Sacred and Profane

To utilize the notion of a sacred and a profane is to suggest an explanation and ordering of the world encountered that looks back to the Judeo-Christian traditions often claimed as the foundations of Western society. The term sacred and profane, bound together often as a figure of speech, suggests the defining differences between a number of oppositions: good and evil, Godly and Godless or diabolical, civilized and uncivilized or savage, worthwhile and worthless, white and black, and so forth. The absolute definition of such differences in relation to each other effectively divides the world into two: a “theory of everything,” which imposed a binary view. The sacred and the profane thus becomes the vector through which the world, as encountered, is interpreted and processed: that which is worthwhile is worthy of God's creation, and therefore a sacred endeavor, and can be said to be moral or ethically just, even healthy; that which profanes God's order is understood as morally bankrupt, a corrupting enterprise or influence, and is counter to all our best intentions. Consumer culture has long been considered to be in this latter category, with money seen as indexical to man's order rather than God's, and material items—which belong exclusively to the earthly and temporal realms—of no use, therefore, to the soul. In Titian's painting Sacred and Profane Love (1513–1514), the bride is positioned between the symbols of the transitory earthly love (that presumably overwhelm her on this, her wedding day) and the eternal heavenly love. The lesson is clear: only a love of God is sacred, and all other loves (of others, of objects) are merely distractions.

Such an orthodoxy of absolute ideas held sway during the years of theocratic and feudal governance and would only begin to wane with rationalism and the Enlightenment. Early battles between science and religion (as with Galileo and Darwin) can be read as attempts by the church to shore up the sacred and profane dichotomy via a retention and defense of a philosophical-theological binary divide, in the face of the fraying borders between the two caused by the advances in science. Any finding of worth in the material world detracted from the transcendental, metaphysical, mystical, and otherworldly modes of religion. Even scientists who sought to locate God's handiwork in material creation were accused of blasphemy—often with fatal consequences. The wrath that met such modest proposals can be accounted for by an acknowledgment of the usurping of the absolutism of the sacred and profane in favor of the idea of a dialectical relationship between the two: a thesis of the sacred, an antithesis of the profane. And yet even the scientific engagement with reality that informed rationalism suggested, or became the foundation for, a new religious impulse: that reality, even in its fallen state, still speaks of God's creation, and so the possibility of transcending this realm of the fallen and profane, to find the sacred, remains possible. Therefore, if reality is not itself entirely redeemed, it can be the site of grace, of learning, and of new paths to God.

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