1. Introduction
There are some things in our lives that seem to have a profound level of significance and meaning that makes them categorically different from things of the ordinary world, and, as such, we afford them a special place of recognition and protection in our thoughts and actions. They can come in a wide variety of forms, e.g., a pristine, old-growth forest; a locket passed down for generations within a family; a great leader in the history of one’s culture; a battlefield where scores of one’s countrymen fought courageously to the death; or a bride’s procession down the aisle in a wedding ceremony. We can, and sometimes do, call such things sacred.
But what exactly is it for something to be sacred? And what are the moral implications of having that status? I contend that these are philosophically important questions, yet they are mostly overlooked in contemporary academic philosophy. That oversight is likely due, in part, to the religious connotations of the sacred. However, I will argue that, regardless of whether we consider ourselves religious or not, the sacred is a deeply important element of our lives. After exploring the question of what the sacred is and developing an answer, I will argue that a philosophical understanding of the sacred also sheds significant light on a number of issues in philosophical ethics, broadly construed to include questions of well-being and political philosophy.
1.1 A Secular Notion of the Sacred?
Contemporary academic philosophy essentially understands and conducts itself as a secular discipline. The academic journals, conferences, colloquia, and general atmosphere of contemporary academic philosophy, with the exception of specialized philosophy of religion forums, do not accept, e.g., appeals to religious scripture or religious doctrines as the premises of arguments. One is expected to appeal only to reason, logic, empirical observation, and rational intuition. If the idea of the sacred doesn’t conform to those methodological constraints, then it’s not surprising that it hasn’t been considered an important or central topic in academic philosophy. Additionally, if the idea of the sacred implies a religious ontology that includes supernatural entities or events that defy the physical laws of nature, then, again, we can see why a secular academic discipline would steer clear of the topic.
But is the sacred necessarily religious? Notice that none of the examples of sacred things that I mentioned in the introduction are obviously religious. They aren’t related in some obvious way to belief in religious doctrines or the existence of supernatural entities. And it’s not obvious that having religious beliefs is a prerequisite for taking things, such as those in the examples, to be sacred. Consider these remarks from the evolutionary biologist and outspoken atheist Richard Dawkins:
I don’t think that they come more anti-religious than I do…. And yet there are objects and occasions which invoke in me a profound sense of the sacred, and I can cite other humanist scientists of whom this is also true. (2004, p. 135)
Likewise, atheist philosopher Simon Blackburn says,
Despite being an atheist, I find a lot of things arouse a sense of the sacred in me. Works of art or music, sublime grand spectacles in nature, the starry heavens above and the moral law within, the oldest human skulls in Kenya or the newest human baby in a maternity ward can all be fitting objects of awe and reverence. (2004, p. 129)
Are Dawkins and Blackburn simply confused and inconsistent in their thinking? Are the millions of other allegedly non-religious people among us who have that same ‘sense of the sacred’ also confused and inconsistent? That would be an interesting conclusion in itself, implying that perhaps it’s much harder to be truly non-religious than it might seem and that almost everyone is religious, at least to some extent, whether they realize it or not. But I won’t be arguing for that conclusion here. Instead, I will attempt to articulate and defend a notion of the sacred that is religiously neutral – i.e., one that neither requires religion nor excludes it. On this view, the sacred is something real and important in the lives of everyone, from the most devoutly religious to the most staunchly atheistic.
1.2 Academic Discourse on the Sacred
While the sacred hasn’t been discussed much in academic philosophy, there is a fairly large amount of work on the topic in other disciplines. The famous sociologist Émile Durkheim produced the first careful and extensive academic analysis of the sacred in his seminal work The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (2001 [1912]). While other academics had certainly invoked the idea of the sacred before Durkheim – for example, the term ‘sacred’ appears hundreds of times in The Ancient City (1864) by Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, who was one of Durkheim’s teachers – Durkheim’s innovation was to analyse the nature of the sacred itself rather than leave it as an undefined term. And rather than appealing to the idea of religion to explain the sacred, Durkheim went in the other direction and attempted to use the concept of the sacred to explain religion.
In the wake of Durkheim, academic discussion of the sacred has continued primarily in the ‘social sciences’ (e.g., sociology, cultural anthropology, and religious studies). However, in that now large body of work, the concept of the sacred is employed in disparate ways, defined vaguely or ambiguously, defined circularly, or, often, simply left undefined. Moreover, in the relatively rare discussions of the sacred in academic philosophy, the conception of the sacred is different from how it is viewed in most of the social scientific literature.Footnote 1 Writing almost a century after Durkheim’s book appeared, the sociologist Matthew Evans (Reference Evans2003) comments that ‘[d]espite its importance and long pedigree’, the concept of the sacred remains ‘undertheorized’ and ‘a poorly developed concept in the social sciences’. Even more recently, the sociologist Gordon Lynch (Reference Lynch2012) concurs, saying ‘the term “the sacred” is still widely used today without clear theoretical underpinnings’.
Despite these problems, the extant literature across academic disciplines contains important insights and recurring themes that I will draw upon as I develop the account in this paper.
2. Four Concepts of the Sacred
In his instructive examination of different concepts of the sacred, Evans (Reference Evans2003) discerns three uses of the term ‘sacred’: as a synonym for ‘religious’; to refer to ‘transcendent reality’; and ‘in reference to things set apart with special meaning’. Evans’ catalogue seems correct as far as it goes, but it is missing an important additional use of ‘sacred’ where the term has a normative, rather than descriptive, sense, referring to that which ought to be honoured and ought not to be violated.
After exploring each of these concepts, I will develop and defend a version of the concept of the sacred as the ‘set apart’. I think that this notion, sufficiently enhanced, does the best job of capturing and explaining our attitudes and behaviour towards the kinds of things in our opening examples, as well as the features of those things that give rise to those attitudes and behaviours. Those attitudes, behaviours, and features are deeply significant for human well-being, morality, and politics, as we will see later, in Section 3. Accordingly, I believe that the concept of the sacred that I offer in this paper does the best job illuminating several philosophically important aspects of our world. To develop this concept, I will contrast it with the alternatives.
2.1 The Sacred as the Religious
On the first conception of the sacred, to say that something is sacred is just another way of saying that it is religious or part of a religion. In many contexts, the term ‘sacred’ can plausibly be interpreted this way (e.g., many uses of phrases such as ‘sacred texts’, ‘sacred music’, and ‘sacred rituals’). However, we will set aside this concept of the sacred because, for the reasons stated in Section 1, we are going to pursue a religiously neutral concept of the sacred.
2.2 The Sacred as the Transcendent
The second idea is that the sacred is the trcanscendent. While I don’t think this concept of the sacred adequately captures the phenomena we are aiming to explain, I believe that the idea of the transcendent is central for understanding the sacred, and we can glean some important lessons from considering the transcendent and its relation to the sacred. The most influential statement of the view in question is presumably the theologian and philosopher Rudolf Otto’s The Idea of the Holy (Reference Otto and Harvey1924 [1917]), which was released only five years after Durkheim’s book. Otto identifies the sacred as the ‘numinous’ (p. 7), which is characterized, inter alia, as the ‘wholly other’ (p. 26), ‘something which has no place in our scheme of reality but belongs to an absolutely different one’ (p. 29). An immediate problem this view faces is one we’ve already encountered: it seems to fail to account for the types of sacred things listed as examples in the introduction of this paper. Magnificent forests, family heirlooms, historical battlegrounds, etc., are not things that have ‘no place in our scheme of reality’. They aren’t supernatural, which seems to be a necessary feature of the transcendent for Otto.
But let’s not jettison the idea of the transcendent too quickly. In the historian of religion Mircea Eliade’s The Sacred and the Profane (Reference Eliade and Trask1959 [1957]), which is another highly influential work on this topic, Eliade builds upon Otto’s account and introduces the idea of an ‘hierophany’, which is ‘the manifestation of something of a wholly different order, a reality that does not belong to our world, in [an object that is] an integral part of our natural “profane” world’ (p. 11). This kind of manifestation can happen with virtually any ordinary or natural thing, but when it does, that thing then ‘shows’ the transcendent:
[T]he sacred [i.e., the transcendent] can be manifested in stones or trees, for example. But as we shall soon see, what is involved is not a veneration of the stone in itself, a cult of the tree in itself. The sacred tree, the sacred stone are not adored as stone or tree; they are worshipped precisely because they are hierophanies, because they show something that is no longer stone or tree but the sacred [i.e., the transcendent], the ganz andere [i.e., the ‘wholly other’]. (pp. 11–12)
This idea is compatible with the initial list of examples in this paper. Moreover, the idea that certain forests, heirlooms, battlefields, etc., ‘manifest’ and ‘show’ something transcendent to us is an appealing way of trying to understand the emotions and other conscious experiences that these things arouse in us. We saw earlier how Blackburn (Reference Blackburn and Rogers2004) describes them as ‘fitting objects of awe and reverence’, and he adds that they ‘can all take us outside ourselves’ (p. 129). Transcendent reality is exactly the kind of thing that could inspire such reactions. So, if certain things in our natural and non-transcendent world can ‘manifest’ that transcendence, that could explain why we have those reactions to them.
As attractive as this idea is, we might still think that it’s simply incompatible with our earlier commitment to developing a religiously neutral conception of the sacred. We might think that the idea of the transcendent, even if now infused into our natural world by way of hierophanies, is still fundamentally a religious or supernatural idea. It certainly can be understood that way. A religious conception of the transcendent could be, e.g., that it is an ontologically real divine realm and that hierophanies are cases where the divine takes, or appears to have, a material form, entering and gracing our world with divine presence. But I don’t think that we are forced to understand the transcendent in such a way. There is room, I think, for a non-religious understanding of the transcendent that appeals simply to ideals. Regardless of whether we consider ourselves to be religious or not, we orient ourselves and evaluate our world in relation to certain ideals. The innumerable everyday judgments that we make – that a particular person is a scoundrel, that another person is heroic, that a particular work of art is decent yet could be much better, that a particular system of government is unjust, etc. – are based upon certain ideals of moral virtue, heroism, beauty, justice, etc. We see, even if only hazily, how things could ideally be, and we judge the world based on how it measures up. Without having some sense of the ideal, we would be incapable of making such judgments. So, it seems that we are committed to the reality of ideals. But ideals are not physical or material. We can’t venture deep into a rain forest and discover ideal justice itself, like an elusive jungle creature, or dive to the bottom of the ocean and find ideal wisdom itself resting on the sediment. These ideals are something beyond or outside of the physical world. In this sense, they are transcendent.Footnote 2
I propose that we can understand hierophanies as cases where objects or events in our material world exemplify to an extraordinary degree, or make particularly salient, an ideal. This can make sense of the examples in the introduction of this paper as hierophanies. A pristine, old-growth forest seems to exemplify ideals of natural beauty, creative primordial force, and harmony to an extraordinary degree. A prized locket that has been passed down for generations in a family seems to make particularly salient ideals of familial love, commitment, and the continuation of one’s identity. Etc. In each case, we are moved, inspired, or uplifted because the hierophany shows us the ideal. It reminds us of what is good, and reinvigorates an important part of our minds (or souls) that require moral (or spiritual) nourishment.
This being said, the account of the sacred offered in this paper will not be that the sacred simply is the transcendent or hierophanies. I claim, instead, that while the sacred involves the transcendent and hierophanies, it is more than that. There are at least two reasons for this. First, this way of thinking misses the role that human thought and action seem to have in making certain things sacred. Things can be sacred because people honour them and set them apart in certain ways, even if those things don’t exemplify, or make salient, the transcendent to an extraordinary degree. For example, a family’s house may not, per se, exemplify, or make salient, the transcendent to an extraordinary degree. The house may be dilapidated and not particularly inspiring. Yet, the house can be sacred because the family honours and treats the house in certain ways – e.g., they think of it as their home rather than an ‘investment’ or ‘asset’; they focus on beautifying it not just because it’s aesthetically pleasing to them but because their home deserves to be beautified; and they guard and police who comes into the house and what the social environment of the house is so as not to pollute or disrupt a certain harmony that seems proper for their home. In these ways, the family makes their house sacred.
I will say more about this below, but, for now, let us move to the second problem with the idea of the sacred as the transcendent or as hierophanies. The issue is that there can be things that exemplify the ideal to an extraordinary degree yet, because people don’t afford them a certain place in their thoughts and actions, we may not want to classify them as sacred. For example, a colourful sunset over a lake, with the water reflecting hues of purple and pink as the sun dips down below an evergreen forest tree-line in the distance can be an event of astounding beauty. Calling it transcendent or even divine seems appropriate. But is it sacred? The notion of the sacred that I am concerned with here requires that we surround the thing with certain rituals. The sacred, in this sense, isn’t something we merely notice and appreciate. It’s something that we actively honour and protect. Many things can exemplify the ideal to an extraordinary degree without us actively honouring and protecting them. For these reasons, I won’t be defending a concept of the sacred that simply identifies it with the transcendent or hierophanies.
2.3 The Sacred as a Normative Status
The third concept of the sacred that we’ll consider is the one that is dominant in the (small) philosophical literature on the topic. On this view, sacredness is fundamentally a normative status. One version of this is the idea that the sacred is that which should not be violated – see, e.g., the introduction in Rogers (Reference Rogers2004), Norman (Reference Norman and Rogers2004), Holland (Reference Holland and Rogers2004), and Clark (Reference Clark and Rogers2004). Other versions claim that the sacred is that which should be revered, or are some combination of both ideas – see, e.g., Uniacke (Reference Uniacke and Rogers2004) and McPherson (Reference McPherson2015).
While it’s plausible that the sacred has an important normative status, it seems less plausible that having that status is the essence of the sacred itself. It’s unsatisfying to think that the explanation of the sacred bottoms out, so to speak, with its normative status and that there’s nothing more to say about what the sacred is or why it has this normative status in the first place. Compare this to properties such as dangerousness and beauty. If something is dangerous, it has a certain normative status: ceteris paribus, it ought to be avoided. But the idea that all it is to be dangerous is to be that which, ceteris paribus, ought to be avoided is explanatorily unsatisfying. We think that there is a deeper explanation of what dangerousness is, presumably something like this: x is dangerous when, relative to other activities in which humans normally partake, x has a significantly higher probability of harming someone. The normative status that dangerousness has is because of this deeper fact about what dangerousness is. Presumably, the same thing holds for beauty. Beautiful things have a normative status: ceteris paribus, they ought to be appreciated and preserved. But, again, it is implausible that beauty just is that normative status. Rather, it seems that there is some set of features that makes something beautiful and, then, because of that, it has a certain normative status.
I take it that the same thing is true about the sacred. If the sacred is that which should not be violated, presumably that is because of some deeper fact (e.g., that something is an exemplification of the transcendent to an extraordinary degree). So, while accounts of the sacred that reduce it to normative status end up discussing one important aspect of the sacred, I don’t think they are getting to the heart of what the sacred is.
2.4 The Sacred as the Set Apart
The account of the sacred that I will develop in this paper is a version of the fourth, and final, concept of the sacred that we’ll discuss: the sacred as the ‘set apart’. The classic statement of this view is Durkheim’s (Reference Durkheim and Cosman2001 [1912]), where he claims that the sacred is that which is ‘set apart and surrounded by prohibitions’ (p. 46). More fully, Durkheim claims that the world can be divided into two categories, the sacred and the profane, where
[s]acred things are those things protected and isolated by prohibitions; profane things are things to which those prohibitions apply and must keep their distance from what is sacred. (p. 40)
There are multiple problems with Durkheim’s claims, one of which is the same kind of problem we just discussed. Saying that the sacred is that which is protected or isolated from certain things is to say nothing about why that is the case, leaving it explanatorily unsatisfying. I will address that issue further down. But let’s first notice some other problems with Durkheim’s account. He says that sacred things must be ‘isolated’ and that we must ‘keep our distance’ from them; but this isn’t true. An old-growth forest can be sacred, yet we can still visit it so long as we treat it properly; a family heirloom can be sacred, yet we can hold it and pass it around so long as it is handled with care; etc. Furthermore, being protected with prohibitions isn’t enough to make something sacred. A white shirt might be protected by certain prohibitions – don’t let tomato sauce or red wine touch the shirt – but that doesn’t mean that the shirt is sacred.
Adding something about the attitudes or emotions that we must have towards the ‘set apart’ helps solve these problems. The sociologist Christian Smith (Reference Smith2014) claims to endorse Durkheim’s view but immediately supplements it by saying that sacred things are ‘hallowed, revered, and honored as beyond questioning’ (p. 1). This addition allows us to avoid the latter two problems we just saw for Durkheim’s basic position. We can revere or honour something without isolating it and keeping our distance from it (e.g., a multigenerational family heirloom), and not everything that is protected by prohibitions is revered or honoured (e.g., a white shirt).
But what about the problem of explanation? Why do we honour and revere and set apart certain things and not others? At this point, we can reintroduce the idea of the transcendent (ideal). It seems to me that holding things sacred is how we properly honour and revere the transcendent, which makes sense because it is plausible that the transcendent (or a subset of it) is worthy of honour and reverence.Footnote 3 My view is that the sacred are the things that we ‘set apart’ – i.e., we take attitudes/actions of honouring/reverence towards – in an attempt to connect with and show proper appreciation of the transcendent (ideal). We can call this the reverential connection view of the sacred.
I further propose that there are two ‘directions’ of connection. One is from our end. Some things are sacred because we dedicate or offer them as a way of honouring the transcendent. Ceremonies are good examples of this. Consider, e.g., a wedding ceremony. Marriage aspires to certain elements of the transcendent – e.g., ideals of love, unity, and potency – and the wedding ceremony is, in an important sense, dedicated or offered to those ideals. Through the décor; the clothing; the ritualistic and traditional movements and words spoken; and the explicit vows of commitment to the ideals themselves; the participants honour the transcendent. In doing so, they make wedding ceremonies sacred.
The other direction of connection is when we experience something as manifesting the transcendent (exemplifying the ideal) to an extraordinary degree – i.e., as an hierophany – and honour it as such. We receive the transcendent in this way. For example, standing under the canopy of an ancient, old-growth forest, you might be overwhelmed with a sense of the transcendent. If you then honoured that by, say, speaking of that forest with others in reverential tones; dedicating yourself to protecting and preserving it in certain ways; and incorporating that cause into your value structure in significant ways, it would be sacred for you.
The sacred, thus, includes what is reverentially offered to the transcendent and what is reverentially received from the transcendent. Both ways connect us to the transcendent. In some cases, there may be a simultaneous connection from both directions. For example, when a professional violinist plays a beautiful piece of music with passion and care for the beauty of the piece, that may be a kind of offering to the transcendent, and the resulting sounds may manifest the transcendent to an extraordinary degree. Perhaps it is a direct two-way connection that we perceive in such a performance, which may be why we can be moved to tears or have other intense emotional reactions. Likewise, when a bride proceeds down the aisle, if done with the right elegance and poise, it can seem as though she radiates a transcendent beauty, perhaps because the act is simultaneously an offering to the transcendent and a manifestation of it.
Before moving on, I’ll note that the view I’m offering is an attitude/action-dependent account – i.e., whether something is sacred depends upon our attitudes (including beliefs) and actions towards the thing rather than factors that are independent from our attitudes and actions. This allows us to understand sacredness as a distinct way of valuing certain things, which is both ethically significant (as I will argue in the next section) and makes sense of many common uses of the term ‘sacred’ (e.g., ‘The American flag is sacred to American patriots, but it’s not sacred to most Japanese people.’). That said, there are some questions that this type of account raises that I would like to address.
First, what about uses of the term ‘sacred’ that don’t fit with my account? For example, if anti-abortion advocates claim that ‘human life is sacred’, they are saying that there is something about human life itself, regardless of one’s attitudes or actions towards it, in virtue of which it is sacred. Answer: The historical and social complexity of the term ‘sacred’ make it unsurprising that some uses fail to be neatly captured by one theory. This is presumably the case for most or all terms of philosophical interest – ‘love’, ‘rationality’, ‘freedom’, etc. I contend that the theory of the sacred that I’m defending in this paper explains an intuitive and central sense of the term ‘sacred’, even if there are other ways the term is sometimes used. Additionally, even if the present view cannot directly account for such uses, it can often indirectly account for them with its constituent concepts. So, e.g., while the reverential connection view cannot say that human life is sacred regardless of anyone’s attitudes or actions towards it, the view is compatible with the idea that human life is a hierophany; that whether something is a hierophany does not depend upon anyone’s attitudes or actions towards it; and that certain hierophanies should be honoured and protected – i.e., they should be held sacred in the sense defended in this paper. So, the reverential connection view has significant resources to account for claims that people make about the sacred even if it has to rephrase and reconceive some aspects of those claims.
Second, since this account implies that what is sacred is a subjective matter, yet what is transcendent (ideal) is an objective matter, doesn’t this account imply that people can hold things sacred that are not actually being offered to, or received from, the transcendent (ideal)? Answer: Theoretically, yes. My view is that people hold things sacred in an attempt to connect with the transcendent. There is no guarantee that those attempts will succeed. However, people typically do succeed. Emotions of awe and reverence typically guide people to recognize the actual transcendent (ideal). (Compare the way that subjective experiences of crisp, juicy, sweet, appley taste typically connect people with actual apples.)
Third, the concept of the transcendent itself doesn’t seem to rule out bad transcendent things. Correspondingly, the concept of the ideal can be understood in a value-neutral way that allows for ideals of both goodness and badness. So, doesn’t my account imply that people could hold bad or evil things sacred? Answer: There is some reason to think that this is conceptually impossible. Genuine attitudes of honouring or revering are moral attitudes, and it may simply be conceptually incoherent for them to have bad or evil objects. (Compare this to it being conceptually incoherent for the attitude of believing that something is a triangle to have, as its object, something with four sides.) But perhaps, just as it seems possible to love bad or evil people, it is possible to hold bad or evil things sacred. Even if that were true, it wouldn’t diminish the philosophical significance of the sacred any more than it would diminish the philosophical significance of love. As I will attempt to show in the next section, sacredness, like love, is a profoundly important element of good human lives, even if it can sometimes be misguided and destructive.
3. The Ethical Significance of the Sacred
Now that we have a better sense of what the sacred is, we can turn to the issue of its ethical significance, broadly construed to include issues such as value, well-being, and politics. I believe that the sacred has several important philosophical implications for the ethical domain of human life. Specifically, I will focus on five issues: happiness, meaning, virtue, identity, and politics.
3.1 The Sacred and Happiness
What is it for a human being to have a good life? This is the philosophical question of well-being. While there have been many answers offered to this question, most of them afford an important place to happiness. Philosophers have conceived of happiness in various ways – e.g., how much pleasure a person is experiencing; how many of a person’s desires are satisfied; how overall satisfied a person feels about his life; or what a person’s background emotional mood is – but almost regardless of how exactly we construe happiness, I think that the sacred has a significant bearing on it through its ability to revitalize or restore us in a unique way. Obviously, the sacred doesn’t provide physical sustenance like food or water does. But that is not that only kind of sustenance that human beings require. People face challenges and hardships in life that batter them around psychologically and morally. They witness depravity, vice, ugliness, and suffering. The weight of the world takes its toll. Unanswered, it will leave people in states of sorrow, apathy, depression, or emptiness. They will become psychologically (or spiritually) depleted. The sacred serves an essential function of restoring people psychologically (or spiritually). Most of us – I hope all of us – are familiar with the way that we feel a renewed sense of purpose or hope, or a fulfilling sense of peace, when we engage with sacred things. For example, the sacredness of nature, as experienced walking alone through the woods, hearing the sounds of the forest, realizing the ancient cycles of life in process all around you, can recalibrate your mind and revitalize your spirit. Or, reading about a sacred, heroic figure from the history of one’s culture, learning about the dedication and sacrifices he made for others, the challenges and suffering he courageously endured, again, you can find yourself inspired and renewed. By connecting with the transcendent (ideal), things are ‘put into perspective’ such that your own life and challenges once again seem manageable. As Durkheim (Reference Durkheim and Cosman2001 [1912]) says,
The individual soul is regenerated … by immersing itself once more in the wellspring of its life; subsequently, if feels stronger, more in control of itself, less dependent on physical necessities. (p. 259)
This phenomenon is, again, I hope, familiar to all of us. But I also think we can say more about why this psychological (or spiritual) revitalization happens. My suggestion is that is the sacred impels us to believe that the world is, overall, good and beautiful. In doing this, it restores our moral confidence in the world. This process involves an emotional reaction that is similar, or identical, to what the psychologist Jonathan Haidt (Reference Haidt2006) calls ‘elevation’.Footnote 4 Haidt cites striking evidence of the physical and psychological effects of elevation, which seem to include ‘feelings of love, trust, and openness’ and a relaxing effect (pp. 197–198). Haidt also cites a letter that he received about his work on elevation, which contains this remarkable passage describing the phenomenon of being elevated to the point of tears:
That was a tear of celebration, a tear of receptiveness to what is good in the world, a tear that says, it’s okay, relax, let your guard down, there are good people in the world, there is good in people, love is real, it’s in our nature. (p. 199)
That is a wonderful description of the reassurance that our connections with the transcendent via the sacred provide us. One can find many examples in literature and poetry that capture this same sense of reassurance in the goodness and beauty of the world. John Cottingham (Reference Cottingham and McPherson2017) cites a passage from George Eliot’s novel Adam Bede where she references examples of things that are presumably hierophanies – ‘[a]utumn sunsets, or pillared vistas, or calm majestic statues, or Beethoven symphonies’ – and she claims that they ‘all bring with them the consciousness that they are mere waves and ripples in an unfathomable ocean of love and beauty’ (p. 16). It’s not hard to see why we would feel uplifted by the sense that our world is an ‘unfathomable ocean of love and beauty’. These experiences restore our confidence that the world is worth living in and this fosters, or at least clears the path for, our happiness.
Is this kind of revitalization or restoration available through other means? Psychotherapy, medication, alcohol, video games, etc., might help in various ways at various times – at least temporarily – but, arguably, none of them are adequate substitutes for the deep human need to connect with, and be renewed by, the transcendent. If that is correct, the sacred is essential for sustaining human happiness.Footnote 5
3.2 The Sacred and Meaning
Another plausible requirement of any good human life is that it is sufficiently meaningful. One way to start thinking about meaningfulness is to imagine a meaningless existence and think about what is missing from it. A standard example to consider is Sisyphus’ task of rolling the rock up the hill only to have it roll back down over and over without end – see, e.g., Taylor (Reference Taylor2000). Intuitively, this strikes us as meaningless activity. And while the case of Sisyphus is obviously an extreme one, we can think of many real-life situations that have structurally similar features (e.g., a person who does one very rote task all day long on an assembly line that produces a trite, low-quality product). The same concerns about meaninglessness, albeit to a lesser degree, present themselves. The question is: what is missing from these situations that deprives them of meaning?
There are at least two broad concerns: one is the subjective experience of the person in the situation, which we presume to be one of alienation and boredom. What is missing is connection and engagement with one’s activity. The second concern is about the activity itself. It seems pointless or trivial. What is missing is activity that is important.
The sacred addresses both concerns. Holding things sacred, on the present view, requires that we set them apart with attitudes/actions of honouring/reverence. The attitudes and actions involved are necessarily ones of connection and engagement. You can’t actively honour or revere something while simultaneously being alienated from it or bored by it. Of course, most people won’t spend most of their time actively honouring and revering the sacred. Much of life is spent on the mundane. But our concern about meaningfulness in life is presumably not that everything we do be meaningful, but that enough is meaningful. Focusing on the sacred to a sufficient degree in life would be at least one way to live a life of sufficient engagement and connection to one’s activities.
Understood this way, it might seem as though the sacred is just one of many things that could make life meaningful. If one could connect or engage with something else (e.g., doing crossword puzzles or even rolling a rock up a hill over and over), we might think that one could have a life equal in meaning to a life engaged with the sacred. But I don’t think that that’s the case, which brings us to the way that the sacred addresses the concern about the nature of one’s activity itself. I contend that to have a meaningful life, or, at least, to have the most meaningful kind of life, the sacred is necessary because it orients one’s activities towards the highest goods. Since sacred things represent or manifest the transcendent, a life engaged with the sacred will be one focused on the transcendent. The activities that flow from this will be, correspondingly, important. Smith (Reference Smith2014) captures what I’m talking about here in his description of ‘spiritual matters’, which
concern beliefs, longings, and experiences—both conscious and unconscious—about the greatest and highest good, truth, rightness, value, vitality, meaning, and beauty. Such irrepressible concerns of the “human spirit” speak and respond to what is most worth living for, what purposes merit our devotion, what goods are to be most prized, what ends are worth dedicating ourselves to realize. (p. 2)
Sufficient engagement with the sacred can lead us along the path to meaningful lives by directing us to activities that connect us with the ‘greatest and highest good’ (e.g., lives devoted to the service and care of other human beings; to promoting and appreciating beauty; or to utilizing the cognitive gifts we’ve received in order to discover the deep truths of the universe). It won’t lead us to lives of endless crossword puzzles or rolling rocks up hills because those activities don’t connect us with the transcendent. In these ways, the sacred plays an integral role in meaningful lives.
3.3 The Sacred and Moral Virtue
Another part of having a good human life is to be a morally good person – i.e., to have moral virtue. What role, if any, does the sacred have in that? More precisely, which particular moral character traits (e.g., courage, generosity, and temperance) involve the sacred? In most academic discussions of moral virtue, the sacred has no explicit role. For example, looking through twenty-four contemporary introductory philosophy textbooks and anthologies that have sections on moral virtue, none of them say anything about the sacred. These books include the work of contemporary authors and, in several cases, parts of Aristotle’s foundational discussion of moral virtue. None of the moral virtues described by either the contemporary authors or Aristotle explicitly or obviously involve the sacred.
Again, I want to suggest that this is an oversight. Specifically, I contend that piety is an essential moral virtue and that the sacred is essential to piety. But what is piety? Like the term ‘sacred’, ‘piety’ has immediate, strong religious connotations and we might initially think that piety is, necessarily, a religious concept. It certainly can be understood that way. For example, the philosopher Robert Roberts (Reference Roberts and McPherson2017) describes the virtue of piety as
a developed and temporally stable disposition to appreciate the glory of God and his creation and thus to feel inhibited from actions that violate its order (p. 62)
But, as with the case of the sacred, while piety can be understood as religious, I don’t think that it must be understood that way. I think that there is a coherent and compelling religiously neutral concept of piety that incorporates the religiously neutral concept of the sacred developed in Section 2. Instead of insisting on the focus of piety being ‘the glory of God and his creation’, we can understand the focus as being the transcendent, which, as explained in Section 2, can be understood both religiously or non-religiously. I propose that piety is a cultivated, stable disposition to properly show appreciation for, and connect with, the transcendent (ideal). And since, on the view of this paper, the sacred are the things that we honour to show appreciation for, and to connect with, the transcendent, the concept of piety I’m proposing can be restated as a cultivated, stable disposition to properly hold things sacred.Footnote 6
The plausibility that piety thusly understood is a genuine moral virtue can be checked intuitively by thinking about different attitudes/actions that people could have towards the examples in the introduction of this paper. Imagine a person who would have no problem razing an ancient, old-growth forest to the ground in order to turn a profit; for whom a family heirloom that had been lovingly passed down for generations meant nothing and he carelessly tossed it in a cluttered drawer where it was then damaged; who, instead of having feelings and thoughts of reverence while learning of the truly heroic deeds of a great figure in his culture, is mostly wondering about whether people will ‘like’ the picture of his breakfast that he posted on social media; etc. Intuitively, we perceive a serious moral character flaw here. What we are sensing, I contend, is a lack of piety. The person is neither properly appreciative of, nor properly attempting to connect with, the transcendent. Notice, however, that none of his failings are religious failings in some obvious way. Piety, in the sense I’m suggesting, is a moral virtue that any truly decent person, religious or not, must have.
But what is it to properly hold things sacred, as the present notion of piety requires? Which things? What ways of honouring them? How often? Etc. Here, I must leave things vague, partly for concerns about the length of this paper, and partly for methodological reasons. I agree with Aristotle’s wise adage that we should seek precision in each subject just so much as the subject matter admits (Nicomachean Ethics, Bk. I, Ch. 3). And Aristotle applied this good advice to his own account of virtue, for example, by eschewing an attempt at some exact formula for each virtue and settling with the idea that each requires particular emotions and actions ‘at the right time, about the right things, towards the right people, for the right end, and in the right way’ (Nicomachean Ethics, Bk. II, Ch. 6, quoted text from the (Reference Crisp2014) translation by Crisp). Correspondingly, piety requires that we honour the right things, at the right time, in the right way, etc. With Aristotle, I do not believe that we will discover a precise algorithm or formula that tells us which thought or action is the right one for every possible situation. Rather, we must use phronesis (practical wisdom) to decide in each case (Nicomachean Ethics, Bk. VI, Ch. 12).
Drawing on another element of Aristotle’s work, he famously characterized virtue as a mean between excess and deficiency, and provided several examples of how this worked (e.g., that, in dealing with dangerous situations, courage is the mean between the excess of recklessness and the deficiency of cowardice). Thinking about piety in this way has a least one noteworthy, and perhaps surprising, implication: that religious ascetism may be a moral vice. If the mean state in regards to appreciating and connecting with the transcendent is piety, then presumably the deficiency is profanity or sacrilege (again, understood in a religiously neutral sense). This is not surprising in that, I think, most of us accept the intuitive judgments that we have about unappreciative and detached people like the one I described a few paragraphs ago. In contrast, however, we are often expected to admire religious ascetics – i.e., those who shun the normal world and devote all of their time to appreciating or connecting with the transcendent. They are often presented as morally more ‘pure’ or ‘higher’ than normal people. But an Aristotelian-mean notion of piety suggests that perhaps this common judgment is actually an error, and that religious asceticism is an excess and, thus, a moral vice.
I think that there is considerable plausibility to this idea. Is a person who renounces any attachments to ‘worldly’ things, including material possessions and sex, really a moral exemplar for human beings? Consider, e.g., the famous Christian ascetic Simeon Stylites, who allegedly lived on top of a small pillar for over thirty years, exposed to the elements, spending much of his time continuously bending down and then back up again to a standing position – allegedly, one observer counted one thousand, two hundred, and forty-four repetitions of this movement and, at that point, stopped counting even though Simeon was still going. Was Simeon a morally better person than a more normal and balanced man who interacts lovingly with his wife, supports and guides his children, is a good friend to those around him in his community, is a responsible worker at a local company that provides important jobs and services for the community, etc.? There is something disturbingly life-denying about asceticism. If an ascetic is motivated to his extreme thoughts and behaviour in an attempt to escape from difficulty or ‘suffering’, he can even seem selfish or narcissistic. While the urge to connect with the transcendent is deep within humans – Eliade (Reference Eliade and Trask1959 [1957]) aptly classifies humans as homo religiosus – it also seems important to remember that human beings are part animal. It seems to me that the morally good life for human beings is one that situates us firmly in our animal bodies, with all the physical and social attachments that go along with that, while at the same time striving to connect with the transcendent. The virtue of piety involves connecting those two realms, not abandoning the human world for the transcendent.
3.4 The Sacred and Moral Identity
The sacred also bears on morality beyond the issues of moral virtue and piety. Piety, like the other moral virtues, doesn’t dictate a one-size-fits-all course of life for everyone. One’s particular circumstances, capabilities, opportunities, etc., combined with the nature of the moral virtues, including piety, presumably make a variety of virtuous lives possible (e.g., a virtuous warrior, a virtuous scholar, a virtuous farmer, etc.), with different ones naturally emphasizing some of the particular virtues more than others. This raises a question for all of us: what is the virtuous life for you, given your particular circumstances, capabilities, opportunities, etc.? I think the sacred comes into play in determining the answer to this question because the sacred connects people to the particular moral ideals and pursuits that animate them and structure their particular moral activity. There are many moral causes and paths that one can take in life (e.g., caring for animals, standing up for civil rights, making a beautiful and harmonious home for one’s family, or protecting one’s country from hostile forces through military service). The particular causes and paths that you are drawn to and dedicate yourself to constitute your particular moral identity. Your moral identity is one part of your broader identity, which includes other things like your intellectual identity, your bodily identity, etc. But I think that one’s moral identity is an especially important part of one’s overall identity because it relates us to what is good and beautiful in life, which, as I argued earlier, is essential in sustaining our happiness and making our lives meaningful. And the sacred is centrally involved here because the particular moral causes that we sufficiently dedicate ourselves to are sacred to us. Certain elements of the transcendent in the form of moral ideals (e.g., caring for the vulnerable, fighting against cruelty, or achieving the highest levels of wisdom) call out to us, in some sense. We honour those ideals by dedicating ourselves to activity in their image. Thus, they become the sacred moral causes that constitute our particular moral identities.
3.5 The Sacred and the Political
The final area of ethical implications of the sacred that I will discuss in this paper is the political. While there are many ethical questions about politics, I will focus on some implications that the ideas about the sacred we’ve been considering have for (supposed) ‘pluralistic liberal democracies’ such as the United States of America. A salient feature of such regimes is intense political disagreement among the citizenry. Since the citizens differ significantly in what they value (hence, ‘pluralism’), and are all supposed to be able to, within certain limits, pursue those diverging values (hence, ‘liberalism’), but also get to participate in deciding what rules and restrictions govern everyone else (hence, ‘democracy’), there are, unsurprisingly, clashes over what limitations on behaviour should be codified into the laws and policies of the society. How does the sacred factor into these disputes?
If we take the claims and arguments of political activists at face value, we might conclude that the answer is: not much. Public political discourse in pluralistic liberal democracies is mostly conducted in a distinctive and recognizable lexicon – a language of rights, equality, harm, compassion, violence, danger, prosperity, etc. – and appeals to the sacred or to piety are conspicuously absent. This is not a mere accident. Sacredness and piety are commonly associated with religion, and liberal democracy’s central tenets of ‘freedom of religion’ and ‘the separation of church and state’ foster the idea that beliefs about what is sacred or pious should be cordoned off in a ‘private sphere’ which, per se, offers no legitimate justification for political policies.
Despite this general attitude and public decorum, it is plausible that, lurking behind the surface of our discourse, the real reasons for many political disagreements are indeed matters of the sacred and of piety. Dan Demetriou (Reference Demetriou2013) makes this point,Footnote 7 and he illustrates it with the example of an anti-abortion activist group, composed of Christians, that publicly argues that foetuses are a ‘marginalized’ group, that they should be given the equality in rights that has been granted to other marginalized groups, and that abortion is a rights-violation of foetuses. Thus, the group argues in the lexicon of pluralistic liberal democracy. However,
[a]s anyone intimately familiar with the world of pro-life Christianity from the inside can testify, the language of rights, equality, and liberty is not the language in which the rightness or wrongness of abortion (or any other matter) is discussed. When speaking to each other, the sorts of appeals Christian pro-lifers will make against abortion concern our being created in the image of God and the holiness of the womb. (Demetriou, Reference Demetriou2013, p. 386)
This is the language of the sacred. Innocent human foetuses and the mother’s womb are seen as hierophanies that must be honoured. Demetriou suspects that these are the real reasons, rather than concerns about rights-violations, etc., that are driving the group members’ beliefs about abortion. It is plausible that the same conclusion applies to many other political disputes. For example, those opposing drug legalization may talk about crime rates, negative effects on property value, and other issues that can be addressed in the lexicon of pluralistic liberal democracy; but many of them just viscerally feel that drug use is ‘gross’ and ‘degrading’ to users. This suggests that they think that it desecrates something about human beings that they hold sacred. This is why, presumably, many of them wouldn’t approve of legalized and widespread drug use even if it could be shown that it would not increase crime or negatively affect property values, etc. Similar things can be said about prostitution. Stated concerns about the dangers of disease or the physical abuse of women ‘sex workers’ – a term that itself suggests a desecration to many people – are arguably a veneer over fundamental concerns about the violation of sacred things.
These examples might lead us to think that there is a kind of conservative/progressive asymmetry when it comes to the sacred, viz., that conservatives are typically much more motivated by concerns of the sacred than progressives. Haidt (Reference Haidt2012) has argued extensively for that very conclusion. But I think that we should be wary of accepting that.Footnote 8 The religiously neutral conception of the sacred defended in this paper could, in principle, explain the beliefs and actions of agnostic or atheistic progressives just as well as it could explain those of religious conservatives. And there are reasons for thinking that such an approach indeed offers the best explanation of many important progressive beliefs and actions. Durkheim (Reference Durkheim and Cosman2001 [1912]), speaking of the zealotry involved in the French Revolution – a paradigmatically ‘progressive’ movement – remarks that ‘things that were purely secular in nature were transformed by public opinion into sacred things’, mentioning, e.g., the ‘cult of Reason’ (p. 161). He contends that
[e]ven today, with all the freedom we grant each other, it would be sacrilege for a man to deny progress and flout the humanistic ideal to which modern societies are attached. (p. 161)
Is there a ‘cult of Progress’ involving things that progressives set apart and honour, protect from violation, treat as offerings to progressive transcendent ideals, and are, thus, ‘transformed by public opinion into sacred things’? Examples suggest themselves. For instance, the solemnity and deference that progressives show towards values of ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ (DEI) indicates that these are transcendental ideals that they are honouring through their emotions and actions. Events such as DEI training seminars and frequent, repeated public affirmations of commitment to DEI have ritualistic and ceremonial aspects of them that are hallmarks of the sacred. The strict and vigorously enforced prohibitions surrounding DEI are further indications. If, in Durkheim’s day, it would be considered a kind of ‘sacrilege’ to ‘deny progress and flout the humanistic ideal’, the response to rejecting or flouting DEI that one receives today – public shaming; formal sanctions at work or, in many cases, termination of employment altogether; threats of physical violence, etc. – suggests that, for many progressives, questioning or opposing DEI amounts to ‘sacrilege’ as well.Footnote 9
Similar things can be said about other progressive causes such as the ‘LGBTQ’ movement and the environmentalist movement. There are symbolic and ritualistic elements (e.g., gay pride month, the rainbow flag, and Earth Day) through which devotees commune and are renewed in their sense that there are other good people out there, allied together in the glorious struggle for equality or sustainability. There are also strict prohibitions on ‘sacrilege’ (e.g., people who publicly deny the claims of the transgender movement have received public shaming, loss of employment, death threats, etc.).Footnote 10 Again, these are all hallmarks of the sacred.
If this is correct – if the political values of both conservatives and progressives involve things that are sacred to them – I think that it raises a challenging question for pluralistic liberal democracy: can we legitimately force citizens to hold certain things sacred (or at least act as though they do), and, if so, to what extent? If the answer is that we can’t do that – perhaps because it would violate the freedom of conscience that is a core part of liberalism – then citizens may find themselves without legitimate political justification for many of their political convictions. For example, it may be impossible to justify legal prohibitions on prostitution without relying on, explicitly or implicitly, the idea that prostitution violates something that is, or should be, sacred. Likewise, it may be impossible to justify controlling or censoring speech about transgenderism without relying on, explicitly or implicitly, the idea that the reality and acceptance of transgenderism is something that is, or should be, sacred. If citizens can’t legitimately justify such policies in a pluralistic liberal democracy, perhaps this just shows that pluralistic liberal democracy is not compatible with human beings’ needs to shape their societies in accordance with their deepest values and convictions.
On the other hand, if pluralistic liberal democracy can legitimately justify policies that force citizens to hold certain things sacred (or act as though they do), to what extent? While the ability to politically enforce one’s sacred values may satisfy a deep human need to do so, in a pluralistic society with significant divergences in what people hold sacred, it can leave behind a set of profoundly demoralized and frustrated political ‘losers’. Failing to protect what is sacred to you, or being forced to treat something as sacred even though you believe that it is wrong or evil, is not the same as losing on political issues that don’t involve the sacred. For example, you may be opposed to regionalizing your children’s school system because it will be personally more expensive and inconvenient to have your children going to a school that is further away from where you live. Still, nothing sacred is on the line here. If you are on the losing side of an election on this issue, you may be quite frustrated, but that’s not the same as feeling morally alienated from your own society, which is how people feel when they lose on political battles over the sacred. As discussed earlier, honouring and protecting sacred things plays fundamental roles in human well-being. When the political process dishonours or violates what people hold sacred, it has opposite effects – instead of renewing their spirits and hope in the overall goodness of the world, it depletes their spirits and diminishes their sense of hope; instead of making their lives seem more meaningful, it makes them seem less meaningful; instead reinforcing their moral identities, it erodes them. And since this is being done to them by others in their society, who are simultaneously honouring and protecting what they (the others) hold sacred, the more that people end up on the losing end of these battles, the more they feel degraded, oppressed, and subjugated in their own societies.
I don’t have the space for a full discussion of what a solution to these problems could be, but I will close this paper with two suggestions for further thought: one is simply that we acknowledge the role that the sacred is playing in our politics rather than hide it behind the standard lexicon of pluralistic liberal democracy. A first step in solving problems is being able to name and describe them in accurate terms, and I think that we need to employ the concept of the sacred (and related concepts such as hierophany and piety) to accurately describe political disputes.Footnote 11 Second, I think we should carefully consider what a path might look like that navigates between the Scylla of an inhuman politics that makes all appeals to the sacred out of bounds and the Charybdis of a politics where factions of citizens morally and spiritually subjugate the other citizens by forcing what they hold sacred on everyone else. In particular, this might require more decentralized, localized political control over issues that now tend to be governed by central bodies. This would force both conservatives and progressives to accept that there will be swaths of their own countries committing sacrilege. But it would also allow citizens to have real control over what is held sacred by giving virtually everyone the opportunity to situate themselves within, or build, a local community of like-minded citizens who together honour and protect what they believe are the highest goods.
