Kilian McCurrie

When I initially contemplated the question, “What is the sacred?” I returned Mircea Eliade’s The Sacred and the Profane (1957). While Emile Durkheim and Clifford Gertz present important ways to consider the social and cultural dimensions of religious experience, Eliade also constructs an influential paradigm for thinking about the sacred. Eliade begins his inquiry by accepting Rudolf Otto’s definition of the numinous. Otto concludes that an experience of the fearful, fascinating, and mysterious is fundamentally human and precedes any typically religious desire to explain the origin of the world or find a basis for ethical behavior. The numinous power he describes was sensed by human beings in different ways – sometimes it inspired ecstasy; sometimes a deep calm; sometimes people felt dread, awe and humility in the presence of the mysterious force inherent in every aspect of life. Eliade shows that the symbolic stories of ancient religious people were an attempt to express their wonder and to link this pervasive mystery with their own lives. He argues that with the exception of poets, artists and musicians, modern culture has lost the ability to recognize the numinous.

By examining the dialectic of the sacred and the profane, Eliade goes beyond Otto’s work to consider how modern culture has lost the sacred by failing to understand its opposite: the profane. In fact the ability to recognize the sacred in the radically profane is the central feature of all religion according to Eliade’s analysis. In the dialectic of the sacred, hierophanes, i.e., the manifestation of the sacred in the profane world, have a paradoxical structure because they reveal and at the same conceal the sacred. Eliade claims that the dominance of scientific culture has focused people on the physical and material world in front of them, but it has also edited out the sense of the spiritual that pervades the lives of people in more traditional societies. Viewing the world in this scientific way prevents people from recognizing and appreciating hierophanes. While this method of looking at the world has achieved great results, Eliade believes it has been damaging to the human spirit, disconnecting people from an essential component of their experience of the world.

Over the last fifty years Eliade and others have been the focus of debate and scholarship concerning the human response to the sacred embodied in religion. Scholars interested in studying the rhetoric of religion have struggled to shed light on how religious language works to some extent because of the strength of paradigms like Eliade’s “sacred and profane.” Often, the privileged place of religious language has made it difficult for scholars to thoroughly investigate its effects. This resistance to critical engagement with religious rhetoric has much to do with a larger cultural passion for the explanatory power of binaries like “sacred and profane.” Those with a stake in maintaining a privileged category of the sacred often resist the efforts of rhetoricians to examine its textual effects because rhetorical analysis may undermine the ability of religious language to function as both the limit of language and as evidence for the transcendent. In other words, the enduring power of Eliade’s binary relies on the ineffable (what language cannot do) while also pointing to something that exists outside of language and human culture.

My interest in the ways religious language works has led me to the work of Kenneth Burke. He offers an important perspective and method for examining religious texts. In The Rhetoric of Religion: Studies in Logology, Burke writes, “In general, there was a tendency to assume a simple historical development from the ‘sacred’ to the ‘profane,’ from the ‘spiritual’ to the ‘secular.’ But logology systematically admonishes us against so simple a dialectic” (47). By the term ‘logology,’ Burke does not suggest a theological investigation, but a study of people’s relationships to words that indicate religious experience. “We are to be concerned not directly with religion,” explains Burke, “but rather with the terminology of religion; not directly to man’s relationship to God, but rather with his relationship to the word God” (35). Through his approach to religious rhetoric, Burke redirects critical attention away from the sacred/profane dialectic and into a more demanding method of how religious words work. Examining the “sacred” not as a category beyond experience but as a category that claims to be beyond experience, Burke investigates how sacred rhetoric effects feelings of its “superior” position in (or beyond) discourse. He concludes that religious rhetoric produces feelings of sacredness through the creation of titles that represent religious experience. Burke characterizes religious rhetoric as a search for the “title of titles,” the ultimate entitlement. Religious language that seeks this kind of entitlement, that wants to be authoritative and powerful while still claiming to reference some kind of experience, is a language that craves and is thought to provide definitive speech. In other words, according to Burke, religious language attempts to be a language of powerful, unquestionable speech, and it therefore represents the most public and authoritative mode of talking.

Burke’s study of Augustine’s negotiation of “secular words and the theological Word” has inspired my interest in Augustine as a rhetorician for the 21^st century. The powerful rhetorical stance he develops in On Christian Doctrine and Confessions offers a path for contemporary rhetoricians seeking to transform rhetorical practices for new and expanding contexts. Augustine effectively transformed classical rhetorical concepts and techniques relating to audience and ethos in light of the new cultural context brought about by Christianity. We find ourselves in a similar cultural moment at the beginning of the 21^st century: searching for ways to re-interpret notions of audience and ethos as we become more immersed in expanding roles and forums for speakers, writers, and audiences. By examining the ways Augustine was able to revise the classical tradition he inherited, I hope to show how these transformed theories and practices can energize efforts to understand the expanding expressive spaces we occupy.

The Rhetoric of Religion: Studies in Logology (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961).