Eliade, Trask, and Otto on Sacred Time, Space, and Objects

The traditional view of man is a carnal one. It portrays him as a biological organism that inhabits a three-dimensional world where space is delimited by boundaries of ownership or jurisdiction apart from which the space has no intrinsic meaning. In reality, however, man is a cosmic being, connected to the universal and eternal by way of the sacred. In their book The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, Mircea Eliade and Willard R. Trask assert that there are two kinds of space, two kinds of time, and two kinds of objects-the sacred and the profane. Of these two types, it is only the sacred that is valuable; the profane is irrelevant. This paper is predicated upon that insight, and it will examine the issue of the sacredness of time, space, and objects in the light of Biblical clues that can explain why Eliade's and Trask's assertion is valid.

Eliade and Trask describe the concept of sacred space by citing the scripture where the Lord tells Moses, "Draw not hither. Put off thy shoes from thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground" (Exodus 3:5, KJV). They assert that "There is, then a sacred space, and hence a strong, significant space; there are other spaces that are not sacred and so are without structure or consistency, amorphous" (Eliade & Trask 20). They point out that for religious man, there is a "spatial nonhomogeneity" that "finds expression between space that is sacred-the only real and real-ly existing space-an

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cterized by an absence of time; it is instead the eternal "now." Eliade and Trask describe it as "reversible in the sense that...it is a primordial mythical time made present" (68). They intimate here that the sacred is primordial and mythical and that it can be brought into the present reality through contact via sacred ritual. The Biblical explanation of this phenomenon is that God inhabits the praises of His people (Psalm 22:3). In the act of worship, man transcends the profane space, because God steps into that space and renders it holy. Wherever God is, that space is of necessity sacred. Rudolf Otto and John W. Harvey expound upon this phenomenon further in their book, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry Into the Non-rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational. Here, they explain the sacred in terms of "mystery" that is "so closely bound up with its synthetic qualifying attribute 'aweful' (tremendum) that one can hardly say the former without catching an echo of the latter, 'mystery' almost of itself becoming 'aweful mystery' to us" (Otto & Harvey 25). Otto and Harvey assert that "Taken in the religious sense, that which is 'mysterious' is-to give it perhaps the most striking ex

Category: Philosophy - E