Nature, Secularization and the Transformation of the Sacred

A summary of:
Szerszynski, B. (2005). Nature, Technology and the Sacred: Religion and Spirituality in the Modern World. Blackwell Publishing: Oxford.
Chapter 2: Nature, Secularization and the Transformation of the Sacred

For Szerszynksi, one of the first steps to realizing the continuing role of the sacred in modern Western society is to broaden its definition. As he says, “I will be arguing that the sacred has its correlate of what astrophysicists call dark matter – that there is much more of it about than we might think” (11).

One of the preeminent voices on the ‘sacred’ is of course Durkheim, whose definition is defined by Szerszynski as follows: “to regard something sacred is to set is apart from the routine and the everyday; to attribute to it some kind of divine or transcendent characteristic, power or significance; to treat it as an end in itself rather than something that can legitimately be used solely as a means to an end” (10). This understanding has come under attack as being majorly flawed because it ignores how things “come to be seen as sacred in the first place” (Milton, in Szeryszynski: 10). An alternative definition posited by Kay Milton is that the sacred is “‘what matters most to people’” (10), taking into account emotions.

But there are potential useful demarcations of stages in the development of the meaning of the sacred in our world. For the purposes of comparison (perhaps not to serve as a comprehensive list), Szerszynski identifies primal religion, archaic religion, the Axial Age, the Protestant sacred, the modern sacred, and the postmodern sacred:

Primal: “The aim of primal religion is to secure the sustainable reproduction of life within this world, rather than to escape it or to live according to laws originating from outside (Bellah, 1970: 25-9)” (16).

Archaic: “Like primal religion, archaic religion is similarly monistic in its experience of the world as a unified ‘natural-divine cosmos’, but here the deities are more definite gods with whom humans must interact in an ordered way” (17).

Axial Age: “In a radical shift in the understanding of the sacred which occurs across the globe between 800 and 200 BCE, in what Karl Jaspers calls the axial age (Jaspers, 1953), the cosmological monism of earlier religion is progressively reordered around a dualistic distinction between ‘this’ world and a transcendent reality understood to exist ‘above’ it” (17).

Protestant Sacred: “We arrive at the Protestant sacred when the Reformation strips away the institutional and supernatural hierarchies that both constituted and spanned the gulf between the transcendent divine and the world, making that gulf at once infinite and infinitesimal, absolute and vanishingly small. With the divine’s even more absolute removal from this world, it became apprehended under the figure of the sublime – as infinite, unconditioned and unknowable (Mellor and Shilling, 1997: 106-7). But at the same time as the Reformation radicalizes the gulf between the empirical and transcendent worlds, the latter is also brought close to each individual, and to nature” (19).

Modern Sacred: “With the modern sacred, embracing the Enlightenment and Romanticism, the vertical transcendent axis is increasingly drawn into the empirical world. Instead of Being and order being seen as deriving from a supernatural source external to empirical reality, they are increasingly seen as properties of that reality itself. The world thereby comes to be seen as profane in a newly radical sense” (20)

Postmodern Sacred: “Finally, we arrive at what I want to call the postmodern sacred, which exhibits a more thoroughgoing collapse of the organizing dualism of the monotheistic and Protestant sacred. But this signals not a return to the monistic, single reality of the primal and archaic sacred, but the emergence of a multiplex reality, one filled with and constituted by different cosmologies and world-views grounded in subjective experience. Rather than religion and cosmology – including ideas of nature – determining who people thought they were and how they experienced the world, instead people feel obliged to fashion or choose religious and cosmological ideas on the basis of their own subjective experience – what ‘feels right’ to them (see Heelas, 1996; Roof, 1999)” (22-3).

What’s fascinating to me is that at some point, “Divine attributes are thus stripped of metaphor and allegory and allotted specific functions in the new scientific understanding of the world – a move which helps lay the grounds for the later erasure of God from Western science” (20), and this sort of abandonment by God (which I talked about in my earlier posts) in a way helps us define our new purpose, and it is technology: “And in America in particular the sublimity of the monotheistic God – his supra-human grandeur, his indifference to the interests and projects of individual humans – is transferred not only to nature but also to technology, as the human capacity to transform the world starts to be seen not just as the ability to meet empirical needs but as a quasi-salvational collective project (Nye, 1994)” (22).

This of course becomes part of the mythology of disenchantment described earlier. The function of the myth, he argues, is to basically make us feel special, important (and secondarily, to perpetuate our current ways of knowing, which include our mythologizing of secularization): “Secularization was thus one of the key ideas used to capture the idea of the uniqueness of modern Western society…. It was assumed widely – and argued explicitly by secularization theorists – that this shift was a natural and inevitable outcome of societal development…. As societies moved up this [evolutionary] ladder, it was thought, religion would lose its hold and disappear” (12). Thus, made meaningful by the myth, the waning participation in organized religion serves to reinforce notions of superiority. And the notion that technology has replaced God is a key interpretation of this disenchantment myth. (I also really like this statement: “as the goal of technology comes to be rendered in technical terms, technology starts to order the ends of life in its own terms” (172). It’s an excellent way of saying that technology has not only become a source of meaning in modernity but that it is self-reinforcing.)

So understanding how religious ways of knowing have changed throughout history is crucial for understanding the modern epistemologies; as Habermas argued, “the history of religion is actually the history of reason” (25).