The theologies of established religions enshrine and interpret specific historical experiences that cannot simply be deduced from first principles, whether those of GA or an alternative theory of origin. But it is essential that we be able to establish a scene on which the practitioners of religion and those of anthropological theory (who need not be seen as mutually exclusive) can find sufficient common ground to share their insights to the end of improving our human self-understanding.
Generative anthropology (GA)’s minimal hypothesis follows the principle of Ockham’s razor by minimizing the worldly presuppositions of human emergence. To this end, it is essential to provide a strictly anthropological-empirical definition of the sacred, as the core of the beliefs in sacred beings that are the substance of religious ontologies.
I have often cited Roy Rappoport’s dictum in Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (Cambridge, 1999) that language and religion were coeval, born in the same moment. GA provides Rappoport’s revelation with a Girardian basis: proto-humanity needed language and the sacred because at a certain point in the evolution of protohuman intelligence, conditioned reflexes could no longer resolve the problem of (mimetic) desire.
What became necessary was conscience in the human sense: the emergence in each individual of a “soul” consisting of a mental scene of representation on which objects of potential desire could be designated by signs communicable to his fellows, and thereby mutually understood in terms of the human community’s needs and judgments. In this way, rather than following our appetites limited only by reflexive inhibitions, we became able to contemplate the objects of these appetites in the context of the community as a whole while deferring our appetitive drives toward them, thus limiting the danger inherent in the mimetic multiplication of these appetites by their presence in our fellows.
In this context, the signs of language are hypothesized to originate in a collective context from “aborted gestures of appropriation” originally directed toward possessing an appetitive object but suspended for fear of the conflict they might arouse with other members of the group. These interrupted gestures would thereby become understood as acts of pointing designating their object, gestures that could be reproduced by the entire group without their coming into conflict, thereby creating a stasis that would permit the participants to share the object in a way satisfactory to all.
We thus define the sacred as the intuited agent of this deferral, an emerging common sense within the group that it cannot, as in the ape serial distribution system, pass the object from the Alpha to the Beta and the Gamma, but must divide it in more or less equal portions, in a common space we call a scene because it constitutes for the first time a terrain on which all members of the emerging human group are aware of the sacred constraint on individual behavior, and obliged to communicate about the object of their common desire through signs. With the focus of attention of the entire group on a common object, it comes to constitute a community.
“Religion” is then what we call the collective celebration of the sacred in order to reinforce the lesson of the originary scene. Such reaffirmations of communal solidarity reduce intragroup tensions overall, as is the case at church services or indeed in any public celebration, from concerts to sports events to political rallies. What the originary humans understand as preventing them from fighting over the common object of the group’s desires is the sense of interdiction that surrounds it, rooted in the fear of violent conflict that individual attempts to appropriate the object might arouse, but understood not simply as a reaction of fear, but as a moral obligation, a matter of conscience.
Thus fear of mimetic conflict comes to be shared by the entire group, the participants’ gestures of appropriation are aborted, become gestures of pointing, of representation. This is the origin of language, and at the same time, of the sacred—the concrete realization of Rappoport’s intuition in the context of Girard’s discovery of the transformative effect of mimetic desire in making us, in forcing us to become, human.
Thus far we have not needed to speak of the embodiment of the sacred in gods or idols. It is essential to understand that the priority of the sacred is a simple truth of anthropology; before the first humans could begin to conceive the source of this sacred deferral of appropriation as emanating from one or more specific beings, they must have felt the interdictive force generated from the group dynamic surrounding an object of common desire, presumably a source of alimentary nourishment, no doubt recalling memories of conflicts that had erupted before the common sense of sacred interdiction had come to replace the Alpha-Beta distribution system. The central animal/victim itself would be felt as embodying a force preventing the completion of their individual acts of appropriation—and to the extent that cave art provides a clue, the animals of the hunt were clearly objects of reverence, as were the clay “Venuses” found nearby, presumably as agents and protectresses of childbirth, hence likewise objects of common desire. And from all we know of elementary societies, the originary division of the desire-object would have been egalitarian, symmetrical.
What do these introductory remarks imply concerning how we can speak about the singular God of our own Western religions in terms of generative anthropology? Indeed, it is characteristic of such discussions to begin from a Biblical perspective in which God is a unique “meta-person” whose model is the Creator of Genesis.
That monotheism—realization of the uniqueness of the sacred throughout humanity—is more faithful to anthropological truth than polytheism is generally accepted, and one wonders to what extent even practitioners of polytheistic religions still fully believe in the personhood of their plural gods. In any case, the overall dominance of monotheism can hardly be ignored.
And it is no accident that it was in the Axial age, when the early middle-Eastern empires came to communicate among themselves, that the Hebrews, taking advantage of the newfound technique of writing, were able to set down on parchment their sacred history, which subsequently expanded into the “Abrahamic” trio of monotheistic religions that still dominate the West and Middle East. Hence in this part of the world, to be religious is to “believe in God” as a singular “meta-person,” enriched but not contradicted in Christianity by the addition of two “persons” to that of the Father-Creator.
Thus to speak of “God” is in effect to celebrate the Hebrew “victory” of monotheism over polytheism: the triumph of the One God, whose anthropological superiority would lead to the West’s triumph over the rest of the world—and at the same time, to the unique hatred of antisemitism, the resentment of those who cannot deny the Hebrews’ “firstness” in affirming the One God. Its return in force after 10/7/23 surprised many who had naively thought it to have gone into permanent decline after the defeat of Nazism
Sacred and Significant
For something to be significant is, in its minimal sense, for it to “be worthy” to become a signified, that is, to have a word (signifier) that signifies it. The sharpest distinction between religious and anthropological ontology is that the former makes a fundamental distinction between what is sacred and what is not, the sacred and the “profane,” whereas if we take significance as the secular equivalent of sacrality, everything we use signs for thinking/speaking about is somewhat significant. Or in other terms, all signs/words may be said to possess a certain degree of sacrality, the fact of using a sign implying that its object in conceived on a scene of representation, and that we defer for the moment seeking to appropriate its physical being. In particular, the Jewish refusal to name the divinity, to “signify” him, is a way of distinguishing the One God absolutely from the universe of his nameable creations.
A closer look at our attitudes toward language complicates the categorical distinction between the sacred and the significant. Certain words, for example, constitute “profanity,” which is a negative form of sacrality, and despite the recent blurring of this distinction that has led to the inclusion of such language even in the margins of public discourse, it certainly remains recognizable. (And we cannot fail to note that “swear words” or “oaths” borrow these categories directly from the sacred, as does the French sacrer, which means “to swear” in the sense of using profanity.)
Mistakes in grammar and usage also bear a stigma—relative of course to the expected “level” of language in a given context, where a term or turn of phrase “higher” than expected may seem as inappropriate as a more vulgar one. This too reflects a certain kind of sacrality, as is indeed associated with any behavioral “sign” that we transmit to others—through our dress, for example, or the way we wear our hair. All of these behaviors signify, and in so doing, they confront certain norms—and the respect for norms cannot be separated from the respect for the rules of human interaction that were enunciated in the Ten Commandments, or in Hillel’s Golden Rule, as the essence of the sacred.
Which is after all only to say that all human life is in principle lived on a scene where we are in principle observed by our fellows, and where every detail accessible to the senses may accordingly be judged according to the norms of that scene. Human life, in a word, is never “insignificant,” and by the same token, never wholly neutral with regard to sacrality. Animal behavior too follows “rules,” but these are the result of conditioned reflexes; animals cannot discuss them or agree to change them.
Thus the difference between sacrality and significance in the Western/Abrahamic context is that the former is understood as the product of a singular universal will that governs its manifestations in rites, holy objects, etc., whereas the latter—a category rarely encountered in serious theoretical discourse—is applied only a posteriori to words or ideas whose importance strikes us. On the rare occasions in which individuals or groups may be said to discover a revelation of the sacred, we naturally attribute it to an “act of God,” an intervention that differs from God’s normal omnipresence by the fact that He conveys to us a “message.”
But we should not forget that at the origin, significance in the representational relation between sign and thing was itself a revelation, and always retains the trace of one: the mark of the deferral or différance that separates the human mind—in the liberating space of Sartre’s néant—from its potential objects of discourse.
A final word on God and humanity’s place in the universe
We are so used to defining an individual’s position on the sacred/religious issue by whether or not he believes in God, that we have trouble thinking about the sacred in more general terms—one more thing for which we can blame the Jews. Readers of Chronicles 802 and 806 will recall the importance of broadening our Western perspective in this respect: Sartre would surely never have written his L’être et le néant (Being and Nothingness) had he not spent months discussing philosophy with a Buddhist philosopher. Researching this subject made me realize that “nothingness,” which means little to Westerners, is in contrast a central concept in Hinduism/Buddhism, where it is understood in scenic terms as a space of freedom. Whence Sartre’s association of the néant with the freedom of the pour-soi, of human scenicity, in contrast with his vision of the non-human en-soi as a world without free space, in which everything is jammed up against everything else.
This space of freedom is precisely what humans brought themselves with language. And in this respect, it is ironically curious that nowhere in L’être et le néant does Sartre make this connection between the freedom of the human pour-soi and human language, as though the latter were a mere artifact of this freedom rather than its primary manifestation. Nor to my knowledge do the oriental religions that focus on the emptiness of Nirvana as the ultimate goal of liberation ever associate it with language.
But this only shows that, however language may appear a far better-defined characteristic of humanity than the sacred, it is the sacred that has been the primary focus of anthropological concern, while our possession of language is taken for granted.
Thus we can teach language to machines, but (as I suggested a few years ago in a talk at COV&R) getting machines to conceive the sacred “for themselves,” as opposed to merely repeating what humans have said about it, would be a truly momentous undertaking, one for the moment inconceivable. Without a sense of the sacred, not as a word but as an intuition, a pour-soi, a superego, we would never have invented language—and machines wouldn’t have either.
Thus I cannot help thinking, on the basis of my amateur understanding via Scientific American and similar journals of the evolution of physical science, that Pascal’s intuition of the endlessness of the “two infinities”—the ever-expanding vastness of the universe and the ever-diminishing tininess of its minimal components of matter/energy—is constantly being borne out as our means of detection become more powerful.
What reason then do we have to assume that there is some endpoint either to the vastness or the tininess? All we can know for certain is how to make things work in the human-accessible intermediate zones that we have been able to explore up to the present, and which we can be assured that we can continue to expand so long as we are able to survive without destroying ourselves. But the goal of a “theory of everything” that could presumably be explained to the layperson never ceases to recoil, and it is hard to believe that any such theory is truly conceivable.
It was in the spectacle of these limitless infinities that Pascal defined the basis of religious faith: we must place a wager on God, however infinitesimal our chance that he will respond to us, else we have no reason to affirm the truth of our intuition of the sacred. But in simple, anthropological terms, what we are really betting on is not the existence of a benign power ruling the universe for our benefit, but merely the ability of the sacred, as it emerged with human language and religion, to continue to protect us sufficiently so that our species can prolong itself indefinitely in time, hopefully (however unlikely the possibility) even after the demise of our solar system.
We should still have some time to prepare for that eventuality. In the meantime, my Pascalian wager is that language and the sacred as minimally defined by generative anthropology offer the best point of departure for understanding humanity’s role in the universe.