#34: A Taste for the Sacred

We’re all familiar with the standard set of five senses. We understand them to be sight, hearing, smell, touch, and taste. But our way of speaking also suggests other senses as well. For example, we speak of a “sense of humor.” Is there really a “sense” of humor, or is this merely a metaphorical extension of the physical sense of “sense”? The fact that we often encounter people with very different senses of humor or, more compelling yet, people who have no sense of humor suggests that there is indeed a responsiveness that is peculiarly adapted to specific scenarios and circumstances. If not a “physical” sense, then certainly something very much like a physical sense. If one asks precisely what the sense of humor is, the answer is both simple and unsatisfying. The sense of humor is the disposition to respond with pleasure to a perception of funny objects, circumstances, or scenarios. “Funny?” you might respond, “is this not a circular definition of humor?” I don’t think so; not any more than a definition of vision as the perception of shaped color is circular. One has to understand the primitive undefined notion of color before we can understand the notion of sight. Similarly, we must understand the primitive undefined notion of “funniness” before we can understand notion of humor.

Humor is not alone in this respect. There also seems to be a sense of the beautiful and ugly, which is usually referred to as the “aesthetic” sense. This is not to say that all people identify the same things as beautiful and as ugly, but merely that most people consider some things to be beautiful and other things ugly; that is, they understand the meaning of the words “beautiful” and “ugly.” Following this line of thinking, we may wonder whether there are yet other “senses.” One very interesting candidate is the “religious” sense, perhaps it can be called the sense of the “sacred.”

While there is little dispute that human beings have a sense of humor that is quite distinct from, say, the aesthetic sense, there is less confidence these days, it would seem, on the existence of a sense of the sacred. The sense of the sacred has been subject to various attacks, but the most successful, I think, has been the attack of reductionism. This attack maintains that there really does not exist a distinct set of affective states that we can call “religious” or “sacred,” but that the ones we might think are such are actually something quite different. I have illustrated this attack in the past by reference to Bernini’s famous statue entitled “The Ecstasy of St. Theresa.”

St. Theresa of Avila (1515-1582) was a Spanish nun who was subject to a variety of visions and experiences, most notable among which was the appearance to her of an angel carrying a fiery spear with which he repeatedly penetrated her heart. Rather than describe her states, I’ll let her speak for herself:

“ I saw in his hand a long spear of gold, and at the iron's point there seemed to be a little fire. He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and to pierce my very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God. The pain was so great, that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain, that I could not wish to be rid of it...”

The Baroque sculptor Bernini used this passage as his inspiration in creating a representation of the encounter. Needless to say, one of the first features of the statue to strike the viewer is the expression of extreme ecstasy on the face of Theresa.

Now Bernini created the statue between 1647 and 1652, long, long before the world had ever heard of Sigmund Freud. There is no doubt in my mind that what Bernini was after was a depiction in marble of peculiarly religious ecstasy; yet, in this secular, post-Freudian time it is admittedly difficult to look at the face on the statue and to be aware of her description of her experiences in her diary without thinking, perhaps she was not really experiencing religious ecstasy, perhaps she was actually having a sexual experience, a sexual ecstasy, which she had to transform in her mind in order to resolve inner conflict. In this very, very modern story, Theresa simply cannot have a religious ecstasy because, after all, there is no such thing; if she is having any ecstasy, it must, therefore, be sexual (because that’s the only one our psychologists feel comfortable with).

But the bottom line is that this is just a “she said”/”he said” dispute; she says she’s having a religious ecstasy, he (our modern psychologist) says she is having a sexual one. In this dispute, it would seem that she is in a privileged and unassailable position. After all, she is the only one with direct access to the fact under discussion, her affective state; he is making his pronouncement on the basis of a theory that is largely a priori. Using one of my favorite lines again, the psychologist is asking Theresa, Who are you going to believe, me or your lying self-awareness? Denying Theresa her distinctively religious experience has to rank right up there with telling a person eating chocolate that they are actually tasting strawberry. No, the psychologist tells the chocolate eater, you are tasting strawberry. Yeah, right.

Clearly, there have always been and currently still are people who believe that they have distinctively religious experiences. Are there such experiences?

As I say above, the only person in a position to judge is the person having the experience. If even one person says, I’ve experienced religious ecstasy and I’ve experienced sexual ecstasy, and, honey, believe me, I know the difference and when I’m having which, then the reductionist is finished. But there is more indirect evidence as well. Surely, we are aware that religion has existed all over the planet, arising as it were spontaneously in every primitive human development known to us today. Surely, all those people were not simply sublimating their sexual needs and wants. I don’t want to suggest that there are no complex interactions between the sexual and the religious, but why shouldn't there be? I’m only suggesting that there is a distinct domain of experience that seems to be hard-wired into the human frame just as securely as the capacity for laughter, the capacity for pleasure in ornamentation, and the capacity for sexual pleasure.

None of this has ANYTHING to do with “the existence of God” or the “truth” of ANY religious teachings.

All I am arguing is this simple thesis: there is a fundamental human appetite for a distinct experience that I am calling “the religious” or “the sacred.”

II

If this is true, which I do think it is, it helps to explain some common contemporary phenomena.

The curtains of the European 17th C tent opened slightly and the governing theologians of the time saw the camel’s nose of modern science snuffling between them. They had already heard the camel snarking and farfling around the outside in the late 16^th C, but now they really saw the nose of the beast, and, to put it mildly, they did not like what they saw. Well, folks, they lost most of that war, they should known: that camel was coming in, one way or another. And now, it’s fully here, at least in the West. And the sad truth for the descendants of those long dead pre-Enlightenment religious governors is that the narrative told by the camel really beats the hell out of theirs. I'm talking evolution, just for starters. I still think there are problems of detail, but you can't beat it for a compelling story. Oh, there are rear guard actions all around from the Christian community, but story-wise, it’s really all over but the shouting.

But story-wise is not the only-wise.

We noticed that different people have “different senses of humor” and that different people enjoy different art. People disagree about “tastes” in all of these arenas, but what remains in each case is it’s distinctive appetite.

And people are very plastic as far as the “objects” of each of these senses are concerned. People can be taught or trained to enjoy new and disgusting foods; they can be taught or trained to laugh at stupidity of all sorts; they can be taught or trained to think of almost anything as “beautiful”; and, as the long list of perversions testifies, people can be taught or trained to find just about anything sexually fulfilling.

There’s a lesson in this.

When modern science has made tales of the supernatural religiously indigestible, the appetite remains. And when that appetite fails to find its food in the supernatural, it turns itself towards the natural.

The religious appetite brings with it an entire context. The appetite needs a narrative that involves sin and redemption, it needs an ultimate object of worship, it needs sacred intermediaries who are themselves objects of worship, it needs rituals, it needs festivals, it needs liturgy, and, above all, it needs an over-arcing narrative.

This is what the modern Eco-system nature worship is all about, this is how it has come about. Of course, there are the huge special interests, both political and economic, who are the drivers of this thing; but it could not move forward without the grass-roots movement, and this movement has as its main-spring the peculiarly religious appetite.

The religious appetite does not only explain the global warming scam, which is what it is. It also helps to explain such phenomena as Royalty worship, as in the case of Princess Diana, of Oprah worship, and of fan-ism in general.

What is the ultimate root of the religious appetite? What is its evolutionary advantage? One can speculate about these things, but I suspect we can never do more. The religious impulse and appetite seems as surely and securely a part of us, however, that we can expect to see one group or another capitalize on it for as long as human groups congregate on earth.