An old man named Oedipus wanders into a strange country, guided by his young daughter Antigone. Neither of them has any idea where they are, except that they are somewhere near Athens. He is blind and crippled, stumbling along, leaning on a heavy stick. He is homeless. Because he carries a curse, he has been hounded out of his own home, and then out of one town after another. He stumbles to a mound of earth, trembling with fatigue, and sits there to catch his breath.
A man who belongs to the place soon turns up. He is horrified at the sight—a homeless old beggar, a complete stranger, sitting on a mound that is sacred to the gods. Of course Oedipus has no idea where he is sitting, but this makes no difference to the gods, or to the feelings of the people who live nearby. This is insufferable. The gods will be angry.
A sacred place is one you may not freely touch, or enter, or trample, or soil.
The horrified native tells the old beggar he is sitting on sacred earth, that he must move before he angers the gods into doing something dreadful to the people here. Other local people arrive, a whole chorus of them, shouting at him to move. They are terrified of the trouble his sacrilege will bring to them if he does not appease the gods.
Reluctantly, Oedipus will eventually shift himself on his heavy walking stick—but only to the boundary of the sacred area. There he will stay. But he must do more than move. The Chorus tell him:
The goddesses demand ritual purification
For trespassing on their holy ground. (466–67)
Oedipus realizes he must propitiate the deities whom the local people believe he has offended. Too weak himself, he will have his daughters perform the ceremony on his behalf. So ends the crisis of the sacred place, and so begins Sophocles’ last play about Oedipus, Oedipus at Colonus.
Imagine ourselves in the place of Oedipus. This is not far-fetched. We often travel to countries we do not understand very well, where places and things are sacred to the natives but not to us. If asked to move, we could move readily enough. Imagine we are tourists, off the beaten track in, say, Turkey. A mosque that has attracted our curiosity is not guarded by English-speaking guides or protected with signs advising those who enter to remove their shoes and cover their naked limbs. In shorts and tee shirts, exclaiming loudly at the beauty of the place, some of us enter—to the consternation of those who are praying within. I refuse to follow the others. “Have some respect,” I tell them. “This place is sacred.” “Not to me,” says one of us flippantly. But he could, and should, respect what is sacred to others.
Now suppose we are in a land of many gods, whose images abound in sacred places. And through some violation of the sacred we have incurred an obligation to perform a ceremony as required by the local gods: we must bow, pour a libation, and light a candle in front of an image. Could we do this as readily as we could remove our shoes and cover our limbs before entering the mosque? Yes, if we have no religious beliefs of our own. But not if we are pledged to honor no other gods but One, and never to bow down to or serve graven images. Not, that is, if we feel bound by the first two of the ten commandments of Hebrew and Christian scripture as these are usually interpreted (Exodus 20:3–5).
What is sacred in one culture or religion may be profane in another. Your sacred book may well be my abomination. I might believe that if I treat your sacred book with reverence I would betray the gods as I know them. I cannot bear to do that. But if I profane your sacred book, you may feel that I have insulted or attacked God as you know Him. You cannot bear that. Violence erupts.
The reverent soul tries never to violate sacred things in any culture, out of respect for the people who hold those things sacred. Reverence, remember, is not directly related to any particular faith; it is a quality of character that can be found in any religious community. Reverence belongs to ethics. But ethics cannot require me to betray my own faith in order to treat your sacred things with respect. On the other side, ethics cannot require you to stand idle while I insult your God as you know Him. Violence erupts. What is the reverent soul to do about sacred things?
In a word, sacred things are untouchable. The sacred is what you may not freely touch, or enter, or trample, or soil, or even change. Sacred things include places and times, people and relationships, books and images, laws and treaties, names and words. Almost anything can be made sacred.
A sacred place may be a sanctuary which you do not enter unless you have been duly consecrated—by prayer perhaps, or by washing, or by taking on vestments—or perhaps simply by wearing your starched Sunday best. A sacred time is a time during which you do only what is appropriate to that time: you fast, or you abstain from drink, or you avoid the use of machines. A sacred object is one that you do not touch, or that you touch only with clean hands, or at a sacred time. It might be a sacred book or scroll. A sacred word might be one that you never say or write, or utter only with special blessings.
A sacred relationship may be a treaty sworn between two states with a divinity as witness, or it may be a marriage that has been consecrated by sacrament. Although marriages are now easily marred and broken, they remain for us in the territory of the sacred—how else to explain the intensity of the debate over same-sex marriage? Same-sex couples may be thirsty not only for the legal status of marriage, but for its blessing, its sacredness. And those who campaign against same-sex marriage may be moved by the fear that a sacred institution will be torn out of shape and therefore defiled.
Many believers hold that the world is full of truly sacred things, marked as such by whatever god or gods they worship. They may respect these things out of fear: “What horrible punishment will the gods give us if we violate a sacred day?” More commonly, they may do so in order to prove their commitment: “By respecting the sacred day, we remind ourselves of our faith and cement our bond with God.” They respect their sacred things in order to practice their religion.
Some of my readers, however, may think that to call something sacred is to evoke a quaint memory of far-off times—times when magic and superstition clouded people’s minds. They are wrong. For many believers, the sacred has nothing to do with magic, and for all of us, “superstition” is an insulting name to call other people’s religions. Besides, we will see that even unbelievers—people with no ties to religion or magic—are committed to treating some things as sacred—what I call the secular sacred.
Unbelievers may think nothing of treading on sacred ground, while believers may hold that violations of the sacred are attacks on their god. Other believers may feel a religious duty to trample on what is sacred to someone else’s religion, if they believe that religion is an insult to their god. When religious cultures clash and one side tramples on what is sacred to the other, believers may quickly storm into violence. In our time, global communication brings cultures into clashing distance. Sacred things make the world a minefield; no matter how carefully we tread, we may set off an explosion at any moment. And in real life, we cannot always tread carefully. War, famine, the necessity for quick action—any of these can lead to unintended violations. Sacred things are among the world’s great dangers.
Reverence can help us face these dangers. Reverent people never erupt in violence on account of things that are merely sacred. Reverent believers know that God is not vulnerable to attack, and they understand the difference between reverent worship and idolatry. On the other side, reverent unbelievers see that sacred things make ethical demands on all of us, whether we are religious or not. I will address the believers in the upcoming section on God. First, however, I will bring out a number of ethical points that should appeal even to unbelievers. The sacred often belongs to religion, but it always belongs to ethics.
The philosopher Nietzsche, who was hardly a believer, nevertheless had enormous respect for the sacred, and faulted scholars for not appreciating the subject:
The way in which respect for the Bible has, on the whole, been maintained in Europe might be the best piece of discipline and refinement in manners that Europe owes to Christianity. Books with this sort of profundity and ultimate meaning need the protection of an externally imposed tyranny of authority; this way, they can last through the millennia that are needed to use them up and figure them out. It is a great achievement when the masses (people of all kinds who lack depth or have speedy bowels) have finally had the feeling bred into them that they cannot touch everything, that there are holy experiences which require them to take off their shoes and keep their dirty hands away—and this is pretty much as high a level of humanity as they will ever reach. Conversely, what is perhaps the most disgusting thing about so-called scholars, the devout believers in ‘modern ideas,’ is their lack of shame, the careless impudence of their eyes and hands that touch, taste, and feel everything.
As an unbeliever, Nietzsche is making an ethical point about refinement. Clearly the point is not restricted to the Bible; he is disappointed that only the Bible seems to have this status in Europe. Evidently he would like to see the refinement of respect extended to other areas not restricted to objects related to the Christian God. He is concerned for the survival of the ability to recognize and treat the sacred, wherever it is found, with appropriate feelings. He thinks scholars have lost the ability to do that; they think too much and feel too little. He is asking scholars to have emotions more like those of the uneducated, and to be aware of the emotions they have. Nietzsche does not believe that the Bible is the Word of God, so he can’t be asking scholars to worship the Bible as if it were. He can’t be asking them to treat it as something transcendent. He is, nevertheless, asking them to respond to the Bible as something sacred.
Things can be sacred without having any connection to God or to anything else that deserves reverence. Secular examples abound outside of what we usually consider the boundaries of religion. Take theater. Performance space for drama is sacred, and the same is true for space dedicated to playing a game. Walking onto the stage during a play, when you are not a member of the cast, is touching the untouchable. So is interfering with the players during a football game—for example, throwing a stone from the stands at the quarterback of the team you oppose, or rushing out onto the field to block a run.
By “sacred” in the ethical sense I mean anything that has been given ethical properties by rules that protect that thing—hedging properties. Being untouchable is a clear example of a hedging property. The ethics of a reverent culture forbid us from interfering with the sacred—we should not tread on sacred ground, get in the way of a sacred person, violate a sacred friendship, or abuse a sacred object. To interfere with what is sacred is a failure of reverence—the ethical virtue that calls us to treat other people, and therefore the things that other people care about, with respect. Rules that protect the sacred are often strict, and violations often lead to public disgrace. Think of “don’t touch,” “do not change,” “do not enter,” “do not interrupt,” and now “turn off your cell phones.”
These rules often specify exceptions: “Don’t touch unless you have washed your hands,” or (as in the case of Oedipus) “don’t step here unless you plan to undergo a certain ritual afterwards” or “unless you take your shoes off first,” or “unless you have been consecrated,” or “unless you are dressed as a priest, or a player, or an umpire” (depending on the kind of place).
The actions that make something sacred are called sacraments. Some sacraments are so familiar that we do not recognize them as what they are. The anthem before a game, the rising of the curtain, the dimming of lights—any of these can make a space sacred for the time of the performance or the game. And at the end, another action takes the protection away from the space and the time. The last whistle blows, and the fans are free to rush out on the field. The curtain falls, and the audience begins to talk. These actions of consecration and de-consecration are sacraments in the broad sense I wish to use.
A thing does not need to be special in any way in order to be made sacred. A place need not be beautiful or awe-inspiring. A shack can be set aside for praying, a scruffy plot of ground can be a marked off for a game, the ugliest and most disreputable of men or women may be given a sacred role in ritual. There need be nothing about these that makes them untouchable, prior to their being made so by human action. When we make something sacred, we do not make it good or beautiful. Instead, we make it important to us, as many things ought to be, including what is beautiful and good.
Everything sacred is untouchable either literally or figuratively. Breaking an oath that has been consecrated is (figuratively) touching the untouchable, as is violating a consecrated marriage. But not everything that is untouchable is sacred. Human excrement is untouchable in most cultures, but not because it is held to be sacred or cursed. The same goes for a poisonous viper. The danger of its poison alone would make it untouchable (whether or not the viper is sacred in the local culture).
In some cultures, a curse or a dreadful action can make you untouchable. Oedipus has made himself untouchable by killing his father and having children with his mother. It makes no difference that he did not know what he was doing. One can violate sacred things unwittingly, as Oedipus did when he sat on the sacred mound at Colonus. Oedipus also carries a double curse—one that he blindly pronounced against himself as his father’s killer, and another that he inherited from his father, Laius. Laius had raped a young boy and received a curse from the father of the boy. The words “cursed” and “sacred” are the same in some languages, and the concepts are closely related.
Generally, cultures have allowed sacred things to be touched under certain circumstances. Some sacred places or objects should not be touched at all; some should be touched only by people who have been consecrated to do so—people who are then, in a sense, sacred. There is a class of sacraments that mark off the people who are permitted to enter sacred space or handle sacred objects. An action that exempts a person from the hedging properties is itself a sacrament. Consecrating priests gives them the status to enter places others may not, and so does suiting up a player and sending him onto the field. On the other hand, we can remove hedging properties and return something sacred to ordinary status. If we follow the rules of the culture, we may lift a curse, transform a church into a shopping mall, defrock a priest, or dissolve a marriage.
The boundaries that define the sacred are not bright; we can identify central examples of the sacred, such as the Sabbath day for many Jews and Christians, or the Koran for adherents to Islam. And then there are cases of the sacred that are further from the center, such as a football field during play, or the stage of the Metropolitan Opera during a performance.
You need not belong to a given culture to recognize and abide by its sacraments. A Christian can feel that it is right to remove shoes before entering a mosque; an atheist can feel that it is right to maintain silence during a mass. One need not believe in anything divine or transcendent in order to recognize the ethical value of the sacred. All you need is the capacity for respect. When you are among people with hedging rules that are new to you, you should be able to recognize that these people are engaged in a common human practice. They have goals very like your own. You can respect these people and their goals, and you ought to respect them with deep feeling.
We owe respect to people with whom we share reverence for shared ideals. Although it would be false to say that we all worship the same god, it is true that all of our prayers can share the same reverence (as I have argued throughout this book). Shared reverence entails shared ideals, albeit at a high level of abstraction. These people bowing down to this image—however strange it seems to me—have needs and prayers and hopes for the ideal that are very much like mine, whether I am a believer or not. Without sharing their beliefs, I can find that I share enough with them to call for respect. We are all engaged in the great project of human reverence. So I owe respect to their sacred things, respect as deep as what they feel, if I can manage it. This argument from ethics should convince most believers, and all unbelievers as well, if they are reverent.
Respect meets its limits at rituals that deny respect to others. Many religious practices are ethically benign and respectful of other people, but some are not. Suppose you find yourself among a people who insist that the gods will abandon them unless they offer up the severed hearts of a dozen people a day. They have made human sacrifice sacred in their culture, but this is a sacred thing that you should not respect. If you respect the people whose hearts are in danger of being ripped out, you should not respect the knife-wielding priests or their lethal ceremonies. That is, the ethics of respect allows you to lay hands on the knives and stop the killing—as you are obliged to do if you can.
The same goes for less-bloody forms of human sacrifice, still widely practiced in our day—physical or mental mutilations. You can sacrifice the lives of young people without killing them. To prohibit a young girl from going to school is to wall her off from most of life’s opportunities. We owe the girl respect, and we should prevent her sacrifice if we can, even though this means violating a practice sacred to her culture. Her elders have the power to make things sacred for them—that is, to make rules for them not to touch certain things or alter certain rituals. As for us, we should respect those rules out of respect for the elders, if we can do so without denying respect to the girl. We know that her elders cling to their rules because they believe that the gods insist on it. But the elders are human beings, and human beings do not have the power to make their beliefs true. Reverence balks at relativism.
We owe respect to all sacred things, but we not owe reverence to anything that is merely sacred. To think that we do is to make the fundamental mistake I call idolatry. Sacred things are not gods. God is not a sacred thing. We call Him holy, but never sacred. We have no power over God, but we do have the power to declare certain things sacred and others not. We have the power to consecrate and deconsecrate, and we know this power is ours whether or not we believe it came to us from God. The sacred ceremonies are ours; we debate endlessly over their design. The sacred books are ours—our translations, our interpretations, our paper, our bindings. We worship God with reverence, but we ought not to worship the things that are ours, the books or the ceremonies. That would be idolatry.
As we have seen, human beings make things sacred by their own actions, and sacred things are sacred within human cultures. In saying this, I am drawing a line between the sacred and the transcendent. I have argued earlier in this book that what we recognize as transcendent is worthy of awe and reverence—God for example, or Platonic Justice. But what falls below the transcendent deserves respect at most.
We humans create images of persons we consider holy, and we may well make these images sacred. But an image is not the same as what it is an image of. An icon of the Virgin Mary may be sacred, and therefore we all owe it a certain kind of respect. But as believers, we would owe reverence not to the image, but to Mary herself. An image is at best a reminder of what we take to be transcendent. Images are things we can make or mar. Reverence is due to things that are beyond our ability to make or mar, while respect is due to human beings and their creations. We have parallel distinctions in ethics and religion: religion condemns the idolatry of worshipping anything of human manufacture, while ethics asks respect for what is human, but for what is divine, it asks reverence.
Reverence is primarily a felt understanding of the difference between the human and the transcendent. So if believers are reverent, they will recognize this difference between their god and their sacred things. Then they will not fall into idolatry—they will not start treating human things with reverence. And they will not feel that an insult to their sacred books or words or names is the same as an insult to their god. The god of a reverent religion is above such insults. Sacred things are dangerous, but reverence reduces the danger and prevents violence. This argument may not convince an idolater, but it should convince a believer who is reverent.
But perhaps not. Suppose our reverent believers are convinced that sacred things are not ours—that they are not of human manufacture—that they belong to God—that our puny sacraments are only outward signs of what God has done—that God Himself has made all sacred things sacred, and that to violate these sacred things (or allow others to do so) is a direct violation of God’s commandment—that to trample on the sacred is to trample on God. For people with beliefs like these, the danger of the sacred remains in full force, unless they are reverent. Religion often lacks reverence. That is why we have religious wars.
Reverence would temper these beliefs with a full appreciation of the transcendence of God. Reverence knows that God is not vulnerable—that we do not have the power to trample on God, although we trample on the sacred all too easily—that we can desecrate a temple, but we cannot desecrate God—that God is beyond the boundary of what we can pollute. And the same goes for our enemies. Our enemies may insult us and injure us by messing with our sacred things, and we have a right to resent that. But the reverent soul knows that God does not command us to turn to violence. Even if the sacred things are his, his interests are not at stake. God is not vulnerable to human wrongdoing.
Time travel has brought you into the precinct of Dionysus in Athens, about twenty-four centuries ago. Miraculously, you understand the Greek they are speaking here. You are sitting on a wooden bench on the lower slope of the Acropolis, looking across the valley at Mt. Hymettus. On the round dance floor in front of you young men are dancing and singing a prayer to the god they worship. Athens has become a shadow of what it was in its golden age only a generation earlier—weakened by plague, almost leveled by war, desperate for a revival. The young men are enacting a prayer that has nothing to do with the play they have been performing, so it is their own prayer now. They are totally in earnest now as they summon their god to be present in this, his sacred place. The audience is earnest too. They keep sacred silence; once the prayer breaks out they freeze in their seats.
And you, what do you do? Do you stand in your seat and shout out at the absurdity of this? Do you tell them all that Dionysus is really the devil, that they should turn and worship the one true God? Do you instead close your eyes and block your ears? Or do you feel, with a chill at your spine, that this is a reverent assembly of people—that their needs, their prayers, their hopes, their ideals, are not so different from yours? Can you watch and listen to this ritual and not feel respect for the sacredness of the occasion?
If this is too challenging, imagine you are a Presbyterian invited to watch a Catholic Mass. At the moment of transubstantiation do you rise in your seat to tell the celebrants that this is a hoax? That the bread and wine remain just bread and wine? Or do you feel the sacredness of the occasion and respect it? You know by now which of these is the response of reverence.
Can you read this without recognizing the reverence that lies behind it? Couldn’t you treat it with respect?
You are in danger of losing the empire, and if you do, the anger of the people you have ruled will raise other dangers. You are in no position to walk away from your empire.… You see, your empire is really like a tyranny—though it may have been thought unjust to seize, it is now unsafe to surrender.
—Pericles’ last speech, Thucydides’ History 2.63