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Religion and the Sacred
| Article
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10601 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1986 |
3,334 Words |
| Author
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Thomas Molnar
Thomas Molnar is professor of religion at Yale. He is the
author of The Pagan Temptation; The Decline of the
Intellectual; Sartre: Ideologue of Our Time; and God and
Knowledge of Reality. |
I see that my fellow lecturers have prepared a text and I alone will speak from notes. I am speaking from notes because I am presently writing a book on politics and the sacred, and I could not envisage sitting down and writing a paper for this symposium, because I would probably end up writing another book. Therefore, please permit me simply to tell you some of the things I'm thinking about the sacred in relation to religion.
We speak of the sacred primarily in a religious context. I do not necessarily believe in defining terms, but I would like to give a formulation of the sacred. I would call it the channel through which the transcendent or divine communicates with man. This communication is not only rational. It is much more because it addresses itself to man who is a sensate being. As the Council of Trent affirmed in the sixteenth century, men cannot really comprehend the abstractions and realities of faith without approaching the transcendent through their senses. Therefore, it is very important that the transcendent, which is by definition beyond us, and which has its own revelations, also addresses itself to us through the senses.
This is why we have sacred objects. A sacred object may be a cathedral (the plan of a cathedral is the plan of the crucifix), or a mosque (which has a different kind of a plan, but which speaks to the Moslem about the truth and the doctrines of his religion), or the sacred object can be an "audible object," such as Gregorian music, or it can be a work of art. It can be any object made sacred, such as the Pietra Negra, the Black Stone in the middle of the Roman Forum that was dug up a few decades ago. Any object can serve the sacred because it is not the object that is sacred; it is the flow of the transcendent through the sacred object that communicates the transcendent to man.
Therefore, every object, in a way, is an incarnate object, insofar as it incarnates the transcendent. For the Christian religion, the only thing that is really sacred is the body of Jesus Christ. Everything else depends on the contact that Christ had with the object, either in his own lifetime or later through the church that he founded. Every sacredness in Christianity comes through Jesus Christ, and in every other religion a similar phenomenon is observable: sacred objects derive their sacredness from something that goes beyond the object itself.
Now the sacred can manifest itself in every possible way through space. We tend to forget this reality in our modern, or post-modern world. Every great
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