Kevin Gontkovic - Sacred and Profane

For this post, I’d like to talk about Mircea Eliade’s book, The Sacred & The Profane: The Nature of Religion, and how it ties in with this class. One part I find interesting in this book is when he talks about the difference between chaos and cosmos. He says, “One of the outstanding characteristics of traditional societies is the opposition that they assume between their inhabited territory and the unknown and indeterminate space that surrounds it” (29). The cosmos represents order, which would be the civilization that these people live in. The chaos represents everything that is not ordered, which would be the outside world to these people. Everything that is not in our world is considered to be apart of some “other world” that we cannot comprehend. This “other world” could be similar to the world that artists give themselves up to in order to turn their art into something sacred. In order to created religious art, no matter what form of art it is, the artist must give up their whole being to create this “other world” in his or her art.

Eliade also discusses the differences between sacred and profane time. Sacred time would involve events that are held in honor of the sacred, like festivals. Profane time is essentially when nonreligious acts are performed. He states the big difference when he says, “Every religious festival, any liturgical time, represents the reactualization of a sacred event that took place in a mythical past, ‘in the beginnning’” (69). Every sacred event tries to recreate an event that happened in the past, which is usually described in one of the society’s sacred myths. This is similar to how an artist tries to recreate something that occurred in the mythical past when he or she is creating a religious artifact. The artist attempts to create an artifact that can go back to a sacred time and recreate what occurred then. A good example of this is Da Vinci’s painting of the Last Supper. Da Vinci recreated the event that occurred in the mythical past where Jesus had his last meal with his apostles. By recreating the world described in this myth, Da Vinci’s painting is able to go back to the sacred time of this event. This painting became a religious artifact because Da Vinci gave up his being to go back to this moment in sacred time and recreate for all to witness.

In another chapter, Eliade discusses the relationship between religious man and nature. Religious man knows the sacredness of nature because he is aware that the gods created the cosmos. Eliade says, “The sky directly, ‘naturally’, reveals the infinite distance, the transcendence of the deity. The earth too is transparent; it presents itself as universal mother and nurse” (117). All of the aspects of nature show the different characteristics of the sacred. When we look at the sky, we see it go on infinitely, which is the same as the deity that created it. The deity that created the sky is not a finite being. The earth is considered a mother because many organisms are birthed from the earth. These organisms that are birthed directly from the earth are then used for sustenance by other organisms that were not directly birthed by the earth. Many artifacts try to recreate these aspects that are present in nature. The artists recreate different aspects of nature in order to recreate the different aspects of the deity that created nature. The artist has to become one with the divine in order to recreate the divine that is present in nature.

Reference: Eliade, Mircea. The Sacred & The Profane: The Nature of Religion. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers. 1957. 256 pages.