The Sacred as a Comparative Observation. Just as
“holy” can be seen principally as an aspect of the idea
of God, so “sacred” has been through most of Western
intellectual history a description of the objects of reli-
gion rather than an integrating idea in its own right.
While, in one's own piety, to hold something sacred
is to affirm that holiness is mediated through it, the
interplay of civilizations and traditions has repeatedly
brought men into contact with the sacred things of
others, reverence for which they did not share, and
posed the opportunity to describe religiousness from
without. We must leave aside here the details of how
Hesiod, Herodotus, Philo, and many others dealt with
situations where gods were many but truth presumed
to be one, but must observe at least that an awareness
of religious diversity is as old as Western culture itself.
For centuries in Christian Europe, the principal
religious horizons included the Muslims as an alien
world without, the Jews as an alien world within, and
classical pagans as an alien world in the past; while
the piety of these was seen as religion and its objects
as sacred, comparisons of them with Christian “truth”
remained odious. Interest in the religiousness of others
gained momentum gradually during the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, with the secularization and
humanism of the Renaissance, the fragmenting of
ecclesiastical authority in the Reformation, and
Europe's voyages of discovery and trade. Now a genre
of literature describing the religious customs of the
world would appear, and the word “religion” would
be used for the first time in the plural as denoting
various communities of piety rather than piety itself.
A Christian attempt to baptize Chinese customs as
appropriate to the church in seventeenth-century
China was made there by Jesuits, but evoked strong
opposition from the Franciscans and Rome in the
so-called Rites Controversy.
In the eighteenth century there were those outside
the church who held it to be benighted along with
the rest. David Hume and Immanuel Kant argued that
one could not have valid knowledge of such a thing
as the sacred. Friedrich Schleiermacher, working from
Kantian premisses, was at least able to ground religion
in the feelings. The romantics argued from the uni-
versality of myths to their appropriateness in human
emotion and feeling. But from the sixteenth through
the early nineteenth century such arguments were
logical rather than chronological: at bottom, they were
philosophical rather than historical speculations on the
nature of religion.
Modern use of “the holy” and “the sacred” as key
terms for analysis we owe, however, to the emergence
of the comparative study of religion which began in
the mid-nineteenth century. Increased historical and
archaeological discovery, coupled with the intellectual
excitement generated by Charles Darwin's idea of
biological evolution, turned many minds toward the
construction of developmental theories of human cul-
tural institutions and, among them, religion. The period
from Darwin to the First World War saw a wealth
of major theories of the origin (and, thereby, the nature)
of religion. Noteworthy among them, to mention only
three, were the attempts to see religion as belief in
animate spirits (Edward Tylor), or as stemming from
interpersonal conflict (Sigmund Freud), or as sym-
bolizing communal solidarity (Émile Durkheim). Most
of the theories held that the prehistoric origin and
present essence of religion could be tested by observa-
tion of contemporary primitive cultures. In addition,
these theories can be described as reductionistic, in that
they explained religion as an adaptation to psychologi-
cal or other human needs. Such functions of religion
have remained the content of behavioral-scientific
study of religion to the present.
Two terms in particular came into wide use in
European languages in the description of primitive
religion: mana and tabu (“taboo”). Mana, a Melanesian
word, refers to an aura of potency and mystery, and
came into use as a generic term for the primitive
“holy.” Taboo, also a term from the Pacific islands,
denoted, like “sacred,” that which is set apart from
common use or contact.
Thus it was that Nathan Söderblom, writing the
general article on “Holiness” in the Encyclopaedia of
Religion and Ethics in 1912, would find it appropriate
to introduce the subject through a recapitulation of
primitive equivalents of mana and taboo, bringing the
Western sense of the divine into explicit parallel with
ethnographic data. Thus it was, also, that W. Robertson
Smith would in 1889 treat the early traditions of the
Old Testament as of a piece with primitive Semitic
religion. It became common especially in liberal
Protestant scholarship to portray as primitive sacerdo-
talism the background from which the prophets and
Jesus rescued the faith of Israel through an ethical
conception of holiness.
On the eve of World War I, the net effect of these
themes was to present Christianity as one of the fruits
of religious evolution, and religion as the function of
man's social or psychic needs. While for Protestants
Karl Barth was to reassert the incomparability of
Christianity, another Protestant theologian was to
reassert the irreducibility of religion.
