I don’t believe the word “sacred” appeared in my The Origin of Language (TOOL), which appeared in 1981. Now, 43 years later, I think more and more about the sacred, not in order to “turn to God” but to understand the sacred as indeed part of the human, an aspect that, through the Incarnation, Christianity pushes as far as it can within a religious framework, that is, one that takes for granted the ontological and indeed chronological priority of the sacred in the extra-human mode we call the divine to our cognition of the profane world which we inhabit.
We all have at least a passing familiarity with the religious understanding of the sacred. I have no desire to contest this understanding. My interest is rather to translate it into anthropological terms, not to “destroy people’s faith,” but—in an era where increasing numbers no longer admit to faith of any kind—establish a homology between religious faith and an anthropological reality that simply brackets its otherworldly component: that understands the sacred entirely as an anthropological phenomenon independently of one’s answer to the question of whether it can function only in a religious context. All this, of course, with the understanding that the belief in this reality is by no means arbitrary; it is central to the social, the “scenic” world in which we live. It is only in the somewhat artificial world of intellectual exchange that we can attempt to abstract from any specific communal context to discuss “the sacred” as a phenomenon in itself. And it is not accidental that, unlike “the good,” the sacred is not truly a metaphysical category—for, unlike the typical adjective, it cannot be given a generally agreed-upon empirical definition. (Here the reader is referred to the discussion in my “Plato and The Birth of Conceptual Thought”; https://anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap0202/plato/ ) of Plato/Socrates’ attempts in the Euthyphro at defining the sacred (normally ἱερός) in terms of social practice rather than seeking its “objective” essence.)
The sacred in the originary scene is minimally defined as the external agent of our conscious choice of deferral in aborting the “natural” gesture of appropriation, thus providing the basis of the first sign. And it is certain that this choice cannot be understood as merely subjective. The awareness of the others’ sharing one’s interest in the desire-object makes the appropriative gesture a possible source of conflict, and by the same token establishes a symmetry among the members of the group that binds them together not merely out of fear of conflict but in a communal consciousness that reinforces their prior connection as members, say, of a hunting party, but above all connects their common objective of obtaining sustenance for themselves and their dependents with the necessity of respecting each other’s “equal” status. The shared sign, which by designating the object of general interest/desire is the guarantee of this symmetry, embodies a new understanding of the aborted gesture that emerges from the scene in which the participants find themselves. We can imagine that those more sensitive to the sacred quality of the intuition that commands deferral in a sense impose it as a model for the others, but the resulting egalitarian equilibrium is clearly of benefit to all. Thus is inaugurated a communal unity whose members are linked together through the deferral of appropriation and the symmetrical/ritual emission of the sign.
The connection between the sacred and the community is marked in many texts of the New Testament, where Jesus speaks of his presence whenever his followers come together in communion; e.g., in Matthew 18:20: “When two or three are gathered together in My name, I am there in the midst of them.” But clearly the sacred as a separate concept is not reducible to the good of the community. If we understand the sacred as the voice of our conscience, then its authenticity as sacred is independent of its worldly results; whatever the value of utilitarian calculations in a given circumstance, they cannot supply the ground of the sacred.
Which is to say that the community itself has no magical assurance of the value of its collective judgment of its needs, and above all of its justification. It is the latter that most easily explains the value of the sacred. Utilitarianism is not capable of defining and/or replacing the sacred, which we can only conceive as an indisputable a priori source of moral judgment.
To cite a famous example, Kant affirms that we should never lie, e.g., in his essay On a so-called right to lie out of love for one’s fellow man:
To be truthful in all declarations is, therefore, a sacred and unconditionally commanding law of reason that admits of no expedience whatsoever.
(https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/kant-2023-2043/html),
But as for applying this precept to, e.g., a Nazi soldier asking if there are Jews in the cellar, it is clear that this judgment does not correspond to the normal person’s sense of morality, nor a fortiori to that which we would attribute to God. On the contrary, Kant’s affirmation is a reductio ad absurdum of his position: if his critique of practical reason leads to this conclusion, then we simply cannot accept it.
Indeed, we should see this anomalous conclusion as an indication of the reductio ad absurdum of metaphysics, grounded in its fetishization of language. Words are not sacred nor is their “truth”: the use of language is at all times instrumental, and there are surely few for whose conscience the morality of using a lie to protect an innocent’s life does not simply go without saying. The function of signs is to allow us to deal with reality without consuming it; there is no moral value in the signs themselves. God, to the extent that we postulate a Being who guarantees moral judgments, is precisely not understood as a sign, but as a real being whom we normally know only through signs, but whose appearances in the real world cannot be simply denied.
A ”mind,” whether divine or human, transcends its objects, which is to say that it is not limited by moral considerations in thinking whatever thoughts it likes. The whole point of language, of signs, is to liberate the mind from the life-world: to bring into being a scene of representation that can be shared with others without putting in question worldly realities. The function of God in this situation, to bracket the question of his reality, is to make clear what are our worldly moral choices, that is, those that accord with the good of the human community in the broadest sense, which we as humans cannot possibly know with certainty, but must seek as an ideal. To claim that God exists is essentially to say that there is truly a right decision in every case, and that he would not let humanity be bereft of the possibility of such a decision.
The Christian notion of Christ’s love is a “humanization” of God’s love for humanity that seeks to assure us that, save in its certitude of affecting reality, divine love is not distinct in principle from human love. Thus the agony of the Cross may be understood as a test-demonstration of this ultimate unity, of Jesus-as-human loving humanity so much that his love was always-already divine. In this sense, the Resurrection was miraculous “in reality,” but not in essence.
Morality vs Ethics
This distinction, which is rarely made in explicit terms, reflects the degree to which the situation we are judging seems to us to embody the fundamental structure of the human scene that exemplifies the primary function of the sign: the enabling of symmetrical exchange in the place of a necessarily asymmetric and potentially conflictual appropriation. In the absence of a legitimized differentiation among a society’s members, ethics and morality are one. Thus our basic sense of morality is illustrated spontaneously in encounters between strangers, where, in the absence of an opportunity for equal division, deferral is the rule, as in my pet example of the two party guests and the last canapé. No doubt we do not think of the sacred in this context, yet this experience is a reenactment of what can be conceived as the originary scene of deferral, the first “act of conscience.” Which is to say that our first experience of the sacred is as a “commandment” that we experience as internal to ourself and yet imposed on us as a moral obligation to defer what would be our “instinctive” act, in this case, to take the canapé.
The complications that social differentiations add to morality, which I am calling ethical, are never equally spontaneous. Presumably experimental psychology would be able to distinguish between the physiological correlates of the two categories, but in any case it is useful to make this distinction to remind us that although the moral choice is not itself “instinctive,” it is a fundamental element of human experience unmediated by any specific social order, although of course it must be be subordinated to it in many situations.
Similarly, Western monotheism is grounded in the idea that on the moral plane, all peoples are ontologically equal, to be judged by the same criteria, so that HaShem’s “election” of the Jews is not a judgment that this people should either reign over all others or convert its members to their religion, but a choice of it as the receiver of His revelation so that it may serve as a “light unto the nations,” a light that shines with the power of the One God.
And no doubt inevitably, what has been experienced from without as the arrogance of this assertion has provoked the millennia of Jew-hatred whose perpetuation is so evident today. But the latter in no way invalidates its claim of historical authenticity. Nor is it a matter for the Jews of a necessary “sacrifice,” of purification through suffering. It is simply the case that in a world of imperfect beings, this claim risks being taken as an assertion of superiority, such that those excluded from it are likely to resent it—unless or until they reach the point, as the Catholic Church appears to have done under John Paul II, of accepting the Jews’ status as “elder brothers”—all the while recalling that in Genesis it is frequently the younger brother (Abel, Jacob, Benjamin) who makes the most progress.
One might speculate that now that the two older Abrahamic religions have in principle become reconciled, future reconciliation with Islam is not inconceivable. Whence the importance of the Abraham Accords—and of their enemies’ attempts to weaken them to the advantage of Iran and its anti-Western allies.
We need say no more for the moment on this subject.