Presuppositions of the Sacred
by Philip Sherrard
Feast of St Malachi the ProphetAnno Domini 2020, January 3
Moreover, God is not only the principle – the original cause – of all making sacred. He alone is sacred. At one of the most solemn moments in the divine liturgy of the Orthodox Church the priest raises the consecrated bread before the congregation and cries: “Holy things to those who are holy”; whereupon the congregation responds: “Only One is holy, only One is Lord, Christ in the glory of God the Father.” The presence of God is, that is to say, the initial and ultimately unique presupposition of the sacred, for the simple reason that without that presence there is no sacredness anywhere. This means that if, for instance, earth, nature, life, art, or anything else is sacred, this is because it is the expression or revelation of something infinitely more than itself, something which it but discloses or manifests. It is not because it is sacred in its own right, apart from this Other that it enshrines, still less because we make it sacred. The first symptom of the profane mind – of the idolatrous mind – is its habit of separating its ideas of things from the idea of God; because as soon as you do begin to separate these ideas from the idea of God you have set out on the path that leads to the desacralization, the desecration and ultimately to the destruction of the things themselves.
If, then, something in the physical or psychological realm – the realm in which we experience the greater part of what we do experience – is sacred, this is because God, the wholly Other, has irrupted into or ingressed upon it. The sacred, in so far as we experience it, presupposes the ingression of that which is wholly Other upon the physical or psychological realm. This posits a theme crucial to the understanding of the sacred: the theme of the transcendent.
This theme may be introduced by way of a comment. In much contemporary literature that speaks of a new approach to things – that speaks of mankind having reached a turning-point or being about to enter a new age, the age of Aquarius or the solar age – one frequently comes across the word whole, or holistic: we are asked to see things as a whole, in all the complexity of their multi-interrelationships, and not as isolated, fragmented, non-participative phenomena or substances, which is the way we have been conditioned to see them over the last few centuries.
This is excellent, so far as it goes. But it doesn’t go as far as the point that would make it really meaningful. Because the interrelationships that are spoken of and the wholeness which they are said to constitute appear to be confined to the psychological and physical realms alone. That which lies beyond this realm – the transcendent – appears to be tacitly left out of account, almost as if it were irrelevant to the real world with which modern science, including the so-called new physics and parapsychology, is concerned.
Yet to talk about wholeness, or the holistic approach to things, without including within one’s perspective that which lies beyond the psychological and physical realm, is to put the cart before the horse. For just as there can be nothing sacred without God, because ultimately God alone is sacred, so there can be no wholeness without God, because ultimately God alone is whole. It is God that is the principle and source of wholeness, and without participation in God there can be no escaping fragmentation, disintegration, self-alienation, however much we may struggle against them. In Greek the words which correspond to the English words save, salvation, Savior, contain the sense both of soundness and of wholeness. To be saved is to attain a state in which one is sound and whole, entire; and the Savior is He who bestows these qualities – who integrates, makes whole, keeps alive and well – because they are qualities that belong to Him and to no-one and nothing else. That is why when we lose contact with God, or when we ignore the transcendent, we not only cut ourselves off from the source of sacredness but also, and as a consequence, fall into a state of sickness and self-division.
Indeed, it is this losing contact with God, the source of holiness and wholeness, that is the crux of the fall of man; and our modern age exemplifies it as perhaps no other age ever has, because it is the product of a state of mind which has lost the sense not only of this fall but also and correspondingly of practically every aspect of the sacred.
~Philip Sherrard, excerpt from The Sacred in Life and Art,
available for purchase at Eighth Day Books
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"What is it that has ordered the things of heaven and those of earth, the things which move through the air and those which move in the water; nay, rather the things which proceeded them: heaven and earth and the natures of fire and water? What is it that combined and arranged them...set them into motion and put them on their unceasing and unhindered course?..But who is the architect of these things? Or did not he who made them also bring them into being? We shall certainly not attribute such power to spontaneity." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 3 This comes after St. John of Damascus sets out to delineate between the created and the uncreated, a fact which, while at the core of existence, seems for him to be, for this very reason, the simplest to believe. Everything but God is created and, thus, susceptible to change. This means people, but this also means demons, angels, the rest of the created order across the entire cosmos. Everything is vulnerable to unrest. Except for God. If you have ever tried to explain the Holy Trinity to a child for the first time, maybe you have felt as I have the weightier, inexpressible side of God's unchangeability: how do I possibly communicate this essential fact to the person in front of me? (This is usually when my faint stutter starts to pop up again.) I like that here, like St. Patrick reaching for a three-leaf clover, St. John brings us back to earth to better understand the cosmos. Fire and water are no less mysteries than heaven and earth. And yet here we are, cooking and washing, eating and drinking, filled and sustained on what we can neither fully explain nor claim to have created. Only God is unchanging. Vice versa, God is the only constant we need. Maybe the rest is better left unsaid. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
"Now, one who would speak or hear about God should know beyond any doubt that in what concerns theology and the Incarnation not all things are inexpressible and not all are capable of expression, and neither are all things unknowable nor are they all knowable. That which can be known is one thing, whereas that which can be said is another, just as it is one thing to speak and another to know. Furthermore, many of those things about God which are not clearly perceived cannot be fittingly described, so that we are obliged to express in human terms things which transcend the human order. Thus, for example, in speaking about God we attribute to Him sleep, anger, indifference, hands and feet, and the like." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 2 When I was studying Fiction in graduate school, one of the first methods I learned to really situate the reader in the story you were about to tell them was disorientation; if you wanted to ground them in one story, first you had pull the rug out from under their feet. So it's fitting that in the beginning of St. John Damascene's On the Orthodox Faith, before rebuilding our foundation, he first puts us squarely in limbo, seesawing back and forth between certainty and uncertainty. To paraphrase, there is no doubt (certainty) that about God some things can be expressed...but not all things (uncertainty). Some things about God are truly knowable (certainty), but some are unknowable (uncertainty). Oh, and while we're speaking about God (certainty), let's admit there's a gap, too, between what we say and what we know (uncertainty). My favorite line in this spiraling excerpt, "...it is one thing to speak, and another to know," takes me back to the final lines in Wendell Berry's poem, "How to Be a Poet," which he wrote primarily as a reminder to himself: Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came. Wherever your preferences fall on the cataphatic or apophatic spectrum of theology (whether you lean more toward what we can say about God or what we cannot), Berry's poem, I think, would nod along with St. John: before we say too much, let our words be preserved by the silence from which they came. I'm thinking of the silence, that filling, restorative quiet I feel when I step into a cathedral or in some of my favorite moments with my kids in the early hours. Even before praying, can we hear the One already praying in us? Let's start there. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
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