Religion

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The sacred and the holy – from around 1917 to

today

Michael Stausberg

To cite this article: Michael Stausberg (2017) The sacred and the holy – from around 1917 to
today, Religion, 47:4, 549-556, DOI: 10.1080/0048721X.2017.1377887

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RELIGION, 2017
VOL. 47, NO. 4, 549–556
https://doi.org/10.1080/0048721X.2017.1377887

EDITORIAL

The sacred and the holy – from around 1917 to today

Michael Stausberg
Department of Archaeology, History, Cultural Studies and Religion, University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
This editorial introduces a thematic issue on the sacred and related Sacred; holy
concepts, in honour of the 100th anniversary of the first publication
of Rudolf Otto’s Das Heilige and the death of Émile Durkheim. It
highlights key themes and provides brief synopses of the six articles.

In the earliest works of the nascent study of religion\s as an academic discipline that
appeared during the last quarter of the 19th century, the terms holy or sacred were
used extensively and interchangeably but in a pre-theoretical manner. The terms
mainly served to qualify places, rites, and scriptures (among many other things), but
the qualifiers as such were not considered theoretically important. It was only at the
turn of the 20th century that the sacred (Émile Durkheim, Marcel Mauss, Roger
Callois), holiness/the holy (Nathan Söderblom, Rudolf Otto), and the numinous (Otto)
emerged as key terms in the nascent field of religious studies. These terms, the opening
article of this thematic issue claims (Stausberg 2017), set up a discursive space for the
study of religion\s that acknowledged its reality and relevance for modern societies and
individuals, but that proceeded independently of confessional theologies as it sought to
transcend Western-Christian ethnocentrism. By providing a close reading of the works
of the above-mentioned scholars, in particular Durkheim (who passed away in 1917),
the opening article of this thematic issue revisits the emergence of these terms. In particu-
lar, it looks at the different ways in which the sacred, the holy, and the numinous were
related to religion. While the sacred had become a defining notion for religion, it had
never been restricted to the traditional religious sphere. Durkheim, for example, had pro-
pagated the idea of the sacred character of the modern individual. Shortly before WWII, a
group known as the Collège de Sociologie wished to reinvent sociology as a ‘sacred’ dis-
cipline and sought to identify the sacred in a wide range of social spheres such as everyday
life, language, and war (Stausberg 2017).
The success of the terms the holy and the numinous in the 20th-century discourse on
religion to a large part is the result of the dissemination of Rudolf Otto’s book Das Heilige,
first published in 1917. This book soon became one of the most influential bestsellers on
religion of the past century. In her article, Satoko Fujiwara exemplifies the vibrant recep-
tion history of this work by attending to the case of Japan. No less than four translations of
Das Heilige were published since 1927, and Fujiwara explores their respective intellectual
contexts. Otto had visited Japan in 1912 for a period of two months; among other things,

CONTACT Michael Stausberg Michael.Stausberg@uib.no

© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
550 M. STAUSBERG

he had lectured on his view of Japanese religion (Fujiwara 2017, 591). The first Japanese
translation, published in 1927, had a clear Christian apologetic and missionary agenda, but
this did not preclude its intellectual impact (Fujiwara 2017, 594). The Japanese term
chosen to render ‘das Heilige,’ seinaru-mono, is not an abstract notion but creates associ-
ations to a living divine entity. The second translation, by the same translator (Seigo
Yamaya), came out in 1968, though it was apparently not meant to appeal to the counter-
culture movement. The third and fourth translations were published in 2005 and 2010,
respectively. For the history of the academic reception of Das Heilige, Fujiwara dis-
tinguishes between three main periods: a pre-phenomenological period, when the
Kyoto-school was a dominant factor and the book was read to support nationalist
agendas; a phenomenological period (1960s to 1980s), when scholars provided emphatic
readings of Otto’s book with the aim of understanding the essence of religion and human-
ity; and a post-phenomenological period (1990s to the present), where, for instance, Otto’s
notion of the holy or the numinous are applied to a contrastive interpretation of Shinto
kami.
In the post-WWII period, the notions of the holy and the sacred have served as key
terms in the phenomenology of religion, for example in the works of scholars such as
Heiler, Eliade, van der Leeuw, Mensching, and Smart. The success of Eliade’s The
Sacred and the Profane (1959) and his other works may well have contributed to the
spread of the term the sacred to wider audiences – and thereby popularized the sacred/
profane dichotomy earlier developed by the Durkheim team. However, this terminology
has largely fallen prey to the widespread rejection of the phenomenology of religion
since the 1970s. In particular, the critique of Eliade and his use of the category of the
sacred seem to have effectively discredited the notion of the holy/sacred in the study of
religion\s. As Kripal (2010, 9) puts it, not without irony (given that for early theorists
being taboo was a main trait of the sacred): ‘the category has become taboo today.’ Yet,
this is a very limited view. First of all, the sacred sells. ‘Sacred’ is a common component
of book titles, even where the concept does not play a clear or prominent role in the argu-
ment. More importantly, Kripal is not the only contemporary scholar of religion\s who
continues to engage or explore the notions of the holy or the sacred – or even to
defend its use (see, e.g., Colpe 1990; Gantke 1998; Anttonen 2000; Evans 2003; Knott
2005; Kraft 2010; Orsi 2011; Gantke and Serikov 2015; Heinämäki 2015; Äystö 2017;
Dawes 2017). Others prefer to use related terms such as sacralization (Sekine 2006; Mon-
temaggi 2015) or sacralities (Taves 2013). Last but not least, our disciplinary perspective in
the study of religion\s should not blind us to the pervasiveness of the use of the terms
sacred (and holy) in various other disciplines or fields of studies ranging from anthropol-
ogy and cognitive studies to terrorism research, theology, and tourism studies. Examples
would be far too many to list here. But it should be mentioned that the end of the first
paragraph above is not meant to suggest that the sacred was abandoned in sociology
after the Collège de Sociologie came to an end shortly before the outbreak WWII – at a
time when the sacredness of the human person that Durkheim and Mauss had propagated
died a tragic death in the extermination camps. While it has been called ‘an almost neg-
lected sociological category’ in a recent overview article (Righetti 2014, 134), a recent
survey of social theory in the study of religion\s is built on varieties of the very notion
of the sacred (Mellor and Shilling 2016). It seems that sociology did not experience a
similar crisis of the sacred as witnessed by the study of religion\s. One branch of sociology
 RELIGION 551

that has embraced the category of the sacred is Jeffrey Alexander’s cultural sociology
(Lynch and Sheldon 2013) – a line of research and theory that has been taken up in theol-
ogy (Lynch 2012). In tune with the French tradition outlined above, there is some interest
in locating the sacred in the secular among sociologists and scholars of religion\s (e.g.,
Demerath 2000; Knott 2013; Knott, Poole, and Taira 2013), including sports (e.g., Shilling
and Mellor 2014). The confidence of sociologists in the robustness of the sacred as an
analytical category is confirmed when Christian Smith, a prominent American sociologist
of religion, seeks to challenge American sociology by unmasking it as a sacred project
(Smith 2014). Smith seems to take the meaning of the term so much for granted that
he writes: ‘My argument does not turn on a tricky play on words. I mean exactly what
my terms ordinarily suggest’ (Smith 2014, 1). Apparently, in this context, vaguely invoking
Durkheim is enough to make further conceptual clarification superfluous.
While there thus is a wide range of publications that, in one way or the other, touches
upon the notions of the holy and the sacred and derived or related terms, on the occasion
of the centenary of 1917, some senior colleagues have agreed to engage in an exercise of
conceptual and theoretical clarification. Some of the contributions are published in this
thematic issue.1
Steven Engler and Mark Gardiner review the scholarly debate on the sacred from the
meta-perspective of underlying theories of meaning. They distinguish between four
approaches to the sacred. The ineffabilist view, which they exemplify by a scholar of lit-
erature and a theologian, puts the sacred ‘beyond the reach of language’ (Engler and Gar-
diner 2017, 620). The second approach, for which they refer to Otto, Eliade, and Kripal,
does not deny that the sacred is accessible to language, but that it requires a specific
mode of communication. This builds on the assumption that religious language talks
about an unusual kind of things and involves special kinds of experiences. The meaning
of this communication lies in its reference to what it is supposedly about, for example
the sacred as ‘the really real’ behind appearances. The third approach, for which they
point to Durkheim, Callois, J.Z. Smith, Demerath, Lynch, and others, is what they call
‘the polarized sacred’ – the idea that the meaning of the sacred is given by its opposition
to something else, e.g., the profane. This opposition can take different forms: Engler and
Gardiner distinguish between logical, ontological, spatio-temporal, potency-related,
emotional, and normative forms. Since the meaning of the sacred in this approach is
dependent on the meaning of the profane – be it in a negative or a positive manner –
meaning shifts from a word–thing to a word–word relationship, even though these
approaches can still be read as wishing to say something about the sacred as an objective
referent, the sacred itself as an objective fact. This contrasts with the fourth approach, ‘the
contextualized sacred,’ for which they quote from works by Lynch, Paden, Knott, Desp-
land, Fitzgerald, J.Z. Smith, Anttonen, and others. This approach places the sacred in ‘a
more nuanced set of relations to a broader variety of other concepts’ (Engler and Gardiner
2017, 629). The emphasis on context, which has been a major concern in the departure
from the phenomenology of religion, resonates with core concerns of the contemporary
study of religion\s – and some varieties of this approach seem to presuppose, even
more than the polarized approach, a relational, language–language view of meaning,

1
Some additional articles were commissioned which, for different reasons, do not appear here. I wish to thank the authors
for their efforts all the same.
552 M. STAUSBERG

where the meaning of the sacred is ‘determined only through its relation to its context’
(Engler and Gardiner 2017, 630). This requires an indeterminately bounded work of
interpretation. Contrasting these views on meaning and language brings to mind the
groundbreaking transformation of the philosophical frameworks of the humanities and
the social science during the century since 1917. Both Durkheim and Otto still lived in
a foundational world that had not yet seen the linguistic turn.
Two contributions to this thematic issue discuss the concept of the sacred in relation to
art. David Morgan takes a historical approach by describing the emergence of the modern
system of fine art, which he compares to and contrasts with (Christian) devotional piety.
In both environments, the sacred seems like a relevant principle of operation – and in
Morgan’s conceptualization of the sacred one can see the legacies of both Durkheim
and Otto: the sacred is something that is set apart, dealt with as special, an act of segre-
gation that effectively connects (or affiliates) humans to relevant, significant larger realities
– human or non-human, religious or otherwise – and makes and designs this connection,
this ‘power of presence’ (Morgan 2017, 657) or ‘aura’ accessible to individual experience.
The sacred is not just there, but requires ‘cultural work.’ The process is set into motion by
acts of sacralization, which, when successful, result in conveying a specific value, project-
ing an ‘aura,’ on an object; as long as this state is maintained, we can speak of its sacredness
(= the being sacred of an object). Both environments – art and religion – have different
criteria of evaluation and institutional regimes for making this process happen. Both
have different notions of authenticity. The same object – consider Michelangelo’s Pietà
– can be present in both visual fields or semiotic economies at the same time; its presence
is established, evaluated and experienced in part similarly and in part differently in both
environments – and the differences would make it ‘rash’ to collapse both fields into one
(Morgan 2017, 657).2 For Morgan, the kinship between both environments is the result
of specific historical circumstances in Western Europe that, since the 17th and 18th cen-
turies, have made art independent of religion and let art appear as an alternative meaning
system, which, it was thought, could rescue modern society from atheism, and in which
the artist obtained a prophetic stature (Morgan 2017, 645).
Bryan Rennie approaches art from a much broader perspective. His analysis is not
limited to modern fine art. He suggests that art is a universally attested, evolutionary
evolved, adaptive form of behavior based in human skill. This skill involves both produ-
cing and recognizing skilled works of art. Displays of skill, claims Rennie, resonate with
humanity’s evolutionary set-up. In many religious traditions, the greatest displays of crea-
tive skills are those of the gods. While fine art appreciates the skill of the artist, in art classi-
fied as religious, the perceived relevant agency is that of more than human agency, ‘of
collectives and of cultural representations of the “character” or “personality” of the real’
(Rennie 2017, 677) – and it is precisely the ‘apperceived presence of remarkable power,
worth, importance, salience, and significance’ (Rennie 2017, 672) that he, as a result of
his reading of Eliade, finds to be specific to sacrality (a term that indicates deviance
from a misunderstood theological and ontological reading of Eliade’s sacred). Since he
endorses theories according to which art behavior – as a training of perception of

2
St. Peter’s basilica, where the Pietà is placed, serves likewise as a church and a work of art. On most days, this church mainly
serves as a tourist attraction. Tourism is an environment where different semiotic regimes interact, including the ones
described by Morgan (see Stausberg 2011).
 RELIGION 553

reality – has adaptive functions, Rennie puts forward some hypotheses on the adaptive
advantages of religion. As creative skills in general seek to ‘change reality for the better
in terms of human success’ (Rennie 2017, 680), the ultimate skill is that of leading a suc-
cessful life, the ‘creation of a life worth living’ (Rennie 2017, 681). In his conclusion,
Rennie speaks of religion as a mode of behavior characterized by ‘the focus of attention
upon, and the organization of activity around, items and behaviours apprehended as
sacred, that is, [as] sufficiently special to excite behaviour that perpetuates the initial
apprehension’ (Rennie 2017, 683). This implicit definition of the sacred makes it appear
unspecific to religion – and according to Rennie the sacred can be found in other branches
of human behavior. But it is in religion that sacrality obtains an overarching, system-like
character that aims at covering every aspect of human life. Rennie’s agenda, as he phrases
it at the end, seems to echo Durkheim, namely to account for religion in a way ‘that neither
involves assumptions of any supernatural, nor excoriates the concept of religion as
nothing more than imaginary and inaccurate description of physical conditions’
(Rennie 2017, 684).
While Rennie speaks of a life worth living, drawing on evidence from different religions,
Gavin Flood proposes to think of the sacred as addressing ‘higher forms of living’ (Flood
2017, 699), that is, the intensification and transformation of life. He refers to the sacred as
‘a participatory mode of human existence’ (Flood 2017, 699). He grounds these claims in
his reading of literature that has posited face-to-face-encounters as fundamental to human
sociality. While Rennie seeks to connect his reception of advances in evolutionary and
ethological theories in a positive manner to Eliade, Flood develops his reception of cogni-
tive neuroscience in contrast to an influential book by the Italian political theorist Giorgio
Agamben, who revisits the enigmatic and exceptional Roman legal figure of the homo
sacer (a convict who may be killed but not sacrificed) to recover the sacred as a juri-
dico-political (rather than a religious phenomenon) and as a foundational category for
rethinking sovereignty. While the connection between the homo sacer and the sacred as
a theoretical concept is primarily word historical (etymological), Agamben speaks of the
Roman legal creation of the homo sacer as ‘a figure of the sacred’ (Agamben 1998, loc.
117) and, following earlier scholars such as Robertson Smith, as a case for a more
general ‘sacred’ as expressed by the idea of the ‘ambiguity of the sacred’ (which he
rejects). It seems as if his analysis would say something about ‘the sacred’ when he
speaks of homo sacer; in fact, his discussion presents something like an emergent theory
of the political. Flood reviews Agamben’s train of thought but wishes to overcome two
of its main limitations: its limitation to Western history, and its limitation to the political,
given that ‘life itself resists politicization, and where this resistance is most intense, there is
the field of the sacred: life itself … as participation in an order that can be conceived to be
at variance with sovereign power’ (Flood 2017, 694 [original emphasis]). Agamben’s ‘bad
sacred’ of politics ‘needs to be balanced by the “good sacred” or “holiness” of vertical
tension in which people and communities strive for something else’ (Flood 2017, 700),
namely some kind of ultimate transformation. This alternative vision recovers the term
holiness (without reference to Söderblom), in contrast to the sacred that has been captured
by discourse on the political.
William Paden follows a more explicitly Durkheimian agenda – for instance in his
emphasis on the creation of sacred things by groups or the importance of respect – but
he also refers to Otto, not only as an interesting religious actor in a specific context (or
554 M. STAUSBERG

‘habitat’) but also as providing fitting concepts for elucidating specific contexts. Otto,
however, had been critical of naturalism – the framework embraced by Paden. From a
metaphysical entity, the sacred – or sacredness, as Paden prefers – becomes a factor in
four types or sites of collective human behavior as it unfolds in groups in specific ecologi-
cal environments and niches. Setting apart objects and institutions for special respect and
protection, giving them a specific status, as the result of ‘making sacred’ or ‘sanctifying
things’ (Paden 2017, 706) belongs to the list of human universals. A second ‘site’ of ‘sac-
redness’ invokes inviolability – the need to protect orders that have achieved a sacred
status from violation, i.e., oppositional and offensive profanation. For Paden, this ‘self-pro-
tective aspect of sacrality’ seems to reveal ‘a dark, amoral heritage’ of humanity’s deep
evolutionary past (Paden 2017, 709). The attribution, enhancing and signaling of status
and prestige – social processes that are part of evolutionary history – is a third ‘site’ of ‘sac-
redness.’ A fourth ‘perspectival frame for sacrality’ sketched by Paden is the perception of
and engagement with the environments created through sacralization. In his exercise,
Paden seeks to rearticulate the relevance of the sacred (sacralization, sacredness, sacrality,
holiness) for a naturalistic-evolutionary framework – and the relevance of this framework
to rethink the varieties of the sacred.
As the examples of Flood, Paden, and Rennie show, some scholars of religion\s are
fascinated by new avenues in research on human behavior informed by evolutionary the-
ories and there is an ongoing reception of at least some sociological work in the study of
religion\s, the interdisciplinary conversations with psychology are much less vibrant. The
article by Kenneth Pargament, Doug Oman, Julie Pomerleau, and Annette Mahoney
shows that (at least some) psychologists are read up on relevant literature in the study
of religion\s, including the critique of the term ‘the sacred’ – a term they defend
because they find it useful for psychological research. They suggest thinking of the
sacred as a conceptual core and a ring: the core is constituted by metaphysical or super-
natural elements typically associated with religion such as god, the divine, or transcendent
reality, while the ring contains numerous aspects of life that are related to this core by
means of a process of sanctification, i.e., a perceptual ascription of the qualities relating
to the core in life. This does not completely untie the sacred from religion, but relates it
to a broad range of phenomena from art to sexuality. The core elements of the sacred
are characterized by a number of qualities, among them transcendence (which is
already implied in transcendent reality), ultimacy, and boundlessness. While Pargament,
Oman, Pomerleau and Mahoney recognize that religions are not alone in dealing with
‘sacred matters,’ for them religion is specific because it ‘has as its primary substantive
focus the sacred’ (Pargament et al. 2017, 728) – which is clear given that its core is
constituted by elements typically related to religion or that can appear to be ‘religious.’
Contrary to many scholars of religion\s, the four American psychologists find spirituality
to be a useful complementary and distinctive term: ‘Religion is defined by its special focus
on beliefs, practices, experiences, relationships, and institutions that are sacred in charac-
ter. Spirituality is defined by its special life motivating force – the quest for the sacred’
(Pargament et al. 2017, 729). For them, both terms are distinct in terms of context, sub-
stance, and function: religion has a broader set of functions, while spirituality is broader in
its context. Similar to Flood (and to some extent Otto), Pargament, Oman, Pomerleau, and
Mahoney are keen not to let their conceptualizations be guided by Western or theist pat-
terns. In their article, the four co-authors review a wide range of psychological publications
 RELIGION 555

that have tested the effects of theoretically predicted functions of the sacred, including
some that also occur in the sociologically informed literature (strong reactions to viola-
tions of the sacred), whereas others are more specific to psychology (the elicitation of
emotions). Much of this research is still in early phases of development. In their con-
clusions, the authors acknowledge that they have liberally drawn from theories from
different academic disciplines. They find this appropriate because ‘The study of the
sacred is not the exclusive domain of any institution or academic discipline’ (Pargament
et al. 2017, 739). For the same reason, it is important that scholars of religion\s pay atten-
tion to the concept of the sacred, as it is one of our avenues into inter- and multidisciplin-
ary conversations and research.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor
Michael Stausberg is a professor of religion at the University of Bergen, Norway.

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