Martin Camper

RSA Workshop: Rhetoric and the Sacred in the 21st Century

Position Paper

6.22.09

The Transcendent in the Religious, the Sacred, and Discourse

As a student of language, my first inclination is to answer the last question, a question about discourse, first, only arriving at an answer to the first two questions by means of my answer to the last. While I could have easily rearranged my essay such that the order of my paper corresponded to the order of the questions, I think starting from discourse may in fact be instructive. In terms of academically studying these phenomena, how else can we know the religious or the sacred but through texts (broadly construed)?

To understand how one might recognize the religious (more specifically on the sacred later) in discourse, I think it best to start by adducing genera of discourse that incontestably fall into the category of religious or sacred discourse: prayers, holy books, sermons, incantations, hymns, spells, glossalia, creeds, etc. Once we have amassed a satisfactory list, our job then is to find a common denominator (or several) among the items. For me, such a list would have this shared characteristic--the transcendent. That is, each kind of discourse has an aim to aid the individual in transcending the self, the physical, the temporal. This transcendence need not always mean a connection with the divine or the universe. Sometimes such discourse can facilitate a connection with other human beings (dead or alive) or a connection with powers that are not bound or constrained by laws of nature. This transcendence can also be a deeper and more harmonious connection with reality, in which case, the individual believer is transcending common misunderstandings about how the world works. In an individual believer, this could manifest itself as a strict adherence to a particular way of life.

While this definition is a good start, it is already too narrow. Not all texts which manifest the religious have the primary goal of helping their audience achieve some kind of transcendence. We might recognize the religious and/or sacred manifesting in discourse, when the discourse is the product of felt transcendence. For instance, a public statement made about a political candidate by a religious organization could be considered “religious discourse,” or discourse that manifests the religious, because the rhetor feels his/her utterance is validated by his/her transcendent sources of choice (prayer, sacred texts, etc.). Often believers and non-believers recognize the most explicit forms of such texts. However, this category is necessarily broad to capture discourse that may otherwise fly under the radar, but may not actually differ from more obvious instances.

Given this discussion, we might define “the religious” as anything that belongs to a system of beliefs, practices, and materials, that system having that system’s goal being the transcendence of the believer.

“The sacred,” on the other hand, is closely related to “the religious,” but they are not one in the same. When we talk about “the sacred,” we are in fact attaching particular value to an object (or set of objects); we are setting that object apart, separating it from the profane, from the everyday. For all intents and purposes, we are saying that that object is “holy.” It is common for religions to set apart certain objects to inspire or elicit religious experience and devotion, a sense of the spiritual. Everyday objects are sullied and soiled with “ordinary” human emotions, feelings, associations, etc. But by setting an object apart, we reserve it for special sentiments and attachments. It can remain untouched, aloof from the material world which religion helps believers to transcend.

By having these particular, reserved sentiments attached to them, sacred objects may stir in the believer those same sentiments, or at least help the believer to transcend the ordinary world. “Object” here is not a limited category. We can have a sacred image, a sacred text, a sacred song, a sacred place. What is key is that the object receives its sacredness from the community. That is, a community endows an object with value, with sacredness, through use, practice, repetition, tradition, or authority. A sacred object need not be vocally sanctified, but we would expect a sacred object to be treated in a way that an ordinary object would not be. A sacred object can be profaned. A sacred object has a place in the spiritual life of the members of the community that give it value, although its exact place may vary for each member (this will also depend on the object and its centrality to the particular faith). The sacredness of an object in a real sense is performed, as a spiritual community will often develop rituals around a sacred object that preserve, acknowledge, and/or reinforce the object’s sacredness.

In discourse, then, the sacred would manifest itself as that which in language is set a part from the everyday, from the profane. An example might be the name of God in Jewish tradition, or perhaps a sacred text, like the Koran. The lines soon begin to blur between “the religious” and “the sacred,” which should not surprise us.

While the above represents my answers, albeit brief, to the given questions, I am well aware that there may be other phenomena--other discourses, other objects, other belief systems--that we do not ordinarily consider religious or sacred that could possibly fall under this categorization. We could make refinements to prevent this, but I’m not sure we would want to. I personally believe that more analysis needs to be done comparing obviously religious experience with similar non-religious experience. Religion, in terms of scholastic analysis, often seems sequestered, when scholarship might fruitfully benefit from not merely doing comparative religious work, but from comparing religious activity with other areas of human life. Such scholarship would give us a broader understanding not only of religion but also of what it means to be human.