Holiness as a Religious Goal. Through much of the
history of religion in the West, the word holy has been
not so much a key term for independent reflection as
it has been an attribute of the divine. A history of the
adjectival force of the term thus approximates a history
of those qualities of inaccessibility, power, authority,
and goodness which have attended the idea of God.
In a sense Western tradition have not classically
regarded the idea of God's holiness to have developed
but have seen it as present in the earliest revelations.
God's holiness was his presence, as when Moses trem
bled in awe before its radiance, or when Isaiah ex-
claimed, “Holy, holy, holy is [the Lord] of hosts.”
Various precincts were the localization of that pres-
ence: the land of promise, but within that the holy
hill of Zion and especially the inmost courts of the
Temple; or the nation as God's people but within that
the priesthood; the institutions of Hebrew society and
warfare but especially the cultus, with particular spe-
cial acts and moments. In all of this the holy was God's
domain, in contrast to the profane, which was only
more ambiguously so.
An increase in the specifically moral implications of
holiness in ancient Israel developed in the course of
time, in part through the teachings of some of the
eighth- through sixth-century (B.C.) prophets and in
part as a result of the destruction of some of the more
tangible Israelite political and cultic institutions by
foreign conquest in the prophets' day and again in the
first and second centuries A.D. Nonetheless Jewish tra-
dition has clung to its emphasis on purity of life and
thought as a people holy to God through very specific
cultic and communal acts, and holiness in Talmudic
usage has been interpreted largely in such terms. It
has been in modern times beginning with the Enlight-
enment that there has been within Judaism significant
questioning of the sacredness of traditional ritual or
locality and a discussion of the extent to which being
a holy people entails separateness from the surrounding
society.
On the subject of God's essential holiness Christen-
dom likewise has from the start held it to be majesty
and power, with the area of contention what institu-
tions or forms of conduct reflect it. Under persecution,
holiness implied steadfastness for the early ecclesia, the
community called apart from the world; but from
Constantine onwards, that community came to have
more of the world, including emperors, within it. The
collapse of the Roman Empire in the West gave the
church much secular as well as sacred authority, and
while in principle a distinction existed between the
church's spiritual holiness and the sacredness it con-
ferred on kings and princes, in practice even the idea
of holiness was intimately linked with the struggle for
authority in the high Middle Ages.
With the secularization of the European social order,
the selfless moral purity and devotional perfection of
the saint remained as the principal content of holiness.
In the Catholic tradition the saint, besides being the
model for the individual, has been seen as interceding
on his behalf with God. Protestantism has stressed the
element of law and judgment in God's holiness, with
wrath awaiting the wicked, but it too asserted that his
redeeming grace can sanctify the lives and wills of
men; of this grace the pietists and “holiness churches”
especially claim a vivid awareness. Holiness, in the
internal theological writings of Western Christendom,
remains in part the domain of the transcendent God,
in part an ethical and devotional aspiration.
