of difference or heterogeneity : This heterogeneity suffices to characterize this classification of things and to distinguish it from any other for one particular reason: it is absolute. There is no other example in the history of human thought of two categories of things so profoundly differentiated or radically opposed to one another. The traditional opposition between good and evil is nothing in comparison; good and evil are opposite species of the same genus, namely morality, just as health and sickness are 1 For a comparable division, cf. Gilhus/Mikaelson: 2001, 49 ff. For a more fine-meshed division, cf. Allen: 1987, 273.

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merely two different aspects of the same order of facts – life. By contrast, the sacred and the profane have always and everywhere been conceived by the human mind as separate genera, as two worlds that have nothing in common (Durkheim: 2001, 38).

It would be impossible to formulate this point with greater clarity : the holy and the profane have nothing in common. The essential functions of rituals and taboos are to ensure that there is no admixture between the holy and the profane, and that they do not come into contact with each other in any other way. Although the holy seems to be an autonomous phenomenon, Durkheim’s intention is to show how the holy is in reality a masked expression of the fellowship itself. The holy is to be understood as a product of, or more precisely as a function of, societal mechanisms or functions which emerge in all fellowships. In order to unmask the actual societal mechanisms as simply as possible, he takes his starting point in the most easily understood form of religion, which was accessible in his own day, viz. Australian totemism. A totem is a material object, often an animal or a plant, which a delimited societal fellowship, a so-called clan, views as a symbol of its unity (Durkheim: 2001, 88). For Durkheim, such totems are the most exemplary instances of the holy. He is particularly interested in the fact that the totem is both adored as something transcendent – something that crosses a boundary, something “outside” – and understood as the very embodiment of the closed fellowship. Durkheim’s thesis is that the holiness of the totem is in reality a product of the fellowship, which it symbolizes. The individual understands himself in relation to a fellowship, which is larger and more powerful than he is. This is why the power is experienced as something transcendent in relation to each individual. In order for the individual to take part in the fellowship, it is necessary that one bridle one’s own interests and natural needs and that one is thus willing to sacrifice something for the good of the fellowship. The moral authority of the fellowship is transferred to the totem in such a manner that the rituals and prescriptions, which are linked in one way or another to the totem demand obedience and respect. Although the clan members experience the commandments and prohibitions as issuing from the totem itself, Durkheim believes that on the deepest level, this involves a transference. The totem is nothing other than a crystallization point for the moral power of the fellowship. This power appears with a religious quality – as “holy” – which is transferred to the totem. The fields of existence which are not regulated by the fellowship, where the individual can decide freely for himself, thus become profane, while those fields which are regulated by the fellowship through commandments and prohibitions appear as holy (Durkheim: 2001, 155 – 160). According to Durkheim, if one takes one’s starting point in the totem, it is possible to explain the universal structure of holy/profane by pointing to the underlying societal mechanisms.

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Neither Otto nor Eliade made any fundamental alteration to Durkheim’s understanding of the relationship between the holy and the profane, although this distinction is seldom expressed so unreservedly as in Durkheim. This means that they all confirm and develop the typically modern logic, where the dichotomies dominate their presentation. Durkheim agrees with the phenomenologists that religion is characterized by a particular feeling or experience, but it is here that they part company : for where Durkheim holds that the feeling can and should be traced back to the societal structures of which it is a product, the phenomenologists invest their entire analysis precisely in the feelings or experiences themselves, and refuse to go behind them. The phenomenologists’ intention is not to block the investigation before it reaches its conclusion, nor do they wish to close their eyes to potentially uncomfortable explanations. They are quite simply in disagreement with Durkheim about what constitutes the ultimate “behind,” the very basis, which the investigation seeks to uncover.

“To the Things Themselves!” For the phenomenologists, it is the phenomenon that constitutes the basis, not only of the research carried out by the science of religion, but of all human knowledge. The phenomenon is neither a subjective experience nor a really existing object, but simply that which manifests itself, independently of whether or not it objectively exists. According to what Husserl calls “the Principle of all Principles,” “every originary intuition” is “a legitimizing source of cognition” (Husserl: 1982, 44; Husserl: 1950, 55). Husserl holds that all knowledge has its origin in the present experience or original intuition. As a source of law, however, intuition sets limits for what the human person can know. All assertions, which do not correspond to some possible content of experience are empty speculations. Husserl’s slogan “To the things themselves!” was the lodestar of the phenomenological work. He noticed that philosophers had a tendency to take their starting point in philosophical principles, metaphysical or scientific dogmas, and then attempted to offer explanations of actual problems; sometimes, the preferred starting point was the principles of psychology, and sometimes – as in the case of Durkheim – they chose sociology. Husserl objects that this means overlooking the fact that all knowledge must have its starting point in “the things themselves,” i. e. the phenomena; it also entails overlooking the special character that belongs to the religious phenomena. Instead of uncovering the special aspects which belong to the religious phenomena and giving a precise description of their essence, Durkheim always leaps behind the phenomena to an entity which is not itself of a religious nature – in Durkheim’s case, the norms of the fellowship. Such an explanatory model, where one claims that one phenomenon is in reality

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merely a byproduct of something else, is reductionist: the phenomena are not described on their own premises, but are explained away.2 Although phenomenology holds that the human person always is conscious of something, the phenomena are not always equally obvious to our eyes. On the contrary, the eye often lets itself be seduced by antecedent prejudices, which may come from metaphysics, from religious dogmatism, or from science; or the eye may be veiled by the mechanical routine, which characterizes everyday living. This is why phenomenology recommends that one eliminate all prejudices, in order to cleanse away all the slag and to turn one’s attention totally and exclusively to that which makes itself known to experience. Husserl sometimes calls such an elimination epoch (to set something in parenthesis), sometimes reduction (in the sense of “leading something back” to the experiencing consciousness). This may be complicated in detail, but the underlying idea is built upon a well known experience, viz. that things can often be seen more clearly from a distance. The phenomenologists employ epoch to gain distance – paradoxically enough, with the intention of examining “the things themselves” more closely. Eliade proposes that one can understand epoch on the analogy of a rite de passage: the novice is set outside the society for a period, in order to return with renewed insight to the reality he or she had earlier left (Eliade: 1969, 125). Something is eliminated, not in order to impose limits on knowledge, but rather in order to pierce through the prejudiced understanding. This lays the ground for the appearance of the phenomenon. But no answer has as yet been given to the question of what the phenomenon means, and how it is to be classified. The phenomenon is the thing towards which the religious life is directed. In Husserl’s view, scientific knowledge demands that we penetrate into the essence of the phenomenon. This does not require us to penetrate “behind” the phenomena; on the contrary, the phenomenologists hold that the essence itself remains accessible on the surface of the phenomenon (cf. van der Leeuw: 1933, 637). Husserl sees the essence as integrated into our understanding of the phenomenon, but holds that specific methods may be required – a so called “eidetic reduction” – in order to distill this essence in its pure form (Fenn: 2001, 9 f). Husserl recommends that one think in one’s imagination, as in a centrifuge, of all the possible alterations one type of phenomenon can undergo. Something is flung around, but what lies in the center will remain still; in a similar manner, that which remains immutable in all possible variations of one and the same thing in our imagination is the essence. Accordingly, if I want to learn what the essence of chairs is, I must use 2 Otto makes a similar criticism of evolutionistic theories about the emergence of religion, because they reduce the specific character of religion to an historical product of non-religious circumstances. Inter alia, he criticizes Wilhelm Wundt for holding a historical-reductionist theory (Otto: 1977, 296). Although Eliade does not insist as strongly as Otto on the specific character of religion, he makes a similar criticism of the tendency on the part of other historians of religion to reduce religious phenomena to societal or material conditions (Eliade: 1969, 6).

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my imagination to evoke an infinite number of varieties. That which is common to everything that I can call a chair is the essence of the chair. Correspondingly, van der Leeuw holds that a study of the history of religion and a comparison between different religions can also serve as a variation of this kind, where the researcher can finally extract religion in a condensed form – its essence (van der Leeuw: 1925, 4). And its essence was often identified as the holy. Otto and the Numinous Otto, the historian of religion and theologian, reached his undisputed high point in 1917 with the book Das Heilige. His broad schooling was both his strength and his weakness. It was his strength, because his interdisciplinary approach gave him access to a wider spectrum of knowledge than most other scholars; but this breadth also meant that Otto was an outsider in relation to the established research in his period. The leading theologians at that time, the so-called “dialectical theologians,” regarded Otto’s flirting with universal religious, non-Christian phenomena almost as a theological cardinal sin, while the historians of religion had reservations about the theological interests which were clearly present in his research. Independently of his theological interests, Otto probably saw some traits in the holy, which go far beyond the borders of Christianity.3 There can be no doubt that his insight into the holy as a complex phenomenon full of tension has become a lasting contribution to our understanding of the holy. Otto wishes to uncover “the thing itself,” viz. the holy as a phenomenon, scraped free of all cultural and theoretical overpainting. Otto calls the original phenomenon, out of which all ideas about holiness have been generated, the numinous, which he sees as the very essence of religion, the original “primordial datum.” At a later stage in the history of religions, a number of qualities are attached to the numinous, and that which we associate with the holy gradually emerges. At best, the historical content of meaning enriches the holy ; at worst, it means an alienation of the holy in relation to the original numinous. In order not to let himself be led astray, Otto begins by employing a kind of epoch to cordon off a number of prejudices which obstruct the pure access to the phenomenon. The first prejudice he confronts is the idea that the holy in its most original form can be tied to a concept, or is indeed generated by concepts. Since concepts are the most fundamental instrument of human rationality, Otto describes such an understanding as a rational approach to the holy. There are various subspecies of such rational understandings, perhaps especially in the 3 Ricœur refers to a similar point of view in his treatment of myths, viz. that they have their origin in one particular cultural contxt, but nevertheless are capable of uncovering universal structures (Ricœur/Kearney : 2004, 125).

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Christian tradition, from the metaphysical systems in mediaeval scholasticism to the solid dogmatism of Protestant orthodoxy. According to Otto, however, all such basic attitudes have lost contact with the phenomenon itself, which by its very essence eludes all human concepts. We cannot express the numinous in words. To use Otto’s vocabulary, the numinous is irrational (Otto: 1979, 2). One may get the impression that Otto rejects every form of conceptual rationality in the name of religion, but this is not the case. Rather, the fact that religion makes use of concepts and of rational thinking in its dealings with the holy is a characteristic of the high level of development on which certain religions stand. But this does not constitute an objection to Otto’s decisive point, viz. that rational concepts possess a limited value, because the holy in its original form (i. e. the numinous) is irrational. All concepts and systems of thought come on the scene only after the numinous has manifested itself on its own premises. The second prejudice, which Otto wishes to sweep aside is that the holy is basically a moral phenomenon. The close link between holiness and ethics is probably not so obvious today as it appeared to Otto’s contemporaries. Like the rational, the moral has entered into relationships with the holy in the course of history. According to Otto, there is still an echo of the ethical meaning in words for the holy, such as the Latin sanctus, the Greek hagios, and the Hebrew qadsh. We should however note that this applies to the late usage of these terms, since none of these words had such a moral tone in the earliest historical stages – and it is precisely this original, pre-moral meaning that agrees with the core in the holy. In the account he gives, Otto wishes to “invent a special term to stand for ‘the holy’ minus its moral factor or ‘moment,’ and, as we can now add, minus its ‘rational’ aspect altogether” (Otto: 1976, 5 f; Otto: 1979, 6). The name Otto chooses for what is left is the numinous. The numinous is a primordial religious datum which cannot be further defined, still less be reduced to societal mechanisms. In short, it is what Kant calls an a priori, i. e. a necessary and universal condition which is presupposed in concrete experiences.4 What then remains of the holy, after the rational and the moral have been deducted from it? Otto has recourse to his Romantic precursors in order to find the answer : feeling is the third dimension, between rational thinking and ethical action, and feeling corresponds to the holy. Otto finds support for his understanding in the philosopher and theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher. Both Otto and Schleiermacher oppose the one-sided moralism and intellectualism, which are typical of the ages in which they live. The feelings put one in a direct relationship to that which transcends the human person’s boundaries, in a way that goes deeper than thought and action. This is why Schleiermacher 4 Nevertheless, Otto holds that it is necessary, in an historical perspective, that the numinous should not remain enclosed in its most original form: it must make alliances with other aspects of the human person, such as knowledge and morality.

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and Otto hold that feeling is at the center of the human person’s religiosity. The holy, and the feeling which accompanies it, must be respected in their specific quality of a sui generis, i. e. of a specific universal concept (Otto: 1967, 212; cf. Schleiermacher : 1967, 41 – 54).

The Mystery Laden with Tension How does the numinous make itself known? One of its characteristics is that it is a complex phenomenon, which can be dissected into various different elements only in subsequent reflection. Otto’s analysis gradually becomes highly complicated, but it will suffice here to present the principal elements and show how they are related to each other. The most concise collective term for the holy is mysterium tremendum et fascinans, something mysterious which is both frightening and fascinating. The “mystery” designates the enigmatic quality of the numinous, that which cannot be captured by a full rational understanding. There is an ambivalence in the mystery : on the one hand, the numinous appears as something disturbing which repulses the one who experiences it, while on the other hand, it appears as something which entices and draws to itself the one who experiences it. Otto himself emphasizes that the analysis of the mysterium element is the most important key to understanding the specific character of the numinous. It is the mystery that is the center of the double movement between attraction and repulsion. The “mystery” is the name of something hidden, something that cannot be grasped and therefore stands outside the familiar circle with which we usually surround ourselves. It evokes a variety of reactions, encompassing everything from amazement and astonishment, to paralysis. On a smaller scale, this also applies to strange experiences for which we have no words, even in the world we know so well. The mystery is related to alien phenomena, to the incomprehensible or inexplicable, which we encounter from time to time. Ideas about the soul in nature, animism, and ghost stories are two examples of phenomena which are related to the mystery, although Otto argues that these must both be counted as faint shadows of the more fundamental feeling of the mystery in the religious sense. The mysterium to which Otto seeks to draw attention cannot be measured in accordance with any known criteria. It cannot be subordinated to concepts nor defined exhaustively : it makes its escape and remains alien. To use Otto’s formulation, which was to become classic, the mystery remains das Ganz andere, that which is radically different. Taken in the religious sense, that which is “mysterious” is – to give it perhaps the most striking expression – the “wholly other” [das “Ganz andere”] (thateron, anyad, alienum), that which is quite beyond the sphere of the usual, the intelligible, and the familiar, which therefore falls quite outside the limits of the “canny,” and is contrasted

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with it, filling the mind with blank wonder and astonishment. (Otto: 1976, 26; Otto: 1979, 31)

He pushes language here to its uttermost boundary in order to point to that which remains outside the range of the well-known world in which we live – indeed, that which is opposed to all that is well known. We can hear an echo here of Durkheim’s understanding of the relationship between the holy and the profane, and of Durkheim’s insistence on the absolute separation between “two worlds, which have nothing in common.” The mystery is set in motion by two antithetical elements. The first element, which is the object of a more detailed description, is the tremendum, i. e. something frightening and repulsive. Otto and van der Leeuw agree that the primordial scene of religion is the extraordinary, the non-everyday ; Otto emphasizes the uncanny in the extraordinary, while van der Leeuw underlines the power which is often called mana (Otto: 1979, 14; van der Leeuw: 1925, 13 f).5 The uncanny or eerie (das Unheimliche) is the experience of something alien which does not belong in the reality with which we are familiar ; we shall look more closely at this experience in chapter 5 below. According to Otto, the uncanny with its “holy shudder” has always been experienced as an address, which demands a religious response. Even in modern times, the uncanny can be one component of experiences of holiness. Gothic novels and sophisticated horror films play on a similar eeriness. Although the tremendum resembles fear of various kinds, Otto emphasizes that there are only similarities – not a genuine link – between natural fear and religious eeriness. Accordingly, when the Old Testament speaks of God’s wrath, this evokes associations, which are completely different from other threatening utterances we know from our daily life. The terror or eeriness invokes one particular form of response in the one who is exposed to it. For the religious person, the natural response is reverence, which can be directed to an overwhelming reality, an encounter with an uncontrollable will or a power, or to the danger associated with approaching that which is absolutely exalted (Otto: 1979, 16 f). The element of fascinans is also connected indissolubly to the mystery, but it is the opposite of the tremendum. In the fascinans, distance becomes closeness, fear becomes mercy, and repulsion becomes enchantment. Otto claims that the cultic life of the religions would be unthinkable without a contrary movement of this kind in the numinous. We shall see later on that sacrificial rituals too can serve as a motivation for seeking to take part in the cult; in this case, the sacrifice is often understood more in a negative sense, as a way of attaining reconciliation with a threatening deity. The sacrifice becomes a useful means to moderate the deity’s wrath (cf. van der Leeuw: 1925, 130 f). 5 The concept of mana held a central position in the history of religion from the end of the nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. This Malaysian concept denotes an impersonal and universal power which manifests itself in various ways. Van der Leeuw and others thought of mana as religion’s first breakthrough, earlier than ideas about gods.

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Otto claims, however, that a positive attraction to union with the holy is a more fundamental motivation for the cultic life. The positive cultic impulse can take a variety of forms, from magical attempts to manipulate the divine forces, via cultic praises of the gifts life gives us, to mystical asceticism as a path to unity with the deity (Otto: 1979, 44 f). He affirms that the fascinans is particularly prominent in the religions of salvation, where the human person is assured of grace and liberation. The characteristic trait of the holy is thus the tension between unity and contrast within one and the same phenomenon. The mysterium has two qualities, which, despite their differences, both belong to the numinous experience. In order to capture this inherent tension, Otto introduces the term contrast harmony, where the “contrast” runs between the tremendum on the one side and the fascinans on the other (Otto: 1979, 56), and yet both elements belong to the mystery – hence the “harmony.” This dynamic generates a restless tension, which is never completely resolved, where one is simultaneously attracted and repelled.

The Wholly Other and the Disenchanted World The holy entails the experience of something that is other and different. But there is also a limit to how different something can be before it becomes meaningless, empty, irrelevant to human lives. When Otto emphasizes the otherness of the holy, this must be seen in connection with the context of his theory. He was defending the specific nature of the holy against various forms of reductionism, i. e. attempts to make religion a by-product of underlying mechanisms. Like Durkheim, Marx held that religion was an ideological “superstructure” which had grown out of the material basis, and the German critic of religion, Feuerbach, who was his contemporary, saw the idea of God as nothing other than human projection of itself. Against this background, it is easy to understand why Otto needs to show that the genuine religious experience has another source, namely in something that is radically different. Is it in fact possible to experience something that is radically and absolutely other? Will it not necessarily elude our receiver apparatus? We have already seen that Husserl held that experience established the framework for all knowledge. That which cannot in principle be experienced must be rejected as abstract speculations without any root in reality. This, however, makes Otto’s emphasis on the radically other appear profoundly problematic: for as soon as something becomes accessible to human knowledge, it is reshaped into something known, and ceases to be absolutely other. One could perhaps direct the following paradox against Otto: If the numinous is radically other, it is impossible to experience it; but if it is possible to experience the numinous, it is no longer radically other (cf. Ricœur : 1970, 525). But does not Otto go to unnecessary lengths in his desire to rebut the

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reductionists? Does he not go so far that he risks making the numinous irrelevant? And if this is the case, why does he do so? Presumably, an implicit presupposition of Otto’s exaggeration is that he feels strongly under pressure from a very one-sided and radical understanding of the profane. In his experience, the process of secularization, the de-Christianization of the western world, must have advanced so far that there were no longer any points of contact with the holy in this world. In his view, the world is utterly profane and does not itself generate any form of holiness. If then the holy exists, it cannot be found within the world in which we live: it must come from outside. And it must announce its arrival precisely as something wholly other and different from profane reality. Max Weber was one of the most prominent voices among Otto’s contemporaries. He held that the last remnant of religion had been washed out of the world in which we live, as a consequence of modern scientific rationality. It is this rationality that is the basis of the effective division of labor in modern societies, where each sector is assigned delimited tasks within society as a whole, like a cake with neatly cut slices. And since science lays down the premises for all our thinking about the principles behind the modern order and rationality, everything that is incompatible with the scientific way of thinking must be expelled. Weber sees this type of rationality as the driving force in secularization: where calculating rationality has begun to rule, there is simply no longer any place for religion. Weber argues that this rationality demands that it must be possible for science to analyze everything that exists. One must in fact assume “that principally there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play, but rather that one can, in principle, master all things by calculation. This means that the world is disenchanted.” (Weber : 1991, 139).6 Magic and a divine presence are no longer a part of our world. The phrase “disenchantment of the world” has become the classic emblem of secularization – the fate of the modern world. Weber argues that before this horizon, there is indeed still a potential for the religious flight from reality, but there is no real anchoring of religious experience. According to Weber, scientific rationality means that religion has lost its legitimacy ; but the sad thing is that in the last analysis, this rationality is irrational. Science can no longer answer the fundamental question: Why should we engage in science? Our exploitation of society’s resources becomes more effective all the time, and our knowledge of our environment grows continuously, but this does not make us happier ; science is experienced only as a blind calling for the modern human being. But why then should we continue? We no longer have the answer. In the past, such callings had a 6 The fact that the concept of the disenchanted world remains decisively important for understanding the relationship between the self, modernity, and religion has been recently confirmed by Taylor : 2007, 29 – 41.

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justification – and paradoxically enough, this was a religious justification. According to Weber, the idea of “calling” has religious roots which go back to the Reformation. He claims that historically speaking, it was Luther’s teaching about calling which launched the development of the modern, scientific idea of calling. Weber points out how Reformed and Puritan piety came to lay the foundations of one of the most characteristic forms of modern rationality, viz. capitalism. The pious person works hard, shunning the enjoyments which the world has to offer. The result is that the profit from one’s work piles up, and businesses can be expanded into enterprises which earn more and more all the time. Gradually, the religious superstructure is hollowed out, and what remains is the hunt for profit as an end in itself. In this way, there is created a blind rationality, which keeps the modern human being a prisoner. People feel called to be more and more rational and efficient, without knowing why. “The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so,” writes Weber (1930: 181). In this perspective, religious everyday life appears as a profane everyday life from which the last gods have withdrawn. The everyday life, which modern people must endure is thoroughly disenchanted and profane. Our first impression might be that Weber’s description of the disenchanted world excludes Otto’s defense of the holy, but on closer examination, we see that they go hand in glove. Our question was: Why does Otto exaggerate the difference of the holy? The answer is probably that nothing else is possible. If Weber is correct to say that the disenchantment of the world is a fact, the last remnant of divine presence has been expelled in the course of this disenchantment. The last desperate way to defend the holy is to insight that it is radically other and different from all the profane world. This means that the world can be as disenchanted as it likes – but this does not touch the holy. Otto’s understanding of the holy is a direct response to Weber’s diagnosis of the contemporary age. Ultimately, it is the same fate of the modern world that finds expression in both Weber and Otto, and this fate makes them companions: the holy has been radically separated from the world, because the world itself no longer has any place for the holy. Although their respective theories appear mutually exclusive, there is an inherent link between them, since both of them implicitly confirm the modern dichotomies: holy/profane, religious/secular. Eliade and the Hierophany It is not difficult to see that the same modern dichotomies have a formative impact on Eliade’s thinking. Eliade’s most widely read work, The Sacred and the Profane (first published in 1957), begins by presenting the main points in Otto’s analysis of the holy, with which Eliade is in full agreement (Eliade: 1987, 10). He holds that Otto’s work has provided the analysis of the subject’s experience of the holy, and that the phenomenology of religion must therefore

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take the next and step and ask: What is the position of the holy on the map of the history of religions? Otto has not offered an adequate answer to the question of the relationship between that which is wholly other and symbols, rituals, and myths. Eliade sees all the manifestations of the holy as inextricably woven into a larger symbolic order, which ultimately embraces the cosmos as a whole. Against the background of this insight, one of Eliade’s central tasks is to uncover the orientation and structure of the religious cosmos. In order to broaden the field of the phenomenology of religion, the researcher must engage in a continuous dialogue with ethnologists, anthropologists, philologists, psychologists, and philosophers. Eliade realized this aim in a number of important studies. Eliade regards the traditional concept of “religion” as too narrow. In the course of its history, it has come to refer too exclusively to particular forms of ideas about the divine. Not all religions are acquainted with such ideas about the divine, but all religions relate to the holy. Eliade seeks to shed light on the manifestation of the holy, the so-called hierophany (Greek: hieros, “holy,” and phainomai, “to show oneself”), in all its forms. Although every hierophany is also an historical event, which takes place within a cultural, symbolic system and undergoes historical changes, Eliade holds that despite the differences, it is nevertheless possible to undertake specific structural analyses. He is of course aware that the religions differ and that times change; but he claims that the fundamental structures remain (Eliade: 1958, 462). He argues that religion has a timeless core or essence and that history displays various forms in which this essence can clothe itself. Whereas Otto saw the experience of the holy as having its origin in something, which was so different that it threatened to disappear out of the field of vision, Eliade sees every concrete form of rite, myth, or symbol as a form of expression of the holy. A simple hierophany of this kind cannot be an exhaustive expression of the holy, but must be regarded as one of many possible ways in which the holy can become visible. Eliade writes that in principle, everything can function as the bearer of a hierophany. And if we look at our surroundings on the basis of the panorama of the history of religions, it is probable that most elements, even the most everyday things, will have functioned at some point as the locus of the holy. Food, utensils, and animals all appear frequently in religious universes. Eliade argues that in all the profusion of variations which occur in the religious-historical material, there is one structure which is universally valid: “The first possible definition of the sacred is that it is the opposite of the profane.” (Eliade: 1987, 10). The very definition of the sacred, or as I prefer, the holy is simply that it is not profane – a definition which echoes Durkheim’s sharp distinction between the holy and the profane. It has been objected that such a definition of the holy is completely trivial and hollow, but perhaps such objections to Eliade, though not meaningless, are at any rate premature. First of all, as we shall shortly see, he has more to say about the basic definition of

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the holy ; and secondly, the emphasis on the contrast between the holy and the profane does in fact shed light on one important factor. Although many things have been bearers of the holy, and in principle everything can be such a bearer, it is nevertheless impossible for everything to be holy at the same time within one and the same religious universe. Both as regards manifestations of the holy or as regards signs in general, meaningful boundaries are required if a sign is to be meaningful. If everything is to be embraced by one concept, it has no specific meaning, but becomes devoid of content. To “define” means precisely to draw such a boundary (Latin: fines), and the same is true of the holy : in order to become meaningful, the holy must be distinct from the profane background. In agreement with Otto, Eliade too says that the holy is wholly other. But he insists that this otherness must find expression in the midst of the natural, profane world. He writes that the mysterious event is always and everywhere basically identical, whether this be small apparitions of the holy in stones or trees, or the revelation of supernatural beings in this world, such as we know from the Christian dogma of God’s incarnation in a human being. In all cases the holy never becomes directly and immediately visible: it always becomes visible in something that was profane beforehand, and which would otherwise have remained profane. The holy moves into the profane and transforms it into something holy. Eliade calls this indirect movement the dialectic of the holy : […] for the sacred is always manifested through some thing; the fact that this something (which I have termed “hierophany”) may be some object close at hand, or something as large as the world itself, a divine figure, a symbol, a moral law or even an idea, does not matter. The dialectic works in the same way : the sacred expresses itself through something other than itself; it appears in things, myths or symbols, but never wholly or directly. From this point of view, therefore, a sacred stone, an avatar of Vishnu, a statue of Jupiter, or an appearance of Yahweh will all be held by the believer as at once real and inadequate simply because in every case the sacred manifests itself limited and incarnate. (Eliade: 1958, 26)

The most interesting point in this context is that although that which is wholly other makes its dwelling in something as trivial and profane as a stone, the stone does not cease to be a stone – and the profane eye will not perceive a change of any kind, although to the initiated eye it is precisely in the stone that that which is radically different appears. For the religious person, it is no longer the stone as such that is interesting. The entire orientation of a human being – in adoration, fear, or thankfulness – is now directed to the new and radically different reality, which makes itself known. The fact that the holy must show itself along the dialectical path, i. e. via the profane, entails a form of limitation. Within the limited horizon of the human person, the holy does not reveal itself completely. It reveals one aspect of itself, by simultaneously concealing other aspects. The holy always contains more, and remains foreign.

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The lesson I inferred from Eliade’s introductory distinction between the profane and the holy was that the holy must de facto constitute some kind of difference. And differences do indeed seem to play a decisive role in the various forms in which the hierophany appears. Van der Leeuw points to the insistent character, something different from the ordinary, as the first signal of the arrival of the holy ; the extraordinary seems to awaken the religious attention (van der Leeuw: 1925, 14). Eliade too underlines the importance of the extraordinary ; for him, however, the extraordinary is not only a religious awakener of this kind, but also the principle which makes it possible to draw the distinction between holy and profane. Since not everything is holy, the holy must be distinguished against the background of some form of selection. Social-anthropological studies of foreign cultures show that the principle of such a selection is usually the extraordinary in one form or another. Eliade points out that there is a tendency to ascribe a special magic or religious meaning to unaccustomed, unique, new, alien, perfect, or monstrous phenomena (Eliade: 1958, 13). The extraordinary can make its appearance as something terrifying (as Otto’s tremendum emphasizes), but it appears with equal frequency as something positive, the bearer of divine favor (in keeping with Otto’s fascinans). In Congo, for example, dwarves and albinos become priests, and according to Eliade, sorcerers are usually recruited from what we today would regard as pathological cases. It is not only the extraordinary that stands out in this way ; even the deformed and repulsive can be exalted. The reason for such a selection is that the extraordinary appears as the expression of hidden forces, as the irruption of something other, something different from the ordinary, the natural, and the profane. I have said above that Otto’s essential contribution to the theoretical discussion of the holy is his uncovering of the complex character of the holy, of both the repulsive and the attractive, the tremendum and the fascinans. Here too, Eliade develops Otto’s approach and integrates it into a more purely religious-historical context. The ambivalence which is linked to the hierophany finds expression in the feelings which are awakened in the subject; but Eliade goes further than this, ascribing ambivalence to the very appearing of the holy, to the “thing itself.” The hierophany can manifest itself as pure and besmirched at one and the same time (cf. the Greek hagios), or as both initiated and accursed (cf. the Latin sacer). The foundation of all the variations of this holy ambivalence is a basic and permanent relationship of tension between what Eliade calls hierophany and cratophany (1958, 15). The hierophany makes known a power of a different kind, while the cratophany is the revelation of something terrifying and terrible (1958, 17). It is because of the cratophany that one must draw near to the holy with caution. Specific preparations are required in order to draw near to this dangerous power ; Durkheim calls these “negative rituals” and mentions purification, atonement, and fasting.

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Homo Religiosus and the Areligious Person As we have seen, Otto’s overemphasis on the otherness of the numinous and Weber’s one-sided emphasis on the disenchanted world are connected: both see a sharp distinction between the holy and the familiar world in which we live. In Eliade, we find a corresponding distinction between a religious and an areligious, modern worldview. The modern, areligious worldview differs from the worldview of the religious person with respect to the experience of nature, of time, and of space. Homo religiosus, the “religious person,” experiences everything as integrated into a holy cosmos, while the modern western person lives in a disenchanted world. As a first indicator of the gulf that separates these two worldviews, Eliade challenges us to think of how we experience nutrition and sexuality today. The modern person experiences these only as blind biological mechanisms; but the religious person regards them as ways in which the holy works. Through nutrition and sexuality, one is brought into contact with the holy (Eliade: 1987, 14). In other words, all such phenomena contain a whole dimension of meaning, which the modern person has lost. The modern person understands space as basically uniform, as a huge container furnished with natural things, produced things, and other human beings. All things can be localized within the extent of the same space. Although individual places can still possess a nostalgic, pseudo-holy value – e. g. one’s childhood home, or the place where one first kissed – the modern person relates primarily to the mathematical spaces defined by geometry, which leave no place for qualitative differences. For the religious person, on the other hand, space is divided into zones, all of which are oriented around the most intensely real space that exists, viz. the axis of the world (axis mundi), which is symbolized by holy trees, totem poles, or church steeples. For the areligious person, time too is fundamentally homogeneous, although one can perceive weak echoes of the religious feast in the distinction between work and leisure time. Time is broken down to the prescribed measurements of the clock, and the measurement is always identical. In short, the modern person has renounced that which gave meaning to the holy universe: Whatever the historical context in which he is placed, homo religiosus always believes that there is an absolute reality, the sacred, which transcends this world but manifests itself in this world, thereby sanctifying it and making it real. […] It is easy to see all that separates this mode of being in the world from the existence of a nonreligious man. First of all, the nonreligious man refuses transcendence, accepts the relativity of “reality,” and may even come to doubt the meaning of existence. (Eliade: 1987, 202 f)

Eliade was certainly not the only one to portray the modern person in this way. We find a similar understanding in the theologian Rudolf Bultmann, who claimed in the 1940’s that the only way to preserve the Christian message was by means of a radical existential reinterpretation of the New Testament, a so-

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called “demythologization”: “We cannot use electric light and radios and, in the event of illness, avail ourselves of modern medical and clinical means and at the same time believe in the spirit and wonder world of the New Testament” (Bultmann: 1984, 4). In a manner reminiscent of Eliade’s distinction between the religious and the areligious person, Bultmann points to the deep gulf that yawns between the mythical cosmos of the first Christians and the modern person who is surrounded by technology and has a worldview based on scientific explanation. Since Bultmann, as a theologian, is obligated to continue to proclaim the New Testament message, he attempts to give a new language to the obsolete myths. The myths of the Bible must be peeled down to their core, which must then be expressed by means of existential categories such as freedom, understanding, past and future. Although the diagnosis of the present day is similar – an industrial, modern, secularized society in which the worldview has no space for traditional religious experiences – Eliade would be skeptical of Bultmann’s demythologization program, since he tends rather to see demythologization and disenchantment as an unlucky process which modern culture inflicts upon itself, almost as a form of self-injury. Eliade disagrees with Bultmann, in that he sees the myths as entailing something positive, something that must not demythologized. Nor does Eliade believe that the ancient myths will disappear entirely ; however, the remnants of the ancient religious order are forced to lead a life in exile, under various pseudonyms and disguises. In his view, the modern pseudo-religions include not only occultism and sectarianism of various kinds, but equally often ideologies and forms of thought which may even present themselves as explicitly anti-religious. He points to the Marxist thinking about the struggle of the proletariat as a version of the Jewish-Christian eschatological vision, and to nudism’s nostalgic longing for “the paradisiacal state”; he also shows how psychoanalysis resembles a religious initiation into esoteric knowledge about hidden forces and liberation from these (Eliade: 1987, 206 – 209). Naturally, one could present a longer list here, but the point is sufficiently clear : although religion does not disappear, it is banished to new and more concealed forms of expression. Eliade does little to hide his lack of confidence in these religious substitutes: as opposed to these, the task of the historian of religion, as he understands it, is to bring out the genuine insight which lies in the religious ideas’ view of the sacral universe (Eliade: 1969, 126). His emphasis on the new masks borne by religion was perhaps a surer pointer to the future than Bultmann’s program of demythologization. Religion and its myths have not disappeared, but have acquired a different and much broader spectrum of expressions. At the same time, there are structures in Eliade’s thinking which just as certainly point backwards, to his precursors in the history of religion. It is true that his dialectic, where the holy finds expression in something profane and reshapes this, made it possible to see more contours of the holy than was the case with Otto’s free-floating “wholly

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other”; but Eliade too must pay a high price. For his hierophany is in fact unthinkable: If the holy excludes the profane, and the profane excludes the holy, it is unthinkable that they should come together – yet it is precisely this inconceivability that constitutes the innermost essence of the hierophany. Eliade appeals to the paradox: “[…] for every hierophany shows, makes manifest, the coexistence of contradictory essences” (Eliade: 1958, 29; my italics). But does he not thereby repeat Otto’s problem? Is not the holy once again thrust outside the horizon of that which we can relate to? It is as if Eliade insists on retaining Durkheim’s distinction between the profane and the holy, although this distinction must press thinking to its uttermost boundary. But this means that he does not genuinely get beyond the remarkable alliance between Otto and Weber : as long as the sharp distinction between the holy and the profane is upheld, they can live undisturbed by one another. The price to be paid is that the holy and the profane do not become relevant to one another. The holy does not intervene in the profane life, and the profane reality knows nothing of the holy. Their only contact is a paradox, which cannot be thought – surely a slender support on which to rest the weight of an entire religious worldview! However, the appeal to the paradox only prolongs Otto’s problem, where the holy is pushed over the horizon of what we can relate to as experiencing beings. This phenomenological impasse is not only a problem in the science of religion: it touches on a central problem in the modern perception of reality, namely the inclination to press reality into dichotomous pairs of concepts. If religious phenomena are to be taken seriously as something more than theoretical constructions, one must assume that they intervene in some way in the lived life, and are not always separate from this. If the holy does not occur in any way in daily life, it is difficult to see how one can continue to believe in the relevance of the holy in our days. The idea that everyday life can be something more than sheer and unambiguous profanity – the idea that everyday life can be complex and have several dimensions – seems to lie outside the horizon of both Otto and Eliade. And perhaps even more importantly, the idea that the holy can enter into a mixed relationship with everyday life, in the interstices of everyday life, is remote.

After Otto and Eliade Every important scientific advance is met with criticism, and the same applies to the phenomenology of religion. It has long been known that Otto’s and Eliade’s phenomenology has methodological limitations. I shall discuss two objections, which are constantly made to the phenomenology of religion. These concern a lack of attention to language, and a lack of respect for differences. One of the most thoroughgoing changes that occurred in the thinking of the twentieth century is often designated “the linguistic turn.” This is based on the

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insight that language makes a fundamental contribution to shaping the way in which we understand the world. The idea is no longer that the “real” experience or meaning lies hidden behind or under language, as if language were an external casing for an internal meaning. Experiences are fully grasped only when words can be put to them – and religion is no exception to this rule. Very few people today would be tempted to assert that the religious experience is completely independent of the linguistic system in which it is involved. Indeed, the ordinary language philosopher Wittgenstein has argued that an internal, private experience uninfluenced by a common language is an empty philosophical fantasy. Our linguistic expressions, in a broad understanding of this term, help to determine even the most internal experiences.7 In the same way, our everyday language, symbols, and ritual expressions leave their imprint on the way in which we experience the holy. This is why a number of scholars study religion as a linguistic communicative system of words, actions, and symbols. One of the limitations of the phenomenologists of religion is that they have reflected on this linguistic dimension only to a small extent. Otto goes very far in his exclusion of all linguistic “rational concepts” in order to penetrate through to the original experiential core, i. e. the numinous. The problem is that the content and the identity of the numinous thereby also disappear en route (cf. Raphael: 1997, 156 – 159). The phenomenology of religion has also been accused of lacking sensitivity to profound differences. It is indeed true that Eliade himself draws attention to the differences between religions, differences, which are connected to various cultural and historical situations (Eliade: 1987, 15). He affirms that all hierophanies are historical events; but despite being historical, in their essence they are nonetheless similar in all places and at all times (Eliade: 1958, 3). It is only thanks to his confidence in such fundamental, universal similarities that Eliade is able to carry out his comparative studies of religion. He would concede that as a researcher, he is thrown into the stream of history – but he does not draw the full consequences of this fact, since he does not sufficiently reflect on how his research is marked by his own cultural and historical presuppositions. It is probable that a Chinese scholar who had the same ambitions as Eliade would paint a very different picture. Eliade shares an ideal of research, which was dominant for most of the twentieth century, where the researcher is detached from the historical and cultural horizon. It is from this impartial standpoint that the fundamental similarities clearly emerge. The problem is that a so-called “point from nowhere” does not exist – and if it did exist, it would be impossible to see anything from it. Our given cultural horizon is not only a limitation, but also the condition, which makes understanding possible: the limited cultural and historical context provides

7 Scholars often call this argument Wittgenstein’s “the private language argument”: Wittgenstein: 1967, §§ 243 – 307.

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the starting point which enables us to understand others.8 But from such an “insider perspective,” the first characteristic that is perceived in other cultures and religions is their difference. The derogatory label “essentialist” has been applied to Eliade, since he presupposes that ultimately, all the religious differences are variations on the same basic theme, viz. the holy (Gilhus/Mikaelsson: 2001, 20). The idea of such an immovable core has been subjected to thorough criticism. We find the same tendency in Otto’s thinking when he attempts to peel away all the unnecessary qualities that are attributed to the holy, in order to get back to what is original, i. e. the numinous. But if the holy does not exist in a pure form, distinct from changing linguistic, cultural, and historical presuppositions, it becomes difficult to maintain the idea of a fundamental essence underlying all the manifestations of the holy.

Towards a Renewal of the Phenomenology of the Holy beyond Modern Dichotomies Nevertheless, this does not mean that phenomenology must be thrown onto the scrapheap of history. Although the phenomenology of religion is often portrayed as a leftover from the history of research, it is worth recalling that its philosophical relative enjoys the best of health. Names such as Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas, and Paul Ricœur continue to dictate the terms in which today’s theoretical debate is conducted in a wide spectrum of academic disciplines, and not least in the field of religion. Part of the problem is that the phenomenology of religion, as it was shaped by Otto, van der Leeuw, and Eliade, bound itself to a philosophical machinery which today is obsolete, and which it itself has not succeeded in renewing. Besides this, the science of religion has increasingly grown apart from philosophy, and thereby also from philosophical phenomenology. These two factors have made it easy – in my view, too easy – to close one’s ears to those insights of the phenomenology of religion which, despite everything, are still valid. I believe that such insights can be revised and developed, if their insights into the holy are crossed with a more refined philosophical phenomenology. The great merit of philosophical phenomenology is that it pays heed to experience as the primary source of knowledge – including religious knowledge. However, the attempts to appeal to a common human experience, shared by all the religions, have had their day. Phenomenology has become more modest, and it is supplemented by a greater sensitivity to religious differences. An important point is that both experience and language must be investigated, in order to give an accurate picture of the holy, as it makes itself 8 Such positions have been especially developed by hermeneutics, as in Gadamer’s main work, Wahrheit und Methode (1990).

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known within one particular cultural milieu. A number of scholars of religion have been inspired by the more updated phenomenological philosophy to attempt to overcome the limitations of Otto, van der Leeuw, and Eliade.9 For example, Gavin Flood has elaborated a renewed approach to religion in which he emphasizes precisely the role of language, especially through narrative and interpretation (Flood: 1999). It is only by means of linguistic expressions – symbolic, ritual, or employing the language of everyday life – that religion acquires identity and meaning. Without language, experience remains silent. But without experience – of the cosmos, of art, or of everyday things – language remains empty of content. With Kant, I assume that our experience of the holy has two sources, viz. intuition and concepts, or more generally, experience and language (in the broad sense). Experience supplies material for our knowledge, while at the same time our familiar concepts give the experience an intelligible content. The special trait of the holy is that knowledge is never fully realized: the experience can never be translated fully into conceptual terms, and the concepts remain inadequate in relation to the experience. Both sources make a contribution, but it is not possible to subsume them into a higher unity. Ultimately, the holy cannot be captured in language. And yet, our receiving apparatus will inevitably impose some kind of coloring on the experience of the holy ; with the help of symbols, rituals, myths, or more everyday speech, language will give some indication of the direction to be taken. If it were impossible for language to indicate the outlines of the holy, the holy would have remained something utterly unknown and unidentifiable – something that does not concern us. But if the holy were a cultural or linguistic construction, it would have lost its character of a foreign reality that is not subject to our own control. The holy always begins as an address by something outside ourselves, even if it ends with a response on the basis of the resources that are accessible to us – in speech, gestures, symbols, or rituals. In one particular manifestation, the emphasis can lie on the foreign – as in the great revelations of the deity, in the eeriness felt in the encounter with overwhelming forces – or else on the familiar, where an everyday thing suddenly appears as the bearer of a mystery. But whether the emphasis lies on the foreign or on the familiar, it seems that a certain measure of both the foreign and the familiar must be activated in order to kindle the feeling of wonder vis--vis the holy. It is precisely the unresolved play that is the origin of this wonder, a play which unfolds in the interstice. One of the most permanent characteristics of theories about the holy in the science of religion is the insistence on the clear-cut boundary line between the holy and the profane. The logic on which the thinking of Durkheim, Otto, and Eliade is based is a kind of logic of separation which operates with two pure 9 Researchers such as Carsten Colpe and Jacques Waardenburg have attempted in various ways to move beyond the limitations of the phenomenology of religion.

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and clean-cut spheres which are reciprocally opposed: the holy versus the profane, the numinous versus the everyday. Any mixture or overlapping is excluded a priori. This logic of separation follows a typical modern model in which the fundamental order is uniform, and is differentiated into sectors. Since the religious sector is shrinking under pressure from science, the last way to salvage the holy is to make it something radically different, something wholly other. Otto and Eliade are not alone in presenting the holy in a onesided manner ; their one-sidedness is based on the one-sidedness which finds expression in Weber’s understanding of the modern reason. The exaggerations on both sides support each other : a one-sidedly godless everyday life must appear to be the radical antithesis of the pure and absolutely different holiness.10 I believe that it is this kind of logic that lies behind the typically modern willingness to let the dichotomies permeate the theoretical presentations. The modern model of the cake with universal similarity and clear boundary lines between the sectors has become problematic, and we have learnt to live in a more open network of contexts, which are connected in a looser web. This is the situation, which characterizes the late modern period. Boundaries still exist, but they have become more fluid; sectors too exist, but not in a pure form. An order still exists, but it does not simply possess universal validity ; distinctions exist, but it cannot be taken for granted that they are equally pure and unambiguous. Today, Bultmann’s appeal to electric lamps and radios, and Eliade’s geometric understanding of space, have a slightly comical touch: the “modern person” of whom they speak is yesterday’s person. In a late modern context of this kind, however, new aspects of Eliade and Otto can prove fruitful, especially where they indicate tensions and overlappings between spheres which earlier were dominated by the logic of separation. Otto’s contrast harmony is one such concept, where attention is drawn to the unresolved tension between different poles in the mysterium tremendum et fascinans. The contrast harmony ought to be extended today beyond the boundaries posited by Otto. Perhaps it can designate the interstice where the interplay occurs between the holy and the profane, the foreign and the familiar. A corresponding concept is the dialectic of the holy, about which Eliade writes: if we tone down the paradoxes and that which is radically foreign, this term too can point to the dynamic which comes into play between the holy and the profane. For is not the encounter with the holy often characterized by the fact that familiar phenomena – things one thought one knew inside-out – suddenly appear to be different? Is not this also the case with the communicant who perceives a little piece of bread to be the bearer of Christ’s body? Or with the meditating Buddhist who sees the whole world appearing in a new and transfigured light? In that case, this is more the experience of an unresolved between than of that which is radically other. This 10 Cf. Riœeur’s similar criticism of the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas: Ricœur: 1992, 337.

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“between,” says Heidegger, invites us to an open-mouthed wonder, rather than to an attempt to categorize and comprehend (cf. Heidegger, 1984, 168 f). The wonder allows the unresolved to remain unresolved. The holy may not be as pure and as different as was supposed in the past. But what about the profane? We must ask whether it is truly the case that this everyday world is so unambiguously disenchanted, so empty of all traces of holiness, as is often assumed. Must we not challenge this “lack of ambiguity” in the profane too? And does this open the door to traces of the holy in the midst of the everyday? If we are to grasp something that is holy in the midst of everyday life, our attention must take a different direction. It should not be directed so much upwards, to the exalted and grandiose. Rather, it should be directed downwards, to the unobtrusive and to that which is close at hand – towards a weak holiness.

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3. The Profane Revisited If the holy had not manifested itself to us human beings, it would be meaningless to speak of the holy. This is one of the most basic phenomenological presuppositions, and it has two consequences. First, the holy must become visible at places and under conditions which make it possible for human beings to experience the holy. In order to investigate possible places and conditions for such an experience, we shall look in this chapter at the concept of the everyday in philosophical and sociological phenomenology. Secondly, if the holy is to make a difference, it must be distinct from its surroundings in some way. Despite the exaggerations of Durkheim and Eliade, this is the insight that is captured in the very distinction between the holy and the profane. This chapter will look at that which is distinct from the holy, viz. the profane. This word is derived from the Latin expression for “the place outside the sanctuary (fanum),” i. e. the non-initiated, that which is demarcated from the holy. The corresponding Greek term is koinÞ, which means “usual, low, everyday.” This indicates that there is a conceptual link between the profane and the everyday : it involves prosaic everyday life with its little joys and cares, with its activities and its trivialities. The question which we shall investigate is whether it is in fact the everyday that unites the two presuppositions mentioned above, both as a precondition of the holy and as a contrast to the holy. This, however, seems to confront us with a paradox: the everyday is both profane and connected with the holy. Perhaps, however, closer examination will show that this is not a paradox. I shall ask whether the holy is closer to the profane than we usually think – perhaps in the same way as the extraordinary occurs in everyday life from time to time. But if such an understanding is to be possible, we must overcome the modern dichotomy which has dominated earlier presentations of the holy. It must be possible to open up the profane from the inside, and to demonstrate that it is less unambiguous and less closed than the modern presentations have allowed us to guess. We begin by examining how the everyday has been understood theoretically, before we investigate the relationship between the everyday and that which is not everyday. Finally, we shall ask what consequences this has for our principal question: How is the holy related to the profane?

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Various Meanings of the “Everyday” The “everyday” is not an unambiguous concept, and it has a complex history. Evaluations have ranged from high to low. Let us look at some of the most important meanings, which have been attached to the everyday. First, it is clear that the “everyday” can mean the “profane.” As I have said, this adjective is linked to the outer court of the sanctuary (the temple or house of the deity) and can be understood as something spatially separated from the holy. However, the profane can be equally linked to time, and thus understood as something that falls outside the holy time – holy days, solemnities, or feasts. Durkheim holds that what he calls “negative rituals,” i. e. various forms of purification ritual, function as doorkeepers (so to speak) between the profane and the holy. But rituals can also have a positive effect, as mediators, which reshape the profane so that it becomes holy, the impure so that it becomes pure, or vice versa. Durkheim believes it is essential to keep these two spheres apart. On the one hand, the holy in all its power is a threat to the profane, so that every approach to the holy demands special (ritual) preparations; on the other hand, if the holy were to come into unmediated contact with the profane, the profane would besmirch it and thereby deprive it of its power (Durkheim: 2001, 228 f). From a religious point of view, that which falls outside the holy space or time must be evaluated as occupying a lower position. Eliade claims that the profane is in fact less full of being. Whereas the holy is full of power, the profane appears powerless; and whereas the holy is absolute, the profane is relative. This is why, despite the clear separation, the profane requires continual renewal through the holy, if it is to be kept in existence. In the holy time, the feast or solemnity, time is concentrated. The feast is a return to, and a fresh actualization of, the original time in which the acts of the gods took place (Eliade: 1987, 85 – 91). This holy time fills the profane with new power and being. Although the profane occupies a lower rank in religious terms than the holy according to these scholars, this does not make it any less necessary, since human beings must also satisfy their primary needs: they must get hold of food, they must bring up their children, and they must tidy up and take care of things. In short, work too demands its time. The profane is not permeated by divine or demonic powers. On the contrary, it is completely available to human beings, and this frees the necessary place and time for the material maintenance of life. This, however, also means that the profane is assigned to an everyday existence, which is marked by work, routine, and drudgery. Secondly, in the history of Christianity too – and thus to a large extent in the history of the West – the everyday has not been devoid of meaning. Let me mention only one central historical event in this context, viz. the Reformation. Weber sees the Reformation as the prelude to the development which has not only formed western economic thinking, but has also been decisive for the

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entire development of modern rationality. If we accept Weber’s account, the Reformation can be seen from the perspective of history to have given impetus to the undermining of religion, to the disenchantment of the world, and to the emergence of what Weber called the godforsaken “routines of everyday life” (Weber : 1991, 149). There is however at least one other account of the Reformation, a narrative which takes the religious transformations seriously but without necessarily drawing negative consequences as regards the everyday. In this context, the philosopher Charles Taylor points out how the Reformation in the sixteenth century contributed precisely to what he calls “the affirmation of ordinary life” (Taylor : 1989, 209 – 218). He claims that before the Reformation, the Catholic church set apart specific times and places for the holy. Reality as a whole, and the church in particular, were seen as a hierarchy organized in keeping with the ascending degree of holiness. In the Reformation, this hierarchy was overthrown: the Reformers emphasized that all were equal before God, so that there were no specific vocations which were holier than others (e. g. the vocation to life in a monastery). The vocation to family life and work was just as holy, given and ordained by God for the mutual good of the spouses.1 This meant that a higher value was set on ordinary, everyday life – on theological grounds. Thirdly, when philosophy deals with the everyday, this is in connection with questions linked to the human person’s capacity for acquiring true knowledge. Everyday life often appears unclear and obscure to the philosopher who longs for indubitable truth. This low evaluation of the everyday has roots stretching back to Plato and his celebrated parable of the cave. According to Plato, most people live chained fast to a cave in which they relate only to shadowy images of the real world (which is the world of the ideas). Not only are they content to relate to the shadows, to the world of the senses; it never enters their heads that there is another world, and so they confuse the shadows with the genuine reality. Plato calls this mistaken, but very common position doxa (Greek: a common opinion). The philosopher, on the other hand, must loose himself from his chains, turn towards the real light, and climb up out of the cave in order to see the world of the ideas and thus attain philosophical insight (Greek: episteme). It is the ideas that contain that which is absolutely true, good, and unitary. Since they are eternal, they are not subject to change and transience. Against the light of these dazzling ideas, the philosopher understands how wretched is the shadowy existence to which the everyday people in the cave relate, an existence where truth, goodness, and unity are not absolute and where everything is subject to time, change, and the law of transience. This low evaluation of everyday life was transmitted further in the course of 1 The Swedish theologian Wingren has taken this understanding of vocation as the starting point for his interpretation of Luther’s theology (Wingren: 1993).

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the history of philosophy. It blossomed anew with the launching of the exact mathematical sciences in the Renaissance, and again in the positivism of the modern philosophers of science. These positivists, whose golden age was the first half of the twentieth century, had a great confidence in the methodology of the exact sciences and held that all true knowledge was unambiguous. Anything that remained ambiguous and could not be subjected to empirical or logical investigations must be counted as an illusion; the scientific methods must be employed in order to overcome the ambiguities of everyday life. Besides this, phenomenologists such as Martin Heidegger – followed by many existentialist thinkers between the Wars and after the Second World War – tended to understand the everyday as the flight of the masses from freedom and responsibility. This entire trajectory in the history of ideas seems to agree that the higher the philosophical ideals are, the lower is the evaluation of everyday life. Fourthly, however, there is another undercurrent in philosophy which parts company with the dominant tendency, by a higher evaluation of the philosophical, religious, and aesthetical value of everyday life. For example, the Romantics sought to offer an alternative to the rationalism of the Enlightenment period, which was remote from life. Philosophers and theologians looked for a closer relationship to art, where the poetical experience of nature would forge inner ties to nature through the feelings. The big questions were answered by a return to the everyday, which was close at hand and familiar. Such a return to the everyday finds expression for example in the poetry and the thought of the Lyrical Ballads, the joint project which Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth began in England in 1798, and in some of their later writings.2 Although there are several precursors in the history of ideas, it was only in the twentieth century that the everyday achieved wide diffusion as a legitimately philosophical project. Two currents deserve mention. Philosophical phenomenology has been interested in an upgrading of this kind, and we shall now look at this tradition. Before doing so, however, it is worth mentioning that the everyday has regained a value of its own within the more linguistically oriented philosophy too. The philosophy of language, which takes its starting point in the writings by Wittgenstein or John L. Austin from the 1930’s to the 1950’s is often called ordinary language philosophy. Its founders sought to answer questions of philosophy of language by considering speech acts which were in very general use. In his early phase, Wittgenstein expressed a strong confidence in logic and in its potential as a basis for other exact sciences. In the course of his career, however, he came to doubt the existence of such an ambiguous and crystal-clear logic behind everyday speech. His conclusion was that all human thinking has its origin de facto in 2 The philosopher and theoretician of literature Cavell shows how a number of English and American poets and philosophers thought about the everyday (Cavell: 1988, chs. 1 – 3).

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very ordinary language and in the complicated manner in which language is woven together with actions and environment. The projects of Romanticism, phenomenology, and ordinary language philosophy all attempt to anchor thinking in everyday reality – not in philosophical principles or ideas.

The Everyday and the Lifeworld If the profane is intimately linked to everyday life, it may seem as if we have now come a long way – for everyday life lies before our very eyes. And yet it is often hardest for thought to grasp that which lies closest. First of all, one must clear a path through a long tradition which has made everyday life an object unworthy of reflection; secondly, one must also gain a sufficient distance vis-vis everyday life in order to get an overview of what it genuinely entails. Edmund Husserl was one of the first in the twentieth century to put the everyday on the philosophical agenda. His last work, Die Krise der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Philosophie, remained unfinished at his death in 1938. Here, he introduces the concepts of “lifeworld” and “the everyday” in a way that has shaped research in subsequent generations. Phenomenological literature often employs the everyday with some kind of link to the lifeworld. Sometimes, the two concepts are used as if they were synonymous; sometimes, a more or less sharp distinction is drawn between them. I believe that there is a clear tendency in the way these concepts are used by Husserl, so that it is in fact possible to distinguish between them. The concept of lifeworld refers not to the planet as a gigantic object, nor to the total sum of all imaginable things, which exist in the world. The lifeworld designates the most comprehensive horizon for the concrete experience, which discloses itself to human beings. The everyday is a less comprehensive concept, which is restricted to the most immediate environment in which we perform our concrete actions. In both cases, we are speaking of pre-theoretical experiences, which can be raised up to a theoretical level only at a second stage. Husserl introduces the everyday and the lifeworld as central concepts because he believes that European science is in a fundamental crisis. Husserl claims that the dominant position of natural science has led people to forget the lifeworld. In this condition, people suppress the immediate, pretheoretical experience and instead search all the time behind the existing phenomena, looking to the explanations of the natural sciences (Husserl: 1954, 52 f). In Husserl’s view, this forgetfulness of the lifeworld entails the paradoxical fact that we overlook that which is closest to us. And since, historically speaking, every theoretical construction and all scientific methods are generated by problems that were first encountered in everyday life, we also come to overlook the fundamental role that the lifeworld plays for science. Even the most speculative theories become meaningful and important

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in virtue of the light they shed on the situations to which we relate in our everyday life. With an allusion to Plato, Husserl claims that we have sought episteme and neglected “the despised doxa” (1954, 127). The problems involved in this crisis belong in the context of a history of modernity, which Habermas and others have elaborated further. Habermas’ starting point is Weber’s understanding of modernity, as this was expressed in the Enlightenment period. Here, rationality is deliberately detached from the religious cosmos. The dominant rationality, which had been integrated into a larger worldview where actions are governed by their own (religious) intrinsic value – a so-called value rationality – is now regarded as an instrument to attain specific goals – a so-called goal rationality. Rationality is divided into three principal sectors: one for knowledge and science, one for morality and politics, and one for opinion and artistic expressions. According to Habermas, the problem is that gradually, experts come into existence in each section and that these persons increasingly lose contact with the lifeworld and with the everyday life of ordinary people. The abstract knowledge of the experts parts company with the everyday life that people live, and culture is affected by a crisis (Habermas: 1981, 452 f). The holy likewise suffers under these circumstances, and is under pressure to become just as diluted and abstract as science. Both religion and science need to be anchored in something concrete. Husserl believes that the remedy for this crisis is the rediscovery of the significance of the “despised doxa,” i. e. of everyday life. But what does the everyday actually mean, in Husserl’s view? He believes that the way in which we customarily experience our environment is governed by the so-called natural attitudes (Husserl: 1952, 56). In the natural attitude, we pursue the goals of our practical lives: we do things and experience phenomena because they fulfill some purpose or other. Everyday life is unproblematic, in the sense that we take phenomena and events for granted, without querying them. The fact that the world genuinely exists, that the other human being is animate, that things are not changing in front of my eyes, or that I am not dreaming – such things can appear profoundly problematic to the philosopher in his speculations, but they do not usually perturb us. Husserl maintains that such philosophical questions are expressly theoretical, and require a different, i. e. a more reflective attitude. Everyday things are seldom raised up to the surface of consciousness, precisely because they are taken for granted. Wittgenstein writes that: “The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity” (Wittgenstein: 1967, § 129). This is why Husserl too believes that phenomenology must take a step backwards from the practical life of everyday in order to see it as it truly is. It cannot simply remain in a state of doxa. This is the goal of the so-called phenomenological reduction in which both the world of everyday life and the world of science are set to one side, in order to make an unprejudiced study of the phenomena possible. The

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goal is not to emerge from Plato’s cave in order to see something that is more real (whether ideas or mathematical structures), but on the contrary to penetrate more deeply into the cave itself, into everyday life, into that which is most real. If we adopt a new attitude through the phenomenological reduction, we can put the most fundamental questions to something that we otherwise take for granted: How does the everyday world take shape? Heidegger says that the original way to open the world involves, not a theoretical contemplation, but practical dealings with the world. The world becomes meaningful to us only when we learn how to start using it (Heidegger : 1993a, 66 f), as everyone knows who has ever observed how a child gradually makes the world its own meaningful arena. It is not a question of understanding individual objects in isolation – a stone here, a hammer there. On the contrary, one never encounters a completely isolated object within the field of everyday action. Heidegger claims that the world is like a huge workshop where each tool receives it’s meaning from the tasks it carries out. Heidegger’s example is a hammer, which becomes the object of theoretical speculations only under exceptional circumstances. Normally, I take hold of the hammer when I am in a workshop. But when I use the hammer, a great many other things are taken into consideration as well, e. g. the nail and, not least, the material on which I am hammering, and perhaps the bench which supports this material. But such links and implicit references are in fact capable of infinite extension, since the bench lends much of its meaning from the workshop of which it forms a part; and the workshop in turn is located in a city, in a country, on a continent, with one particular culture, and so on. In this way, all the articles for daily use which surround us are a kind of sign which points in turn to other signs, which ultimately are linked together in a totality that we call the world or the lifeworld (1993a, 83 f). Up to this point, I have described the world as if it were a private and lonely place. We experience the lifeworld as something given, and the same can be said about the existence of other human beings. No one is born into an uninhabited world: we enter a world which is already populated by other people with their own ways of acting and experiencing. It is other people – above all, my parents – who have given me the fundamental introduction to dealing with everyday life, through habits, skills, customs, and language. In other words, it is first of all via other people that I have come to be the individual I now am. When human beings meet each other, this encounter is different from the way in which we relate to a stone, an automobile, or a horse, since we are not interested in the other human being primarily as one particular type of object (unless we are physiologists) or as a living organism (unless we are biologists or physicians). The other human being interests me as a person, i. e. as an animate human being with completely unique characteristics. When I direct my interest to objects, I do not expect any response. According to Husserl, the special quality in interpersonal interest is

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that the interest is reciprocal. This is what makes it meaningful to communicate with other human beings (Husserl: 1950, 194). Language is necessarily presupposed, if a reciprocal interest of this kind is to be communicative. I mentioned in the previous chapter that one of the great weaknesses of the phenomenology of religion was its failure to reflect on the formative effect that language has on experience; nor did Husserl help to shed light on this problematic. Others, however, have taken fruitful steps towards supplementing phenomenology with a greater sensitivity to the role of language.3 On this point, the everyday language philosophy of Wittgenstein and others can offer a complement to phenomenology’s understanding of the everyday. Wittgenstein’s most important contribution is his understanding of everyday language as a series of games – language games. He holds that it is impossible to trace the language games of everyday life back to one single superior logic. There are innumerable different situations which operate with different rules for meaningful “moves” in their games – it suffices here to recall how different words are employed when we give orders, tell about an event, act in a play, warn, thank, curse, greet, etc. (Wittgenstein: 1967, § 23). In each language game, meaning comes into existence when words together with actions perform meaningful utterances – or as Wittgenstein puts it in a centrally important passage, “The meaning of a word is its use in the language” (1967, § 43). The Everyday and the Sociology of Knowledge The everyday is this despised doxa, which Husserl wants to upgrade; it is the place where we make use of the world and make reality our familiar environment. If the holy exists within an everyday life of this kind, the everyday cannot be a closed entity like an impermeable bell jar. The manifestation of the holy presupposes at least fractures or interstices, which disturb the closed order. In the last chapter, we noted that the holy is not radically different; nevertheless, it was important to agree with Otto and Eliade that there remains something foreign about the holy. We must now ask: Is there a place for a weakened holiness of this kind within the phenomenological understanding of the everyday? Does it also include that which is foreign? It is the vast web of everyday experiences, actions and language that establish the most fundamental premises for the way in which the lifeworld presents itself to us. Alfred Schütz, a sociologist who had studied under Husserl, and his own students, Thomas Luckmann and Peter Berger, have made important contributions to the understanding of the everyday. Schütz points out that despite its complexity and the basic philosophical questions, 3 Apel and Habermas are concerned with the dimension of language, as are Schütz, Luckmann, and Berger.

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which can be put to the everyday, we seldom reflect on the everyday itself – at any rate, when we are standing in the midst of the stream of life. He writes that the everyday is primarily problem-free (Schütz/Luckmann: 1984, 30 – 37). The unproblematic, that which we take for granted, is not to be despised; on the contrary, this very quality shows how deeply our entire existence and our understanding of the world are interwoven with the everyday. Often, it is precisely the most fundamental traits of existence that we take most for granted. But we all know that from time to time, the everyday ceases to appear unproblematic. Reality catches up with us and appears otherwise than we had expected. Such experiences range from discovering that my key is not where I thought it was, or that the person I thought I recognized was someone else, to the confrontation with death and the encounter with the holy. But the everyday soon slips back into its unproblematic quality. Schütz notes that when we come back to our senses, we integrate the foreign element into well-known structures and categories. Schütz has something genuinely interesting to say in relation to the holy and the profane when he speaks explicitly of boundaries and transcendences (Schütz/Luckmann: 1984, 146 f). “Transcendence” means crossing or going beyond a boundary. If the holy involves experiencing something other, something more, we must assume that such experiences involve a kind of overstepping or transcendence. Schütz’s point is that such transcendences of boundaries belong to everyday life itself. They do not require any religious technique, meditation, or ars vivendi. It suffices to have the most basic relationship to the world. On the one hand, every single one of us is a body which is placed in a demarcated position. It is possible for our senses to perceive only a very limited radius around us; nevertheless, we assume all the time that the world exists as a much more comprehensive reality. Behind me there is a reality ; behind the horizon there appear new territories, each with its own horizon, stretching further and further into the distance. In other words, my knowledge of the world transcends both my own self and my situation here and now. Schütz calls such oversteppings the small transcendences in everyday life (1984, 147 – 150). There is also a medium transcendence, which involves something very well known, viz. encounters with other people. On the one hand, the other is like myself; I recognize facial expressions, gestures, and linguistic expressions, which I myself employ, and I understand generally what the other person means. Through these expressions, I come to know what the other person is feeling and thinking. But the other person’s thought or feeling itself is not mine, nor is it directly accessible to me. I cannot have the other person’s feelings. Humans are complex beings, and sometimes a person can put on a pretense, expressing something that does not correspond to his or her true state. Although we usually understand one another, we can sometimes be mysterious and incomprehensible to each other. In such a case, we discover something that usually does not occur to us, viz. that an overstepping (what

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Schütz calls the “medium transcendence”) takes place in every encounter (1984, 151 – 157). Several scholars, not least Jewish philosophers such as Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas, note that the encounter with the other can take place as a religious experience, as an encounter with something outside one’s own self. It is probably Levinas who takes the most radical position here. For him, the other person represents a radical breach with the totality of existence, with our own reality. In the face of the other, the holy reveals itself as an ethical appeal and holds me responsible for my existence (Levinas: 1969, 291; I shall say more about his concept of holiness in chapter 7 below). Schütz does not envisage any consequences of this kind, and not so radical; still, it is tempting to develop his thought in this direction. Finally, there is what Schütz calls the large transcendences. Here, we meet clear boundaries vis--vis the everyday ; indeed, we leave the everyday behind. Sleep, death, and religious ecstasy are obvious examples of large transcendences of this kind. Sleep transposes us into another reality each day. In something as ordinary as sleep, we lose our sovereignty over our consciousness and can no longer choose what we wish to direct our attention to. In dreams, we enter into a reality which functions on premises which are not those of the everyday. Death entails a definitive boundary, because one cannot return from death; and this is why no one has experiences with death itself from the inside (so to speak). Our relationship to death puts the everyday into perspective: it disturbs the fact that we take everyday life for granted, and all the seemingly permanent condition of everyday life encounters an absolute boundary. Death puts questions to my usual existence (Heidegger : 1993a, 255 – 267). Schütz locates religious ecstasy, which is of particular interest in the present context, among the large transcendences. He does not look in any detail at the religious content, but is interested exclusively in how one transcends the boundaries of everyday life and is transposed into another reality, from which one then returns (Schütz/Luckmann: 1984, 168 – 170). The ecstatic experience is more than just a move into one special section of everyday knowledge: it is a turning away from the totality of the everyday as we know it. It is often difficult to tell others the content of an ecstasy, because everyday language is not meant for this type of experiences. This is why recourse is often had to symbols, which have the advantage that they point in the direction of another reality, without losing their anchoring in everyday reality. When Schütz gives “religion” as an example, he is referring to such ecstatic or mystical experiences of something that is wholly other. The sociology of knowledge points to the plurality in everyday life, but also holds that everyday life is characterized by the deep intimacy we have with our environment. In a later elaboration of this motif, Habermas confirms that the lifeworld functions as “a wall against surprises” (Habermas: 1988, 93). He may seem to be contradicting Schütz, who emphasizes precisely the possibility of transcending the everyday in a radical manner in the large transcendences;

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but perhaps there is no contradiction here. We have seen in the previous chapter how Otto’s “radically other” and Weber’s closed, de-mystified world corresponded to one another through a kind of logic of separation. It seems that something of the same logic comes into play when Schütz speaks of the religious ecstasy. Despite the small and medium transcendences, Schütz holds that everyday life remains surrounded by the lifeworld, almost like a bell jar, which keeps out all that is foreign. The wall that holds off the foreign is not breached, although it is possible to experience “the other side,” that which is radically other, in the large transcendences. The question is whether Schütz has really challenged the sharp antithesis between the holy and the profane, i. e. the inheritance from Durkheim. The holiness which is accommodated within Schütz’s thinking is always assigned a place outside the relatively stable order of the lifeworld. The profane continues to be irrelevant to the holy, except in the sense that it is the field from which the holy is separated. Schütz does indeed deserve credit for opening the door to a fruitful approach to this question, when he points to the transcendences, which exist in everyday life. But he does not see that the religious potential lies in elaborating and radicalizing the insights in precisely those small and medium transcendences, which are found in the midst of the profane everyday life.4 Radical Phenomenology The everyday is a field in which the holy can become visible. But in order for the everyday to be able to function as this kind of field, it cannot be closed to something “other” and “more”; it cannot be completely and utterly profane. The German philosopher Bernhard Waldenfels has offered some important insights on which we can build here. Like Schütz, he insists that everyday life is the source of all our knowledge; and both scholars emphasize that the everyday is a complex web woven of various contexts. But Waldenfels argues that on certain fundamental points, we must go further than Schütz. Waldenfels claims that we must challenge the idea that there is a uniform foundation on which all our knowledge and all our rationality are based. It is scarcely possible to make a tidy arrangement of all our understanding, like neat slices of cake joined together to form a unity. The anchoring of our knowledge and our rationality is much more concrete than is supposed – but also more loosely woven together. Waldenfels also challenges the idea that the known and well ordered reality entails an invisible bell jar separating the familiar from the foreign – for once one acknowledges that the foreign can penetrate into the profane everyday and also has its own place within it, this 4 Berger has argued that it is precisely the function of religion to create an overarching order which can integrate both ecstasy, death, and sleep and ordinary everyday life. Both of these are integrated under a religious canopy (Berger : 1969, 42 ff).

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has consequences for how we think of the relationship between the holy and the everyday. According to Waldenfels, the idea of the universal foundation seems difficult to maintain, if we believe that the concrete everyday life is the human precondition of all thinking. The sociologists of knowledge had claimed that it was impossible to reduce everyday life to one simple formula, since it was made up of a number of compartments or language games, each with its own rules. But whereas Schütz held that all the compartments pointed back to one superior lifeworld, Waldenfels is more radical. He abandons altogether the typically modern “cake model” and invokes other models such as the labyrinth or the network. It is impossible to take in the labyrinth at a single glance, and its central authority cannot be localized from within. The network is not based on any foundation at all; its strength lies precisely in the junctions where various threads intersect and are united (Waldenfels: 1990, 192). There are many compartments, and they do not share one unified foundation. This applies both to the way in which the various compartments of everyday life are linked to one another and to the relationship between different cultures. Waldenfels attempts in two ways to break open the idea of the universal foundation: first, by pointing to differences between the everyday life of various cultures, and secondly, by illustrating how the foreign is found within everyday itself. He believes that much recent thinking, including phenomenology, has been incapable of dealing with the differences between the foreign and the familiar, between the other and that which is one’s own. In one passage, Husserl discusses the relationship between the worlds of the Chinese and the Congolese; but although he admits that there are considerable differences here, he immediately goes on to say that these are not fundamental. They are chance variations on a fundamental order : all cultures are subject to the same fundamental structures. Waldenfels regards such a supposition about universal structures as an abstract idea which Husserl does not deduce from his own phenomenological descriptions, but adopts from thinkers of the age of Enlightenment. Waldenfels writes that the differences between cultures make it difficult to assume that they all experience the world in a fundamentally similar manner : for if the totality of everyday life is organized differently, with a different language, different patterns of behavior, and different traditions, the perception of the total lifeworld will also be different (1990, 52). And since no one has access to a standpoint beyond cultural differences, there is no phenomenological evidence for the assertion that on the deepest level, the world is one and the same. The experience of foreignness cannot be neutralized. The everyday world constitutes an open but limited order, which is ours. In other words, it constitutes what Husserl can call the “home world” as opposed to the “foreign world.” It is my home world that has formed the way in which I experience the world. This is the world in which I was brought up; its traditions and its worldview have become a part of myself. But just as

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foreignness can be experienced in the encounter with other foreign worlds, so too one can encounter foreignness within the home world which is otherwise so domestic: Waldenfels holds that the everyday world is not a closed and stable order, but an open and mobile web. It is here that we can encounter the foreign and the non-everyday. Such experiences of foreignness occur not only when one turns one’s back completely on the everyday world (as in religious ecstasy), nor only in the encounter which those who are culturally foreign. They can just as easily occur in the midst of the everyday world, in an unexpected event, a disturbing dream, or a twinge of fear. Waldenfels believes that such experiences occur in the points of intersection and the border areas between the various compartments in everyday life. Thus, we are confronted from time to time by that which is problematic, strange, or foreign – without thereby stepping out of everyday life. In the border areas, we encounter the non-everyday in the everyday or, as Waldenfels puts it: “The borders would be that which is unsaid and cannot be said in that which is said, that which is not done and cannot be done in that which is done, that which is unordered and unfamiliar in the ordered and familiar – the non-everyday in the everyday” (Waldenfels: 1990, 175 f. Eng. trans.: B.McN.). The interesting thing is how Waldenfels lays the foundations for an understanding of something foreign in the midst of everyday life. It becomes visible in wishes, in fears, in the imagination, and (I add) in the experience of the holy. In this case, Waldenfels has helped us through his description of everyday life where not only the profane exists, but where the holy too can irrupt as the extraordinary in the midst of the everyday.

The Holy in the Everyday Accordingly, we need a theory, which keeps two circumstances in equilibrium. On the one hand, it must be able to anchor the holy within the horizon of the everyday ; and on the other hand, it must retain the character of the holy as something other and more than the rest of everyday life. Although there are a number of theories, which treat the relationship between religion and everyday life from the perspectives of sociology, practical theology, and the science of religion, it seems that it is not easy to maintain this equilibrium. Why is this the case? According to Henning Luther, one of those who have developed the ideas of Bernhard Waldenfels, there are above all two dominant models, which have been an obstacle to such an equilibrium between the holy and the profane. One model has insisted that the holy is separated from everyday life: it is by definition that which does not belong to everyday life. We have found this model, which Henning Luther calls the separation model, in Durkheim, in the classical phenomenology of religion, and in Schütz’s thinking. It operates with two homogeneous spheres, which are kept clearly apart from each other : holy/

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profane, foreign/familiar. The other model, which Luther calls the integration model, understands religion as an integrating factor in everyday life, as a socially integrative force, which creates unity and harmony (Luther : 1992, 244 ff). Peter Berger’s sociology of religion, at least in its early phase, represents this line of thought. Every societal construction of meaning is an attempt to order reality and keep the threatening disorder in check. Religion’s role is to uphold and legitimate the order, thus establishing the greatest possible measure of stability. Religion does this by integrating everyday life into a larger, holy order – the holy cosmos. Even the large transcendences such as death and ecstasy are integrated into a comprehensive holiness in which everything has its place (Berger : 1969, 26 ff; 33 – 36). In the integration model, the sting is taken out of the disturbing and the foreign. Despite this diametrical antithesis, Henning Luther claims that both these models are based on the same prejudice, viz. that everyday life is fundamentally one-dimensional and unambiguous (Luther : 1992, 214 f). It is therefore important to reflect on whether such an assumption corresponds to everyday life in today’s big cities, with their frequent changes of tempo, locations, and contexts. Is it not much more appropriate to assume that everyday life is both pluridimensional and polyvalent – both foreign and familiar, both holy and profane? This simple observation allows Luther to place the holy within the framework of everyday life. It builds on Waldenfels’ understanding of everyday life as a network or labyrinth. The holy can win admittance to this polyvalent everyday life without thereby being reshaped into a piece of profane life. In Luther’s eyes, the holy is not a trivial or banal everyday phenomenon; nor is it a soothing or integrative force. But because everyday life is polyvalent, there is also room for the extraordinary, the disturbing – the holy. There is nothing new in the affirmation that the boundaries and crises of life contain a very special religious potential. As long ago as 1909, Arnold van Gennep published a pioneering work in which he identified characteristic ritualizations of such transitions. Birth, puberty, marriage, and death are often marked by what van Gennep calls rites of passage. He writes that all such rites include three phases: they begin with a phase of separation, followed by a liminal phase, and end with a phase of reintegration (van Gennep: 1965, 21). Boys who are to become men may have to undergo a test of their manhood. When they reach the correct age, they are first separated from society for a period. They may live on their own in the liminal phase, exempted from the customary obligations and norms which otherwise regulate societal life. Finally, they are reintegrated into society, but now with a changed social status: the boy has become a man with a new set of social norms with regard to his obligations and privileges. The most interesting point for Henning Luther is the middle phase, the liminal phase, because it begins as it were in the midst of the equivocal state of the interstice – one status has been left behind, but the person has not yet been reintegrated into the new phase of his life.

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It is precisely here that the plurality of religious meaning forces itself upon our notice. Luther claims that we can also transfer this idea about transitions between the phases of life to everyday life itself. We do not live in one homogeneous world, but in a network divided up into many smaller meshes, which we move into and out of. In this way, there are numerous transitions in everyday life itself, every single day, whether or not we notice them. Sometimes, the small interruptions, which occur in everyday life appear clearly, for example in an unexpected meeting, in the sudden loss of a cherished object, in a near miss, or perhaps in the form of a choice that must be made. In such situations, differences and interstices make themselves manifest. Waldenfels describes the relationship between the holy and the everyday as follows: Since religious phenomena like that of the holy are defined by a specific differentiation which one can describe as the difference between the extraordinary and the ordinary, between the exceptional and the usual, or between the noneveryday and the everyday, one lands in a religious exoticism as soon as one directly approaches the holy and believes that one can get beyond all that is profane (Waldenfels: 2001, 83. Eng. trans.: B.McN.).

The difference and the tension between the holy and the everyday enter into the experience of the holy. Every attempt to get beyond this difference is merely exoticism’s attempt to attain to something undifferentiated, which lies behind the everyday and is independent of it. Like Luther, Waldenfels believes that the holy manifests itself precisely in the difference between the everyday and the non-everyday. This is not an either/or – either everyday and profane, or else non-everyday and holy – since everyday life is thought of as so open and loose that it has room for differences, transitions, and interstices. All such transitions open up an interstice where wonder makes its way to the fore, and the experience of something “more” and “other” shines through. This does not mean that everyday life continuously appears as a bearer of holiness, but that at any time, everyday life can let its religious potential break through (Luther : 1992, 223). Such transitions can be accompanied by a greater or lesser fear of the unsettled and the foreign, but this fear can also open the door to a new way of looking at the future. Everyday life borders on small and large religious rituals. The theologians Hans-Günter Heimbrock and Wolf-Eckhard Failing have written several short phenomenological studies in which they discuss the holy and the everyday. They too point out that everyday life is polyvalent, but they also emphasize that it has a dynamic of its own. Everyday life has a tendency to sink down into a forgetfulness with routines and trivialities, where things are taken for granted, or we lose the sight of things as we get absorbed in interesting activities. In this way, everyday life can pose a threat to the religious sensitivity. But everyday life is also interrupted from time to time. Heimbrock and Failing confirm that the holy seems to manifest itself precisely in the interruptions,

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and that the cultic, with rituals and an approach to the holy, constitutes such an interruption in everyday life. It suffices here to recall how the repetition of cult – in synagogue, mosque, or church – continually makes its way in between everyday life and everyday life. The cult is an interruption, which breaks up routine and makes it possible to see the holy in the everyday, behind the veil of habit. The cult itself can be understood as the staging of a huge interstice. But everyday life itself, independently of the cult, also bears such interstices within itself. Indeed, Heimbrock and Failing claim that the holy itself is an “in between” of this kind (Failing/Heimbrock: 2001, 201). This contributes yet another dimension to the interstice which is so central for the holy, the interstice which is stretched out not only between the profane everyday life and something which is foreign to this everyday life, but also between work days. This is given a shape in liturgy and rituals. The Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig expresses a similar view: “It is through the holiday that the work day receives its definition. We must bear in mind that we are not dealing with something entirely distinct from the weekday” (quoted by Putnam: 2008, 34). This formulation entails two things. On the one hand, the holy day entails a breach with everyday life, because the latter can be understood only at a sufficient distance. On the other hand, Rosenzweig underlines that what is brought about in the rituals and the celebration is not something other than everyday life itself (such as Otto’s “wholly other”). This last point is decisively important, if the traces of holiness, which are hidden in everyday life are to become visible. It is very easy for these traces to drown in all the small details of everyday life. And this is why it is essential to have places, times, and sets of expressions which are distinct from everyday life – for the sake of everyday life itself. The “in between” of the cult functions because it has one foot in the ordinary and another in the extraordinary.

The Holy, the Profane, and the Religions We can change our perspective and ask how this understanding of the profane and of its relationship to the holy corresponds to the religious picture on the global scale. Instead of looking for one single inclusive definition of religion, the religious scientists Linda Woodhead and Paul Heelas have chosen to present three types of religion which see the relationship between the holy and the profane in different ways. First, there are “religions of difference,” where the distinction between the holy and the profane is sharp and unambiguous, and there are clear and decisive differences between God and the human person, as well as between believers and non-believers. Secondly, there are “religions of humanity,” where the distinction between the holy and the profane is more gradual and there is a reciprocal interplay between God, the human person, and nature. Thirdly, Woodhead and Heelas speak of

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“spiritualities of life,” which envisage a fundamental, holistic unity between the deity, the human person, and nature (Heelas/Woodhead: 2000, 3 f). It is obvious that Otto, Eliade, and van der Leeuw base their analysis of the holy on the religions of difference. As we have seen in the previous chapter, a clear isolation of the holy is one consequence of an understanding of reality in which the world has been disenchanted. The differences have occupied a central place in the traditional monotheistic religions too: the holy as a transcendent authority, and the clear hierarchical structure which upholds the distinction between God and human beings, between believers and nonbelievers. But there are some aspects of late-modern rationality which are not in harmony with such a model. This understanding is challenged especially by distrust of the clear-cut boundaries that are drawn between the holy and the profane. Nevertheless, the religions of difference continue to find prominent representatives in today’s situation. Both fundamentalism of various kinds and conservative charismatic Christianity are strong on the world scale (Heelas/Woodhead: 2000, 31 ff). It is probably correct to see such retreats to strong and clear structures as an attempt to stem the loss of an overview and of a stable identity, which is one consequence of late modernity (cf. Krogseth: 1998, 205). The other extreme erases the distinction between the holy and the profane by making the profane holy. This is where the strategy of the spiritualities of life differs from the established religions. Spirituality is organized in a much looser manner, and each individual adheres to the spiritual truths on the basis of his own choices. This openness corresponds more smoothly than the religions of difference to the contemporary situation, and not least to the understanding of the self, which reflects and makes it own choices. But the clear holistic tendency of spirituality looks for a unity which goes beyond the distinctions that continually come into play in everyday life, in a search for a spiritual understanding of the holy as a power or a spiritual dimension that permeates everything and everyone – and not least, the self (Heelas/ Woodhead: 2000, 110 f). Spiritual experiences of the holy occupy a central position in this search. Such neo-religious movements are not as widely diffused as the two other types of religion, but Woodhead and Heelas point out that they constitute a clear trend. When the spiritualities of life attempt to make everything holy and to get beyond all the distinctions, one is tempted to think that this too is a reaction to the uncertainty entailed by everyday life in the late modern period. It is hard for the personal feeling of identity to cope with the shifts between the various contexts to which one must continually relate, and a movement such as New Age can be understood as an attempt to master this situation without losing one’s footing. The self and holism can be seen as a strategy to establish a solid anchoring and a larger context in one’s existence. Such a spirituality also disposes once and for all of the disenchanted world. But it is here that the weakness of this spirituality also lies: it is unable to hold onto the fact that central parts of

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everyday life and of the societal institutions to which we relate are indeed secularized. The type of religion which has the most direct and positive relationship to the analysis of everyday life, which we find in Waldenfels and other scholars, is what Woodhead and Heelas call the religions of humanity. These are not in fact new; they find expression in the liberal religious currents, which have integrated into religion the Enlightenment ideas about freedom and human dignity (Heelas/Woodhead: 2000, 70 ff). Here, the firm dividing lines between God and the human person, and between the holy and the profane, lose their sharp outlines. This can also be called a de-differentiation, i. e. a moderation of the emphasis on the dichotomies, which are so characteristic of thinking in the modern period. Nevertheless, the distinction between the holy and the profane is not erased, although it is a mobile distinction, which is often transcended. In this sense, the religions of humanity hold fast to the profanity of everyday life, without denying that it also contains something other and something more. In everyday life, the profane and the holy are interwoven. The present chapter has looked in particular at everyday life as the place where the profane and the holy intersect. Against this background, we can restore Otto’s understanding of the contrast harmony of the holy to its position of honor. Otto wrote of the ambivalence between the tremendum (uncanny) and the fascinans (attraction), but perhaps we can transpose this contrast harmony to the interplay between the profane and the holy in ordinary life. If the holy dwells in our environment, it becomes possible to ascribe a positive meaning, and indeed a varying meaning, to the holy in a quite different manner than was possible in the older tradition of the phenomenology of religion. This brings together two central leitmotifs in my understanding of the holy : it occurs in an interstice, and it often appears weakly. Heidegger presumably wishes to lead philosophy in the direction of an everyday quality like this when he relates a story about the Pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus. According to Aristotle, a great crowd once came to see the celebrated thinker Heraclitus. They had great expectations of this legendary figure and hoped to experience extraordinary, perhaps superhuman occurrences, but they were disappointed. What they saw was Heraclitus sitting in an everyday posture beside his baking oven. He is said to have uttered the following words: “Even here, the gods are present.” Heidegger comments: […] “even here” at the stove, in that ordinary place where every thing and every condition, each deed and thought is intimate and commonplace, that is familiar, “even there” in the sphere of the familiar, einai theous, “it is the case that the gods come to presence.” Heraclitus himself says, ethos anthropoi daimon, “The (familiar) abode for man is the open region for the presencing of god (the unfamiliar one)” (Heidegger : 1993b, 258).

Both Otto’s attraction and repulsion, both the safe and the uncanny, are reflected in Heidegger’s interpretation. But another point is even more

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important, viz. that the holy, the presence of the gods, is localized in the midst of the everyday, or (to put it more strongly) that precisely the everyday is openness to the mystery in its most modest appearance, as weak holiness. In turn, such an anchoring of the holy means that it loses its status as wholly other and absolutely pure. In one sense, this means that the holy is besmirched by the profane – and this brings us to the problem of the next chapter : How is the holy related to ideas about purity and taboos?

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4. Taboo and Impurity Earlier theories about the holy must be challenged, where these operate with sharp dichotomies between the holy and the profane, between the wholly other and the worldly. Perhaps we are left with the impression that things have gone too far in the other direction: the holy becomes vague, undefined, and almost devoid of boundaries. Are there any boundaries that mark where the holy begins and where it ends, boundaries, which show what really makes a difference and what is trivial? If the holy can mean everything, it is emptied of content – and this is precisely why we need such boundaries. In the present chapter, we shall discuss various aspects of the taboos and problems connected to purity. Taboos and impurity are concerned with boundaries; often, they are clear markers of boundaries, and are meant to protect the holy. Many of the pioneering works in the history of religion and anthropology which introduced and coined these concepts took their starting point in premodern cultures. In part, this interest in the simpler pre-modern cultures was linked to methodological advantages, since it is easier to offer a description of uncomplicated societal structures than of complex structures. In part, however, it was also linked to a belief that one came into contact here with something original, something that remained fundamental even for modern human beings. Although there are great historical and cultural differences between archaic societies and our own, it is indisputable that many of the same central structures have survived. It is perfectly possible that fear of the impure and fear of taboos live on under other names and with other forms of expression. One meaning of purity, which is still relevant is hygienic purity ; the modern understanding of contagion and the access to innumerable detergents have led to a historically unparalleled concern with hygiene. But we also speak of purity in aesthetics, in chemistry, and even in the context of political ideology. We tend to think of purity as that which is unmixed, that which belongs to only one category. Are modern understandings of this kind merely derived from a more original meaning, as Roger Caillois claimed in his studies of religion (Caillois: 1959, 33), or are they based on completely different principles? The taboo is a negative expression of the holy, since it marks a “thus far, but no further,” a prohibition against drawing too close to the holy. I call the taboos “negative” expressions because they can be understood only in relation to something that exists in a positive manner, i. e. the holy. There is a correspondence between the taboos and the holy. But are there still boundaries in our culture? Have they not all been captured long ago? Or have mass communication and the film industry, sexual liberation, and speculative art

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made us blas and shattered the last remnants of our culture’s taboos? As I see it, they continue to exist, but in other forms, transposed or suppressed – but still relevant. The Taboo of the Historians of Religion The taboos function as a protective fence around the holy. This first characteristic follows directly from the meaning of the word. According to Eliade, the Polynesian word taboo means that things, places, or persons are set apart from their profane surroundings. They are forbidden, because all contact with them is dangerous. Both the separation and the prohibition are nevertheless anchored in the holy, because the holy is an extremely ambivalent phenomenon. Otto spoke of the contrast-harmony between the fascinans and the tremendum, while Eliade points out that the holy can be both holy and impure. He recalls that the Latin sacer can mean both “holy” and “accursed,” just as the Greek hagios can mean both “pure” and “polluted” (Eliade: 1958, 15 ff). Such positions have gradually become very widespread in the secondary literature on this topic, but this was not always the case. We shall therefore look at how these theories were elaborated. Two images dominate the presentations and discussions of taboos, one drawn from the sphere of electricity, the other from the sphere of contagion. The taboo can be compared to an object charged with electric tension. As soon as someone touches the electrical object, a powerful force is discharged. The taboo can also be compared to a dangerous contagious illness, which is caught through unprotected close contact. Both images shed light on the element of danger, which is linked to taboos, and explain why one must protect oneself from them by means of prohibitions and restrictions. The electric shock corresponds to theories about mana (i. e. the religious force), while the metaphor of contagion corresponds to ideas about the impure. We need not discuss here the question whether or not the English Old Testament scholar and historian of religion William Robertson Smith was the originator of these images; but at any rate, he employed them in a way which left its mark on subsequent scholarship (Robertson Smith: 1956, 151; 153). Rhetorical figures were not all that entered the standard repertoire of the science of religion in the wake of Robertson Smith’s The Religion of the Semites (first published in 1889). In the Semitic word for “holy,” qadosh, the primary emphasis lies on the meaning “separation.” Holy things must be kept separate from ordinary things, for whereas ordinary things are available for human use, the holy is withdrawn from normal human use. The taboo can be understood more precisely as the regulations, which ensure this separation. They place restrictions on human dealings with holy things, places, or persons, and in this way they separate the holy from the profane. When we speak here of taboos, we must draw a distinction between two different religious motifs, both of which lay down frameworks for the radius of

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human action. On the one hand, we have taboos, which are motivated by respect for the holy. These exist in order to protect the holy place from idols, to shelter the property of the gods, and to ensure that they receive everything to which they have the first rights. Robertson Smith calls these restrictions rules of holiness, where the human being turns aside in deference to the gods. There is however another class of restrictions, the real and primitive taboos, which are motivated not by deference to the deity but by fear of impurity. Accordingly, Robertson Smith calls these rules of uncleanness. The decisive factor in understanding this form of taboo is that it is motivated by fear of contagion. Mothers who have borne a child or men who have touched a corpse not only become unclean: they themselves become taboo and may not be touched before they have undergone some form of purification. The impurity is transmitted like a contagious disease. The rules regarding impurity are taboos which are governed by the fear of the supernatural danger that is a consequence of contagion; this may mean that one incurs shame, or that one succumbs to a deadly illness (Robertson Smith: 1956, 153). If we are to believe Robertson Smith, the “rules of holiness” are the expression of a much more highly developed form of religion than the “rules of uncleanness,” which he calls “irrational” and “superstitious.” Robertson Smith’s discussion concentrates on the old Semitic religions, which were the forerunners of the Israelite religion, as we find traces of it in the Old Testament. The question is whether the concept of holiness, which we find expressed in the Old Testament has completely freed itself from the idea of infection and impurity. Robertson Smith begins by considering whether the Israelites’ sacred restrictions were originally governed, not by a fear of danger, but by a vigilant attention to the God who supplied benefits, i. e. by what he called “rules of holiness.” On closer examination, however, he comes to the conclusion that this is certainly not the whole truth. The early Semitic religion comes into view again and again in the Old Testament, e. g. in the dietary prescriptions which divide the animal kingdom into pure and impure, in the idea about the transfer of guilt to a scapegoat, or in the rules for the cleansing of lepers. Such taboos are “rules of uncleanness,” guided by fear of the dangerous contagion that came from impurity (Robertson Smith: 1956, 447 f). The holy too is contagious. Like the impure, the holy is taboo because an unprepared touching of the holy entails great danger. This however means that the holy and the impure are very close to one another. Robertson Smith writes: “Holy and unclean things have this in common, that in both cases certain restrictions lie on men’s use of and contact with them, and that the breach of these restrictions involves supernatural dangers.” And he draws the conclusion “that it is impossible to separate the Semitic doctrine of holiness and uncleanness from the system of taboo” (Robertson Smith: 1956, 446; 452). The holy and the impure are entangled with one another because both parts are distinguished from the profane through a system of taboos, which is meant to prevent infection. Thanks to this observation, it is often claimed that

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Robertson Smith was the one who discovered the connection between the holy and the impure. If the holy and the impure can be two sides of one and the same thing, what boundaries is the taboo meant to guard? Caillois, who perhaps emphasizes the connection between the impure and the pure even more strongly than Robertson Smith, maintains that there is one decisive distinction, viz. that between the holy and the profane (Caillois: 1959, 60). And it is precisely here that the taboos have their function of guarding the borders between the holy and the profane, so that the profane is not exposed to danger, and the power of the holy is not poured out in profane everyday life. The entire cosmos is ordered and structured in the way in which it is perceived by “the primitive human being,” and this order follows the fundamental pattern that is established by the distinction between holy and profane: man and woman, night and day, summer and winter, and so on. As Caillois sees it, it is the function of the taboos to create and maintain order. The danger entailed by contagion is that unlucky mixed situations arise, so that the structured order of things becomes confused. He argues that one must understand that the taboos are fundamentally taboos on mixture (1959, 26). These studies in the history of religion have grasped some profoundly decisive links: the taboos are linked to the holy, and although the taboos can be motivated both by reverence and by fear, they serve to maintain some decisive distinctions. Once again, we can see the tendency to draw the boundary lines somewhat too quickly and definitely, without really perceiving how the holy and the profane can interlock. Nevertheless, it is certainly true that the taboos impose limitations on the human person, although these can be counterbalanced by the great service performed by the taboos, viz. the maintenance of meaning and order in existence.

The Taboo in Psychoanalysis Historians of religion study and impose a systematic order on the findings of the history of religion. Often, it is the pre-modern religious views that are in the foreground. We ourselves, however, live in another society, which has been transformed by modernity in far-reaching ways. How are the discoveries of the historians of religion relevant to people today? One important difference between pre-modern and modern societies is the role ascribed to the individual. Roughly speaking, one can postulate a transition from an understanding, which gives priority to the collective, to an understanding in which the individual plays the main role. When the modern individual or subject takes on the central place in our orientation to reality, we must expect that religious problems too will be shifted. Psychoanalysis is one typical example of this shift. Freud and his followers did not limit their studies to clinical questions about psychological sufferings and therapy, they also

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analyzed a wide spectrum of cultural phenomena. Freud himself made a contribution to the understanding of the taboo. Typically, he reads it in the light of the modern psyche, where prohibitions now occur as an authority in the psychological structure. There is one observation, which must have occurred to Freud early on, and to which he continually returns in his later writings about religion. It concerns striking similarities between obsessive-compulsive neuroses and the life of religious faith. Freud believes that an increased understanding of the religious taboos can shed light on aspects of these neuroses, but also that the psychoanalytical understanding of the neuroses can shed a new light on the taboos. Neurosis was the most widespread suffering in Freud’s days. It is due, roughly speaking, to impulses, which are prevented from finding their natural expression and are then suppressed. A sub-category of neuroses is the compulsive neuroses which consist of compulsive actions or thoughts, and which tend today to be called “compulsive-obsessive disorders.” Freud notes four parallels between taboos and compulsive neuroses. First, both taboos and compulsive actions are related to strict prohibitions, where there is no obvious motivation for precisely these prohibitions. Although both the neurotic and the religious leaders can certainly produce reasons for the prohibitions, these must be regarded as post factum rationalizations. The primary thing is not any reasonable grounds for the prohibitions, but the categorical “You shall not!” The prohibitions are rigidly observed, because the prohibition itself entails fear of transgressions, a fear of the powers that will be unleashed by the forbidden phenomenon itself, almost like a discharge of electric power (Freud: 2001, 31). Fear of physical contact is one type of compulsive-neurotic symptom that corresponds well to the taboo. Secondly, although both compulsive neuroses and taboos restrict the human person’s sphere of action by means of prohibitions, there are also commandments, which are dictated by a kind of inherent necessity. Freud observes that both religious commandments and compulsive actions should be considered as a form of purification or penitential action. Since the guilt feeling does not cease, both sacred actions and neurotic symptoms take on the character of compulsive repetition. Compulsive washing is a very widespread variant of compulsive actions, corresponding to the religious need for ritual purification (2001, 33). Thirdly, both the taboo and compulsive actions can be transmitted as an “infection” by way of association. The taboo is easily transferable, and it entails a strong risk of contagion, so that the one who comes into contact with the taboo object is exposed to danger, or even himself becomes taboo. The danger of infection applies likewise to the forbidden objects in compulsive neurosis. Freud relates how a woman patient insisted that an “impossible” household article be removed. This was because the object had been purchased in Smith Street, and Smith was the maiden name of a childhood friend of this woman, who was “impossible” for the time being (2001, 32 f). In

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a similarly associative manner, the taboo is transmitted as an infection. The prohibition is continually transferred from the original object to new objects, either through contact or through associative relationship. Ultimately, this can make the world a minefield for the neurotic person, because there is finally so little that is not polluted, that there are scarcely any possibilities left for safe action. Fourthly, some of the actions, which must be repeated continually appear completely meaningless and devoid of any clear motivations. Usually, the neurotic person cannot explain why precisely these specific actions must be performed, rather than any others. And yet, these actions must be carried out in the minutely prescribed manner, i. e. under a form of inner compulsion. Freud gives such compulsive actions the name ceremonial, and it is surely obvious that he is alluding here to the religious rituals. Often, compulsive actions have their starting point in trivial actions, but they become identified with the rituals through repetitions and formalization: It is easy to see where the similarity between neurotic ceremonial and the sacred actions of religious rituals is located, namely in the qualms of conscience when something is omitted, in total isolation from all other activity (no interruption allowed), and in meticulous conscientiousness of performance (Freud: 2004a, 5).

Some believers will surely feel profoundly uneasy if they are prevented from going to Mass or praying their daily prayers. They will also feel uneasy if the ritual is not performed in the correct manner. But there are important distinctions to be drawn here. Religious ceremonies are collective, whereas the neurotic ceremony is private; the religious ceremony is full of symbolism, whereas the neurotic ceremony seems ridiculous and devoid of meaning. But the latter only seems to be the case, for it is one of the deepest principles of psychoanalysis that all human expressions are meaningful. This applies to the interpretation of dreams, to the interpretation of slips of the tongue in daily life, or, in the present case, to neurotic symptoms. The dream, the slip of the tongue, and the symptoms are distorted expressions of unconscious wishes. What meaning lies behind the taboos and the compulsive neurosis?

Taboo and Ambivalence One of Freud’s great sources of inspiration is the popular psychology of Wilhelm Wundt, who confirmed Robertson Smith’s thesis that the earliest apprehensions of the holy include both purity and impurity. Wundt believes that this inner tension must be derived from an even more fundamental experience, which he calls “the demonic horror.” Freud agrees with Wundt that there is an internal tension in the holy, but he rejects the idea that this tension is derived from one simple cause. Rather, the holy even in its most

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original form is already marked by tension, or more precisely by ambivalence (Freud: 2004b, 284). Ambivalence consists of two contradictory feelings which are linked to one and the same object, such as love and hate or admiration and envy, and we have already encountered the ambivalence in the holy, viz. the tremendum et fascinans. It is difficult to cope with emotional conflicts of this kind, and the situation is made worse by the fact that the feelings involved are often intense. Since Freud supposes that there is a particularly close link between the holy and the taboo, ambivalence too acquires a central position in the taboo. The ambivalence of the taboo entails a tension between prohibition and inclination: one experiences a strong unconscious attraction precisely to the forbidden action. One wants to do something, but one is not allowed to do it (Freud: 2001, 38). In order to shed light on this ambivalence, Freud begins from the obsessive fear of contact, and investigates how the fear of contact develops in children. A fear of this kind presupposes on the one hand the existence of a strong inner instinct, e. g. the pleasure the child takes in touching its own sexual organ, and on the other hand an external prohibition (cf. the first point made in the previous section) which is laid down with sufficient authority to overcome the child’s original instinct. But the instinct does not cease to exist in the child. Rather, it is forced underground – as Freud puts it, it is suppressed. The advantage of suppression is that this instinct disappears from the region of consciousness and that it is possible to observe the prohibition against touching; but the price to be paid is that the instinct continues to work with undiminished power, only now in the unconscious. Since the instinct is unconscious, it is impossible to negotiate the conflict between the conscious prohibition and the unconscious wish, or to work it out in some constructive way. The conflict gets jammed in the system, so to speak – vibrating in a strong but unspoken ambivalence (2001, 34). Behind Freud’s thinking, one can sense a model, which conceives of the human mind as a water-tank with three different sections, regulated by hydraulic principles: if the pressure in one section increases, it must supply water to another section. Freud thinks that we have a lower storey, an unconscious stratum, where the instincts and the forbidden wishes hold sway. In order to emphasize the animalistic character of the instincts, which dwell here, Freud can speak of this storey as the id. There is also a higher stratum, which likewise eludes the bright light of consciousness: here, however, it is the moral principles that exercise supervision. This is the dwelling of the superego, which is formed through the internalization of the education received from one’s parents. Between the superego and the id lies the ego, which consciously attempts to relate to reality and at the same time to mediate between the pressure, which comes both from the higher stratum and from the lower stratum. In the ambivalence, which Freud discusses here, the pressure in the container increases strongly : the child has an uncon-

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scious wish to touch itself, and this wish is checked by the superego’s control. When there is no direct means of neutralizing the pressure, the hydraulic laws mean that the inner instinct will seek new outlets. Since the most obvious path – viz., to put into action the wish to touch oneself – is blocked, the instinct seeks outlets along other labyrinthine paths. As Freud puts it, the instinct is displaced. This displacement means that the feelings or instincts, which originally were linked to one object via association, proximity, or similarity are now transferred to new objects. One must find something to touch that is linked in a symbolic manner of this kind to the genital organ. The original impulse spreads to more and more areas in order to neutralize the pressure. This displacement means that the original instinctive impulse finds more and more compensations and spreads as a contagion (cf. the third point in the previous section). But the superego is an attentive overseer and responds to the displacement by imposing new prohibitions against the compensations, which the instincts seek (Freud: 2001, 35). For a compulsive neurotic person, therefore, the “impossible” areas, which are under a taboo can spread more and more widely through a contagion with an almost epidemic quality. The final – and not particularly constructive – way to release the pressure finds expression in the form of neurotic symptoms. Freud believes that these are not in the least neurological defects, as medical science earlier held, rather, they are meaningful signs, which have come into existence as a compromise between unconscious wishes and the moral prohibitions of the superego. The instincts finally discover an action, which is sufficiently reminiscent of the original object of the instinct, an action which the superego too can accept. The enormous psychological pressure under which these actions are performed gives them the character of a compulsion or commandment (cf. the second point in the previous section). Freud regards compulsive actions basically as substitutes for the suppressed instinctive impulse. Since the action takes place under great pressure and is surrounded on all sides by prohibitions, compulsive actions acquire a ceremonial quality (cf. the fourth point above; Freud: 2001, 36). If we now reverse the perspective and consider these matters with our starting point in the taboo, we can shed light on a number of factors. We have seen that both taboos and compulsive actions lack a clear motivation: one simply must submit to them (cf. the fourth point above). Freud is now able to explain this remarkable lack of motivation: there must be an unconscious wish, which corresponds to the taboo’s prohibition, and since the wishes elude our consciousness, the prohibition too takes on an arbitrary character. There is therefore a reason for the apparently arbitrary taboos, namely a secret wish to thwart the taboos. We see how grotesque Freud’s explanation is when we envisage a secret wish behind the most fundamental taboos, viz. the prohibition of killing the totem animal (the father) and the prohibition of incest.

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The taboos thus correspond to the superego’s prohibition of acting out certain instincts, and they become all the more precarious, the more contagious these instincts are. In pre-modern societies, one can observe how the same mechanisms, which Freud discovers in the modern psyche are acted out on the societal level. But how does Freud explain why this contagion can be so intense that the entire collective must impose harsh penalties in order to stop it? The explanation must be sought in the forbidden wish, which is masked by the taboo. The transgressor has yielded to precisely this wish, thereby not only calling forth consciousness about the wish from its shadowy existence in the unconscious, but also awakening other people’s wish to act out similar desires. This brings to light the whole problem of temptation, which rapidly spreads from one person to another : If you can do it, so can I. Harsh penalties are enacted in order to ward off the temptation, above all by making the transgressor taboo and thereby expelling him or her from the society. If we move this dynamic into the psyche, we discover that the temptation is punished by the superego with guilt feelings and a bad conscience. Freud sums up as follows: Taboo is primeval prohibition forcibly imposed (by some authority) from outside, and directed against the most powerful longings to which human beings are subject. The desire to violate it persists in their unconscious; those who obey the taboo have an ambivalent attitude to what the taboo prohibits. The magical power that is attributed to taboo is based on the capacity for arousing temptation; and it acts like contagion because examples are contagious and because the prohibited desire in the unconscious shifts from one thing to another (Freud: 2001, 40 f).

Patricide, the Oedipus Complex, and the Maternal One presupposition which Freud shares with Durkheim is the conviction that totemism displays the most elementary and fundamental mechanisms in all religions. This is why he concentrates on uncovering the logic behind the two fundamental taboos of totemism, viz. the prohibition of killing the taboo animal and the prohibition of incest. The question Freud asks is: Why are precisely these two actions prohibited? The taboos cannot be inherent in nature, since Freud points out that the kings in ancient Egypt chose their wives from among their closest relatives, thereby transgressing the prohibition of incest; and in the case of the prohibition of killing the taboo animal, there is nothing on the part of nature which prevents human beings from killing particular animal species in order to preserve their own lives. Nevertheless, even in our own culture, echoes of totemism’s taboos – in the form of incest and killing – still provoke a strong aversion. Freud believes that we cannot be content with investigations of the human psyche by means of systematic

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reflections. We must enter that stratum of the psyche, which we have inherited from our prehistory (Freud: 2004b, 260 – 264).1 If every taboo contains an ambivalence, we must ask: In these instances, where does the ambivalence have its origin? Here, Freud offers a somewhat speculative explanation in which he himself clearly had great confidence, since he repeats it in all his writings on culture and religion (Freud: 2004b, 244 ff; 2004c, 151; 2001, 162 – 70; 1971, 100 f). This is the idea of the original patricide, an idea which he borrows from Darwin’s explanation of the origin of culture in terms of the theory of evolution. The idea is that a so-called “primal horde” existed at the dawn of time, totally dominated by a powerful father with a violent and jealous authority, who wanted to have all the women for himself and refused to allow his sons access to them. Driven by indignation and dammed-up hatred, the sons joined forces and killed the father, and since they were cannibals, they immediately ate him. In order to prevent internecine warfare, the sons imposed restrictions on their instincts: it was not permissible to have sexual relations with women from the same family or tribe. This is the origin of the prohibition of incest, and this initial bridling of aggression and the sexual instinct represents the beginning of culture and civilization. According to Freud, the principle that sustains civilization is the imposition of checks on one’s instincts for the good of the fellowship. What about the prohibition of killing the taboo animal? Once again, Freud employs the same half-mythical narrative as his explanation. The sons killed the father, but he remained their father and, as such, was a person with whom they continued to identify. As time passed, the memory of their father grew and he took on more and more the form of an ideal figure. But this also meant that the guilt feeling intensified. The dead father became more powerful than when he was alive – he was exalted to become a god. The prohibition of patricide was instituted in an attempt to alleviate the guilt feeling and to be reconciled to the father. The idea of the father was first divinized and then transferred to the totem animal: a prohibition of patricide became identical to a prohibition of killing the totem animal. This allows Freud to explain the second taboo, against killing the totem animal. Basically, this taboo concerns an ambivalent relationship to the father – both the wish to kill him and a strong identification with him. With the replacement of the father by the totem animal, the last piece of the puzzle falls into place. Freud can explain the genesis of the taboos against incest and the killing of the totem animal. In addition, he can link the taboos to the very cornerstone in psychoanalysis’ theory about neuroses, viz. the Oedipus complex:

1 In these speculations, Freud in practice draws close to Jung’s idea of the collective unconscious and the doctrine of archetypes.

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The first consequence of our substitution is most remarkable. If the totem animal is the father, then the two principal ordinances of totemism, the two taboo prohibitions which constitute its core – not to kill the totem and not to have sexual relations with a woman of the same family – coincide in their content with the two crimes of Oedipus, who killed his father and married his mother, as well as with the two primal wishes of children, the insufficient repression or the re-awakening of which forms the nucleus of perhaps every psychoneurosis (Freud: 2001, 153).

In Sophocles’ Greek tragedy, Oedipus is the king who unknowingly and unintentionally comes to kill his father and marry his mother. Freud holds that such forbidden wishes occur in the psyche of every individual during childhood. A harmonious psychological development is completely dependent on a favorable solution to the father-son conflict which occurs at the age of about five or six. The boy’s sexual instinct is still directed to his mother, but he discovers a rival – in the person of his father. But the father is superior, and Freud believes that this superiority creates castration anxiety in the son. As in the case of the brothers, the father is both an ideal figure with whom the son identifies, and a rival whom he wants to kill. The Oedipus complex and the ambivalent relationship to the father’s authority correspond to the taboos and, in more general terms, to the way in which Jews and Christians deal with guilt (Freud: 1971, 136 f). Although Freud’s theories still constitute the basis of more recent psychodynamic therapy, the clinical picture has changed, and is linked today more to indistinct boundaries than to the neurotic person’s exaggerated observation of boundaries. The clinical picture is now linked, not so much to the conflict between internal authorities (the superego, the ego, and the id), but rather to a fragmentation of the inner self, as the so-called self-psychology has pointed out. Let us also dwell briefly on another limitation to Freud’s thinking, viz. the one-sidedly masculine character of the entire Oedipal conflict. Julia Kristeva – psychoanalyst, linguistic scholar, and theoretician of literature – has drawn attention to this point in connection with Freud’s understanding of taboo, not in order to reject it, but to amplify it. Like Freud, she believes that civilization is formed against the background of murder, guilt feelings, and the consequent prohibitions; but she holds that Freud has not understood the psychological root of the prohibition of incest, which corresponds to another disagreeable experience which she calls “the confrontation with the feminine” (Kristeva: 1982, 58). In an entirely traditional manner, both Freud and Kristeva affirm that the taboos correspond to the holy. For Freud, in keeping with his Jewish inheritance, the holy is marked by a strong and unambiguous father-figure; Kristeva emphasizes a feminine experience of holiness which is found in the ambivalent, in the transitions, and in the interstices, rather than in institutionalized religion (Clment/Kristeva: 2001, 27 f). Freud’s taboo has the character of prohibition and suppression, but also of

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cultural structuring. Kristeva wishes to supplement this with an understanding of taboo based on one particular psychological experience of aversion and fear, which is linked, not to the primal father, but to the primal mother. In its earliest period, the child lives in a symbiotic unity with the mother. The child does not yet distinguish between itself and the mother, nor between the inner and the outer. But a time comes when a third person, the father, breaks into this duality, and this is the beginning of a violent and painful process of detachment. Kristeva concentrates on the transition from the primary symbiosis to the separation of a delimited ego. In order to form a delimited ego, the child must eject that which does not belong to the ego, and this means first of all the mother. Kristeva calls that which is ejected the “abject” – it is not yet a delimited object, but something that is ejected because it is experienced as disgusting. She holds that this disgust functions as an insurance against the child’s constant tendency to sink back into the devouring unity with the mother : the disgust is directed to that which belongs to this unity with the mother. She interprets the taboo against incest as a prohibition meant to protect us from coming too close to the “abject” which we all bear in ourselves as a memory from childhood (Kristeva: 1982, 13).

Transgression and Maintenance According to Freud, the taboos conceal a desire. When he wrote Totem and Taboo, he believed that this desire had its root in the instincts and that the inner nature of these instincts consisted in seeking pleasure, most profoundly in the form of sexual satisfaction. His theory about the instincts gradually became more complex, as he introduced the death instinct alongside the love instinct. In one of his most speculative writings, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (1920), Freud reflects on why the human being sometimes seeks out psychological processes, which do not increase pleasure, but instead are characterized by discomfort or even destruction. One example is the traumas, which are repeated again and again in the consciousness. Freud now believes that just as we have instincts, which seek love, union, and growth, there is also a corresponding instinct directed towards division, destruction, and death. Ultimately, the death instinct seeks to return to the non-organic condition, which the first living cell left at the initial tender beginning of life. The death instinct also has the last word in life as we know it (Freud: 1984, 307 – 311). Freud himself does not develop further the idea of religious taboos and holiness along these lines, but Georges Bataille in many ways follows up Freud’s speculative approaches. After his own psychoanalytic therapy, he became particularly preoccupied by the idea of a death instinct of his own. Bataille sees the human being as thrown into a mighty drama that is played out between life’s abundance and momentous destruction. We can experience life only as individual human beings. In agreement with Nietzsche’s The Birth of

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Tragedy, Bataille understands individuality in terms of discontinuity – a concept which Bataille employs to emphasize that the human person is not only separated from his or her fellow human beings with their inner experiences, but also separated from a more comprehensive form of continuity, viz. the infinite unity of reality itself. In moments of transition in life, nevertheless – at its beginning and its close, its coming into being and ceasing to exist – one can glimpse the transition between the discontinuous individual and the larger continuity, and such experiences have the character of a transgression (literally, a “crossing over”). These “transgressions” are also at home in eroticism and religion, and it is precisely the holy that finds expression in them (Bataille: 2001, 21 ff). The holy, as Bataille understands it, is indissolubly linked to violence. Violence in this context means tearing the human person out of his identity as a solitary individual. Violence is terrifying (tremendum), but also attractive (fascinans), because it bears the promise of reunion with wholeness. But such experiences of holiness are not, and cannot be, a part of daily, profane life. The human being rose up above the animals through work and rational contrivances. It is by cultivating the profane world that the human being parts company with his violent impulses, at least to some extent. The chaos of violence poses a threat to profane existence (2001, 45). The task of the taboos is to protect the profane life from violence and to structure a world which is calm and foreseeable. Their origin is the profound fear we have of annihilation and of life’s boundless, prodigal force, the thoroughly violent cycle of birth and death. But precisely because of this same fear, the taboos elicit an unconscious attraction to the macabre element in death and obscene sexuality, if we are to believe Bataille (2001, 59). For him, as for Freud, the taboos are absolute prohibitions linked to sexuality and death. Nevertheless, he makes the paradoxical claim that “The taboo is there in order to be violated” (2001, 64). The human person relates to prohibitions even before they are explicitly formulated; but as soon as they are transgressed, the taboos become visible in the intense, ambivalent feeling which is unleashed when the human person transgresses the prohibitions. The weight of profane everyday life with work and prohibitions makes it absolutely necessary to find safety valves for the dammed-up pressure, and this is why we often find in pre-modern societies a delimited holy time which constitutes the opposite of the profane time: that which is forbidden in the profane world is permitted, and sometimes even commanded. Bataille bases his arguments on Caillois’ analysis of the original feast, where people devoted themselves to orgies and destruction. However, it is not total freedom or total chaos that breaks out in the feast, since the chaos is allowed to occur only within clear frameworks (cf. Caillois: 1959, 97 – 103). One might be inclined to think that Bataille wanted to abolish every taboo, and he does in fact believe that the understanding of sin, which Christianity has attached to all transgressions has parted company with the true holiness

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that is involved in transgression. However, a transgression of the taboos does not mean setting them aside. Most profoundly, it is a confirmation of them. Not only does a transgression presuppose that one runs over an obstacle; it is also true that the contradictory experience of pleasure and fear, of attraction and repulsion, presupposes that the taboos are effective and that transgression is truly a mortal sin. If we shift perspective, the idea can be understood as follows: the human person employs the taboos in order to rise above the nature of the animals. But when one transgresses the taboos, e. g. in eroticism, it can seem that one is reverting to nature. Bataille claims, however, that this is not the case, for what makes an experience erotic for the human being is precisely the awareness that a boundary is being forced: “But a transgression is not the same as a back-to-nature movement; it suspends a taboo without suppressing it.” (Bataille: 2001, 43). We find similar reflections in the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, who noted that ambivalence is a theme to which Freud comes back in several of his writings. More precisely, this is the ambivalence between taboo and transgression, prohibition and desire. Perhaps it is because of Freud’s own Jewish background that the prohibition, in the form of the Jewish Law, always lurks in the background; but according to Lacan, it is Paul who gives the most accurate picture of our ambivalent relationship to the Law. On the one hand, it is clear that the Law is meant to hold desire in check, but at the same time it is precisely the Law that awakens desire to life, i. e. the wish to transgress the Law (Lacan: 2008, 102 f). It is here that the Christian understanding of sin comes in. Lacan thinks of sin as the silent gap – the “thing,” as he calls it – which is left in each of us after the first separation from the mother (or, in relation to the primal fall, from the Father). Desire attempts all the time to fill this emptiness. It is the same sinful desire that finds an occasion in the Law, turning it into an instrument of transgression and destruction. Law and desire, which ought to work against each other, in fact strengthen each other (2008, 216 – 227). This paradoxical logic confirms Bataille’s thinking about the relationship between taboo and transgression. Bataille’s concept of holiness is limited to the experience of transgression of the taboo, and we should recall that most of the literature on which the present book is based is dominated by another concept of holiness. The “holiness of transgression” constitutes a supplement to what Caillois and others call the “holiness of respect,” where one stands over against the holy in awe and reverence. Nevertheless, Bataille has seen an important point: there is a mutual dependence between taboos and transgressions. Distinctions and boundaries have not ceased to exist in the late-modern period, but they have become more problematic and more mobile. One might therefore be inclined to think that our culture and our societal life would profit from being liberated from all taboos and transgressing all the boundaries. But the taboos are important, since they are distinctions, which orient and give meaning to our everyday life. And they are a necessary presupposition,

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which makes transgression possible. When everything is allowed, there is no longer any transgression – and where there are no taboos, there is no holiness. The Taboo – Oppressive or Protective? Freud not only showed that deep human conflicts lie buried under “primitive” religious ideas about the taboo. He also brought people of our own days closer to pre-modern culture, since we too live with taboos, even if the religious motivation has evaporated. Nevertheless, the most central insight, which Freud brought to light is the ambivalence and ambiguity which are hidden under the apparent clarity of the taboo. One central variant of the taboo’s ambiguity can be sensed when we inquire into its function, since it seems to have both an oppressive effect (as a form of suppression) and a protective effect. When we speak in everyday life about taboos or “making something taboo,” these words have a clearly negative value: individual persons or cultures impose taboos, which can have an oppressive effect on the way people live. Although Freud emphasizes that he is concerned only with the structural similarities between the compulsive neurosis and the taboos, it is obvious that this comparison points in the same direction. The neurosis arises when some one is so crushed by his own control mechanisms that the life-affirming impulses are suffocated at birth. In the picture Freud paints, a culture marked by taboos does not appear particularly inspiring. Just as the taboos have no rational motivation, but are simply dictated in the imperative form, so too there is no rational reason for the fear, which is unloosed when they are broken. It seems that they are maintained by an irrational, profound fear. Little imagination is required to sense the potential for the abuse of power, which is available to those who have the power of definition in society. As soon as the taboo declares something to be sacrosanct and off-bounds, all criticism is excluded. Since the taboos have a kind of existence, which does not demand any further justification or legitimation, underlying power structures can live on, undiscovered in the shelter of the taboos’ silence. In recent years, Latin American and African liberation theologians, feminists, and liberal Muslims – just to mention a few – have challenged much of what would have been regarded only one or two generations ago as an inviolable taboo. The British social anthropologist Mary Douglas has observed that the taboos are as repressive as those in power want them to be: “Criticism will be suppressed, whole areas of life become unspeakable and, in consequence, unthinkable” (Douglas: 2002, xiii). The taboo creates silence. Its effect is thus based on a link between language and criticism: since there is no clear thought without language, areas for which there is no language remain areas about which no one thinks – and without the aid of thought, no criticism is possible. The structure, which comes to light here resembles a collective edition of Freud’s

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model, which centered on the individual: the impulse is forced down into the subconscious and therefore remains unconscious, unmentionable, and unmanageable. However, Freud claims that that which is subject to a taboo does not disappear : it returns as what he calls “civilization and its discontents,” i. e. the sufferings which are a consequence of the necessary limitation of the instincts which civilization demands. In view of the danger, which is inherent in the taboo, critical thinking must remain alert. However, the taboo is not an unqualified evil that must be overcome at all costs. In addition to its potentially oppressive aspect, it also has a constructive side, which may perhaps make the taboos indispensable. Although she points out the dangers linked to the taboos, Douglas’ primary concern is to draw attention to their protective function. They offer shelter to phenomena and to relationships that are especially vulnerable (2002, xiii). Despite his one-sidedly negative evaluation of pre-modern societies and their “magic” and “superstition”, Frazer too concludes that the taboos have played an inestimable role in the production of the basic pillars of society, such as a stable government, property, marriage, and the respect for life. This is why these serviceable structures, which were maintained in the past by a superstitious fear, have survived, even if the modern development has given them a different theoretical justification (Frazer : 1909, 80 – 83). Up to now, we have spoken of the taboo’s function in culture, but not of the taboo as a phenomenon. The taboo is the negative side of the phenomenon of the holy. In other words, it is connected with the way in which the holy appears. In the world of ideas of pre-modern societies, the holy entails in itself a potential danger, like an electrical charge. Here, the taboo is maintained by a fear of the violent consequences that will follow its transgression. But if Douglas is correct to say that the taboos exist in order to protect weak and vulnerable phenomena, the way is open to another interpretation of the taboo. The holiness of our own time is perhaps linked, not so much to potential power, to strict dogmas and regulations administered by central institutions, as to a much more modest existence in the interstices and on the border, as Heidegger, Waldenfels, Kristeva, and many others have underlined. The manifestation of this phenomenon is vulnerable because its appearance is like a cautious wave of the hand. Without sufficient alertness, the phenomenon will either be overlooked or else crushed to death, so to speak, by the urge to get control over it. Today, the holy is not a threat. Rather, it is under threat! Since the boundaries and forms into which we are socialized have become more vague, there is also a loss of respect for the meaning of distance and of the boundaries. It may be a good thing that some of the veneration one was obliged in the past to show the leading persons of society has vanished, but this loss of respect has also made us less sensitive to constructive boundaries. These are the boundaries, which protect us against brazenness, formlessness, and violence. Let me mention a few examples. The German intellectual Walter Benjamin has

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pointed out how the reproduction of works of art in books, posters, and postcards leads to a loss of perception of the unique character of these works, of their aura. The cultic image, e. g. the religious icon, originally possessed this aura, which is meant to ensure that we attain a correct form of close relationship to the image, a closeness that presupposes the right amount of distance (Benjamin: 1977, 16). One must respect the distance of the picture, before it speaks to one. The Danish theologian Knud E. Løgstrup speaks of the zone of untouchability, a zone or intimate sphere which all should respect. The embarrassment we feel when someone sticks his head into this zone shows that we react intuitively when it is infringed. Some things must be left in peace, and others must not be allowed to touch them (Løgstrup: 1982, 163). The holy too demands a certain distance. One final example: Wittgenstein holds that language games are structured by certain boundaries. Not everything counts as a move in the game called chess. The human person can transgress these boundaries, just as it is de facto possible to transgress the taboo, but this does not unleash a danger. What happens is that we are not saying anything meaningful at all – just as moving the knight straightforward is not a move in the game of chess. If one wants to play chess, one must respect the rules and the boundaries, which these rules indicate. They constitute the very conditions of the game. Similarly, meaningful dealings with the holy have their boundaries. The taboos are a special form of boundary markings: “thus far, and no further!” In this way, they protect the vulnerable distinctions, boundaries, and dividing lines without which our entire symbolic universe is meaningless. The language game, which surrounds the experience of the holy has become very vulnerable. The holy does not count as scientific in the sense of the natural sciences, nor does it have the tangible quality of a cup, a stone, or a tree. I would suggest that there is one way of understanding taboos, which intends precisely to mark the necessary distance, which is entailed by this language game. If one draws too close, the result is not a supernatural danger, vengeance, or visitation by demons – at any rate, such things do not belong to a typical western worldview. But if we are too aggressive, the phenomenon itself – the holy – will vanish like sand running through our fingers. A cultic image, which is no longer venerated is no longer the face of the Lord; a eucharist which is treated like lunch does not make known the saving presence of the holy. Perhaps we can compare the holy to the rainbow: there is certainly no treasure hidden where the rainbow begins, for the rainbow will simply disappear when we come close enough. The beauty of the rainbow can be experienced only at a distance. Only distance can preserve its presence. The holy too is so fragile that is can be experienced only at a certain distance – a distance guarded by the taboos. The taboo can be both oppressive and protective, but how do we know when it is oppressive, and when it is protective? There is surely no definitive answer to this question. We must simply invoke our moral power of judgment and our

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religious sensitivity. Sometimes, the repressive potential in the taboo is undoubtedly being employed as an instrument of power. At other times, it can be important to see the function of the taboos – whether oppressive or protective – in connection with the kind of understanding of the holy to which they correspond. I have written above that people have become hypnotized by the great hierophanies, where the holy was linked to powerful and dangerous revelations of cosmic dimensions. This means that we fail to see the weak holiness, those small, almost invisible signs which manifest themselves in the heart of everyday life. The strong holiness is linked to violence and power, and has a repressive potential, whereas the weak holiness is neither dangerous to ourselves nor oppressive in any other way. Both kinds of taboos entail “thus far, and no further!”, but for opposite reasons. The one taboo seeks to protect the human person against the dangers of the strong holiness, while the other seeks to protect the weak holiness against the human person’s need to take possession of it. Holiness and Impurity How is the impure linked to holiness and taboos? As I have mentioned, Robertson Smith is regarded as the discoverer of the fact that the holy and the impure are certainly not opposites, at least not in the ancient Semitic religions. Both a holy person and an impure person are taboo. It is precisely because both the holy and the impure are contagious that the taboos are necessary. The contagion can be explained variously, in keeping with competing theories. For Freud, the contagion is linked to displacements of the objects of the forbidden instinctive impulse; for Durkheim, the holy is not really a phenomenon or a physical quality, but merely a mask for social norms and values. Since, according to Durkheim, nothing is holy or impure in itself, it is easy to transpose both to other objects with the help of social mechanisms (Durkheim: 2001, 221). These accounts agree, however, that the holy must be kept clear of the profane. Although it is indubitably true that both the impure and the holy are taboo, this close link between holy and impure has been questioned, as well as the view that pre-modern cultures made no distinction between the two. Mary Douglas does not mince her words: “To talk about a confused blending of the Sacred and the Unclean is outright nonsense” (Douglas: 2002, 196).2 Although I shall challenge this claim below, but we can for the moment at least say that it sounds very strange today to envisage an intimate link between impurity and holiness (although this does not mean that one can exclude the possibility that things were different in the past). The Swedish historian of religion Nathan Söderblom saw that this emphasis 2 She adds, however, that the impure can be transformed into the holy by means of special processes and rituals.

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on the impure in the holy did not correspond to the great majority of the Old Testament writings, nor to the views taken by his own contemporaries. His merit is that he does force us to make any unambiguous statement about the relationship between the holy and the impure, since there is no constant relationship between them, historically speaking. In 1913, Söderblom elaborated a systematic presentation of three different views, which have been linked to the holy and its relationship to the impure. The first model corresponds to the tradition, which stems from Robertson Smith. In the archaic societies, the holy was identical to the “You shall not!” of the taboo, and it was unnecessary to draw a distinction between holy and impure, since both were forbidden. The profane, on the other hand, was exempt from the taboos and was thus regarded as pure. holy – impure ——— profane – pure Secondly, however, this model did not possess perennial validity, and a different view is taken in some parts of the Old Testament. In part, the profane everyday life was disparaged and separated from the holy ; this meant that it was regarded as impure. And in part, we find an increasing link between the moral ideal (understood as purity) and the holy – and ultimately, God as pure and righteous. This means that according to Söderblom’s second model, the holy is pure and the profane impure. holy – pure ——— profane – impure A third model which came later can be discerned against the background of other Old Testament material, viz. the inheritance from Moses and the prophets, where God becomes so exalted that he must be detached from all morality whatsoever. The everyday and profane is located between the two poles of the holy and the impure, forming a profane sphere, which can in fact be regarded as pure (Söderblom: 1913, 736 ff). holy ——— pure – ordinary ——— Impure Although his own material is the Old Testament inheritance, Söderblom believes that thinking about the holy and the impure has always been formed

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on the basis of these three models. It is of course possible to question this, but the point in the present context is only to show that Robertson Smith’s thesis certainly does not clear up once and for all the relationship between the holy and the impure. Söderblom is probably correct to state that this relationship is not permanent in history, but is subject to changes, which follow the historical vicissitudes of more overarching religious and ideological systems. This however implies a transposition of the question: What is the connection between the impure and the overarching religious and ideological systems?

Order and Purity Why do some things, which appear disgustingly impure to us, not cause anyone in other cultures to lift an eyebrow? In 1966, Mary Douglas wrote the pioneering study in this field, Purity and Danger. Her thesis is that there is nothing at all that is inherently pure or impure. Durkheim had claimed this much earlier, and Douglas too takes her place in a theoretical tradition, with its roots going back to Durkheim, which emphasizes societal structures. Unlike Durkheim, however, Mary Douglas is able to explain the production of meaning in changing cultures by pointing to the importance of the symbolic order. She focuses not only on societal structures, but on the systems of meaning in different cultures. It is only in the light of the entire symbolic system of cultures that it is possible to explain the distinction between the pure and the impure. When she speaks of the “symbolic order,” Douglas has in mind the way in which all cultures create meaning in a chaotic universe by drawing boundaries for actions, thoughts, and language, by sorting things into various categories, and by establishing a reciprocal relationship between these categories in a structured totality. According to her, human beings can never avoid creating meaningful orders – this seems to be the universal fate of cultures. We need regularity and unity, if we are to find orientation. But no matter how much one may tidy things up and impose a structure upon them, reality appears to be incorrigibly disorderly : nature produces mutants, human beings transgress social norms, and new and hitherto unknown objects turn up which certainly do not fit into the system. In short, the map cannot cover the whole terrain. And Douglas asserts that it is precisely this tendency to evade order that is the key to understanding the impure. Her definition is as follows: […] dirt is matter out of place. This is a very suggestive approach. It implies two conditions: a set of ordered relations and a contravention of that order. Dirt, then, is never a unique, isolated event. Where there is dirt there is system. Dirt is the byproduct of a systematic ordering and classification of matter, in so far as ordering involves rejecting inappropriate elements (Douglas: 2002, 44).

The striking thing about her approach is that the impure – which we immediately experience as dangerous, unhygienic, or repulsive – is explained

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by something as formal as the symbolic order, or more correctly by the breach of this order. Where the “pure” is events, qualities, or things which tidily and properly keep to their places in the category to which they have been assigned, the “impure” is unruly. Mice and bacteria, spiders and infections – we never know what to make of them. We are unsettled by things that do not fit in, according to Douglas. Indeed, they provoke a perception of danger. Freud too emphasized the link between ambivalence and emotional conflicts, which are very uncomfortable and almost unmanageable. The taboos warn against the uncomfortable and potentially dangerous element in what is ambivalent – and we can add that they also warn against the impure. Since the impure is uncomfortable, dangerous, or repulsive, we seek to avoid it. Douglas does not hold that human beings first experience something as dangerous or repulsive, and then create symbolic systems almost as a defense reaction. On the contrary, we must already presuppose a system with which the impure tampers, or which it threatens to break open from within. The unease arises as a product of the system. Similarly, she underlines the constructive aspect when she discusses the impure: when we tidy up the impure by separating it off or by putting it in its proper place, this is a positive way to create and maintain a meaningful order. When we tidy up, wash, and polish, we are not driven by fear, but by a vision of one particular way of organizing our existence (Douglas: 2002, 44 f). The pre-modern cultures had a rich repertoire of rituals on which they could draw. These help even the most fleeting aspects of life to take on a form. Things are cleansed, one is led into new phases of one’s life, authorities are invoked, and values are maintained. Douglas believes that something like this also happens in today’s spring cleaning, redecoration projects, and tidying up in the garden – these activities are the purity rituals of our own time. Douglas points out that although one can employ a number of different strategies to encounter dirt, they all attempt to restore order. The negative strategies attempt to push the impure away in various ways, either by excluding the impure in a physical sense or by setting up precautionary measures to keep it at a distance. There are also positive strategies, which attempt to integrate in various ways that which is disorderly. For example, one can re-shape the system and establish new definitions and demarcations, so that what was previously disorderly is now given an orderly place. It is also possible to exploit the polyvalence in the impure in order to shed a new light on reality ; this can be done by rites and by art (Douglas: 2002, 78 f). In the previous chapter, we have seen how Waldenfels and his followers in a similar manner see the holy as a disorderly interstice, which is capable of putting the everyday into perspective. There can be no doubt that the impure is linked to religious taboos in archaic societies. We ourselves see the “pure” primarily as a hygienic category, and so we ask: Are not the pre-modern ideas about impurity an expression of the same hygienic concern – albeit, in scientific terms, a primitive expression? In Douglas’

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opinion, an affirmative answer to this question would both underestimate and exaggerate the differences between the pre-modern and the modern views of impurity. Such an answer underestimates the great difference between then and now, because the religious ideas about impurity in the past were woven into a completely different system, in which the holy and taboos were fixed points. After the modern insight into hygiene, bacteriology, and the understanding of illness achieved its breakthrough, our relationship to the impure has been inexorably changed (2002, 40). At the same time, to look on archaic ideas about impurity as primitive expressions of hygiene entails an exaggeration of the differences. It is all too easy to think that their system is symbolic and ours hygienic – as though one had reached “hard facts” behind the symbols. If we broaden our perspective, we will soon see that our ideas about purity too are linked to symbolic systems. A few simple examples will demonstrate that impurity continues to be much more for us than a question of hygiene: Shoes are not dirty in themselves, but it is dirty to place them on the dining table; food is not dirty in itself, but it is dirty to leave cooking utensils in the bedroom, or food bespattered on clothing; similarly, bathroom equipment in the drawing room; clothing lying on chairs; outdoor things indoors; upstairs things downstairs; underclothing appearing where over-clothing should be, and so on. In short, our pollution behavior is the reaction which condemns any object or idea likely to confuse or contradict cherished classifications (Douglas, 2002: 44 f).

Although our worldview is different from that of “the primitive peoples,” our ideas about impurity obey the same underlying logic: dirt is matter out of place. Taking our starting point in Douglas’ model, we shall now discuss more concretely how food, the body, and morality are linked to ideas about purity and impurity. Dietary Prescriptions It is a remarkable fact that in the world of the past, with food in short supply, systems were introduced which regulated the relationship between pure and impure food, sometimes with considerable rigidity. These systems remain alive today in several of the world’s religions. In particular, the dietary prescriptions in the Old Testament have been the object of various theoretical constructions, not least because they have had an indirect influence beyond Judaism itself, on both Christianity and Islam. Another reason is that scholars are attracted by the difficulty in perceiving the principles on which these dietary regulations are based. A number of theories have been in circulation, some emphasizing that the prescriptions are completely arbitrary and have no deeper doctrinal basis, others understanding them as a form of symbolic presentation of virtues and vices. Douglas is not satisfied with any of these alternatives, because they fail to shed sufficient light on the relationship between impurity and the symbolic system (Douglas: 2002, 51).

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She holds that one must not get bogged down in the qualities of the impure food itself. The important thing is to grasp how the impure breaks with the symbolic order. The point around which everything in the Old Testament revolves is God and his covenant with his chosen people, and the dietary prescriptions too conclude with something that looks like a kind of justification: “You shall not defile yourselves with them, lest you become unclean. For I am the Lord your God; consecrate yourselves therefore, and be holy, for I am holy” (Lev 11:43 f). Douglas writes that the Hebrew word for “holy,” qadosh, means both “set apart” and “being whole or perfect” (Douglas: 2002, 62 f). The setting apart and the drawing of boundary lines belong to the strictly regulated understanding of order, where it is important that the various parts of creation should not be mingled with each other. This means that all forms of blending and hybrids become impure. But if one takes “the holy” in the sense of wholeness, one can understand how wounded bodies too, and the fluids which seep out from bodies, are viewed as impure: they signalize something which is not whole and self-contained. In both cases, violence is done to the holy order. The holy is an expression of the order of creation. Accordingly, to “consecrate” oneself means acting in agreement with the systems, which have been laid down for the creation, and Douglas argues that the dietary rules can be read as a direct consequence of this logic. God creates the world by ordering and establishing systems, “each according to its own kind” (as the creation narrative puts it). The creation is ordered on three levels, water, land, and air, with the plants and animals, which belong to each level. Those animals which are located safely within one of these elements are pure and can be eaten. Ordinary fish and ordinary birds are pure, whereas lizards, salamanders, creeping things which do not walk but crawl (e. g. snakes and worms), as well as animals with wings and four feet, are impure (Lev 3:9 – 45). In other words, it is those animals which in one way or another exist on the boundaries of the divisions of the creation, and therefore do not fall completely within the symbolic system, that constitute the impure. This confirms Douglas’ overarching understanding of impurity as something that is not in its correct place in the symbolic system (Douglas: 2002, 69). But what about the land animals? Leviticus states: “Whatever parts the hoof and is cloven-footed and chews the cud, among the animals, you may eat” (11:3). All those animals, which either do not have cloven hoofs, or do not chew the cud, are impure. Some have only one of these characteristics, but lack the other (e. g. the camel, the hare, and the pig), and they are to be regarded as an “abomination.” This cannot be explained by recourse to the creation as a three-decker construction, since all these animals indubitably belong to life on land. However, Douglas does not abandon the idea that their impurity must be linked to deviations from order. Her explanation is that the Israelites, who were farmers and shepherds, saw their domestic animals as included in the covenant with God. Among these domestic animals, sheep, goats, and cows

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were probably regarded as exemplary for land animals, with the consequence that two criteria were inferred from them in order to distinguish pure animals: they must have cloven hoofs and chew the cud. All those animals which lack one or both criteria are borderline cases, and therefore do not satisfy the covenant’s requirements of unity and order. In short, they must be regarded as impure (Douglas: 2002, 68). Although Douglas herself has since expressed some reservations about her own theory,3 it has become established as one of the most fruitful explanations of the dietary prescriptions in the Pentateuch. What she does not in fact explain, however, is why the impure food is experienced as an “abomination,” i. e. as repulsive. Her explanation points to structures, but she does not fill out these structures with experience. From a psychological and phenomenological perspective, Kristeva inquires into precisely this question. Her intention is to make good this defect by elaborating the above-mentioned theory of “abjection,” expulsion by means of an emotional aversion, since such an expulsion is also a way of creating meaningful distinctions – indeed, the very first distinction in the individual human being’s own symbolic system. In order to get to the bottom of the subjective aversion which corresponds to the prohibitions in the dietary prescriptions, Kristeva centers her interpretation on one specific scriptural text: “You shall not boil a kid in its mother’s milk” (Ex 23:19; Deut 14:21). She immediately observes that the meaning of this prohibition is symbolic: it concerns the taboo on incest, on which she has earlier commented. The milk symbolizes the close unity with the mother, and the mother is the disagreeable “abject” from which everyone must separate, and to which one must not return. In terms of the history of religion, this too corresponds to the Israelites’ expulsion of the maternal cult from which they were obliged to separate in order to constitute a patriarchal religion. Just as Douglas sees the impure as ambiguous, so too Kristeva sees the original experience of the mother as ambiguous, not yet differentiated and ordered. In this way, the mother becomes the most fundamental experience of impurity, and the entire symbolic system is put into operation in order to hold this experience in check (Kristeva: 1982, 107 f).

The Body In our days, we are accustomed to give the natural sciences the first and the last word. There is no doubt that the body is a piece of nature which can be studied by physiologists, biologists, and zoologists, but its natural equipment does not 3 In later studies, Douglas has tended to abandon the theory that the “abomination” is ascribed to the anomalous animals themselves. She argues that it is precisely in order to protect all the animals created by God that it is an “abomination” to harm them. The ultimate justification for this structure remains God’s covenant with his people (Douglas: 2002, xv).

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supply its meaning. In part, this is because an inner history is required in order to form each individual’s special experience of his or her body ; and in part, this experience of the body is related to the symbols which are otherwise accessible in one’s culture. The fact that a nod of the head can mean such varied things as a greeting, a confirmation, or a denial, shows the extent to which the meaning of the body depends on differing cultural interpretations. Nor do the concerns of hygiene say the last word about the impurity of the body. Rituals employ experiences, objects, or persons which are already a fundamental part of our everyday lifeworld. The rituals reshape these through action and symbolism. Douglas points out that one of the most important objects in rituals is the human body, especially its boundaries, i. e. its openings, its cavities, and its secretions. The body, which is whole and has well-defined boundaries is controllable and pure. Spittle, blood, urine, semen, nasal mucus, and excrement cross over the body’s boundaries through its openings and open the gates for that indefinable something which threatens the body’s clear boundaries. In the same way, various things peeled off from the body (e. g. nails, hair, and skin) are often regarded as impure. This means that ideas about the body’s impurity are not based on looking at the body as nothing other than a piece of nature; on the other hand, however, Douglas argues that if one draws on psychological theories to focus exclusively on the individual experience of the body, one will lose sight of the collective ideas and symbols. Douglas holds that the body often functions as a symbol of society, where the dangers which are linked to the body’s openings represent the precarious external borders of society. When some cultures focus strongly on the body’s boundaries and openings, this corresponds to a great fear of external pressure; this is often found in minority societies. Where living conditions are under threat, e. g. for a minority caste in India, we can expect the control over the body’s impurities to be correspondingly large (Douglas: 2002, 150 – 153). It is not only society which attributes a symbolic meaning to the individual body ; here, Douglas’ argument is too one-sided, since society presupposes that each individual too has unique experiences. This means that it is perhaps more appropriate to locate the genesis of the symbolic meaning in a circular flow between individual experience and collective structures (cf. Solheim: 1998, 61). We can therefore supplement Douglas’ theory about the body as a symbol of society’s external boundaries. Here, it is Kristeva who points to the early bodily experience through which the human being must pass. She divides the impure into two principal groups: that which threatens the boundaries from outside (excrement is the standard example here) and that which threatens the boundaries from the inside (e. g. menstruation). Recourse is had to prescriptions dealing with purity and to rituals in order to relate to the secretions of one’s own body, because these secretions are so uncomfortably close at hand and must therefore be separated from oneself, in order to

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reestablish a pure and whole body. Once again, Kristeva holds that the first drawings of boundaries in the child’s development are decisive, since these lay the foundation for all later notions (Kristeva: 1982, 71 ff). The impurity which is linked to bodily symbolism also finds strong expression in the way in which we think of gender. Gender is not – perhaps not even primarily – a question of biology. Gender is also created through society’s expectations, ideological or religious notions, and individual experiences. The understanding of gender is profoundly marked by the symbolic system. The Norwegian social anthropologist Jorun Solheim points out that traditionally, the male body has been seen as more closed and self-contained, and consequently pure, whereas the female body has appeared to be more open and therefore impure (Solheim: 1998, 73 f). The female body overflows with food for the child, and it has openings and cavities which bring forth new life. The female body is more open and unbounded, and it is therefore easier for ideas about impurity to be associated with it. Not least, the sexual openness has been thematized in the Christian tradition. The virgin who lived in sexual abstinence seemed to be the one who was as whole and closed as possible, and she was therefore presented as especially pure and holy, whereas the sexually active woman appeared as the very embodiment of impurity and as a threat to the order of things. Although such ideas contain an obvious potential for oppression, Solheim argues that the solution is not to reject all forms of boundaries. She writes that the anorectic is a typical symptom in a time when everything is fluid and stability is in short supply, since the anorectic desperately attempts to find one stable point to hang onto. The body is this point, and it is subjected to a despotic control. Both the anorectic and the virgin draw completely unambiguous boundaries around their own body, in the pursuit of something that is demarcated and pure (Solheim: 1998, 76; 78).

Morality In the Old Testament, we find not only dietary and cultic prescriptions, but also moral prescriptions. According to Douglas, it is the same logic that underlies both morality and purity : holiness demands that the various categories of creation be kept separate. Immorality is something impure, in the sense that it breaks with order. Incest and prostitution break with the fundamental order which finds expression in marriage; falsehood, theft, and pretense are immoral because they escape from the societal system (Douglas: 2002, 67). She believes that this is not found among the Israelites alone. We find complex systems in other pre-modern societies too, where morality and impurity are linked in a similar manner. Of their nature, the moral norms are completely general, while each action is tied to a unique situation which is never completely like earlier situations.

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This creates a space between the general moral norm and the individual action, and Douglas claims that it is precisely when there is no correspondence between these two levels that ideas about the impure appear to come into force in pre-modern societies (2002, 163). The link between morality and impurity can be manifested in various ways, but wherever the unity between moral norms and concrete actions is precarious, the idea of impurity supplies help (2002, 172). One important historical change in the idea of the impure takes place through Christianity. In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus says: “Not what goes into the mouth defiles a human being, but what comes out of the mouth, this defiles the human being” (15:11). Here, we are far removed from the minute prescriptions we find in the Old Testament. The impure does not suddenly disappear with Christianity’s arrival on the scene, but it is linked to inner qualities (Kristeva: 1982, 113 ff). The will becomes a completely decisive factor with regard to purity. It is not surprising that so much of what has been written about the nature of sin has concentrated on the falling or unfree will. Today, we are at the end-point of this internalization and moral orientation of the ideas about purity. If we are to understand some of the very central ethical ideas in our JudaeoChristian tradition, such as sin and guilt, we must become archaeologists who uncover the historical foundations on which these symbols rest. Paul Ricœur holds that this work brings us back to the idea of impurity. All the oldest ideas concern the human person’s fallibility and potential for evil. The ideas about impurity on which the Judaeo-Christian tradition builds have an external objective aspect and an internal subjective aspect. Seen from the objective external aspect, the impure was originally regarded as “something” that infected both the psyche and the soma. Such notions of “stain” have their root in a condition where no distinction had yet been drawn between ethical demands on the one hand and physical nature on the other (Ricœur : 1967, 27). Murder meant that the impure infected the murderer, not only in the concrete form of bloodstains, but also in an ethical and symbolic sense. Even today, some conservative religious milieus still regard sexuality in the same way, as an impurity which is contagious and must therefore be placed within the framework of marriage. Impurity has also a subjective and emotional aspect, which Ricœur links to the fear of punishment. Earlier in the present chapter, we have encountered the idea of the taboo and the danger which threatens the transgressor. Ricœur understands the fear which is associated with the taboo as a punishment “paid in advance”: one is afraid of what will happen. In their most primitive form, such fears have no connection with justice. Rather, they express the idea that the price for defying the order of reality is suffering. If you suffer, it is because you have offended against the established order of reality (1967, 31). The original ideas about impurity are further developed and changed in the concept of sin. Now, one is no longer confronted with a more or less blind fate,

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but with a personal god. Sin is no longer something that infects one from the outside. It is primarily an existential dimension: I know that I have sinned, and I confess my sins to God. Guilt is the next symbol where the conscience and ethical responsibility come into the foreground. All these ideas culminate in the psychological human being, where one turns towards oneself and discovers both that one is responsible and that one succumbs to weak points in one’s own will. A self-understanding based on what Ricœur calls the “servile will” has had an immense influence in the history of ideas on the development of the western world’s understanding of human fallibility (1967, 152); Augustine, Luther, and Freud are important representatives of this tradition. The human person who examines himself finds that he succumbs to a power, which attacks the free will. Although this power is no longer understood as a quasi-physical contagious substance, fundamental ideas still resonate here, viz. the ideas of the human person’s fractures and of the similarity of evil to an external power which besmirches his original state (Ricœur : 1967, 155 f). The impure has been recast, but not entirely abandoned.

Purity – Order or Exclusion? Although, as we have seen, there are aspects of the impure to which Douglas’ focus on structures does not do complete justice, and need to be supplemented by means of psychology and phenomenology, her thesis is nevertheless correct: dirt is matter out of place. We need order, and impurity follows as an inevitable byproduct of the establishing of order. But it is arguable that Douglas does not pay sufficient attention to the other aspect of the establishing of order, viz. that this excludes. Although exclusion is a completely necessary and intended aspect of the continuous tidying up, Douglas does not distinguish here between the impure in the form of a pair of shoes, excrement – or another human being. The cultural sociologist Zygmunt Baumann believes that when the exclusion concerns human impurity, one must look at it in a very different way from Douglas, for it is here that the moral perspective comes in. Baumann agrees with Douglas that our everyday orientation in our culture presupposes a number of structures and symbols. When something foreign appears, it causes discomfort because it suddenly puts a question mark to all the structures that we take for granted. We know from past history how human beings exclude and shut out, especially where the cultural order is precarious. The most characteristic aspect of the modern period, however, and especially of the last one hundred and fifty years, is that the most permanent thing is change itself. The order that was taken for granted only yesterday is replaced by a new order of things today. Baumann writes that this constant change fosters discomfort and suspicion. In such circumstances, the most important concern for a culture is to do something with dirt, with what is irregular – with

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the impure. The furious pace of change in the modern period has given rise to visions of a standstill and of a permanent harmony where the disturbing foreign elements are cleared away once and for all. But visions of this kind also underlay some of the greatest cruelties that humankind has ever witnessed – the concentration camps of the Nazis and the communists’ labor camps in Siberia. What was “totalitarian” about totalitarian political programs, themselves thoroughly modern phenomena, was more than anything else the comprehensiveness of the order they promised, the determination to leave nothing to chance, the simplicity of the cleaning prescription, and the thoroughness with which they approached the task of removing anything that collided with the postulate of purity. […] Nazism and communism excelled in pushing the totalitarian tendency to its radical extreme – the first by condensing the complexity of the “purity” problem in its modern form into that of the purity of the race, the second into that of the purity of the class (Baumann: 1997, 12).

The Holocaust bears witness to an extremely dangerous vision of purity, with offshoots that still belong to our recent history – the genocide in Rwanda and the ethnic cleansing in former Yugoslavia. Nevertheless, Baumann is one of those theoreticians who take a pessimistic view of culture and hold that we have inexorably crossed over into the postmodern period. He claims that the disorderly is welcomed today and that it takes the form of the new and adventurous experiences which the market offers us. This entails an uncertainty which is the source of discomfort; but this is balanced by the pleasure in living out one’s wishes. And yet, the impure does not simply disappear from the new societal formation. The impure person in the post-modern world is the one who cannot take part in what is offered by the market, the one who “sponges off the taxpayers,” in short, the deficient consumer (Baumann: 1997, 14). It is persons such as these who arouse opposition in the liquid post-modern system. One must be aware of the moral dangers that are inherent in ideas about purity, and Baumann is probably more accurate in his description of the modern than of the post-modern impurity. One can ask whether our time is really abandoned so one-sidedly to an undifferentiated post-modern fluidity which obeys only the principles of the consumer society. In this book, I argue basically that we must accept that the modern dichotomies today appears much more undefined and polyvalent; but the fact that the distinctions have become problematical does not mean that they cease to exist. Earlier in the present chapter, we have also seen that the taboos are ambivalent, as Freud underlines, and that the impure is linked to what does not fit in, to that which crosses the interfaces. In previous chapters, I have pointed out that the holy often manifests itself precisely in the interfaces and the interstices. Does this bring us back to Robertson Smith’s thesis that the impure and the holy are one – a model which, according to Söderblom, was abandoned

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as early as the Old Testament period itself ? Douglas dismisses such an idea, for as she says, “To talk about a confuse blending of the Sacred and the Unclean is outright nonsense” (Douglas: 2002, 196).4 But is this truly “nonsense”? It has at any rate not always been so, if we are to believe Söderblom, and perhaps the impure and the holy are once again drawing closer to each other in our own time, in one particular sense. Douglas is probably correct to say that our sensitivity to our approach to the holy will always mean that we avoid besmirching it or taking it by storm in an inappropriate manner. The holy must not be desecrated. In another sense, however, I have already spoken in this book on behalf of one form of impure holiness. This refers to the role played by the interstice. When the interstice occupies the center of the holy, it is difficult to regard the holy as some other “pure” and separate thing, or something contained in a “pure” and demarcated concept. This tendency is reinforced when we reflect on the relationship between the everyday and the holy. In the last chapter, I argued that holy occurs in and through the everyday, in an everyday world where the holy and the profane overlap. This allows us to set a higher value on the everyday as something that is religiously relevant. But the holy not only becomes weaker. It is also besmirched by the profane – it becomes impure. To argue that the holy is something “in between” means affirming one sense of impure holiness. Perhaps a greater psychological tolerance for the impure can take the air out of the compulsive neurotic’s taboo, and we may also hope that this will have moral consequences. Just as that which is suppressed can be integrated into the psychological ego, so too the impure must be integrated into the fellowship.

4 She adds, however, that the impure can be transformed into the holy thanks to special processes and rituals.

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5. The Sacred, the Uncanny, and Sacred Violence Let me begin by distinguishing three poles, all of which belong within the force field which we call “the holy.” First of all, we have the holy in the narrow sense, which designates a specific experience of something “more,” something “other”; then there is the profane everyday with which the holy is woven together ; and finally, there is the shadow side of the holy. I have reserved the designation “sacred” for the shadow side, although this concept does not possess this narrow meaning in everyday language, nor is it an established term in scholarly literature. Nevertheless, the distinction between the holy and the sacred is not my own invention; Emmanuel Levinas is one of those who have drawn a similar distinction. For Levinas, the holy is linked to the divine, as this becomes visible in the human Other. It would be too hasty to conclude from this that Levinas was concerned with the closeness and the everyday character of the holy, with how it is interwoven almost in an impure manner with the familiar horizon of our experience. On the contrary, he affirms as an absolute presupposition that the holy is radically distinct from the familiar world and that it appears as unmixed and pure. It is the impure mixture that is sacred – that which lies hidden under the surface of the well known, that which thrives in the twilight, that which is linked to sorcery and magic – in short, that which is governed by uncontrollable forces which intervene in our experience and our lives. Levinas wishes to protect a strictly desacralized holiness against the uncanny and potentially violent sacred (Levinas: 1990a, 141). Arguably, both the holy and the sacred belong to the dynamic and suspenseful unity which is at stake here – the contrast-harmony, the interplay between what attracts us and what repels us. The experiences of the uncanny and of violence are linked by the fact that they both belong to the dark side of the holy. These forces must be treated with caution, but also with a critical distance, since the danger of misuse lies in the nature of the case. By defining the sacred in this way, we can both draw sharper distinctions and more easily criticize the dangers which are linked to dealings with the holy.

The Sacred Uncanny One classic expression of the fascination with the uncanny is gothic architecture, a fascination mixed with dread. When Otto mentions artistic expressions of the holy, the gothic cathedral is one of his favorite objects. The play between light and shadow in the vast, dimly lit room, all the hiding places

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which our eyes fail to see, the labyrinthine system of pillars and decoration, the ornamental dragons and demons – all this instills the perception of an uncanny sacred presence (Otto: 1979, 88). But what characterizes the uncanny, this perception in which the sacred too is perceived? Neither the English term “the uncanny” nor the German das Unheimliche actually denotes “fear.” Rather, they seem to link this strange and perplexing experience to something that in some way is both foreign and also familiar. If a ghost is uncanny, it is not so much because the ghost is foreign, but precisely because it is a familiar person, perhaps one whom one knows by name, that is coming back – though of course in an extremely foreign manner. Once again, therefore, we encounter a structure which has been a recurrent theme in the present book: the sacred uncanny too takes place in the contrast-harmony between the familiar and the foreign. Otto sees the holy as stretched between the poles of tremendum and fascinans, i. e. between a terrible mystery and something that is attractive, fascinating. The uncanny which is linked to the tremendum is indeed akin to natural fear. Fear has a clear object: there is something of which one is afraid, either because it constitutes a threat or because it appears foreign. But the uncanny which Otto has in mind is also qualitatively different from natural fear, and it goes by names such as “demonic horror,” “holy horror,” “dread,” or “the fear of God” (Otto: 1979, 15; 17). This uncanny has no object in the usual sense of the term; rather, certain situations and strange phenomena resonate upon one particular sounding board in the mind. Sometimes, it seems that the uncanny is reserved to the wholly other, but at other times Otto comes closer to the oscillating state between “foreign” and “familiar” which I mentioned above. He writes that the uncanniness of the numinous is both violent and strange, both bizarre and awe-inspiring. It awakens both dread and fascination (1979, 53). The American philosopher Stanley Cavell believes that what he calls “horror” (as distinct from “fear”) is not linked to something radically other or foreign, but to something uncanny about being a human being. That which is horrible and monstrous is indeed linked to something inhuman, but Cavell’s paradoxical point is that only the human being can be inhuman. What really frightens us is how brittle the boundary is between the human and the inhuman. No one has a guarantee that he will never change and become unrecognizable. Cavell infers from this that if religion had been linked to fear, we would gradually have grown out of it in the course of history. But if it is linked to horror, we cannot expect to overcome religion: the uncanny aspect of the monstrous is that the other person is other, but nevertheless strangely well known. The taboos and purity regulations attempt to expel such foreign elements from the community, and sometimes even out of human fellowship as such. Nevertheless, we have a creeping suspicion that nothing separates us with absolute certainty from the monstrous – and that is truly uncanny (Cavell: 1979, 418 f).

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Freud too links the uncanny to one particular duality : something is both foreign and familiar. He believes that it is possible to approach the uncanny from two sides, which will support each other reciprocally : one can undertake a linguistic analysis, and one can subject the phenomenon to a psychological investigation. The outcome of both investigations is one particular type of anxiety, which points to something that once was well known. Freud begins with the linguistic investigation, where he consults a number of related German words in encyclopedias – first, unheimlich (uncanny, secret; literally, “not at home”), but also heimlich (homelike, cosy, pleasant), the adjective geheim (secret), and the noun Geheimnis (secret, mystery). After a painstaking examination, two observations are decisive for Freud. First of all, in one particular usage, the word heimlich does not mean homelike or pleasant, but the exact opposite – something which is so mysterious as to be uncanny. In other words, one usage of heimlich corresponds to the usual meaning of unheimlich. An overlapping of this kind permits Freud to conclude that the uncanny must be a special part of the homelike and familiar (Freud: 2003, 134). Secondly, Freud observes that one particular understanding of the uncanny is expressed in the following formulation of the Romantic philosopher Schelling: Unheimlich nennt man Alles, was im Geheimnis, im Verborgenen … bleiben sollte und hervorgetreten ist (“Uncanny is what one calls everything that was meant to remain secret and hidden and has come into the open”; translation in Freud: 2003, 132).1 If we combine these two observations, we get the following provisional picture: The uncanny was once a part of the familiar sphere, but it has been transformed in some way into something covered over and hidden. This ought to have remained hidden; but when it emerges into view, we are confronted by this phenomenon of the uncanny. The uncanny cannot be characterized as fear, since it does not primarily concern one particular object. Accordingly, it must be discussed as a kind of anxiety. Heidegger agrees with Otto that the difference between anxiety and fear is that the former is not directed to an object: one is anxious about nothing in particular. In everyday living, we live like everyone else (das Man), we follow our routines, we think and act more or less like other people, we sink down to the level of an anonymous member of the masses. Reality is our familiar home, where we always know how we are to behave. We forget ourselves, and become completely absorbed in the world in a way which Heidegger calls “being-in.” And then, without warning, anxiety can arise and one is suddenly no longer at home: “The everyday collapses. […] Being-in enters into the existential ‘mode’ of the ‘not-at-home.’ Nothing else is meant by our talk about uncannyness [Unheimlichkeit]” (Heidegger : 1962, 233; 1993a: 1 This is followed by an abrupt quotation from Schelling which is likewise of interest in the present context, since it so unambiguously links the uncanny to the holy : “To veil the divine and surround it with the aura of the uncanny” (Freud: 2003, 132).

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189). Like Freud, Heidegger sees the uncanny as linked to something that once was familiar, viz. all our dealings with the world in everyday life. In anxiety, all the usual meaning retreats and the world grins at us – naked, empty, and meaningless. In order to give a name to this feeling, Heidegger plays on the German word unheimlich, which literally means “not at home.” In the uncanny, the world is no longer human and habitable – in short, we are no longer “at home.” What once was so familiar now appears foreign. The uncanny, this state somewhere between the familiar and the foreign, also has a clear religious resonance. Otto sees the uncanny quite simply as the origin of religion: “It first begins to stir in the feeling of ‘something uncanny’ [Unheimlichen], ‘eerie,’ or ‘weird.’ It is this feeling which, emerging in the mind of primeval man, forms the starting-point for the entire religious development in history” (Otto: 1976, 14; 1979, 16). When the uncanny entered the world, the human person encountered something to which he responded with all the primitive forms of religion or religious belief: magic, the cult of the dead, animism, fairy-tales, ghosts, demons, etc. But no matter how bizarre the expressions of the uncanny may be, Otto believes that they are all linked to the numinous, to the inner core of the holy (Otto: 1979, 151). History has shown that this core can be developed, and this means that we find an echo of the uncanny even in the central ideas about the divine in what Otto calls the “developed religions.” Both the Old Testament and the New speak of God’s wrath and exhort one to fear the Lord; and if we are to believe Otto, there is always something uncanny that vibrates in the “Holy, holy, holy!” of the Mass (1979, 19 f). The Return of the Repressed In addition to a purely linguistic clarification, Freud declared that the uncanny can also be investigated with the aid of psychological insights. Although he is interested in the uncanny as it finds expression in religious ideas, and not least in literary presentations, the uncanny is treated as anxiety as soon as it takes its place on Freud’s divan. For Freud, there are two main categories of anxiety. There is the real anxiety (which we have called “fear”), which is a form of readiness vis--vis an impending danger ; and there is also the neurotic danger, where the danger can no longer be localized in specific external threats, for the simple reason that it comes from within. It is much more difficult to relate to the inner anxiety, because external precautionary measures are useless. It is terrifying to experience that there is something foreign inside one’s own self. This unknown something in the very midst of that which is most intimately familiar – viz. my own self – is nothing other than the unconscious. The human person’s idea of his own greatness took its first knock with the discovery that the earth was not the center of the universe, and the second knock was Darwin’s demonstration that the human being was related to the apes; but no less of a threat is posed by psychoanalysis’ revelation that we are not even

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masters in our own house, but are in thrall to unconscious forces which shun the light of day. Freud holds that the instincts originally dwell in the unconscious stratum of the soul. But the unconscious also contains suppressed ideas and instincts which once dwelt in the human person’s conscious ego. There are some experiences, perhaps especially conflictual and ambivalent experiences, which are unbearable for the consciousness. What the human person fears most of all is his own sexual instinct, his libido – this, at any rate, was how things looked in Freud’s day. The ego cannot admit to such uncomfortable ideas or impulses, so they are thrust away and become unconscious and foreign to the ego. It is here that we reach the decisive insight from Freud’s linguistic investigation, viz. that the uncanny was once well known, as a part of the conscious ego, but later became hidden, i. e. pushed down into the unconscious. According to Freud, something strange happens to all ideas and emotional impulses when they are suppressed: the unconscious recasts all the affects, irrespective of whether they are good or bad, loving or hateful, into anxiety. He employs a financial metaphor to speak of this: “Fear then is the common currency for which all emotional impulses can be exchanged, provided that the idea with which it has been associated has been subject to suppression” (Freud: 1984, 349).2 As long as the impulses remain suppressed, we do not notice them. The problem is that they do not escape notice for ever. As the pressure in the unconscious chamber rises, it seeks channels which emerge into the chamber of the consciousness, in order to neutralize the pressure. With this, the last piece of the puzzle is in place. Certain things which in one way or another repeat the impulse which has been suppressed – often in a symbolic, transposed sense – awaken the unconscious to life, and that which has been suppressed returns as anxiety. To use one of Freud’s favorite expressions, the uncanny is “the return of the repressed.” He sums up as follows: In the first place, if psychoanalytic theory is right in asserting that every affect arising from an emotional impulse – of whatever kind – is converted into fear by being repressed, it follows that among those things that are felt to be frightening there must be one group in which it can be shown that the frightening element is something that has been repressed and now returns. This species of the frightening would then constitute the uncanny, and it would be immaterial whether it was itself originally frightening or arose from another affect. In the second place, if this is the secret nature of the uncanny, we can understand why German usage allows the familiar (das Heimliche, the “homely”) to switch to its opposite, the uncanny (das Unheimliche, the “unhomely”) for this uncanny element is actually nothing new or strange, but something that was long familiar to the psyche and was estranged from it only 2 Freud later modified his theory of anxiety, but this fact is not of decisive importance in the present context.

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through being repressed. The link with repression now illuminates Schelling’s definition of the uncanny as “something that should have remained hidden and has come into the open.” (Freud: 2003, 147 f).

I draw on one of Freud’s examples to make clear what this means. The encounter with a doppelganger may be uncanny enough, but things take a turn for the worse when you meet a duplication of your own self. On the basis of a study by his colleague Otto Rank, Freud holds that there is a connection between the doppelganger and the experience of a mirror image, of shadows, of the immortal life of the soul, and of fear of death. In ancient Egypt, for example, the Pharaoh had funerary masks of his own face carved. The reason for all these duplications of his own self is unlimited self-love, the narcissism which according to Freud holds sway over both small children and “primitive human beings.” This means that one’s own doppelganger will be a protection against death. As however people grow out of this stage, both individually and culturally, something remarkable happens: that which was meant to ensure immortality now appears as an uncanny remembrance of death, i. e. as something closely related to a ghost. Why is this? There seems to be a law here, says Freud, which dictates that dead gods come back as demons. Although the development of culture and of the individual have long since grown out of such ideas, they survive in us in the form of small traces – and suddenly they burst into full bloom. This return of the repressed is uncanny (Freud: 2003, 142 f). The uncanny can be described as the presence of a certain absence, or as something foreign in that which is familiar. Both of these paradoxical formulations approach a theme to which we have continually returned, viz. the interstice. Not only is the holy located between the wholly other and the everyday ; its night side, the sacred, also possesses something of the same ambiguity. Perhaps the intermediary status of the holy is even more obtrusive in the experience of the uncanny, since it is not so easy to overlook the anxiety or to overcome it. Although the positive note has given way to a negative note, something of the wonder at the mystery remains intact: it is located at an indefinable point in between the foreign and the familiar. In several of Freud’s examples of the uncanny, earlier stages of development which have been “forgotten” make their appearance by coming back. A comparison is often made between the cultural and the individual development. The parallels are drawn on the basis of an assumption that these developments both follow the same trajectory, and that traces of earlier experiences can survive as hidden or unconscious experiences. In this sense, we neither lose relation with the child in ourselves, nor do we ever totally lose contact with the primitive humans’ first experiences of the sacred, as Otto too agrees. This archaic inheritance consists of small traces in the memory which link each one of us to our distant forebears. Freud has certainly not offered a convincing explanation of how such an inheritance occurs; but the important point for him is that these unconscious traces can be awakened into

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consciousness when something similar occurs as a present-day experience. This sheds light on the sacred uncanny, and Freud also believes that he is on the track here of the force on which the Jewish religion, and later the Christian religion too, are based, i. e. the way in which they work on the suppressed guilt incurred by the murder of the primal father (Freud: 2004b, 260 – 264).

The Collective Unconscious and Religious Protection Carl Gustav Jung is the other giant who stands at the portals which lead into modern psychology. He collaborated with Freud for a long period, until they parted company bitterly in 1912. Jung agrees with Freud that the unconscious is of immense importance if we are to understand the human psyche, and especially if we are to understand the sacred uncanny and dread. Jung believes that our knowledge of the unconscious ought to have consequences for the human person’s self-satisfaction: as conscious, rational beings we are sitting all the time on the top of a smoldering volcano. There are good reasons for being somewhat afraid of the unconscious, although this does not mean that one should let it remain uninvestigated. For Jung agrees with Freud that the neurotic person is to be healed by integrating dark aspects of the psyche, its wishes and needs, which he or she has not taken sufficiently into consideration hitherto. Jung holds that in general, modern people have despised the irrational and religious dimensions of their unconscious, and have forgotten that precisely these constitute the foundations on which “the skyscrapers of the rational consciousness” are built (Jung: 1938, 41). Jung claims that the unconscious is not constructed primarily out of jetsam left behind by suppression. He sees the unconscious as an autonomous realm, of which – thanks to its very nature – we cannot have any direct consciousness. We can nevertheless receive hints about the contents of the unconscious through the signals which manifest themselves in dreams, and the dreams in turn correspond to ancient myths which are peopled by ideas, visions, and symbols. There are two strata in the unconscious: an individual stratum which contains traces left by one’s own experiences, but also a deeper stratum which is the common possession of all human beings and which Jung calls the collective unconscious. Here, there are a number of common primal images which Jung calls archetypes. These can be ideas about energy, air, demons, and deities. These can be passed down through the generations, but they must originally have their genesis in very fundamental structures of human life. For example, over time, the fact that the sun passes across the sky every day will leave a sediment in all human beings, in the form of an unconscious archetype. Jung refers to Otto’s affirmation that the religious has its origin in experiences of the holy. The holy – or the numinous, as Jung prefers to say – is not a product of the will or of the imagination which projects ideas. On the

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contrary, one is gripped by the holy – confronted by it, or even haunted by it (Jung: 1938, 4). Unlike traditional religious ideas about God or deities, Jung does not wish to remove the holy to a transcendent celestial sphere. He wishes to locate it within the human person himself. Indeed, perhaps it is precisely the self that is divine. It is not surprising that the wave of “self-development” and the interest in New Age at a later period often found Jung’s ideas attractive (Jung: 1938, 73; cf. Gilhus/Mikaelsson: 2001, 154). That which gives the holy the potential to be uncannily sacred is its localization in the unconscious, i. e. among the smoldering volcanic forces. In Jung’s free interpretation of the archetypical trinitarian figure which we know from Christianity, he wishes both to integrate the feminine and to incorporate a destructive element, evil itself. The uncanny aspect of the sacred is thus reinforced in a way that recalls Otto’s element of the tremendum. One might perhaps think that the best protection against all this uncanniness would be to put a lid on the unconscious; but if the unconscious is denied, its forces will simply cut other channels for themselves, which may perhaps be more destructive. One consequence of this can be the individual neurosis, another the collective irrationalism – Jung is writing while two World Wars are still fresh in the memory. What we need is a reassuring way of dealing with the sacred, which will both put us in touch with the unconscious and protect us against direct contact with its violent forces. Jung sees, much more clearly than Freud, that religion and various religious expressions play a constructive role here. In the previous chapter, we have heard how the taboos protect the human being from his own self and his forbidden desires. In a more constructive manner, the rituals and symbols, and indeed also the dogmas play an important role for the mental hygiene of the human person – at any rate, as long as they have not become totally fossilized and lifeless. Where they are still in contact with the holy, the rituals, symbols, and dogmas can give us access to the unconscious in a controlled way. Jung points out that this still works in the Catholic Church, where one always has a wall offering sufficient protection against the potentially destructive element in the experience of the sacred. Jung is much more critical of the Protestant Church, where the rituals and symbols, and in some cases the dogmas too, have faded to such an extent that they have lost any value of their own. The only authority is sola scriptura and the individual’s conscience, an authority which in practice gives free scope to religious experience. The Protestant has no protection when he is confronted with the revelation of the holy itself: Protestantism, having pulled down many a wall which had been carefully erected by the church, began immediately to experience the disintegrating and schismatic effect of individual revelation. As soon as the dogmatic fence was broken down and as soon as the ritual had lost the authority of its efficiency, man was confronted with an inner experience, without the protection and the guidance of a dogma and a ritual which

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are the unparalleled quintessence of Christian as well as of pagan religious experience (Jung: 1938, 22).

There will certainly be some who protest against Jung’s portrait of Protestant spirituality, but it is difficult to overlook the existence of a number of tendencies to which he points. Otto himself is a good Protestant example, with all the weight he attaches to the direct experience of the holy ; and Otto also points out that it was precisely the Reformer Martin Luther who had opened his eyes to the sacred, the tremendum, as one aspect of the holy, since in Luther the gracious God who bestows benefits, the God whom we know from the revelation in Jesus Christ, must be understood against an uncanny background. This background is the arbitrary, unknown God, the God who works in a hidden manner in all the terrifying and uncanny things we do not understand (Otto: 1979, 119 – 122).

The Sacred Uncanny – External and Internal It is interesting to note that Freud localizes the uncanny between the familiar and the foreign, and defines it more precisely as the return of something that was well known at an earlier point. Although he continually returns to religion in his writings, he remains fundamentally critical: strictly speaking, religion belongs to a stage of development which modern people ought to have left behind long ago. This attitude prevents Freud from making full use of the religious potential which lies in his own discoveries – in this case, how the uncanny not only awakens an archaic inheritance, but also helps to form our contemporary experience of the holy. Despite all his speculations about archetypes, Jung’s positive attitude to religion enables him to work on religious insights in a completely different manner. Since he is willing to look more closely at the holy, he is also able to draw a distinction between its constructive and its destructive aspects. On the basis of the phenomenological approach which was established in chapter 2 above, we are entitled to doubt whether the holy is found exclusively in our own selves, or more precisely, in the unconscious. For Otto, as for Eliade, it was important to emphasize that every revelation of the holy, every hierophany, comes to the human person from the outside. The objection to the phenomenology of religion was in fact that it went too far in this direction: for if the holy is wholly other, how could it ever speak to us? The wholly other does not concern us; it scarcely touches the everyday world with which we surround ourselves. And we must pose a corresponding question about the uncanny : If it is so uncomfortable, why cannot we simply shut it off, turn our back on it, or perhaps employ our scientific knowledge to explain and neutralize the danger? The reason is simple: The uncanny speaks to us because it awakens the

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echo of something inside us. The sacred is both in the external and in the internal. Kristeva believes that although the idea of the unconscious was launched as early as the Romanticism of the early nineteenth century, it was psychoanalysis that grasped its consequences for our view of the human person, since psychoanalysis discovered that the unconscious houses the animal in us, in virtue of its biological instincts, but also fragments of earlier experiences. In short, the unconscious is all those aspects that the human person attempts to deny. We succeed in this denial so well that we finally bear in ourselves parts of ourselves which have been rendered foreign. And it is precisely this foreign element, in the very heart of that which is nearest to us, that is awakened to life in the encounter with the sacred. Modern people have indeed tried to secularize society and to disenchant nature, and Kristeva sees this as a massive attempt to keep the uncanny at bay, just as cultures have attempted to refuse admittance to those who are foreign. The important lesson to be learned from psychoanalysis is the reversal of this process: first, it uncovers the foreign in ourselves and attempts to reconcile us to this, and then we are empowered to tolerate and to deal with the foreign and the sacred outside ourselves (Kristeva: 1991, 191 f). Sacred Violence In chapter 4, we have encountered the theory that violence is the constitutive factor for human culture and civilization. Freud asserted that patricide was civilization’s first event, and we shall shortly see that others develop similar theories. Besides this, violence is a decisive factor in the myths in which a number of religions speak of their origins (cf. Brekke: 2004, 25 – 41). One common idea is that the creation is the work of a deity who overcomes the destructive forces of chaos, which are personified as monsters, mighty animals, or demons. In Babylonian, Indian, and Old Testament myths, we find ideas of a huge snake that rules in the waters. Ultimately, the creative forces win the victory in a struggle with the monster and kill it. It is only then that the act of creation can begin: the shapeless matter becomes an ordered cosmos. Similar ideas are found in Norse mythology, where Ymir is killed. Typically, this idea sees the cosmos as formed out of a corpse that is cut up into parts: one part becomes the sky, another the sea, a third the earth, and so on. Since our world is subject to the law of transience, nothing is permanent. The holy cosmos is continuously threatened by returning forces of chaos. It is not unusual for festal rituals to re-enact the violent struggle which accompanies the creation, the killing, and the establishing of the cosmos: in this way, the threatening powers are overcome anew, and the order is re-established (Eliade: 1987, 80 f). Two important books were published in 1972: Walter Burkert’s Homo Necans and Ren Girard’s Violence and the Sacred. Both begin from the same

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basic thesis, viz. that the sacred is founded on violence, and that its most original religious expression is the ritual of sacrifice. The German classical scholar and scientist of religion Burkert claims that “Sacrificial killing is the basic experience of the ‘sacred’”; here, this term explicitly refers to Otto’s mysterium tremendum et fascinans (Burkert: 1983, 3). Girard, a FrancoAmerican literary scholar and anthropologist, makes a similar claim: “Violence is the heart and the secret soul of the sacred” (Girard: 2005, 32). Each in his own way takes up the inheritance of Durkheim, who regarded the holy not as a quality or thing, but as an experienced power which is produced by societal mechanisms. Durkheim, however, did not see the role that violence played in the constituting of the fellowship. Despite striking similarities, Burkert and Girard adopt different explanatory strategies. Where Burkert draws on studies of human evolution, Girard draws on social psychology. Burkert’s fundamental observation is the very elementary similarity between hunting and sacrificial rituals, as these can be reconstructed from discoveries of Neanderthal dwellings and from traces left in Greek culture. Most of the sacrificial rituals from the Greek cultural sphere are variations on a few basic themes, where the ritual as a whole takes on the appearance of a stylized hunt. But why is a sacred role ascribed to this hunt? Why does it become a ritual? Burkert claims that aggression must be understood as a basic instinct in the human person, something resembling the later Freud’s theory about the death instinct. As long as our ancestors dwelt in the trees, aggression was directed inwards into the flock and served to adjust the social hierarchy. An important change occurred when the primates crept down onto the ground and needed to hunt in order to survive. Since human beings are not particularly well equipped, biologically speaking, for hunting, they are obliged to compensate for this by developing societal organization in hunting groups and making use of weapons. Already at this stage, we can see the outlines of a primitive form of culture, which is raised to a higher level when human beings overcome their natural inhibitions and kill a living animal. The aggression which can no longer be directed against one’s fellow hunters gradually mounts up, but finds release in the bloody hunt – it is no longer directed inwards towards members of one’s own species, but outwards, towards an animal. The victim thus takes the place of the member of one’s own species. Since the prey appears as a substitute for a human being, many human characteristics are projected onto it, and as early on as the hunt, the killing takes the form of a sacrificial slaying (Burkert: 1983, 17 f). The feeling of discomfort and guilt which results from thwarting the innate inhibition about killing leads to a strongly consolidated fellowship among those who share this guilt. The cultural human being comes into existence through the killing, and this is why Burkert entitles his book homo necans, “the killing human being.” The guilt must also be dealt with, and it is here that the rituals come in. With a stylized killing followed by a meal, the rituals intensify the collective guilt, while at the same time generating reconciliation: through

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the nourishment which the victim provides, life and the vital force are renewed. Through the act of killing, the abyss of death opens up – but it then closes again through the act of eating. New life rises up out of death. The ritual has one other important function in the forming of culture: a culture which is not capable of surviving over the course of time does not create any permanent order. By means of mysterious sacrificial rituals, the fundamental societal structures and bands are implanted in the generation that is growing up. According to Burkert, the strong elements of both the tremendum and the fascinans will leave an indelible impression. The holy is imprinted with all the authority that is linked to the “religion of the forefathers” (1983, 26). Girard is not content only with postulating the existence of an instinct of aggression; he also attempts to explain how aggression arises and leads to conflict. The most fundamental assumption on which he bases his analysis is that the human being, like all intelligent mammals, is an imitative being: it is only thanks to children’s ability to imitate that they are introduced into the human form of life with language, culture, and tradition (Girard: 1987, 7 f). Like Freud, Girard holds that the human being is equipped with instincts or desires, but unlike Freud, he argues that this desire does not have a fixed direction at the outset, but is formed. The forming of desire takes place through imitation. What Girard calls mimetic desire is not only a necessity for the handing on of a culture; it also leads with inexorable necessity to conflicts. The dynamics are clear enough: an apprentice must imitate his master in order to learn his profession. He tries to the best of his abilities to copy the master’s skilful actions. Not only does he acquire the necessary practical skills; through the learning process, he also adopts the master’s own desire, in the sense that he learns what is worth striving for. As the apprentice becomes really skilful, he will appear as a threat to his own master, whose rival he has now become. The conflict takes the form of a triangle: we have a model and an imitator, and both direct their desire to one and the same object (Girard: 2005, 154 f). Naturally, the conflict will concern the object of their desire – whether fame, wealth, a marriage partner, or something else. Many myths and dramas follow this pattern: brothers or best friends become more and more like each other, they coordinate the object of their desire, and end up as bitter enemies. The biblical narratives about Cain and Abel or Esau and Jacob concern a similar mimetic rivalry, with fatal consequences: Cain and Abel compete for the favor of the Lord, and this ends in the biblical story’s first murder, while both twins Jacob and Esau want their father’s blessing, and although this is meant to come upon Esau, Jacob gets it for himself by cheating and has to flee the country (2005, 4 ff). Even the most primitive cultures have known that violence breeds violence. According to Girard, everything that is said about impurity and contagion is derived from this insight. Religious taboos are laid down in order to protect society against the kind of escalating, contagious violence that is familiar to us

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from the spiral of violence set in motion by blood vengeance. One violent act easily leads to a situation where more and more members of society get involved – and get carried away. The original order, where each person has his or her own assigned place within the societal organism, is abolished and replaced by a conflict involving two or more parties, where each party becomes a shapeless mass moving towards one and the same goal. Seen from within, the parties appear to represent the greatest imaginable opposites, but seen from without, they appear more and more similar, since their mimetic desire is directed increasingly towards the same object. A crisis arises when a society is so choked by aggression that a war threatens which will turn everyone’s hand against everyone else (2005, 51 – 54). In this situation, there is one thing which seems always to have functioned as a solution: a victim is selected, those who are parties to the conflict are reconciled, and they direct all their mutual aggression onto the victim. The killing of the victim has a powerful effect: all violence is channeled, people come together again, and the conflict gives way to peace. Girard gives Freud the credit for being the first to realize that a collective murder was the foundation of society, but he holds that Freud has misunderstood two things. First of all, the murder is presented as justified, whereas in reality the victim is chosen arbitrarily and bears no guilt in the crisis which society is seeking to resolve. It is however essential to the functioning of the sacrificial mechanism that this innocence remains hidden: everyone must believe that the victim bears the guilt for the conflict. As soon as it is clear that the victim is a surrogate victim, it would be meaningless to transfer the aggression onto it. Secondly, Freud puts the killing in the wrong place. He holds that the guilt and the fundamental taboos are unleashed as a consequence of the killing, which is therefore placed at the beginning of the drama; Girard on the other hand sees the killing as a consequence of the crisis within a societal order, and therefore as the conclusion to the drama (Girard: 2005, 229). The Sacred Victim The surrogate victim takes someone’s place. The history of religion presents a number of examples of vicarious victims. The commonest designation of the surrogate victim, the scapegoat, goes back to the regulations in the Old Testament. Leviticus 16:7 – 22 prescribes that two goats are to be chosen on the great Day of Atonement. One is to be killed, and its blood sprinkled on the altar; the leader is to lay his hands on the other one (to which the term “scapegoat” is particularly attached), transfer the sins of all the people onto it, and send it out into the wilderness. But there is also a wider usage in which this term is not linked to specific rituals, but to the transfer of collective problems onto some arbitrary person or group. Ironically, it was the Jews who were identified on various occasions in the history of the West as the cause of

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societal problems and internal conflicts, so that they took on the role of the scapegoat. On what basis is the scapegoat chosen? Often, myths, rituals, and religious symbols give the impression that the scapegoat truly is guilty and must therefore pay the price of death or exclusion. In reality, however, according to Girard, there is no such reason; the reasons are produced simply in order to cover up the profoundly illogical logic of violence which is actually at work behind the scenes. And yet, a pattern can be discerned. The victim is selected from marginal positions or peripheral zones of society. Not only animals were chosen; in the past, slaves and women were often selected, and even today, the finger is quickly pointed at foreigners or persons who are physically or psychologically different. Girard argues that there are two reasons for this. On the one hand, the victim cannot be totally foreign to the society, for then it would be difficult to lay the blame for society’s internal problems on precisely this victim; but on the other hand, it cannot be so well integrated and so influential that the victim and his allies could avenge the collective assault. If the victim had been able to reciprocate the atrocity, the surrogate sacrifice would not have halted the spiral of violence (Girard: 2005, 12 f). The scapegoat is a substitute, a vicarious representative of the real address of the violence, viz. the inclination of every individual to rivalry and violent actions. In order to uncover the genesis of the religious use of the ritual victim, one must envisage two forms of substitution (Girard: 2005, 284). What we find in the numerous religious rituals of sacrifice – for example, as Burkert describes these – are animals, and sometimes also human beings, on the basis of a double vicariousness: the surrogate victim appears in the place of the guilt of society, and the ritual victim appears in the place of the surrogate victim. The merit of the continually repeated religious sacrifices is that they can have a preventive effect on the spiral of violence. The religious rituals keep the dammed-up aggression at a minimum level, since they are a place where the steam can seep out of the pressure-cooker. Why does the sacrifice appear to be especially sacred? Here, we can find a clue in an observation which we have encountered earlier. The concepts which designate the holy or sacred in Greek and Latin have an inbuilt ambiguity : they can denote both that which is consecrated and that which is reprehensible, both the pure and the impure, both the tremendum and the fascinans. We also know that the great religious festivals in pre-modern societies often ascribed an especially exalted religious status to actions which were otherwise forbidden. Girard interprets this ambiguity in the light of the scapegoat mechanism and calls it a double transfer. First, the victim appears to bear the guilt for the deplorable conditions which prevail; but after the sacrifice is carried out, the same victim establishes a state of order and peace. First, the victim is rejected, and then it is exalted to the rank of a sacred power or deity which has brought about peace (Girard: 1987, 37). According to Girard, virtually all the fundamental religious expressions,

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such as rituals, myths, and ideas about deities and divine power (mana), are based on the connection between the sacred and violence. Religions in which this sacred language is intact have preserved the link between the sacred and violence, while at the same time this link gets distorted: Although the sacred is “bad” when it is inside the community, it is “good” when it returns to the exterior. The language of pure sacredness retains whatever is most fundamental to myth and religion; it detaches violence from man to man to make it a separate, impersonal entity, a sort of fluid substance that flows everywhere and impregnates on contact. […] As a concept contagion makes empirical sense in many cases, but it is mythic insofar as it ignores the reciprocal aspect of violence; […] it eliminates the final traces of the real victims and thereby conceals the fact that the sacred cannot function without surrogate victims (Girard: 2005, 272 f).

In addition to contributing new perspectives to the discussion of the impure (see the previous chapter), Girard points out what is problematic, morally and humanly speaking, about the sacred. When the sacred appears as a power that acts independently of us, it is impossible to discern that everyone must in fact take responsibility for the violence in society. Another, equally important point is that all the myths and the exaltation of the sacred conceal the fact that, in principle, the victim could have been anyone at all, since the victim bears no guilt for the state of things. One of the reasons why ideas about the scapegoat refuse to die is precisely that they function so effectively as a repudiation of responsibility. Christ and the Unmasking of Violence Mel Gibson’s 2004 film The Passion of the Christ was a reminder that the New Testament remains an inspiration in our culture. The film makes it absolutely clear that blood and violence are indissolubly linked to the story of Jesus. It gave rise to considerable discussion. There was no attempt to tone down the violence in the film, especially with its barbarous scourging scene and a depiction of the crucifixion down to the last cruel detail. One point, however, remained problematic, viz. the way in which the film communicated the connection between violence and the will of God. What does the New Testament say about this? Is the crucifixion of Christ understood as a sacrificial death? Theology, the criticism of religion, and the history of religion have often answered in the affirmative, but Girard’s reply is an unambiguous “no.” It is of course impossible to overlook the similarities between the traditional mythology and the mechanism of sacrifice: the crucifixion takes place at a period of crisis for Palestine, the Jewish leaders perceive the existence of a religious rebellion, the Romans crush the disturbance, and the mob selects a victim and cries out: “Crucify, crucify!” Jesus suffers death on the cross and subsequently rises from the dead. From the perspective of the science of religion, Jesus’ death on the

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cross belongs to the category of sacrificial myths. With support in several New Testament passages, there has developed a particularly tenacious understanding of the reconciliation between God and human beings in the light of the sacrificial idea, an understanding which finds classical expression in Anselm of Canterbury in the twelfth century : the abyss between the human person and God is so great that only a perfect sacrifice can reconcile God to the human person. Girard dismisses this entire tradition as a mistake. He claims that it does not find support in the most central texts, i. e. the Gospels; and even more importantly, this tradition has simply failed to grasp what the Christian message is really about. It is true that the narratives of Jesus’ death on the cross have superficial structures which are parallel to other sacrificial myths, but according to Girard, they employ these structures only in order to undermine them. The intention of Jesus’ death and resurrection is to unmask something that we seem not to want to grasp, viz. that the victim is innocent, that violence is the problem, and that we are all guilty (Girard: 1987, 182; 228 – 231). According to Girard, human societies are organized in such a way that they naturally entail internal rivalry. In order to keep the violence in check, another violence is employed, a sacred violence – which is every bit as much violence. Perhaps the most central aspect of Jesus’ preaching concerns the kingdom of God. Girard holds that this amounts to preaching non-violence: one must turn the other cheek, one must even love one’s enemies. To employ violence to solve violence is to reply to the world on its own terms. In reality, this solution is very short-lived, because it falls captive to the logic of violence. The only way out of the spiral of violence is a total conversion – a conversion to non-violence (1987, 198). This is the quintessence of Jesus’ preaching and the indispensable inspiration which Christianity has contributed to history. For a world in which religion is a strategic lie about violence, however, Jesus’ preaching is a provocation – blasphemy in the eyes of the Jews, an instigation to rebellion in the eyes of the rulers. The point which the Gospels make is not that the Jews or the Romans were particularly evil persons, but that they represent typical traits in the human person. Jesus’ preaching must encounter resistance, and this is why the Gospels present his death on the cross as unavoidable. But this killing is not a sacrifice which will create a new and short-lived condition of peace and order. The decisive point is that through this execution, all the sacred frauds which have surrounded the sacrificial killing are unmasked: the victim is innocent, and the blame rests on our shoulders alone, in so far as we continue to submit to the logic of violence (1987, 208 f). As soon as one ceases to believe that the victim is in fact guilty, one cannot transfer all one’s aggression onto it. The revelation of the logic of violence simply puts an end to the scapegoat mechanism, and this is what happens in Jesus’ death on the cross. Girard goes to great pains to strip Christianity of its religious and mystical traits, and some may well feel that Girard’s consistent rejection of metaphysics

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makes it difficult to maintain central dogmas. But what about the sacred? Is nothing sacred left in Jesus’ death? Once again, Girard’s answer is “no”: I think that it is necessary to rid ourselves of the sacred, for the sacred plays no part in the death of Jesus. If the Gospels have Jesus pronounce on the Cross those words of anguished impotence and final surrender, “Eli, Eli, lama sabachtani,” […] this is not to diminish faith in the resurrection or the all-powerful Father. It is to make quite clear that we are dealing with something entirely different from the sacred (Girard: 1987, 231).

Girard holds that Christianity abolishes the sacred, and therefore also violence. Evil derives from the human person’s inclination to violence. In his way, Girard dissociates himself from all the proposed metaphysical solutions to the problem of evil (the so-called problem of theodicy). Traditionally, it has been claimed either that evil is necessary in particular stages of historical development, or that God has at any rate chosen the least of all evils. Neither of these arguments takes seriously the point Girard is making, viz. that the victims of evil can never be justified. He holds that Jesus’ preaching and his death on the cross unmask violence and open the door to a non-sacred and non-violent existential orientation which is the solution to the problem of violence in this world. He assures us that: “This doctrine is completely realistic” (Girard: 1987, 198). But not all readers will be convinced that it is possible to realize here on earth the divine realm of non-violence. There is as yet no confirmation in history of the hypothesis that it is possible through preaching to overcome the mimetic desire which leads to rivalry and violence. Perhaps, in the worst-case scenario, such a confidence in non-violence may end up with an unrealistic and utopian attitude to violence. If Girard’s theory is to be credible on this point, one must follow a number of theologians who hold that the non-violent mimetic structure is more original than the structure of rivalry. James Allison has argued that this was how things were before the Fall: the human person imitated God’s unselfish love. The violent mimetic structure is a product of the Fall, but it is unmasked as falsehood in the revelation which comes in Jesus Christ. Accordingly, revelation means bringing human beings back to a more original and more human orientation of their desire (Allison: 1998). In his book about “holy terror,” the English literary scholar Terry Eagleton’s starting point is the unfathomable ambivalence in the holy : both life-giving and death-bringing forces come from the same source. He argues that any attempt to deny or to overcome violence in the service of good will soon be overtaken by the logic of violence. He writes about Euripides’ tragedy in which Thebes, the city of King Pentheus, is attacked by the god Dionysus, flanked by a troop of female warriors. This uncanny invasion is a threat to the order of the city, and Pentheus responds to the attack with a massive defense in order to protect himself against external violence. But the defense soon spreads out in panic and ends in a self-destructive orgy of violence. Eagleton

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concludes that violence threatens just as much from inside the city walls as from outside them (Eagleton: 2005, 5 f). Eagleton draws on Freud’s theory of the human person’s two instincts. Both the love instinct and the death instinct are parts of the human person, and both are necessary for human civilization. In order to create order, something must be excluded through one or other form of violence. But if this violence is not moderated by love, it becomes destructive. Paradoxically, the threat to order – whether external violence or internal chaos – can often unleash such overreactions in the form of violence; the recent “war against terror” is an obvious example. The death instinct does not only belong to the “others,” since it also exists inside our own city wall. And this is why it is so hard to deal with. The death instinct cannot be purged: it must be accepted, and held in check. The challenge is to find the equilibrium between too little and too much, and here Eagleton finds wisdom in the ancient Greeks’ recommendation of moderation (2005, 10 – 16). War and the Sacred Sacred violence and holy war are the most disagreeable aspect of what we have called the return of religion. It is not always easy to distinguish between political and religious motivations in the media reports about suicide bombers and terrorist actions. At any rate, there are many indications that religion must be acknowledged as one of the most important factors in the kind of violent actions we have witnessed in the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and in the course of the conflict in the Middle East. But religious terror and war in the name of religion have a long history, not least because religion was a part of every people’s self-understanding until modern times. But how can religion supply the motivation for war? There is surely no completely clear answer to this question. There are various violent currents within each of the world religions, and the Norwegian historian of religion Torkel Brekke suggests that one can make a rough classification which distinguishes between a holy and a just war in the name of religion (Brekke: 2004, 95 ff). The holy war is directly legitimated by divine authorities, while the just war seeks to be justified by appealing to universal aspects of the human person and of life in society. This means that the just war will often have moderating aspects, since war is regarded as an evil that can be justified only by reference to some greater evil. The holy war follows a different internal dynamic and does not operate with the same moderating barriers. If a war is sacred and willed by the deity, and if it is also necessary in order to keep down the dark forces, violence becomes a means to attain a higher goal. War with God on one’s side often becomes a total and unlimited war. We have already seen how myths about origins make violence a necessary and constitutive act for the cosmos, since it is through violence that chaos is overcome. Many a war has been fought precisely in order to expel the forces of

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chaos – represented by the contemporary foe. One important motif in the holy war is therefore what Brekke calls the violence which creates order (Brekke: 2004, 55 ff). Here, ideas from our earlier discussion of impurity reappear : if our intolerance of impurity is linked to an intolerance of disorder, it is clear that the vision of purity can have a violent aspect. Douglas herself sheds too little light on this aspect, and this is why both Baumann and Girard have drawn attention to the violent implications of the idea of purity (Girard: 1987, 154). One way to establish order is to purge those who are impure. The ethnic cleansing in recent decades in the former Yugoslavia and in Rwanda are terrifying reminders of the shadow side of the idea of purity. In the violence which creates order, warfare functions as an instrument for the re-establishing of the sacred order. But some ideas about war see it not so much as a means, but rather as an end in itself. War fulfills a religious function, similar to that of the holy festivals as they were celebrated in pre-modern societies – this, at any rate, is Caillois’ thesis. His understanding of the sacred aspect of war is thus not linked to order, but rather to the suspending of rules, to the sheer excessive transgressions of taboos, and to a state of “framed chaos.” Like Bataille, Caillois holds that the feast represents a specific sacred character which is linked to transgression. The feast is clearly separate from the everyday with its monotonous routine which is strictly limited by taboos and other regulations. The feast transgresses all these limitations and turns prohibitions into commandments. We know that both the killing of taboo animals and incest formed part of such feasts. The intention of the feast with this orgiastic character is to renew life, society, and nature. All the slag that has piled up is blown away, and one returns to everyday life with renewed vitality (Caillois: 1959, 98 – 101). Caillois mentions a number of similarities between the sacred feast and modern war. First and foremost, war is a genuine interruption of the soporific uniformity of everyday life. In war, as in the feast, ordinary rules are suspended, while taboos become commandments. To take human life is not merely a sad duty, but is exalted to an honorable ritual. Sacrifice is important, since soldiers must be ready to lay down their lives for the nation. War has a unifying effect which recalls the feast: in the feast, the society appeared as a homogeneous collective in which the individuals were almost obliterated for the sake of the unity of the collective. Just as the solemn festival organized time into a “before” and an “after,” so too wars have become the most important point of orientation for the historical consciousness: we speak of the time before and after the First World War, but also of the period between the Wars. With regard to the dynamic of war and to its tendency to self-reinforcement, Caillois points in the same direction as Girard: Initially, one tends to seek to avoid war, but war is very soon perceived as inevitable. The inevitable is transformed into “fate,” and this brings religion into play : the war is a part of God’s plan (Caillois: 1959, 170 f). But why has the feast, which was full of joy in the past, so often taken the

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form of cruel transgressions in modern society? Caillois does not give a direct answer to this question, but mentions the loss of the sacred feasts and the overregulation of the conduct of life in modern society as probable factors (1959, 178 f). This appears to give us two almost diametrically opposite explanations of the cause of war, since we have seen that it can occur against the background of the obliteration of structure and order. Here, Brekke can appeal to Girard, who also emphasizes that the absence of order leads to crisis, and thereby to violence. Where the cultural order and the societal distinctions wither, another, much more brutal law emerges, the law of the strongest (Girard: 2005, 54). From the opposite perspective, Caillois affirms that the yoke of the ordered and disciplined everyday life leads to an acute need to let off steam. Where there are no rituals and feasts, this need finds expression in war. Which explanation is more credible? It is likely that there are various motive powers behind war, with their roots in different mechanisms of individual and social psychology. But there is no reason to suppose that an oppressive order is a guarantee of peace – it is obvious that violence spills out as soon as the lid is taken off once totalitarian regimes, as in Yugoslavia or Iraq. Nor is the dream of complete liberation from the last remaining taboos and other boundary markers a guarantee of peace. In such circumstances, there are few braking mechanisms that can hold the rivalry and contagious violence in check. There is no way to make the holy clean-cut: it seems to have solid ramifications both in the uncanny and in violence. Theologians and humanists have indeed frequently attempted to tame the holy, getting rid of its shadow sides and thus cultivating an ethically unproblematic holiness. A number of scholars regard religion (understood as institutionalization and regulation) as one way to canalize the holy. They claim that without religion, the holy is an unapproachable and uncontrollable power with an incalculable destructive potential (Fenn: 2001, 19). To purge the shadow sides of the holy was an important aim of the so-called liberal theology which was dominant at the beginning of the twentieth century. The liberal theologians wanted to reshape the Christian faith into a gentle humanism and to link it to the optimism about development which was prevalent at that time. But the uncanny struck back – through the incomprehensible horrors of two World Wars. One must simply accept the destructive character of the sacred. But one must look this problem squarely in the eye, if one is to establish a constructive and critical relationship to it. If the sacred is denied, there is no way to protect oneself from its effects. If one acknowledges the sacred, it is possible to analyze, to evaluate, and to take a critical distance. Tillich does not shrink from speaking of the demonic side of the holy. For a theology which does not also maintain the hidden and incalculable side of the deity will no doubt remain a pure version of religion, but it will be more shallow and sterile (Tillich: 1978, 217). “The holy which is demonic is still holy. This is the point where the ambiguous character of religion is most visible and the dangers of faith are most obvious: the danger of faith is idolatry and the ambiguity of the holy is its

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demonic possibility. Our ultimate concern can destroy us as it can heal us” (Tillich: 1957, 16).

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6. Manifestations of the Holy : The Symbol, the Sacrament, and the Sublime in Art

Eliade’s key concept of hierophany, the revelation of the holy, presupposes that the holy manifests itself concretely to the human person. Although we have established that the holy must be connected to a wide and multidimensional understanding of everyday life, we have spoken up to now in very broad categories. If the holy is not to be merely a free-floating category, we need to demarcate some ways and places in which it makes itself known. Since it is in principle possible for everything to be a bearer of the holy, we cannot give an exhaustive overview of all the possible forms of manifestation. However, some forms are more typical than others, perhaps because they are better suited to letting the holy shine through. In the present chapter, I shall indicate three typical manifestations of the holy, viz. the symbol, the sacrament, and art. The symbol, the sacrament, and art shed light on very central, but also different aspects of the holy and its position “in between.” These different forms of manifestation correspond to three dimensions of our reality : the symbol is linked to meaning, the sacrament to material things, and art to the non-verbal expression. The symbols are connected to the way in which we interpret reality, and the holy can come into view in the interplay between various strata of meaning and experience. The “sacraments” are to be understood here in a broad sense, as holy things in general. Our interest in the sacraments is not primarily a question of what they mean; we are interested in how simple things, thanks to their material presence, can be bearers of the holy – something between the mere thing and something else which is “more” and “other.” Finally, we shall see what is implied in theoretical terms when human beings experience the encounter with the holy in art. “Art” is a broad realm, and religious experience linked to art is presumably as varied as art itself. Here, we shall limit ourselves to the concept of “the sublime” and to how this corresponds to the contrast-harmony of the holy in its oscillation between what terrifies us and what fascinates us.

The Symbol and the Symbolic System As I employ these terms here, a symbol is more complex than a simple sign. A sign refers in an unambiguous way to its meaning, and it has a clear function. When the traffic light is red, this means: “Halt!” When it is green, this means: “Drive!” In this instance, the meaning of the sign is established by a

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convention, where we agree about what the green and the red lights mean. But signs can refer in other ways too. For example, they refer by indicating – as smoke indicates fire. Or they can refer by a direct similarity – as the sign of a man on the toilet door does in fact resemble a man. In every instance, a sign corresponds to something specific which is denoted. The meaning of the symbol is much more complex. Its meaning and depth are linked to the interplay between the various meanings which enter into the symbol: the sun can be understood as the source of light and warmth; it can mean life, but it can also be a consuming fire; the course of the sun across the sky can be seen as a chariot which rides over the sky each day, but it can also symbolize the transition from birth, life, to death. The Greek noun sumbolon means “that which can be united, made one.” Originally, it supposedly denoted pieces of a ring owned by more than one person, each of whom has his own part. When the parts come together, the ring is whole – the parts are one. This indicates one important aspect of the symbol, viz. that it brings together more meaning than signs or words usually do, and that it can express a wholeness (Gadamer : 1977, 41 ff). The symbol is brimful of meaning, so to speak; or more correctly, it is full of many meanings which may have formed “sediments” in the symbol over the course of time, in a way which makes its meaning inexhaustible. There is a long scholarly tradition which emphasizes unutterable fullness and polyvalency as the characteristics of the symbol; this tradition blossomed especially with Goethe at the beginning of the nineteenth century (Gadamer : 1990, 82 f). New interpretations of the symbol’s meaning are always possible, and it can be painted over again and again and thus enriched with new layers of meaning. A good example of this is the moon, which is employed as a symbol in a variety of historical and religious contexts. The fact that it appears under various symbolic aspects opens the door to undreamed-of interpretative possibilities. Eliade emphasises the wholeness of the symbol. He points out that the symbol is not an isolated sign, but contains references to a whole systematic field of other signs. This in fact applies to all signs and all speech. A disconnected word which does not point to other words is not meaningful – it is merely a meaningless sound. Similarly, the meaning of the symbol is indebted to something else: that which gives it meaning is the whole repertoire of meanings which are found in a symbolic system (Eliade: 1958, 437). For example, if we think of Christian baptism, the symbolic meaning of this action points to a whole complex of water symbolism – water as the threatening forces of chaos, water which cleanses, water which renews. According to Eliade, the water symbolism is a formation of mutually dependent individual symbols, where the meaning is formed in an interplay between these individual symbols. He argues that we can read so many meanings in one and the same symbol because it is woven into a symbolic system. Like the hierophany, the symbol undergoes a dialectic transformation:

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Thus firstly, symbolism carries further the dialectic of hierophanies by transforming things into something other than what they appear to the profane experience to be: a stone becomes a symbol for the center of the world, and so on; and then, by becoming symbols, signs of a transcendent reality, those things abolish their material limits, and instead of being isolated fragments become part of a whole system; or, better, despite their precarious and fragmentary nature, they embody in themselves the whole of the system in question (Eliade: 1958, 452).

The symbol not only undergoes the dialectical shift from being a material, profane object to becoming a revealer of the holy ; it is also integrated into a symbolism where the individual symbol gives space in itself for the totality. The symbol is like a sponge that absorbs all the indications in the system, and this is why the totality is reflected in condensed form in the individual symbol. But why are some things chosen as symbols, and others not? Eliade suggests the somewhat speculative theory that the symbols point back to unconscious archetypes which, according to Jung, are common to all human beings. He also affirms, less controversially, that the religious symbols are linked to cosmic elements – water, vegetation, sky, earth – since the holy can become visible in them. However, these cosmic elements need to be elaborated further and interpreted by a culturally delimited society. Eliade believes that in this way the symbol links together the individual psyche, the collective culture, and ultimately the entire cosmos. All three components are parts of the symbolic system (Eliade: 1958, 451). Eliade maintains a distinction between the hierophany and the symbol, but on closer examination this distinction turns out to be very complicated. The hierophany manifests the holy directly in the experience of a sudden discontinuity or a surprising change; but symbols too can appear as holy – holy amulets, totems, crosses, etc. The symbols are however stable manifestations which are only indirectly accessible. In other words, the meaning is not directly accessible in the phenomenon which is experienced. Its meaning draws on other symbols, just as for example the symbolic meaning of the moon is indebted to other objects, stories, myths, and rituals. This points to a very decisive distinction: the hierophany has an event character – the holy reveals itself in discontinuities or transitions – while the symbol has a permanent character (1958, 447). It is the permanent character of the symbol that allows it to take the place of the hierophany, as a stable substitute which preserves the meaning that becomes visible in the hierophany. This is why symbols too play such an important role in the religious traditions, and give human beings an abiding contact with the holy.

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Participation and Separation Paul Tillich sheds light on how the symbols acquire their metaphysical and religious meaning. As a theologian, he explicitly brings religious and metaphysical presuppositions to his understanding of what a symbol is. He sees the symbol as the basic component in religious speech. Not only must one grasp that God as “father” or “king” is a symbolic expression; one must also understand “Jesus Christ,” the “Holy Spirit,” and even “God” symbolically. There is no non-symbolic, more sober language behind the symbols – and this is no loss, since the symbol is the most exact expression we human beings can find for the holy. In the symbol, we employ pieces from the sphere of reality which is well known to us and let these point out beyond themselves, to their ground and origin. The symbol has often been seen as a union between what appears to the senses (the symbol itself) and a reality which is higher than the senses (that which is symbolized) and enters into the symbol. Thanks to its sensuous and very concrete presence, something transcendent is made accessible. In this way, the symbol can uncover aspects of our familiar reality which would otherwise have remained closed to us – not least, the holiness which dwells in reality. Tillich adds that the symbol not only uncovers the deepest religious concern of the human person, his or her “ultimate concern,” but also sheds light back onto the concrete raw material which the symbol itself employs. Both of these are decisive. If we say that God is king, this says something about God’s power ; but it also says something about the divine dimension in every king (Tillich: 1978, 240 f). According to Tillich, the difference between the symbol and other signs is that the symbol not only points to something outside itself, but at the same time also participates in what it symbolizes (Tillich: 1957, 42). For example, when one sees that the flag of one’s nation is burnt or trampled upon and experiences this as an insult to the nation, this illustrates well how the flag participates in the nation and in the national sentiment. One sign can be replaced by a corresponding sign without any loss of meaning, but this is not the case with symbols. The symbol has taken up into itself something of the power and the mode of existence of that which is symbolized; it cannot be dealt with freely in the same way as the sign. The flag participates in the nation in the same way as the cross participates in the work of salvation for Christians. The symbol acquires depth by being itself a bearer of the holy, and this makes it possible for the symbol to unite the divine and the human (Gadamer : 1990, 83). Tillich writes that one must never say : “only a symbol,” since this expression reveals that one has not yet understood the difference between a sign and a symbol. Rather, one must say : “nothing less than a symbol” (Tillich: 1957, 45). Although the symbol is a bearer of the holy, this does not mean that it is holy

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in itself. Tillich’s understanding of symbols includes not only participation, but also an insuperable separation between the symbol and that which finds expression through it. This is why the symbol entails both closeness and distance, both revelation and covering up. Theologically speaking, the separation means that we can never take possession of God himself: all we can have is a participation in his holiness by means of delimited earthly symbols. As soon as the symbols claim to be holy in themselves, they have degenerated into idols. In that case, finite things are closed in upon themselves and exalt themselves to the place which belongs only to the divine. It is only when we observe the boundaries of the symbols that they participate in the divine in the correct manner (1957, 48; 59). Accordingly, we can say that the symbol not only bestows a participation, but also points to something “other” and “more” – thus preserving the hiddenness of the mystery. The symbols do not simply drop down from heaven, but must be understood as the human person’s way of relating to the holy. Since the human person understands himself in the light of his historical epoch and the surrounding culture, symbols too are exposed to changing cultural situations. Tillich argues that this means that the symbol has something resembling an organic life: it is born at some point in time, and it can grow and be continually filled with new meaning. One reason why many of the religious symbols are so rich is the way in which they have taken into themselves long and complex traditions. But symbols can also disappear through death. Dead symbols are those where the original meaning is no longer awakened to life. Here, however, it is important to note that Tillich does not believe that it is up to each individual to form new symbols. The symbols belong to everyone and to no one. They live in virtue of a tradition and a nature which is antecedent to and greater than each one of us, and this makes it impossible to manipulate them arbitrarily (Tillich: 1957, 43). The symbols’ life is not dependent on the exercise of the individual’s will, and their meaning is not something that each individual inserts into them. Since however symbols already have taken up into themselves such a large potential of meaning, it is possible for them to mean various things for different people.

The Double Meaning For Ricœur, the central feature of the symbol is that it possesses a double or polyvalent meaning (Ricœur : 1970, 7). Although he worked in the 1960’s on material from the history of religion and his position in many ways resembled Tillich’s understanding of symbols, his primary merit consists in shedding light on symbols from the perspective of the philosophy of language and hermeneutics. Eliade noted the indebtedness of the symbol to a form of symbolic language, but he lacked the more sophisticated philosophical instruments which were available to Ricœur.

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The symbol employs raw material from various spheres. Ricœur indicates the three which he considers the most important. First of all, the religious symbols point back to manifestations of the holy which have occurred in one or other part of the cosmos. Through the symbolism, these parts of the cosmos – water, vegetation, sky or earth – become saturated with meaning; Ricœur relies here on Eliade’s understanding of symbols and on the phenomenology of religion in general. Secondly, we are aware of the symbolism of dreams, which Freud interpreted in an epoch-making manner. Since the instinctive life shuns the light of day, the symbolic meaning is transposed in the dream, in such a way that the symbols both keep the real motivation of the instincts hidden and allow these instincts to come to the surface in a covered manner. Thirdly, symbols are produced in the poetic imagination, which finds expression both in poetry and more generally in the ability to transmute fragments of reality into symbols with the aid of the imagination (Ricœur : 1970, 10 – 14). Although Ricœur closely follows the phenomenology of religion, they part company on one point, viz. the significance of language for the understanding of symbols. For the phenomenology of religion, experience plays the key role, and its intention is to suspend all prejudices in order to offer a description of the phenomenon as it shows itself to the consciousness. In the 1960’s, Ricœur was convinced that a direct reference of this kind to experience or emotion did not take the fundamental role of language into account. Every experience and emotion linked to a hierophany remains silent and blind until it is linked to a concept and is given a language. There is no symbolism prior to man who speaks, even though the power of symbols is rooted more deeply in the expressiveness of the cosmos, in what desire wants to say, in the varied image-contents that men have. But in each case it is in language that the cosmos, desire, and the imaginary achieve speech. To be sure, the Psalm says, “The heavens tell the glory of God.” But the heavens do not speak; or rather they speak through the prophet, they speak through hymns, they speak through liturgy. There must always be a word to take up the world and turn it into hierophany (Ricœur: 1970, 16).

There is no immediate meaning or hierophany which simply imposes itself by virtue of experience, since experience in itself lacks language. If experience is to have a meaning, there must be a language which can articulate it. There is nothing startling in this; we have already seen in the second chapter of the present book how the “linguistic turn” has inevitably led to a number of variations on the theme which Ricœur presents, but bearing in mind that he is writing as early as the 1960’s, he must be regarded as one of the first to make this criticism. For Ricœur, the symbol is in fact a semantic entity, i. e. something which concerns linguistic meaning. Every interpretation of the symbol must therefore begin with the linguistic meaning, before tracing it

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back to the cosmic, oneiric, or poetical components which are inscribed upon it. As I have said, Ricœur regards the double or polyvalent meaning as characteristic of the symbol. This doubleness is understood as a semantic doubleness between two layers of meaning. Like other signs, the symbol has a primary meaning, i. e. a literal meaning in which a dove is a bird and the moon a heavenly body. But the symbol differs from other signs in that it also has a secondary meaning which does not suppress the first meaning, but adds a new dimension of meaning to it. In this sense, a dove also means peace, and the moon also means wisdom (Ricœur : 1970, 12 f). This makes it clear how the symbol inscribes itself upon the interstice of the holy : the power in a symbol is neither the primary nor the secondary meaning taken by itself, but the interplay between them. It is important for Ricœur to give an exact explanation of how the secondary meaning is related to the primary. It is clear that there is some kind of similarity between them: the dove of peace lets itself be picked on, the moon is cool and clear. But there are other theories about how this similarity is to be understood. Ricœur dissociates himself from two ways of understanding the similarity. Analogies designate two corresponding states of affairs, where the situation AB is mirrored in the situation C-D. A doll’s house is analogous to a house in the normal sense because the rooms and functions are similar (analogous) despite the difference in size. Allegories, roughly speaking, are pictorial representations. To read an allegory has more in common with solving a puzzle or deciphering a code than with immersing oneself in the superabundance of meaning in a symbol. In both analogy and allegory, one believes that it is in principle possible to reach the real meaning in other ways: the meaning which is to be denoted already exists independently, and the allegory or analogy is merely a sophisticated way of referring to this. But the symbol can never lose its puzzling character, even when it reveals a dimension of meaning which would otherwise have been inaccessible. It is quite simply impossible to express the meaning of the symbol by any other means; its meaning is intrinsically tied to the symbolic mode of expression (Ricœur : 1967, 15 f; 165).1 In the course of the 1970’s, Ricœur’s understanding of symbols changed. Earlier, he had uncompromisingly emphasized the linguistic character of the symbol, but now he seems to revoke some of his criticism of the phenomenology of religion. He still holds that the symbol contains a double level of meaning, but he no longer understands this doubleness primarily as a linguistic relationship. The symbol must be anchored, or bound, as Ricœur puts it – bound by something other than language, something which makes 1 Gadamer would argue that Ricœur here continues a Romantic inheritance which (on an unsound basis) disparages allegory as something conventional or rationalistic and favors the mystical participation of the symbol (Gadamer: 1990, 85 f).

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itself known in the experience. It is this anchoring in something non-linguistic that gives the symbol its puzzling opaqueness. And it is precisely with regard to the non-linguistic element that Ricœur has recourse to the phenomenology of religion: Even before Eliade, Rudolf Otto in his book, The Idea of the Holy, strongly emphasized the appearance of the Sacred as Power, strength, efficacity. Whatever objections we might raise about his description of the Sacred, it is valuable in that it helps us to be on guard against all attempts to reduce mythology linguistically. We are warned from the very beginning that we are here crossing the threshold of an experience that does not allow itself to be completely inscribed within the categories of logos or proclamation and its transmission or interpretation (Ricœur : 1976, 60).

Ricœur was one of the first to formulate what has become part of the standard criticism of the phenomenology of religion, viz. its failure to acknowledge the role of language. Interestingly enough, he now emphasizes the clear limitations to a one-sided emphasis on the linguistic structures of the holy, myths, and symbols. It is the phenomenology of religion which reminds us that a residuum remains, which cannot be reduced to language alone. Language cannot generate the cosmos: all it can do is to articulate it. In the symbol, a non-linguistic part of the cosmos is also accessible. This may be a heavenly body, an animal, the earth, or the sea – something or other which allows the holy to shine through. Does this bring us back to where we started, with Eliade’s theory about symbols? Not quite, for Ricœur has gained some important insights in the course of his investigations. He does not suddenly cancel out the formative character of language; but nor does he accord this absolute priority. He believes that we need both language and experience. He appeals to the phenomenological element (the specific nature of experience) and the hermeneutical element (the role of language) in what he calls a dialectic between the two elements. The one cannot be thought of without the other. Without language, both the cosmos and experience remain dumb; but if the cosmos does not let the holy shine through, the symbol remains empty (Ricœur : 1995, 53, 65). It is in the interstice between experience and language that the symbol acquires its form.

Holy Things The holy can also manifest itself in material things. In this section, we shall take our starting point in the sacraments, i. e. in holy things as these are understood in the context of Christianity. Tillich’s fundamental definition of sacraments runs as follows: “All those objects and procedures in which that which is on the side of Being is seen as present in an existent, are sacramental. Sacramental objects are holy objects, laden with divine mightiness” (Tillich:

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1962, 119. Eng. trans.: B.McN.). There is an obvious overlap between the way he understands symbols and sacraments. In both cases, something more becomes visible than the signs or the most elementary appearance of the things involved, and in both cases, this “more” participates in the symbol or the things. It is in this sense that Tillich says that Being – the basis of all that exists, the ultimate concern – participates in an existent, i. e. in a concrete object. Nonetheless, there is an essential difference between the way in which the holy is mediated in a symbol and in a sacrament. Although the experience of the cosmos should not be neglected, it is nevertheless the linguistic dimension of meaning that plays the key role in a symbol. In the sacraments, the opposite is true. Although the aspect of meaning cannot be overlooked, it is the material dimension that is most prominent in the sacraments. Accordingly, it is appropriate to speak of the sacraments as holy things. When speaking of the place of the sacraments in the Christian life, some have stressed that Christianity is the most materialistic of the world religions, since everyday and material things are cornerstones of the spiritual life (Macquarrie: 1997, 6). It can be useful to draw a distinction between sacraments in the broad sense and in the narrow sense. In the broad sense, everything is in fact potentially a sacrament, just as everything can become a symbol – it is fundamentally possible for all things, for every aspect of the cosmos, to display holiness. But although the entire cosmos is ultimately viewed as a sacred cosmos, the human being is not capable of perceiving this holiness all the time. This is why there are individual things, places, or events where the holiness must be given a more insistent quality, where the cosmos becomes transparent and the transcendent reality shines through (Eliade: 1987, 138). The human being needs delimited holy times and places where his attention can be directed to the manifestation of the holy. Such specific things, therefore, are sacraments in the narrow sense. Sacraments are understood as simple natural things – so-called elements – which are incorporated into a specific ritual procedure with specific liturgical formulae. Protestants accept two sacraments (baptism and the eucharist), while the Roman Catholic and the Orthodox Churches have seven (baptism, confirmation, the eucharist, confession, marriage, ordination, and the anointing of the sick). The Lutheran Church agrees with the Catholic Church in maintaining the doctrine of the real presence, viz. that Jesus Christ is really present in the sacraments, while the Reformed Churches hold that the sacraments are signs in memory of the institution of baptism and the eucharist. The sacraments have been linked in various ways to Jesus Christ, his life, and his saving work, but it is no secret that Christianity adopted and reshaped symbols or rituals which already existed before and independently of Jesus’ entrance upon the historical scene. Eliade notes how the understanding of baptism in the early Church explicitly made use of the symbolism of water

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which was familiar from the surrounding religious milieu, and this was not seen as problematic or threatening. In various ways, the patristic writers express how the water dissolves forms, but also cleanses and regenerates new life. Baptism was regarded as a kind of death, an immersion in the powers of chaos, or a fight with the monster. It entailed also a rising up to new life thanks to Jesus’ victory over the powers of death, but it could at the same time also be interpreted as a purification ritual in which sin was washed away. In this and similar ways, the Christian sacraments did not obliterate earlier rituals and symbols, but gave them new meanings. The Christians saw Christ as the fulfillment of a potential to which justice had not yet been done in the earlier rituals and symbols (Eliade: 1987, 132 – 136). This look back across history shows that that there is no reason to detach the specifically Christian (i. e. sacraments in the narrow sense) from the more universally religious (i. e. sacraments in the broad sense). There has however been a tendency, especially in the Protestant Churches, to tone down the broad meaning and try to cultivate the specifically Christian character of the sacraments, often by linking this to Jesus’ words of institution. Tillich warns against such a narrowing down, because it ultimately makes the sacraments abstract, without a concrete, sensuous, and cosmic anchoring. It is only the broad understanding of the sacraments that gives the narrow, specifically Christian understanding of them its full meaning (Tillich: 1978, 121).

The Thing as a Gathering At this point, we leave the theological discussion of the sacraments in the narrow sense. We shall attempt to investigate them from a broad phenomenological interest, where we look at the holy things and at how they are woven into everyday life and into history. When Heidegger asks in his later writings what a thing is, it is because he suspects that we have thought of “things” in an excessively one-sided manner, typically as lifeless matter which is linked together with other things by a chain of causality. If things do not entail something more and something other, it is pointless to elaborate a theory about the sacraments which is linked to the concept of the thing. Heidegger suggests that we should reverse our thinking, in order to see a completely different richness in the things close at hand, a richness that makes these things both near and far, familiar and foreign at one and the same time. Etymologically, the noun “thing” means “gathering” in many ancient languages, including Norse. Heidegger employs this as a clue which can help us uncover all the variety which is “gathered” in the thing. He was strongly influenced by his studies of the Romantic poet Hölderlin, and in keeping with him Heidegger held that that which is gathered in the thing is fourfold: heaven and earth, the gods and the mortals. In short, the entire world is presented in the thing. He takes the example of a wine jug. This contains references to wine

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made of grapes which are dependent on rain from the heavens; the grapes grow out of the earth; the wine is the drink of the gods; and it is made for mortal human beings (Heidegger : 2004, 165 f). In short, the jug contains the fourfold. We need not accept Heidegger’s mythical language in order to agree that he has grasped an essential point, viz. that utterly everyday things gather in themselves layer upon layer of meanings which far transcend the merely material object. A number of theologians have drawn on Heidegger here in order to establish a fruitful concept of the “thing” in which the understanding of the sacraments can be anchored. It is not in fact the extraordinary character of the Church’s sacraments that allows them to take up in themselves a rich collection of meaning – on the contrary, the ecclesiastical rituals presuppose that this richness already exists in the everyday use of the things. If the water, wine or bread had not already played the de facto role they have from day to day, they could scarcely have served as bearers of the holy in the sacraments. As in the case of symbols, so too it is only through a deep familiarity with the literal, everyday level of meaning that the secondary sacramental meaning can be evoked. As I have said, however, things do not always appear as sacraments, and this is why special cultic arrangements are necessary. The act of worship takes the things out of their everyday context and plants them in a new ritual context in such a way that they appear in a new light. Experience becomes more acute, so that one perceives more than is registered in the mechanical routines of everyday living. When the rituals focus our concentration on very specific things, it is possible for a greater fullness of the gathered meaning of these things to emerge. The theologian Gordon Lathrop writes that stylization and simplification are important instruments in the generation of a more intense experience. His example is the holy places of the American Pueblo Indians, called “kiva.” In most regards, a kiva is a very ordinary house such as their ancestors lived in, but put in order and simplified. Lathrop infers from this that the holy is based on the everyday – but stylized and focused. The Christian assembly around bread and wine is not unlike the kiva. Here, too, is the domestic – storytelling, a meal – stylized and simplified. Here, too, ages of meaning are focused in simple objects – bread and wine – making them a connection to human history (the ancestors) and to a sense of cosmic order (the powers of earth and sky). Before the liturgy even begins, as the food is brought and set out on an offertory table or credence or prothesis, Christians may rightly behold the loaf and think: “Here is all human life,” or see the wine, thinking, “Here is the universe itself!” (Lathrop: 1993, 93).

In the cult, one can read the profusion of meaning which is gathered in the things, but one can also see that another, transcendent and foreign reality appears in the midst of these things. One may say that the things both intensify their well-known aspect and simultaneously uncover a foreign face. When the

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thing is regarded as more than a merely material thing, we can also glimpse how it is possible for it to be a bearer of something holy : an interstice comes into play between its character as a thing and something “more” and “other.”

Between Foreign and Familiar The holy can manifest itself both in the inexhaustible meaning of symbols and (as we shall shortly see) in the non-verbal expression of a work of art. But the hierophany can just as well take place in simple, material things. What is it about things that enables them to become bearers of the holy? Is it possible to define the double movement or the contrast-harmony between foreign and familiar which characterizes the holy in things? Let me begin with their familiar side. The Brazilian liberation theologian Leonardo Boff has written a little book in which he seeks to draw our attention to “the sacramental universe that inhabits our daily life” (Boff: 1975, 7). This sacramental universe is not necessarily linked to great and mighty visions. Boff writes that it can equally well be linked to the weak holiness. One particular aspect of what it means to lead a human life in this world is that we invest human values, meanings, narratives, and expressions in the things with which we surround ourselves. Only the human being transforms objects into symbols and actions into rituals. Boff writes that the things are tamed through narratives, customs, and rituals; they become domesticated and familiar. This accords well with Heidegger’s observation that what we call “the world” does not appear primarily as a gigantic object or a collection of objects, but rather constitutes the familiar surroundings of human praxis. This means that we are always intimately involved in the world, before we begin to think theoretically – as Heidegger puts it, the human person’s existence (Dasein) is from the outset being-in-the-world (Heidegger : 1993a, 63 f). Boff ’s example of how a thing is incorporated into the human sphere is an old cup: There is this aluminum mug of ours, the good old kind that is bright and shiny. The handle is broken, but that gives it the air of an antique. The family’s eleven children of all ages drank from it. It has accompanied the family on its many moves: from rural countryside to town, from town to city, from city to metropolis. There were births and deaths. It has shared everything. It has always been there. It is the ongoing mystery of life and mortal existence. The mug endures, old but still shiny. I think it must have been old even when it first came into the house. But its elderliness is really youthfulness because it generates and bestows life. It is the centerpiece of our kitchen. When I drink from it, I do not drink just water. I drink in freshness, gentleness, familiarity, my family history, and the memory of a greedy little boy quenching his thirst (Boff: 1975, 9).

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Boff ’s example brings out precisely how a perfectly ordinary thing becomes over the course of time a gathering of experiences which are linked to one specific thing. Through human customs and social norms for dealing with things, we become familiar with our surroundings, and the world becomes our home. Our everyday world becomes so familiar that we generally fail to think about how things manifest themselves ; still less we do reflect on the fact that they exist at all. This intimate relationship between things and human beings allows the things to take up meaning into themselves through continually repeated use and handling, but they can also absorb a great store of meaning from earlier times which has been handed on by particular traditions. As Husserl says, this meaning is “sedimented” in the things, layer by layer (Husserl : 1954, 372). An archaeology of everyday things permits us to regain an understanding of the sacramental dimension of things, where they take on a voice and tell stories. It is as if the family’s cup in Boff ’s example has sedimented innumerable everydays. In particular situations, therefore, things can display a surprising wealth of meanings, values, and experiences – not thanks to some exceptional norm but through continual repetition over time, just as one drop after another hollows out the stone. In addition to the familiar, the sacraments have another, equally important aspect. In the very heart of this profound familiarity there vibrates in the things something which points out beyond the well known to something transcendent or foreign. The foreign is the other element which appears in the holy. From time to time, things can show the contours of something other, something foreign, in the very heart of the everyday things – as little mysteries. The Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa reflects on how the mystery can appear in the midst of the well known. This is evoked by the changing light of the evening sun: And the light pours so serenely and perfectly on things, it gilds them so much with smiling and sad reality! The whole mystery of the world descends until it’s right before my eyes to sculpt itself into banality and stress. Ah, how everyday things touch mysteries for us! As if to the surface of this life, which the light touches, an uncertain smile, comes to the lips of the Mystery! How modern all this sounds! And yet it is so ancient, so occult, so possessed of another meaning than the one that shines in all this! (Pessoa: 1991, 69 f).

In the midst of what we know all too well, therefore, there are traces of something unfathomable, which points to another horizon of meaning. Otto frequently underlines the powerful and terrifying aspect of this foreign element, but this need not always be present; often, small traces, such as a hesitant smile, can be the annunciation of something other and something more. These experiences rise up so seldom to the surface because we usually rush past things. This is why a discontinuity or an altered attitude is needed, if we are to become sensitive to the foreign element in things. Pessoa writes:

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“If only I hadn’t learned, from birth onward, to give accepted meanings to these things, if only I could see them in the expression they have separate from the expression that has been imposed upon them” (Pessoa: 1991, 60). His wish corresponds to the so-called phenomenological reduction, which is an attempt to switch off the predetermined understanding and devote oneself to the open way of looking at things which allows them to show themselves as they are. The phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty says that to undertake this reduction is to step back from the active world in order to be filled with wonder (Merleau-Ponty : 1962, xiii-xiv). In the reduction, the most familiar things appear in a strange and alien way. Perhaps the sacraments are a kind of transitional object which participate simultaneously in the well known reality and in a foreign reality. And perhaps it is in this transition that the many modes of manifestation and meanings of the holy have their source.

Things and Time It is, therefore, completely everyday things that appear as both familiar and yet foreign. One dimension which plays a decisive role in such experiences is time. We can find help in another author, when we seek to penetrate the link between the appearance of things and time, viz. Marcel Proust. At the start of the twentieth century, he wrote his twelve-volume A la recherche du temps perdu, in which he meditates perceptively on small events in which things tell us about a past which would otherwise have been forgotten. On a cold and grey winter’s day in his adult life, the author visits his mother and is offered a cup of tea. She went out for one of those short, plump little cakes called “petites madeleines,” which look as though they had been molded in the fluted scallop of a pilgrim’s shell. And soon, mechanically, weary after a dull day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate than a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but individual, detached, with no suggestion of its origin (Proust: 1923, 58).

It at once becomes clear that this “exquisite pleasure” is linked to one very specific memory which rises to the surface of consciousness with the help of the tea and the cake. All at once, he recalls how his aunt used to serve him linden tea and madeleine cakes before they went to Mass in his childhood. Not only does he see his aunt clearly : it is as if the tea brings with it a whole gallery of figures and surroundings that once belonged to the small town of his childhood: “the whole of Combray and of its surroundings, taking their

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proper shapes and growing solid, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea” (Proust: 1923, 62).2 We have all experienced how material things from time to time awake memories or impressions of our own past, e. g. in a smell or an old picture – or through the taste of tea and cake. The interesting thing here is how simple, everyday things, without nothing extraordinary about them, can let past experience be sedimented in them. Boff writes about how the aluminum mug became a sacrament which gathered in itself the whole history of the family – deaths, births, good times and bad. The past also plays an important role in the sacraments in the narrow sense. They are not only intended to awaken our own memories to life, but to awaken the memory of God’s interventions in history. In the sacraments, we speak of a “remembrance” in the sense of an anamnesis. The remembrance is not meant to direct our attention to the past as such, but to make the past contemporary, here and now. More precisely, it is meant to actualize Jesus’ Last Supper with his disciples and the impending event of his crucifixion. This event is awakened to life thanks to bread and wine. Our authors, philosophers, or theologians are making the same point: By listening to what the things say, we can rediscover a deeper familiarity, but also something strange and foreign about the thing – and perhaps the holiness of things can become visible precisely in the unclosed interstice between familiar and foreign. This doubleness is dramatized in a very concrete way in the Christian celebration of the eucharist. Bread and wine belong to our familiar surroundings: fruit is brought forth from nature, and human work transforms this into the cultural products of bread and wine which are laid on the altar. We know bread from innumerable everyday situations, from the dry but necessary slice on our breakfast table to the memory of the wonderfully delicious slice eaten after a particular exhausting hiking trip. The “daily bread” is necessary to life itself. Similarly, wine and its bottomless red color are linked to feasts and celebrations, to parties with good friends or to special events in the course of one’s life. All such experiences are sedimented in the bread and wine, and can be experienced anew in an intensive manner in the celebration of the sacraments. Through thanksgiving, the invocation of the triune God, and the remembrance of how the eucharist was instituted, something other, something hitherto foreign is evoked in the very heart of the things. This brings the holy into play, in the interplay between the familiar and the foreign. In Christianity, this holiness is interpreted in one very specific sense, with reference to Christ’s body and blood which bring salvation in virtue of his death and resurrection. The natural holiness of the things is evoked and is given one specific religious interpretation; after this, they can be received as the gifts of salvation. The sacraments make use of the things’ ability to take up meaning into themselves, 2 For a longer and more philosophically oriented analysis of time and of its relevance to the eucharist, with the starting point in Proust, see Dahl: 2005.

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and they insert these things into one very specific context of theological meaning. Are the sacraments something that differs from other things? Yes and no – they are located in between. They are things which open the door both to familiar and to foreign dimensions which already exist in the things, but which usually go unnoticed.

The Sublime in Art In the symbol, the aspect of meaning is the most prominent. In the sacrament, it is the material aspect itself which manifests the holy. In art, it is primarily the non-verbal expression that becomes the bearer of the holy. The artistic expression is the origin of an open and polyvalent manifestation of the holy. There is indeed a vast quantity of art with religious motifs, but what we shall discuss here is not the interpretation of motifs, but the experience of the encounter with art. Art, at least the material we shall study here, has a number of points in common with the symbol’s polyvalent formation of meaning. But painting is also related to things, since their material aspect is one essential part of painting’s value and expression. Whereas the things often take their places in the quiet life, and are therefore linked first and foremost to the weak holiness, the sublime is traditionally associated with power and with intensely strong manifestations. Enormous cathedrals have an ability all their own to fill us with a certain kind of religious experience, which is closely related to something strange and at the same time disturbing; the notes of a powerful organ can fill us with an exalted emotion which borders on the uncanny. Similar experiences can also be evoked in the encounter with very eloquent paintings, where we are at a loss for words. In such cases, it seems obvious to suggest that we experience artistic expressions as manifestations of the holy. Otto refers frequently to aesthetic expressions as good parallels to the holy, and indeed as something that has coalesced with the holy. His examples include selections from Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis, Bach’s Mass in B Minor, gothic architecture, and the representation of emptiness in Chinese art (Otto: 1979, 87 – 91). It might be more exact to say that such aesthetic experiences are linked to the sacred, since what resonates in them awakens something of the uncanniness which we discussed in chapter 5 above. Freud himself complains that the philosophy of art in his days dealt one-sidedly with the beautiful and the attractive, and paid little attention to the uncanny and the repulsive (Freud: 2003, 123). Despite this complaint, there is in fact a long tradition of discussing such dimensions of the aesthetic experience, viz. the investigations of the sublime, and Otto’s examination of the uncanny forms a link between the contemporary aesthetic experiences of holiness and the sublime. There are above all three texts which have formed our understanding of the sublime. This tradition starts with a rhetorical work from the first century,

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Longinus’ On Great Writing (On the Sublime). The second text, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, was written by the Irish empiricist Edmund Burke in the mid-eighteenth century. The third, somewhat later, is Immanuel Kant’s discussion of the sublime in his Critique of Judgment. The sublime was a central concern of both painters and philosophers in the Romantic period, but it also turns up in the art history of the twentieth century, and finally undergoes a renaissance thanks to the French post-modernist Jean-FranÅois Lyotard.

The Overwhelming and the Contrast-Harmony Two central characteristics of the sublime are its overwhelming impact and its inner contrast-harmony. From the very outset, the sublime has been linked to the experience of the irruption of something overwhelming, something with a force that shocks, or moves us in some other way. Longinus begins his rhetorical study by speaking of the sublime as follows: “The startling and amazing is more powerful than the charming and persuasive, if it is indeed true that to be convinced is usually within our control whereas amazement is the result of an irresistible force beyond the control of any audience” (Longinus: 1991, 4). Although his study centers on rhetoric, there is one trait in this passage which will follow the concept throughout history, viz. the threatening power which the sublime exercises over the mind. One of Longinus’ examples is taken from the Old Testament: “Let there be light!” It is clear that one can find expressions of what he would call “sublime” in many Old Testament passages – often linked to the violent force in God’s revelation, which is reflected in the Psalms and the prophets (Shaw: 2006, 19). The centrality accorded to the sublime at the close of the eighteenth century and in the nineteenth century must be understood as a necessary counterweight to the dominant view at that time. Charles Taylor describes the eighteenth century as the age of the depersonalized, deistic concept of God, the “disengaged reason” of rationalism, and the entry of economic thinking into ethics. Many people experienced themselves as shut up in a “buffered self” and surrounded by a universe with little content. This lent importance to the experiences of something huge, foreign, and powerful – not in order to flirt with destructive forces, but because the encounter with the sublime had a humanizing effect. The strong experiences of the sublime, in art or in nature, reminded the human person of something decisive in his existence. This in turn could awaken moral feelings or aesthetic longings; or it could be connected to the Creator’s relationship to the work of creation (Taylor : 2007, 338 f; 343). But how precisely was the sublime understood at that period? The sublime can manifest itself overwhelmingly in two ways: either as an overwhelming greatness (what Kant calls “mathematically sublime”) or as an overwhelming power (what Kant calls “dynamically sublime”). The mathe-

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matically sublime involves size, but not in the sense that one thing is larger than another. Rather, it concerns the absolutely great, that which is so huge that it transcends every measurement – like the universe (Kant: 1959, 90). It is possible to think of the mathematically sublime, just as we now in fact speak meaningfully of that which is absolutely great, although it is not possible to imagine something of that size. Kant therefore claims that although it is possible to think of the absolutely great, neither our senses nor our imagination can contain something so huge. In this sense, the mathematically sublime remains beyond comprehension. The dynamically sublime involves power and strength rather than size, and is characterized by the experience of being confronted with a superior power (Kant: 1959, 105). Nature can display a might of this kind in storms and tempests, but it is clear that the creator God of the Old Testament also gives human beings a similar experience: one feels powerless and small. Burke too, who in so many ways is the source of inspiration for Kant, points to the strong religious relevance of the dynamically sublime. In a clear polemic against the contemporary intellectuals who prefer an abstract contemplation of God’s qualities, Burke insists that it is impossible to think of the deity without the quality of power – and a power which does not directly touch us is nothing other than empty speculation. The origin of the experience of the holy, of awe and adoration, is indissolubly linked to God’s mighty greatness and power and to our smallness (Burke: 1990, 62 ff). In the dynamically sublime, we can sense a leitmotif which goes from Longinus’ words about the incoercible power of the sublime, via Burke and Kant, all the way to Otto’s tremendum element. Otto does not believe that the absolutely great or a mighty power can be regarded as holy per se, or as sublime. Something more is needed, something that awakens the experience of something puzzling and strange. And this brings us to the second and decisive point of intersection between the holy and the sublime, viz. what Otto calls contrast-harmony. He writes that the sublime exhibits the same peculiar dual character as the numinous; it is at once daunting, and yet again singularly attracting, in its impress upon the mind. It humbles and at the same time exalts us, circumscribes and extends us beyond ourselves, on the one hand releasing in us a feeling analogous to fear, and on the other rejoicing us (Otto: 1976, 42; 1979, 57).

As is well known, his most concentrated formula for the numinous is the mysterium tremendum et fascinans, the puzzling and different reality which lies between the poles of the frightening and the attractive. It is thus in the tension between tremendum and fascinans that the contrast-harmony of the mystery comes into play. Otto is indebted to Kant for his understanding of the contrast-harmony, and Kant in his turn has found an important source of inspiration in Burke, for whom the experience of the sublime is linked to a special form of “delight” which must not be confused with ordinary sensuous “pleasure.” The special

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feature of the sublime delight is its negative element – it must be inherently related to “terror.” This special feeling presupposes that one is not in fact threatened: one looks at the threat from a safe distance. It is the same delight, mingled with terror that attracts us to horror movies: one can look at monstrous things while safely protected in one’s comfortable cinema seat. On the deepest level, it is the threat of annihilation – as this finds expression in the absence of light in the dark, in the absence of fullness in emptiness, and in the absence of life in death – that is kept at arm’s length in the sublime (Burke: 1990, 34; 36). Kant calls this special feeling “negative delight,” because the course of events is always indirect: first, one is repelled, and then one is attracted. First one experiences disinclination, then pleasure (Kant: 1959, 88). It is not difficult to hear the echo of this thinking in Otto’s “contrastharmony.” The dynamically sublime can, according to Kant, appear as bold, overhanging and almost threatening cliffs, as storm clouds which tower up in the skies and move off with lightning and peals of thunder, as volcanoes in all their destructive violence, and in similar mighty experiences of nature which awaken the feeling that one is small and exposed (1959, 107). Kant took his examples from nature because he believed that painting was able only to represent nature. He considered that the art of his days was not yet able to recreate the overwhelming experience that nature itself can exhibit. Nevertheless, the project of the painters in the following Romantic period can largely be seen as a transfer of Kant’s examples onto canvas. Turner’s whirling storms and dazzling light, or Friedrich’s monk against the background of an endless and threatening sea, all recreate something of the sublime. In the encounter with the sublime, the human being is confronted with something greater or more powerful than himself and is filled with what Kant calls a “holy shuddering.” This finds expression in a feeling of smallness or powerlessness, i. e. in disinclination. But as we have said, this disinclination is only one of the components in the contrast-harmony of the sublime, where it is immediately replaced by delight. Ultimately, in Kant’s view, the sublime points back to the human person himself. Kant is interested not only in this “delight, mingled with terror” which Burke has analyzed so aptly, but equally in how the delight is linked to a feeling of superiority in relation to the events of nature. According to Kant, the human being is not only a piece of biological nature abandoned to the play of natural forces. The human being is also free – not as nature, but as a rational being – and his superiority must be understood as the superiority of a rational being. We ourselves have autonomous laws for what we should do and for how the world is to be understood. It is this movement between fear and delight, this movement between tremendum and fascinans, which is characteristic of the sublime.

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The Sublime and Abstract Painting Kant writes that the most sublime of all the commandments in the Jewish tradition is the prohibition of images. Its formulation in the second commandment in the Old Testament (Ex 20:4 – 5) is motivated by the prohibition of idolatry, and this inheritance was the subject of considerable discussion in the Christian Church, especially during the iconoclast controversy in the Eastern Church (726 – 843 CE). The iconodule party won the day by showing that God himself had made himself known in his own image in Jesus Christ. The controversy broke out afresh in the Reformation period. Luther removed the prohibition of images from the ten commandments, while counseling a restrictive attitude to images; but for the Reformed Churches, which followed Calvin and Zwingli, the Reformation entailed a more intense prohibition of images than had existed in the earlier tradition (Bjerg: 1999, 33 – 37). Such a prohibition has also played a central role in Islam and is the basis of the Muslim non-figurative art and calligraphy. For Kant, the point is that the sublime refers to something more than the senses can grasp and than we can imagine. However, the development of art in the twentieth century has shown that it is in fact perfectly possible for artists to produce non-figurative paintings which do not depict reality. Kazimir Malevich and Wassily Kandinsky, both of whom were pioneers in non-figurative painting, ascribed religious dimensions to their pictures. A group of artists based in New York between the 1940’s and 1960’s developed an interesting formal artistic language. Many of the so-called “abstract expressionists,” such as Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, attributed an openly religious content to their paintings, although these did not depict religious motifs. The abstract expressionists are interesting because they attempt to express the sublime in abstract ways. Rothko painted large pictures, often with color fields arranged in rectangles. Despite – or perhaps precisely because of – the simplicity of these pictures, they have an enormous emotional power. Rothko himself says: “These people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them” (Rothko: 2005, 119 f). Newman’s paintings are related, and often consist of monocolor surfaces which are divided only by one or more vertical tearings, so-called “zips.” In a programmatic statement which Newman wrote for the abstract expressionists, he wrote that art must leave the beautiful, and strive instead for the sublime. Paintings should put one in touch with the feeling of the absolute (Newman: 2002, 113). Lyotard is one of those who have attempted to articulate philosophically what it is that makes Newman’s pictures sublime. It is clear that it is no longer the evocation of mighty, almost threatening natural events that awakens the sublime experience. But even without depiction, something occurs that corresponds to the double movement of the sublime in the pictures. On the one

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hand, one must hold fast to Burke’s insight that the sublime enjoyment must be understood against the background of a threat of absence or emptiness, since there is no guarantee that something will happen – total emptiness is also a possibility, as in the empty canvas on which the artist has not yet worked (Lyotard: 1989, 198). The simple language of Newman’s pictures comes threateningly close to such an emptiness, almost like a tremendum element in the contrast-harmony. The picture comes close to being an expressionless thing. But something important also happens in these pictures, even if it is produced by simple means: the zip bores through the monocolor surface, and the production of meaning by the painting has taken its first fundamental step, so to speak. This is how the tremendum gives way to the fascinans. Lyotard believes that the zip denotes something so elementary that it cannot be caught in any linguistic system, viz. the simple but remarkable fact that something happens (1989, 197). The fundamental event can thus resemble the primal action by the creator God who initiates time and creates ex nihilo. The Bible relates that God’s first creative action was to draw a boundary and thereby divide the sky from the sea and the dry land from the waters of the deep. Lyotard holds that the zips bear a religious meaning: “There is something holy about the line in itself” (1989, 246). Perhaps Newman’s zip has something of this primal event, or perhaps it can at any rate awaken a feeling that something equally elementary and fundamental is happening. Although the abstract paintings do not represent the same overwhelming power as the Romantic pictures of nature, they undoubtedly contain something of the contrast-harmony. This ambivalence, which is so central to the experience of the sublime, is directly relevant to the holy, which also entails an experience full of tension, or a contrast-harmony. Otto sees the similarity between the sublime and the holy as more than a chance coincidence. Since the holy appears in our cultural and historical world, it cannot avoid entering relationships of varying closeness with other phenomena. Accordingly, although the holy has an origin of its own which is different from the sublime, the two have grown together over the course of history to form one internally linked entity. Otto calls a coalesced unity of this kind a schema. Not only does the holy contribute its own resonance to a sublime experience; the sublime and the holy compenetrate one another : “the inward and lasting character of the connection in all the higher religions does prove that ‘the sublime’ too is an authentic ‘schema’ of ‘the holy’” (Otto: 1976, 46; 1979, 61). This close link between the holy and the sublime has however another, much more disturbing aspect, which awakens an echo of what I discussed in the previous chapter under the heading of the sacred and its ambivalent position between the foreign and the familiar. There are also many recent works of art which play on the shocking and sublime effect produced by defying moral boundaries and thus aestheticizing evil. It is obvious that the enormous Nazi assemblies in Nuremberg must have kindled an intoxicating

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feeling of power and powerlessness, dread and titillation. But the sublime event most spoken of in our time is the two planes which slowly crash in grainy film into the enormous Twin Towers: the inconceivable violence in the explosions and the huge buildings which collapse, the destructive forces which are unleashed, and yet the magnetic attraction of the event, the fascination in watching it all at a safe distance. The German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen has said: What happened – we must all readjust our brains – was the greatest work of art ever. That minds carry out something in an action that we musicians can only dream of, that human beings practice like mad for one concert for ten years, with total fanaticism, and then die. This is the greatest work of art which has existed anywhere in the cosmos. Just imagine what happened. This means that there are people who are so concentrated on a performance, and then five thousand people are chased into the resurrection in one single moment. I could not have created that. Compared with that, we are nothing.3

This statement soon became a catastrophe for the composer. Concerts were canceled and the man was declared undesirable. He attempted a retraction: all he had intended was to point out the destructive aspect of art. Although his choice of time and place was certainly unfortunate, his statement nevertheless serves as a reminder of the ethical aspects which art entails. To forbid the sublime is certainly not the path we should take, nor would such a prohibition deprive it of its attractive power – the opposite effect is more likely. In other instances, however, the sublime can have a humanizing power (as in Kant) and can awaken piety and receptivity to the holy (as in Burke, Lyotard, and Otto). The insight into this doubleness which inheres in the sublime counsels reflection and caution. It is decisively important that the holy can and should be distinguished from the sacred; but as Tillich has pointed out, the sacred can surely not be cut out completely. The best and the worst in this experience have the same experiential source. The interstice continues to exist.

3 Quoted from the Norwegian newspaper Verdens Gang, September 18, 2001 (Eng. trans.: B. McN.).

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7. Interstice and Weak Holiness My investigation of what I regard as central aspects of the holy and of the forms of its manifestation has been based on two points: first, that the holy is ambiguous, in the sense that it comes into action in the field of tension in between; and secondly, that the holy, not least in our own days, should be considered as a weak phenomenon. One of the most tenacious problems with the classical theories about the holy is their tendency to draw clear and unambiguous boundaries between the holy and the profane, between the earthly and the wholly other, between pure and impure. These are the consequences of what I have called the modern predilection for dichotomies. Without dismissing the value of these dichotomies, I have sought to demonstrate that the divisions must not be absolutized, since that would in fact block the appearance of the holy. The holy cannot be neatly separated from the profane, because the everyday provides the field in which the holy can appear. Nor can the holy be cultivated in a pure form without taking account of the sacred, because the sacred gives the holy something of its necessary deep resonance. If the holy can be understood as an interstice of this kind, it seems to lead to something like our second motif, viz. its weakness. This too is a concept which does not simply harmonize with many of the established ideas about epiphanies and hierophanies. Nevertheless, it seems to reflect both a historical undercurrent and a contemporary understanding. I have emphasized the everyday as the area where the holy appears. The everyday is first and foremost the close at hand, the ordinary, the quiet life – and in the very heart of this, the holy makes its cautious entrance from time to time. A weak phenomenon demands a certain caution in our theoretical approach, and this demand is further underlined by the fact that it is so difficult to pin the holy down as one thing or another, as external or internal, as transcendent or immanent, as wholly other or mundane – since it is located between the established categories. In the present chapter, I shall concentrate on a discussion of philosophical and psychological positions, showing the role that the interstice and weak holiness can play in this context. This kind of thinking attempts to occupy a middle ground between two positions which we shall examine first.

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Holy Responsibility In a way which we today probably find strange, Otto found it natural to take his starting point in the idea of the moral or moralistic note of the holy, which was dominant in his time. This starting point is connected with the position held by Kant’s thinking in German culture: Kant links the holy to the will and the categorical imperative. One of Otto’s first methodological steps was therefore to put the ethical connotations in parenthesis (epoch) in order thus to penetrate into the innermost core of the holy, viz. the numinous. This has often led to the conclusion that Otto breaks every link between the holy and the ethical sphere, but this is not completely correct, since he has more to say than this. Although the holy does not entail a moral law of its own, it does at any rate entail a very specific value. What Otto calls the augustum refers to the special value which radiates from the encounter with the numinous (Otto: 1979, 67 f). Other philosophers have wished to make a much closer link between the holy and ethics, or more precisely, between the holy and responsibility. The Czech phenomenologist Jan Patocˇka and the Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas agree that an indissoluble link between holiness and responsibility has been established in the Jewish-Christian tradition.

From the Sacred to the Ego’s Responsibility Patocˇka adopts his basic understanding of the human person from Heidegger. Both see the primary responsibility of the human person in connection with taking charge of his existence. This, however, is a responsibility from which we typically try to flee all the time – and we usually flee into the banalized everyday. We act like other people and behave like other people. We forget ourselves by becoming absorbed in the superficial life. And we do this, although our conscience is fully aware of what we are really called to, even in the midst of an everyday life which appears more and more profane. However, the profane time is separated from the holy time, the solemnity or feast. According to Patocˇka, this very separation contains an invitation not only to flee from ourselves, as we do in everyday life too, but even to abandon the whole of the everyday life and to be taken captive by something else, to be lifted off, out of ourselves. In the holy time, we can devote ourselves to what Patocˇka calls the sacred or the demonic (Patocˇka: 1988, 124 f). What Patocˇka has in mind by such concepts is above all the orgiastic feast as Durkheim describes this and which has been investigated in even more radical forms by Caillois and Bataille. The point of the feast is to turn norms, laws, and taboos upside down. Patocˇka understands the sacred dimension as a radical antithesis to all the profane order, and its ecstasy is linked to the act of transgressing taboos, not least in the sexual realm. In the sacred experience,

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we are ready to forget our responsibility, and also to forget the everyday life in which we suffer under restrictive laws, where we work and toil, get bored, and seek distraction. According to Patocˇka, the problem with the sacred is linked to the human person’s alienation in relation to his own self: the sacred helps to separate the human person from what he is truly meant to be, viz. a responsible being. This is because the sacred merely radicalizes tendencies in profane everyday life: the flight from one’s own responsibility into the stereotyped views of the masses. The sacred feast does not only snatch the human person out of this escape route, but also hands the person over to alien powers beyond its control. To give oneself up in favor of something that is other and stronger is an effective way of putting a stop to individual freedom and responsibility (Patocˇka: 1988, 126 f). Such sacred feasts do not yet amount to religion in the proper sense of the term – and when Patocˇka speaks of the “proper sense,” refers primarily to the Jewish-Christian religious tradition. Religion establishes itself through an overcoming or integration of the sacred: This act of establishing a relationship to responsibility, i. e. to the sphere of human genuineness and truth, is probably the nucleus of all religion. Religion is not the sacred itself, nor does it come into existence directly from the experience of sacred orgies and ceremonies; rather, it appears at the point where the sacred qua demonic is explicitly overcome. The sacred experiences at once pass over into religious experiences, where the attempt is made to integrate the responsibility into the sacred or to regulate the sacred by means of responsibility (Patocˇka: 1988, 127. Eng. trans.: B. McN.).

Religion integrates the sacred into responsibility. Religion thus entails a reevaluation of the sacred, or more precisely, a reshaping of the sacred into the holy. One decisive presupposition here is that the delimited ego appears on the historical scene. Patocˇka holds that that which most profoundly forms the ego as an individual is not primarily self-consciousness and the ability to reflect on oneself, but the acceptance by the ego of responsibility for one’s own life. This acceptance of responsibility has two consequences: first, the ego can relate soberly to everyday life without incurring the loss of its own self, and secondly, the holy is internalized. In other words, the holy is not first and foremost a power which comes from outside, but it is inextricably linked to our inner life and to our responsible self-control. The trajectory from Paul to Augustine is particularly eloquent here. If the ego is to become a responsible individual, it must be confronted with a significant other, i. e. the invisible God who sees me and sees what is within me. To be confronted with the face of God entails self-examination and confession, both of which are essential for the emergence of a delimited, self-reflecting and responsible ego (cf. Ricœur : 1967, 50; 84 f). This means that the mysterium tremendum also changes its meaning. It is no longer a quality of orgiastic ecstasy, but the terrible weight which is ascribed to responsibility, when one is

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confronted by an inaccessible but absolute God. Derrida points out that the way in which Patocˇka emphasizes one particular personal experience of God as the moment in which responsibility is born, parts company with Heidegger’s understanding of responsibility. For Heidegger, the voice of the conscience is not linked to any specific human or religious authority, but is in fact merely an expression of the human person’s uncanny encounter with his own self. Derrida develops Patocˇka’s thinking in a way which is very close to Levinas and his concept of holiness (Derrida: 1995, 32 f; 46 f). Let me therefore turn to Levinas.

From the Sacred to Responsibility for the Other As I have indicated, Levinas introduces the very fundamental distinction between sacred and holy, a distinction which is based on the same reasons that Patocˇka adduces. The holy is linked exclusively to responsibility vis--vis the Other ; the sacred is linked to pagan, primitive religiosity – the numinous – or religious escape routes from responsibility, – which Levinas terms “enthusiasm” (Levinas: 1990b, 14). This sheds an interesting light on Otto’s concept of holiness: Levinas agrees with him that the holy is linked to the wholly other, but is highly critical of the way the numinous is entangled with the sacred. Echoing Patocˇka’s critique, Levinas’ accusation is that the sacred entails violence against human freedom: The numinous or the Sacred envelops and transports man beyond his powers and wishes, but a true liberty takes offense at this uncontrollable surplus. The numinous annuls the links between persons by making persons participate, albeit ecstatically, in a drama not brought about willingly by them, an order in which they founder. This somehow sacramental power of the Divine seems to Judaism to offend human freedom and be contrary to the education of man, which remains the action of a free being (Levinas: 1990b, 14).

Since Otto has largely detached the numinous from ethical evaluations, he has little to say in response to such accusations. But Levinas is also attacking the orgiastic feasts which Patocˇka criticized, and more generally, all forms of religious enthusiasm. It is clear that the sacred must be understood primarily as a force which snatches the human person away from himself and his own responsibility. It is only in this way that it does violence to human freedom. Levinas’ negative description of the sacred also lets us glimpse the outlines of his positive concept of the holy. The freedom of the human person is his basic presupposition. Without freedom, there is no responsibility ; without responsibility, there is no holiness. This freedom also entails that the human person is separate from God and independent of him. Only where human freedom prevails is it possible for the human person to enter into a responsible relationship to God. Levinas is aware that this involves a risk – it comes

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dangerously close to atheism. For when God is separated so radically from the human world, the human person can also choose to ignore God completely (Levinas: 1990b, 15). The holy is not something that lies hidden behind or in things. It asserts itself in ethics, and only in ethics. Ethics is the spectacles through which the holy becomes visible – or, as Levinas puts it, ethics is the optics for all that we know about God. Ethics is not anchored in an inner moral law, but begins when one is exposed to the Other, who comes from the heights as something divine. The Other summons me to assume responsibility and puts questions to my self-centered righteousness. The holy entails precisely this responsibility which has its origin in the face of the Other (1990b, 17 f). Patocˇka and Levinas agree that the concept of holiness is indissolubly linked to freedom and responsibility, but there is an important shift in the emphasis: Where Patocˇka underlines the integration and internalization of the responsibility, Levinas unceasingly insists that the source of the responsibility lies outside ourselves, in the Other.

In Between I and Thou I have devoted much energy to demonstrating that the logic behind the separation between the holy and the profane does not correspond to the inner dynamic in the holy. The logic of separation which is consolidated thanks to the contributions by Durkheim, Otto, and Eliade resurfaces in the way in which Patocˇka and Levinas think. Patocˇka speaks of everyday life as something banal, and the profane is sheer toil and emptiness; and Levinas explicitly supports the separation between the human person and God, between the everyday and the holy. It is as if none of these thinkers is open to the possibility of a tertium quid, perhaps because they accept Aristotle’s “law of the excluded middle”: a strict logic of either/or where a third possibility is regarded as impossible. This is simply another way of continuing the modern basic understanding of the precedence of the dichotomies. But is it not precisely in this third dimension, in between the two others, that the holy dwells, i. e. precisely in the excluded middle? Levinas and Patocˇka hope to purge the sacred from the holy, but they exclude the tension between the holy and the sacred to which I have attempted to hold fast (see ch. 4 above). I have spoken of the interstice as lying between the wholly other and the everyday, between the familiar and the foreign, between that which is at home and the uncanny, and between the holy and the sacred. Let me now indicate two further ways in which the holy appears as an “in between.” Patocˇka belongs to the modern tradition in which the individual ego is the center of anthropology ; with Levinas, a certain social dimension comes into the picture. Others, such as Hegel and Marx, give the priority to the collective rather than to the individual. Martin Buber, perhaps the most important Jewish dialogical philosopher, holds that although the two extreme positions

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are deep-rooted, they are unsatisfactory. Where the individual occupies the center, we are left with only a partial explanation of the human person; where priority is given to society, or indeed to the masses, the human person is understood only as a part (Buber : 2002, 237 f). Buber’s third alternative takes its place between these two: the source of the human person’s humanness is the interstice between human persons, “the sphere of between” (2002, 241). This interstice has something of a fluid character, since it is not a thing – though this does not mean that it is nothing. It is neither I nor Thou, although an encounter presupposes that each individual exists separately and autonomously. Nor is it an undifferentiated unity that embraces the two; this is why Buber takes a critical attitude to mysticism, where the separation between the human I and the divine Thou is completely obliterated (Buber : 1944, 83 – 87). The sphere between demands both an I and a Thou, but it belongs to neither of them. The sphere between transcends them both. It is interesting that Buber seems to hold fast to belief in the simple meaning of life, i. e. the everyday, while at the same time understanding that the I can never be separated from the Thou. Although he is not primarily interested in the Other, he does not give the priority to the self. He is concerned with the encounter, or “the sphere of between” – a concept which signals the kind of intimacy with the holy that I have sketched above. Buber holds that our relationship to our own selves and to the world is made possible only by the encounter with a Thou. In this sense, the encounter is the moment in which creation takes place: “In the beginning is a relation” (1944, 18). This relationship is not one-sided and asymmetrical, as in Levinas. It is reciprocal and is based on the interplay between I and Thou, between passivity and activity. Not only is the human being penetrated by the I-Thou relationship; he also relates to his environment by means of an I-It relationship. When I am confronted by an It, grammar itself shows that this involves a third-person perspective. The It has a fixed position in a network of time and space and can be regarded as a collection of qualities. Such a way of looking is of course employed for instruments and objects, and in objectifying science, other persons too can appear in this perspective, as “he” or “she,” not as a Thou whom I address and who addresses me. But when I-Thou is called “the sanctity of the primary word,” this not only denotes a qualitative difference from I-It, but also hints at the religious horizon which comes into view only in such an encounter (1944, 9). Here, two persons come into contact with each other, and this contact is the origin of all genuine dialogue. But just as other human beings can appear in an It-perspective, it is also possible for animals, plants, and even stones to appear as a Thou (Buber : 2002, 12). The decisive point is that one is addressed and that one responds to the address which proceeds from the Thou. In this regard, Buber has a much more inclusive and, in my opinion, a more fruitful view of the Thou than Levinas’ exclusive humanism. The holy interstice can appear in a larger field.

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But what about responsibility, which plays such a decisive role for Patocˇka and Levinas? It certainly does not disappear from Buber’s field of vision; rather, it is envisaged here in a broader ethical sense. Responsibility follows the logic of dialogue (cf. respond – responsibility). Its origin is in the sphere of “between,” and it is connected with the address and the demand that one reply, in word and in action. Buber writes that responsibility does not mean (as Patocˇka may have thought) that the I masters itself and the situation, but that the situation takes hold of us and demands our response (more or less as Levinas envisages it). Concrete reality is placed in our hands and we are answerable for the way in which we respond to a look from a dog, or a child who takes our hand, or the needs of the people around us (Buber : 2002, 20). Since the holy takes place between what he calls the “holy primary words,” “I” and “Thou,” Buber too believes that the holy is inseparable from ethical responsibility. Buber sees such encounters as a part of ordinary, everyday life. Does this mean that the I-Thou relationship is subject to the same “falling” which Heidegger so strongly emphasizes? Buber appears to share Heidegger’s view. This means that the I-Thou does not exist permanently as a stable structure which we are simply told to adopt. The I-Thou relationship is an event which glimmers when the interstice opens up, and then dies down. The Thou is doomed to decline into an It, to a him or a her. Heidegger has pointed out the remarkable dynamic in our fundamental praxis and societal points of orientation, a dynamic in which the very same mechanisms which open the world for us also close it (see ch. 2 above). Buber may share this conclusion, but he understands the premises differently. He explains the decline by pointing to the intensity which the I-Thou relationship entails, an almost unbearable intensity : “It is not possible to live in the present. Life would be quite consumed if precautions were not taken to subdue the present speedily and thoroughly.” In order to escape from this consuming presence, nothing more is needed than to let oneself be caught up again in everyday life. Buber continues: “We only need to fill each moment with experiencing and using, and it ceases to burn” (Buber : 1944, 34). Holiness dwells in the interstice. Indeed, holiness is the interstice between IThou, the holy primary word. Buber says: “The extended lines of relations meet in the eternal Thou” (1944, 75). This formulation has given rise to considerable discussion. It is not entirely clear what model he has in mind here, especially since he adds in a corresponding passage that the Thou is the place where all the parallel lines intersect. The “parallel lines” seem to refer to the parallel between address and response in encounters. He may perhaps mean that our life is involved in many I-Thou relationships, with many parallel lines going in all directions, but all these lines meet in a nodal point which is the very embodiment of the interstice as such, viz. the eternal Thou. For Buber, the eternal Thou and the holy primary words “I” and “Though” are not separated from the everyday. On the contrary, they are anchored in

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this world, the only world that we have, the world which we know from daily life. Buber is therefore opposed to every form of religious exoticism that attempts to lift us out of everyday life – precisely that sacred power which Patocˇka calls “demonic” and Levinas calls “enthusiasm.” Buber speaks candidly in one passage about his own earlier understanding of the holy. He sought religious experience that was characterized by the exceptional or the extraordinary which was able to lift him out of everyday life, until a thoroughly everyday event – a powerful encounter – put a stop to this understanding: Since then I have given up the “religious” which is nothing but the exception, extraction, exaltation, ecstasy ; or it has given me up. I possess nothing but the everyday out of which I am never taken. The mystery is no longer disclosed, it has escaped or it has made its dwelling here where everything happens as it happens. I know no fullness but each mortal hour’s fullness of claim and responsibility (Buber : 2002, 16).

The attitude we find in Buber’s sketch of a positive understanding of the holy is different from what we find in both Patocˇka and Levinas. Patocˇka speaks of religion as a “mastering” or “overcoming” of the everyday ; and for Levinas, the confrontation with the Other becomes so sublime that it does not permit any solid anchoring in the everyday. But for Buber, piety consists in nothing other than a particular attentiveness to the ordinary encounter. It is perhaps somewhat surprising that Buber admits that Otto is right up to a point: “Of course God is the ‘wholly Other’; but he is also the wholly Same, the wholly Present. Of course He is the Mysterium Tremendum that appears and overthrows; but He is also the mystery of the self-evident, nearer to me than my I” (Buber : 1944, 79). The important point here is to grasp the balance which Buber is looking for – between the wholly Other and the Same – a balance which outlines the contours of the holy as an unsettled interstice between the foreign and the familiar. Nevertheless, the emphasis lies on the latter : in our context, Buber’s special contribution is his demonstration of this weak manifestation of the holy, as an interstice, in the heart of everyday life.

Between the Inner and the Outer Let me also outline another field for the holy, as it is explored in psychodynamic literature, where once again the decisive role is played by the space in between. A number of studies have shown that Donald Winnicott’s model can be transposed to a large extent to the field of religion, although he himself only hints at its relevance (cf. e. g. Rizutto: 1979). Its direct relevance from a phenomenological perspective is also linked to his emphasis on what he calls “experience,” and more precisely “the intermediate area of experience” (Winnicott: 1991, 18). This experience opens the door to

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symbolism. “The child,” says Winnicott, “uses the position in between himself or herself and the mother or the father, whoever it is, and there whatever happens is symbolic of the union or the non-separation of these two separate things.” As I have shown in chapter 6 above, the symbol is a play between different but related levels of meaning or “things.” Winnicott immediately goes on to mention the religious meaning of experience and of symbols: “It would also perhaps put religion once more into the experience of those who in fact have grown up out of the concept of miracles” (Winnicott: 1990, 134; my italics). How, more precisely, does Winnicott envisage this “in between”? Much of our thinking about the relationship between the inner and the outer is indebted to the inheritance from Descartes. Although Descartes’ dualism has been strongly criticized, few believe that we should altogether abandon the distinction between the inner and the outer ; rather, we should reinterpret their relationship. In the psychoanalytic tradition, for example, one can draw a distinction between the inner life of the psyche – the place of the imagination and creativity, feelings and instincts, conflicts and satisfaction – and external reality, which involves objective and universally accessible states of affairs, where the objects have permanence and are not under the sovereignty of the life of the psyche. It is assumed that a well developed adult can draw this boundary with the help of a kind of membrane. But is this only a question of either/or? And in that case, what about the ambiguous character of the holy? Winnicott’s special contribution is to insist on a third entity, often called “transitional space” or “potential space,” which is furnished by so-called “transitional objects” or “transitional phenomena” such as dolls, teddy bears, or security blankets. The transitional space is developed in a stage after what Freud calls the primary narcissism, where the child does not yet understand its own inner sphere as separate from an outer, permanent reality. As a compensation for the dawning discovery that the relationship to its mother also entails absence and separation, a space is formed with transitional objects which symbolically refer to the mother’s presence but also incorporate a part of a separate reality. Playing with transitional objects, the entire transitional space functions as a shock absorber against the harsh realities; it allows the child to try out and gradually get accustomed to the outer sphere. For the child, a doll is not so much an available object or a mental entity, as a piece of outer reality which continually coalesces with inner creativity. The transitional space is necessary in order to give meaning to reality, and this is meant to keep the inner and the outer separate, while at the same time linking them meaningfully. The transitional phenomena are neither completely subjective nor completely objective, neither “I” nor “not I” – or, more generally, neither completely familiar nor totally foreign. We find the first manifestation of children’s play in this space, which however does not disappear when the child loses interest in its teddy bear and dolls. Play is the

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basis of the entire sphere of human culture, and Winnicott refers in particular here to art and religion (e. g. Winnicott: 1990, 36). The central question for Winnicott is why and how this transitional space is established in the child’s development. As Freud has shown, before the child learns to relate to other independent objects, it experiences itself as the center of a narcissist universe (Winnicott: 1990, 23). Naturally, it is entirely dependent on its mother, but it does not perceive this as a relationship to a separate individual. Rather, the mother appears as an uninterrupted extension of the child itself. The child experiences itself as omnipotent, as if its surroundings are subject to its will. Freud says that this is indistinguishable from how magic was understood in pre-modern cultures: when one thinks of the mother’s breast, it becomes visible, in the same way as magic formulae produce their effects. Freud also made much of the agreement on this point between “primitive religions” and primary narcissism. But just as the child is gradually disillusioned by testing out reality, and increasingly perceives the reality of external authorities (father and mother) and the world’s independence, so too the history of humanity outgrows primitive ideas. First, it develops into monotheistic religions, and then finally becomes mature, i. e. adopts a scientific attitude devoid of illusions (Freud: 2001, 103 ff). Winnicott’s transitional space and transitional objects help to fill out a stage of development and a sphere of reality which Freud did not see. Interestingly enough, this leads in two central points to a revision of Freud’s parallel to religion. First, Winnicott does not see illusion as a concept with negative overtones. It is not only an unavoidable stage which one must pass through; it is also a permanent trait which emphasizes the creative and subjective element in all cultural experience, from the simple game to the religious ritual. All such experiences are sustained by a necessarily subjective and creative element. Secondly, Winnicott agrees that the infant’s relationship to the mother’s breast resembles magic, but that which is replaced by transitional objects is neither magic nor realism, but something in between: “The transitional object is never under magical control like the internal object, nor is it outside control as the real mother is” (Winnicott: 1991, 13; cf. Rizutto: 1979, 180). It is well known that Freud regards religion as an illusory, infantile consolation which ought to be overcome in favor of reason – “our god Logos” (Freud: 2004c, 162). Winnicott’s discovery of the interstice allows a much more sympathetic, almost phenomenological interpretation of religion in general and of the holy in particular. He himself points out the religious relevance of his concept of transitional objects. The transitional object functions as a symbol, a meaningful entity which unites two spheres. In the same way, the eucharist too unites these two spheres: For instance, if we consider the wafer of the Blessed Sacrament, which is symbolic of the body of Christ, I think I am right in saying that for the Roman Catholic

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community it is the body, and for the Protestant community it is a substitute, a reminder, and is essentially not, in fact, actually the body itself. Yet in both cases it is a symbol (Winnicott: 1991, 8).

He is not interested in the confessional differences, but in what in both cases allows the Host to be considered as holy, i. e. as a transitional object. The eucharist is much more than a physical object: it is also bread and wine, but these elements are made holy only when they are linked to something more and something other, viz. the body of Christ. For both Christian confessions, the eucharist is a central expression of the holy, and we can therefore conclude that Winnicott offers us a psychological approach to the holy via the understanding of the transitional object. Transitional objects set aside the usual distinction between outer and inner, between that which is given and that which is produced: “Of the transitional object it can be said that it is a matter of agreement between us and the baby that we will never ask the question: ‘Did you conceive of this or was it presented to you from without?’ The important point is that no decision on this point is to be expected. The question is not to be formulated” (Winnicott: 1991, 17). Such a prescription can be seen as a deprecating gesture – a “not to be formulated” that is all too closely linked to the taboo. If this is to be understood as a taboo, it is not an arbitrary and repressive prohibition, but a constructive protection of the precarious vulnerability that surrounds the holy. The specific nature of the holy as a phenomenon is suffocated as soon as one imposes the choice between seeing it either as a subjective illusion or as an objective reality. The holy is not found only outside us or inside us; it dwells in the transitional space between inner and outer. In this way, Winnicott has supplied a precise psychological correlative to the holy which corresponds to the special structure of the mystery.

From Strong Sacredness to Weak Holiness I indicated above that to place the holy in the interstice is to put it in an exposed situation. When we attempt to integrate the holy into our theoretical categories, we find that it cannot be finally assigned to the one rather than to the other. We recall here Mary Douglas’ understanding of the impure: in the same way, the holy cannot be assigned a clear and unambiguous place in the system. If we are to do justice to this transitory character, we must renounce the most robust way of pinning a phenomenon down, viz. by identifying its clear and delimited place in the universe of our understanding. The holy appears in the very heart of the everyday, but without quite ceasing to be something more and something other. This exposed position entails that the holy is a weak phenomenon. Buber not only takes account of our responsibility, which is linked to the

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holy ; he also manages to preserve something of the ambiguity of the holy – its “in between.” In the present context, it is also interesting that he notes how such an emphasis on the interstice makes the holy weak. He is interested, not in the great revelations of the history of religion, its hierophanies or epiphanies, but in the quiet moments in which something becomes visible: “The mighty revelations to which the religions appeal are like in being with the quiet revelations that are to be found everywhere and at all times” (Buber : 1944, 116 f). Buber holds that each of the various revelations comes at its own time in the historical process whereby humanity matures. The transition from such strong revelations to weak holiness can be understood in many ways. Either, as Buber holds, history itself changes, or it is our interpretation that changes. There is also a third position: the weak holiness is a new interpretation which has been made possible by our historical position, which brings out a dimension of the holy which has always existed, but which had remained rather in the dark. It is in the last sense that I emphasized in the introduction the more open and less ambiguous structures of the late modern period, which might accommodate weak holiness. One philosopher who attaches importance to a similar perspective is Gianni Vattimo. He speaks of “weak thinking”. He claims that one must hold together, in one profound look, the history of the West, the history of Being, and the message in the Christian revelation that God becomes a human being, the incarnation. Each of these perspectives sheds light on the other, because both of them determine the way in which we interpret our contemporary reality. Vattimo understands the history of existence in the light of Heidegger’s philosophy. The usual view of the history of philosophy sees a chain of human interpretations of reality, which succeed one another in various phases; but Heidegger claims that it is rather the case that reality itself, Being itself, shows itself from various sides. Sometimes, Being is mostly hidden, at other times it is relatively evident. Being expresses itself through the various historical ways in which human beings think about it. In the West, this thinking is influenced by metaphysics, with clear underlying structures such as substance, logic, subject, and will – what Vattimo calls “strong structures.” In the course of the last century or so, from Nietzsche’s time onwards, these structures have become ever less credible: Being is not a gigantic object. According to this Heideggerian idea, such development leads to what Vattimo calls a “weakening,” where thinking becomes less self-assured, less possessive, and more listening. Thought has become weak (Vattimo: 1999, 29 – 35). But Heidegger also indicates the consequences this has for our thinking about God. In the middle ages, Christianity was pressed into metaphysical frameworks which were foreign to it, and God was reduced to an absolute being, as the ground and beginning of all that exists. When the earthly understanding of reality gradually challenged this basic view, God was reshaped into the wholly other – an idea which Vattimo finds in Levinas (1999, 39; 82 ff) and, we can add, in Otto. But neither of these views of God fully

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accepts the center of the Christian faith, viz. the incarnation. In order to understand what the Christ event means, Vattimo turns to Girard. As I showed in chapter 5 above, Girard does not regard the event of the cross as yet another repetition of the motif of violent sacrifice, even if the Christian tradition has seen it in this light. On the contrary, the cross expresses the end of sacred violence. Vattimo thinks that if the Church continues to speak of Jesus’ death on the cross as a sacrifice, this can only mean that Christians have not yet liberated themselves from the strong structures of metaphysics, with an absolute God who demands a violent sacrifice. For Vattimo, the two trajectories come together precisely in this point: on the one hand, the weakening of the metaphysical structures, and on the other hand, God’s own weakening, viz. his becoming a vulnerable child and his handing himself over to death on a cross. Paradoxically enough, it is Nietzsche’s critique of religion that makes this link possible: the death of God (on the cross) also means that one must let the metaphysical ideas about God (as absolute substance) die out. Both trajectories are held together in what is called kenosis (literally, “self-emptying”), viz. God’s renunciation of his strong structures and becoming one with human beings (Phil 2:7). This happens, not out of compelling necessity, but as a consequence of God’s essence, which is love: […] the incarnation, that is, God’s abasement to the level of humanity, what the New Testament calls God’s kenosis, will be interpreted as the sign that the non-violent and non-absolute God of the post-metaphysical epoch has as its distinctive trait the very vocation for weakening of which Heideggerian philosophy speaks (Vattimo: 1999, 39).

Vattimo agrees with Patocˇka and Levinas in criticizing the sacred, but he does not replace it with any positive concept of holiness. This however does not prevent us from speaking of weak holiness in this Christian sense. More precisely, we can say that God’s incarnation entails a transition from strong sacredness to weak holiness. What I will call Vattimo’s weak holiness is relevant to more than just confessing Christians, because he also links this holiness to secularization. He does not see secularization as a threat to the Christian faith, but rather as a realization of this faith. When he speaks of secularization, he has in mind above all the weakening of metaphysical structures, and a transition from sacred violence to weak holiness and charity. In this perspective, one key element in secularization, viz. the Church’s renunciation of earthly property, is emblematic. From a more general perspective, one can also see a historical realization of kenosis in Christianity’s renunciation of its monopoly on the interpretation of reality in metaphysical terms. Accordingly, secularization means that no dogma is exempt from interpretation and doubt, and that no collection of moral laws can regulate all human conduct. All we have is charity and our fallible power of judgment. If this is the direction in which the late

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modern period is tending, it can be interpreted in a double light: partly as the weakening of Being, and partly as a salvation-historical event in which faith has become weak (Vattimo: 1999, 48).

Drawing Close to Weak Holiness The problem with the contemporary appearance of the holy is not so much its overpowering strength and might, but rather its modest appearance. And since the holy is not stable, but is ambiguous, ambivalent, stretched out in an “in between,” it is particularly challenging to approach it theoretically without forcing it into hard-and-fast categories. How can one approach the unapproachable? I have shown in chapter 4 above that the taboo can give us a first clue: for where the holy is acknowledged as a weak phenomenon, the taboo’s requirement of distance must be understood as a way to preserve the intimacy of the phenomenon. The original starting point of phenomenology is the desire to preserve “the thing itself” without distorting it or forcing it into conceptual corsets – and this means keeping the correct distance. This is why Husserl wanted only to describe, not to explain. In an even more radical attempt to get access to the phenomenon itself, Heidegger adopts the following understanding of the goal of phenomenology : “to let that which shows itself be seen from itself in the very way in which it shows itself from itself” (Heidegger : 1962, 58; 1993a, 34). We need not discuss everything that is meant by this difficult formulation, but one thing seems immediately obvious: phenomenology, in Heidegger’s version, attempts to preserve the manifestations on their own premises, to let them be as they are. What makes phenomenology demanding is the fact that, generally speaking, the phenomena do not show themselves in this way. They cover themselves up, e. g. under pressure from a busy everyday life (Heidegger : 1993a, 36). This means that to a certain extent all phenomena are ambiguous, since they are located in this strange “in between” where they both show themselves and cover themselves up. In his later writings, Heidegger increasingly realizes how Western thinking has done violence to the phenomena, and indeed to Being itself. Phenomenology, in contrast, has striven to cultivate another attitude, more open and receptive. This attitude involves clearing away established systems of understanding and refusing to apply well known formulae to the phenomena, preferring instead to pause reservedly at the phenomena. Heidegger gradually comes to describe his own work as thinking about Being rather than as phenomenology, but this does not prevent him from seeing the two as basically one: “If phenomenology is experienced and retained in this way, it can disappear as a title in favor of the matter of thinking, which has an openness that remains a secret” (Heidegger : 2000, 90. Eng. trans. B. McN.). According to Heidegger, the thing itself, the phenomenon which the primary intention of phenomenology is to preserve, is the secret, that which both

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shows itself and withdraws, that which eludes the “attacks” of philosophy – we might call it the holy. In one of the central passages where Heidegger writes about traces of the holy, he speaks precisely about the relationship in between heaven and earth, the gods and human beings (Heidegger : 1994, 271 f). Let me conclude with a brief sketch of some aspects of this reserved approach to the unapproachable, which Heidegger gradually comes to call Gelassenheit. Gelassenheit denotes an attitude which demands hands-off without being indifferent. The concept is first introduced as a counterweight to the technical world’s increasing demands for domination and control, calculation and analysis. One fundamental problem with the Western understanding of thinking is that it is linked to activity, as something governed by the will – and it is precisely for this reason that it shows signs of violence and assault. But to decide not to use one’s will is merely a new use of the will, which does not break out of the vicious circle. How can we let go of the thinking which is governed by the will? Heidegger seems to recommend that we wait: wait for the invitation that comes from the phenomena themselves (Heidegger : 2008, 30 – 35). More specifically, he understands such a waiting as maintaining an attentive position beyond both activity and passivity, between yes and no, directed at the interstice of that which shows itself and that which remains hidden (2008, 51). The “in between” of the secret – viz. the unsettled interstice between foreign and familiar – corresponds well to the holy. To approach the holy in keeping with Gelassenheit therefore means first and foremost to wait and to let something happen, not in order to attain a distant attitude, but rather in order to gain a distance which can put into correct perspective that which is near. The holy is not subject to my will or imagination: it comes to me from the outside, as a hint or an address. While such insights can at the least serve as reminders to phenomenology of the caution or sobriety which is appropriate, phenomenology on its part can continually point out a practicable way to approach the unapproachable. Buber showed how the holy, as he understood it, is more quiet than the classical epiphanies in the history of religion. Heidegger also writes about how the poet makes the inaccessible accessible by letting it take on form in words and song. This process of rendering accessible transforms the dangerous element in the holy – the power of chaos, the immediate – into something that is undangerous and mediated. But it does not become wholly familiar, for the holy always entails a tremor, albeit a quiet tremor (Heidegger : 1996, 72). Such a quiet or weak tremor can best be met with a reserved Gelassenheit.

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The Holy between Doubt and Faith Vattimo holds that kenosis means that God renounces his supreme exaltation, his metaphysical certainty. By emptying himself out in human history, God hands himself over to human beings in one special sense: the revelation becomes an object open to human interpretation. But interpretation has its clear limits; it has both historical and cultural presuppositions, and is also limited by the finite horizon of the human person. This has consequences not only for thinking about Being, but also for Christian dogmatics. Since no interpretation is perennially valid, no dogmas or sets of moral rules are immune to changes and doubts. The interpretations must be, and must remain, varied. This is why Vattimo has reservations about the Catholic Church. His faith is weak – he only believes that he believes (Vattimo: 1999, 70). The holy is weak, and it is located in between – obviously, it is a strong candidate for weak faith and strong doubt. Doubt as faith’s traveling companion is a decidedly modern phenomenon, although doubt has always been a part of human thinking. There are some structures underlying our way of life in modern society which open the door to a comprehensive uncertainty in an hitherto unprecedented way. Berger believes that modern pluralization, with its multiplication of the possibilities of choice, is one such structure. In pre-modern societies, there were a unified tradition, permanent authorities, and stable societal institutions, and this meant that people’s view of life could largely be taken for granted. In the modern period, there are no longer any societal recipes for the choices one is to take in life, for what one is to regard as valuable, and for what is holy. One is condemned to choose. Freedom brings with it a gnawing loneliness in the big questions, and doubt establishes itself as an inescapable part of the view of life itself (Berger : 1979, 24). Berger points out that when there is no longer any societal agreement that “We believe in x,” each individual must address himself and ask: “Do I truly believe in x?” In the absence of external frameworks which stabilize the view of life, one’s own experience becomes ever more important. But one’s own experience too is overtaken by doubt, since one cannot prove that one has not been the victim of an illusion (1979, 30 f). There are religious traditions and religious symbols in which one can find support, but such a support too needs to be chosen. And the consequence of the solitary choices is uncertainty. Doubt seems to follow the holy as its shadow.

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Doubt and Skepticism Tillich relies on the phenomenology of religion when he claims both that all faith must have an experiential content and that this content can be defined more precisely as the encounter with the holy. No matter how intense the selfmanifestation of the holy may be, human access to it remains limited, onesided, and finite. The holy points out beyond itself to something that transcends the limited horizon, to the infinite. The human person stands in an intermediate position: he is limited and finite, but comes into contact with the infinite in the encounter with the holy. This situation “in between” is a good soil for the growth of doubt, since the fact that we have a finite and one-sided access to the holy makes us uncertain about whether this one side truly points out beyond itself, or whether it rests on an illusion. One cannot confute this doubt and put it behind one, says Tillich. It must be accepted. Faith demands courage, since it involves placing one’s trust in something which in principle is open to doubt (Tillich: 1957, 16). Doubt is a part of faith. If doubt becomes what Tillich calls skepticism, it ends by rejecting religion. But this is certainly not a necessary outcome. The starting point of skepticism is that there are only two alternatives, either a pure and rock-solid faith or a total rejection. But these alternatives are misleading, since human faith quite simply tends to vacillate: There is no faith without an intrinsic “in spite of” […] This intrinsic element of doubt breaks into the open under special individual and social conditions. If doubt appears, it should not be considered as the negation of faith, but as an element which was always and will always be present in the act of faith (Tillich: 1957, 21 f).

Skepticism differs from doubt on some essential points. Whereas doubt should be considered a fruitful element of unrest in the inner dynamic of faith, skepticism entails something more radical. When doubt grows into a rigid attitude, it becomes skepticism, which in the full sense is an attitude that rejects all knowledge – religious, philosophical, or scientific. Skepticism is the rejection of knowledge of the world, of other people, and of God. Skepticism is a voice that sometimes finds expression in philosophical positions, especially in the modern period, but can equally often be observed as a voice within ourselves, as part of a larger ambivalence. Let us call this voice the skeptic. What underlying motives move the skeptic? The writings of the American philosopher Stanley Cavell reflect on precisely this question. He agrees with phenomenology and ordinary language philosophy that everyday life is the basis of our knowledge and of our experiences (see chapter 3 above). The skeptic often claims that we cannot know for certain whether the external world really exists, since we cannot refute the hypothesis that it is only a dream or an illusion; and he insists that we do not have certain proofs that other human beings are genuinely animate, since all we see is their bodily aspect, not

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their mind. Cavell’s question is whether our knowledge, which is based on the everyday, is sufficiently robust to refute the skeptic. His surprising conclusion is that the skeptic is in fact right – but at the same time, that skepticism is fundamentally wrong. The skeptic is right, because everyday language and the knowledge which belongs to it are vulnerable, and can collapse. We never have absolute guarantees that we understand each other, and this is why we encounter the boundaries of language from time to time: we become puzzles to each other, and we do not see the meaning in others’ gestures. More concretely, Cavell agrees with the skeptic that the existence of the external world and of the other person’s soul, to say nothing of the existence of God, falls outside the range of what the criteria of language can prove. The linguistic mechanisms of classification, the criteria, tell us what things are, but not whether things actually exist or not. This does not mean that Cavell doubts the existence of things. It means that ultimately, such an existence must be received and accepted – or, as Cavell prefers to say, must be acknowledged (Cavell: 1979, 45). And this is what the skeptic gets wrong. The skeptic makes wrong demands of human knowledge, demands based on a deeply anchored but misleading ideal of what it ought to be possible for human knowledge to attain. This ideal is an absolutely certain knowledge based on indisputable proofs and unshakable grounds. But we can have access to the world and to other people even if they do not satisfy the ideals of our knowledge. Our access is different than knowledge, perhaps even deeper : it is a matter of acknowledgement. In acknowledgement we come to realize the conditions of our world-relation and take responsibility for taking what this relation means to human life. Both Tillich and Cavell agree that human knowledge and faith are finite. Although our knowledge goes deep, it also has clear limits, and we must therefore include the possibility of doubt as one aspect of human existence. But it is precisely this possible doubt that the skeptic is unwilling to accept. The human person’s knowledge disappoints him, writes Cavell (1979, 44). If the skeptic does not get certain knowledge, he does not want to have any knowledge at all. It is an either/or. As soon as the skeptic realizes that absolutely certain knowledge cannot be attained, he opts for the total renunciation of any access to the world, others, and God. Both Tillich and Cavell want us to grasp that finitude is a part of the human condition. Such a condition does not preclude knowledge and faith, but it means that we must reconcile ourselves to the possibility of doubt. We must endure our finitude, realize and acknowledge what we can attain, without giving in to skeptical despair. In chapter 2 above, we encountered Weber’s thesis that the world has been disenchanted, inter alia as a consequence of science’s conquest of more and more spheres of our reality. There is one dominant standard of knowledge, which is dictated by science with its theories, its methodologies, and its proofs. If we suppose that the holy has a modest and fleeting form of appearance, a

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special attentiveness is needed in order to register it. If natural science’s demands for knowledge are allowed to set the standard for religious experience too, the holy will most assuredly collapse. And this is precisely what the skeptic does: he rejects the holy, since it does not live up to the demand for exact knowledge. But since he is unable to relinquish this demand, he must also renounce the knowledge which – despite its limitations – is in fact accessible to us. This is where nihilism becomes its fate. However, skepticism seems to be a natural reaction to the human person’s finite knowledge, and this is why it is doomed to recur. Like the Christian doctrine of original sin, skepticism is something that must be accepted as a part of us, while at the same time it is something that we must work upon. Cavell says that the oscillation between the unceasingly tempting voice of skepticism and a self-correcting voice is the form of confession, which has been immortalized in Augustine’s Confessions (Cavell: 1976, 71; cf. Mulhall: 2005).

Between Fundamentalism and Nihilism The price which must be paid for maintaining the ambiguous and weak character of the holy is an openness to doubt. Since it is weak, it renounces an indubitable metaphysical position. And the holy defies definitive classification, since it comes into play between the inner and the outer, between I and Thou, between the ordinary and the extraordinary. It is uncomfortable to remain open to doubt, because the lack of external security lays more responsibility on the shoulders of the individual. Not everyone accepts that the holy appears – perhaps due to the fragile way it appears – nor does everyone agree on its ethical, political, and epistemological consequences. Each one must stand up for his own views – not necessarily in isolation from others, but in such a way that he accepts his individual responsibility for agreeing or not agreeing with what a fellowship might think. A relationship to the holy on such premises is not immune to doubt, and it is understandable that not everyone can endure this. On the global scale, religious fundamentalism is one of the great challenges of our times. One might understand this as a position which operates with very simple boundary lines between “us” and “the others,” between good and bad, and between believers and unbelievers. Fundamentalism also refuses to accept that its ideological or religious standpoint is finite and fallible. Understood in this way, fundamentalism is certainly not the same thing as political Islam or Islamism – it is found both among Christians and among militant atheists.1 The term was in fact introduced by American Christians at the beginning of the twentieth century. All fundamentalists employ one particular strategy in 1 This is a broad understanding of fundamentalism. Some prefer to reserve this category for religous anti-secular movements. Cf. Brekke (2007), 8.

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their encounter with the world. Their over-simplified understanding of the world can be seen as a reaction against the fluid complexity of the late modern age. We can also add that fundamentalism can emerge as a counterpart to the attitude of skepticism; Eagleton holds this view. Nevertheless, both the fundamentalist and the nihilistic skeptic agree on the following premise: nothing has a value unless it is absolutely certain. Fundamentalism wants to take the holy into possession and claim its existence with absolute certainty. The problem is that the holy is extremely ambiguous, and does not guarantee this type of certainty. It does indeed manifest itself, but in a manner which eludes scientific proofs. The weak appearing of the holy is utterly unbearable for the nihilist and the fundamentalist. But whereas the fundamentalist believes that such a certainty exists, the nihilist denies it. For both, it is an allor-nothing choice (Eagleton: 2005, 26; 33). The holy appears on the border between what we can grasp and that which remains foreign to us: it appears to us and is yet an event initiated from outside. Without human limitations, the holy would not appear as we know it, as simultaneously foreign and familiar. Human life is permeated by remarkable realities: by “[…] fragility of our existence, its enigmatic origin, its unthinkable ambivalence,” to such an extent that we remain “darkly opaque to ourselves,” as Eagleton writes (2005, 16). Militant atheism is certainly not a satisfactory response to such mysteries. Equally, the “proofs of God’s existence” and the uncompromising apologetic are not experienced today as particularly convincing. Both these positions merely confirm and continue the dichotomy with which we are by now familiar. It is decisively important to get beyond this dichotomy. Ultimately, the holy must be accepted for what it is – a weak gesture against a religious horizon.

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Index of Names

Bataille, Georges 75 – 77 Baumann, Zygmunt 91 – 92 Berger, Peter 15, 58 Boff, Leonardo 126 – 127 Buber, Martin 19, 141 – 144 Bultmann, Rudolf 38 Burke, Edmund 132 – 133 Burkert, Walther 104 – 105

Lacan, Jacques 77 Lathrop, Gordon 125 Leeuw, Gerardus van der 27, 30, 36 Levinas, Emmanuel 54, 94, 140 – 141 Luther, Henning 57 – 59 Lyotard, Jean–FranÅois 134 – 135

Caillois, Roger 67, 112 – 113 Cavell, Stanley 95, 154 – 155

Otto, Rudolf 27 – 33, 94 – 95, 97, 130

Derrida, Jacques 20, 140 Douglas, Mary 78 – 79, 83 – 91 Durkheim, mile 23 – 25, 46, 81

Newmann, Barnett 134 – 136

Patocˇka, Jan 138 – 140 Pessoa, Fernando 127 Proust, Marcel 128

Eagleton, Terry 110 – 111, 156 Eliade, Mircea 33 – 41, 46, 116 – 117

Ricoeur, Paul 11, 90 – 91, 119 – 122 Robertson Smith, William 65 – 67 Rothko, Mark 134

Failing, Wolf–Eckart 59 – 60 Fenn, Richard, 18, 113 Freud, Sigmund 67 – 74, 96 – 100

Schütz, Alfred 52 – 55 Stockhausen, Karlheinz 136 Söderblom, Nathan 81 – 83

Girard, Ren 105 – 110

Taylor, Charles 47, 131 Tillich, Paul 112 – 113, 118 – 119, 124, 153 – 154

Habermas, Jürgen 16, 50, 54 Heimbrock, Hans–Günter 59 – 60 Heidegger, Martin 20, 44, 51, 62, 124 – 125, 150 – 151 Husserl, Edmund 25 – 28, 49 – 52 Jung, Carl Gustav 100 – 102 Kant, Immanuel 131 – 133 Kristeva, Julia 20, 74 – 75, 103

van Gennep, Arnold 58 Vattimo, Gianni 17, 148 – 150 Waldenfels, Bernhard 55 – 57, 59 Weber, Max 12 – 13, 32 – 33 Winnicott, Donald 144 – 147 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 18 – 19, 40, 48, 52, 80

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