Traces of the Sacred

BY LORENZO ALBACETE

News from the Middle East reminds us that in spite of a “modern age” devoted to escaping the consequences of religious obscurantism, disputes about religion and the experience of the sacred seem to play an ever-more decisive role in human affairs.
I remember at a dinner party back in 1995, during the time of the war in Sarajevo between Muslims and Christians, a frustrated young idealist yelled at me that the revival of religion was once again standing in the way of human peace and cooperation. “That is why I absolutely reject anything that can degenerate into religious extremism, such as nationalism and racial or Ethnic identity,” he said with obvious pain and anger. “The most dangerous word in any human language is the word sacred. An appeal to the sacred means that you have surrendered your freedom forever.”
His position was extreme, to be sure, but I could see that it truly expressed his deepest feelings. In his eyes, as a priest I stood for this threat against human liberation. And if somehow I knew better than those who used religion as a weapon, all the more contemptible was my work to spread its influence. I felt personally accused. Still, I realized I shared his concerns. When political entities base their oppression on some appeal to “ultimate meaning,” what recourse does anyone have? There’s no authority to petition, no oversight committee to complain to.
But is the problem really the persistence of the sacred? The idea of the sacred locates the source of ultimate power and authority beyond this world and, as such, it can make freedom possible by de-legitimizing the claims of demagogues and tyrants. Furthermore, the experience of the sacred has proven itself to be ineradicable. Through decades of systematic attempts to eliminate the religious way of thinking, humankind barely survived the most monstrous views of the sacred–the sacred nation, the sacred race, the sacred State and Party. Today, a reaction against this radical secularizing effort is taking place and New Agers are willing to sacralize everything in sight.
The experience of the sacred betokens a way of life, a culture, defining a form of relating to and dealing with “others,” with its unavoidable political consequences. A society–indeed a world–characterized by conflicting experiences of the sacred, of divergent experiences of what human life is all about, has to find a way to structure politically the toleration that will allow all to live in the peaceful pursuit of their convictions about human flourishing. But toleration based on what?
Today there is a debate about whether it is really possible to find a common ground for rational discourse and tolerance that cuts across different perceptions of the sacred, different convictions about what constitutes the humanly good. For example, in the book, Two Faces of Liberalism, John Gray calls us to abandon all attempts to seek a consensus on values by rational discourse. “Common experience,” he writes, “and the evidence of history show human beings thriving in forms of life that are very different from one another. None can reasonably claim to embody the flourishing that is uniquely human. If there is anything distinctive about the human species, it is that it can thrive in a variety of ways.” Gray suggests that toleration be structured politically as a condition for peace that welcomes divergent ways of living as marks of diversity in the good life. On the other hand, Peter Berkowitz, who has written about the place of virtue in liberal thought, asks, “ What keeps us from wishing to crush those who hold views that are incommensurable with ours? Isn’t the very attempt to structure politically a peaceful coexistence between them not itself a response to a perception of the inviolability of the dignity of individual conscience? And is this not an intimation of the experience of the sacred?” It definitely is. There is the sacred and there is The Sacred. There is what David Schindler (echoing Hegel) calls bad infinity, and there is Infinity. There is unlimited power, and there is true Transcendence. There is nothing to fear from the experience of the Sacred when it has revealed itself as one of us, with the human face of the poor.