Belonging Again (Part 43)
Can considering the formation of religion and society help us understand the probability of spreading Absolute Knowing?
In my reading, Mircea Eliade in The Sacred and the Profane suggested that a function of religion has always been a balancing of “releases” and “givens,” where ritual and religious practice provided a way for people to feel “released” from the “given chaos” of contingency, finitude, and the world as a whole, and yet paradoxically that very “release to the sacred” creates a “given” in its own right, for the sacred is beyond contingency and fixed. In this, we can see that religion can thus provide a strange “given release,” which suggests that if we are to avoid the pitfalls highlighted in Belonging Again, then we must realize something similar. However, today, since religion is no longer “given,” this strange “given release” seems like it must move into the individual, which immediately poises a problem, because religion (versus spirituality) is fundamentally social. Is it possible for individuals to operate according to an internal “given release” and yet there still emerge social cohesion and a social order? This seems to be a big question, and perhaps the answer is not exactly this, but something which suggests a similar structure. Admittedly, I am no expert on Eliade, and my understanding of his work might be wrong, but I hope all the same that I am not too far off.
‘The manifestation of the sacred ontologically founds the world. In the homogeneous and infinite expanse, in which no point of reference is possible and hence no orientation can be established, the [sacred] reveals an absolute fixed point, a center.’¹ At the same time, the sacred functions as a ‘solution of continuity’ (both temporarily and spatially) which is to say that life mustn’t only follow the deterministic logic of change and cause and effect: there is “a fixed freedom” that provides us stability and yet also escape (an important paradox).² ‘If the world is to be lived in, it must be founded — and no world can come to birth in the chaos of homogeneity and relativity of profane space.’³ We cannot survive in “pure release,” especially not a given “pure release” that we cannot escape or look beyond, and religion and ritual gives us a way to indeed “look beyond” (from x to X).
‘Revelation of a sacred space makes it possible to obtain a fixed point and hence to acquire orientation in the chaos of homogeneity, to ‘found the world’ and to live in a real sense,’ and yet I want to highlight again how this “fixed point” entails a “release” from finitude and its chaos.⁴ This is a release in “givenness,” as there is a “givenness” in “pure release” — the issue is not exclusivity but locating a dialectical balance between these tensions. ‘A sign is asked,’ Eliade wrote, ‘to put an end to the tension and anxiety caused by relativity,’ which suggests that functioning “givens” work because they are also “signs” of something beyond themselves that suggests possible “fixed freedom” from chaos.⁵ Considering this, if we are to arrive at “a way to manage” the tensions explored in Belonging Again, it will likely involve a metaphysical framework that provides a way for reality to consist of “signs” again. Is beauty a sign? Is Absolute Knowing? These are possibilities we must explore.
‘Religious man’s desire to live in the sacred […] his desire to take up his abode in objective reality, not to let himself be paralyzed by the never-ceasing relativity of purely subjective experiences, to live in a real and effective world, and not in an illusion.’⁶ Religion is a space of ritual and repetition, and strangely it is the very fixedness of this repetition which can point people to the possibility of “Something More” beyond finite contingency and relativity (for more, please see “Negation, Repetition, and the Tensions Between Writing and Speaking” by O.G. Rose). Please note here that Eliade does not strike me as saying that the sacred itself is objective, unmoving, unchanging, “fixed,” and “ordered,” but that religion provides reliable and “fixed” points at which we can gain “reason to believe” the sacred and mystical is present and accessible (not that we always have control over its manifestation). Spirituality is unpredictable and unquantifiable, and yet this means it runs the risk of being meaningless, chaotic, and unreliable: it could be claimed the spiritual exists, but without a reliable “fixed” point in the social order in which this spirituality can be accessed, it will lose it capacity to help a social order find an “orbit.”
Notice I said “orbit” here versus “structure,” for spirituality indeed provides “a shared path and trajectory” (like the moon orbiting earth to allude to my understanding of “form” in Plato), but this trajectory is not a hard or rigid structure (it’s more like a dance). The corresponding religion of that spirituality becomes more a matter of social coordination (though please note there is great variety between religions on how exactly), without which it becomes difficult to locate that “dance” and thus derive a sense of freedom from “the traps” of finitude. It would need to be expanded on, but there are several forces religion can help people find freedom from when it is legitimated by spiritual “orbit,” forces which seem to cancel one another out but are also not the same, and here I’ll mainly note determinism and relativism. In finitude, we seem bound by mere causality, the family ties we happened to end up with, etc., and though there might be a “Divine Fate” in our theology, this is still “outside” temporal causality in that it is a possibility of an alternative path from what is laid out to us by causality. Also, everyone has different interpretations of the world and understands everything differently, and this can be existentially overwhelming. The spiritual and mystical provides us reason to believe there is an ultimate “right and wrong” to reality, which means we do not have to deal with “pure relativism” or “pure perspectivism.”
In finitude, we seem stuck oscillating between an idea that “everything is in flux” and yet also “everything is determined” (and somehow both), and without religion or the spiritual it is hard not to feel forever thrown back and forth between these possibilities. We’re confused, disoriented, and can end up hopeless, and it will not provide sufficient if we can only access “a sense of Something More” randomly and unreliably — hence why religion can provide a “fixed” and reliable point” for accessing the spiritual and its “release.” The authority of a religion often requires a relation with the spiritual and mystical, for otherwise it can fail to provide me “a sense of Something More” which can help people feel that somehow all the paradoxical tensions of contingency, determinism, relativism, authority, and the like are all sorted out. Indeed, in the mystical experience, there can be a powerful sense that everything does somehow “come together,” and if we can hold to the memory of that experience, this can help us feel like the world does somehow “hold together.” Religion indeed can help us hold to that memory while also providing “social support” that other people also ascribe to the legitimacy and reality of what we remember. This way, we don’t feel like we are crazy or experienced something fake: we feel validated and founded.
Religious structure can arise according to “the orbit” beget by spirituality, and the religion must honor that “orbit” or risk it’s authority (like English Kings had to balance their power with the will of the Church and Bible). Problematically, to add additional structure by definition means the religion risks distorting “the orbit” of spirituality, and if it indeed dishonors or inhibits that “order,” the religion could be rebelled again, lose authority, or the like. A religion without spirituality can lose authority, and then it often compensates by becoming oppressive (like “gives” without “releases”), and yet spirituality without religion can collapse a social order, unleash a force of spiritual possibilities which can overwhelm people (like a creature from Lovecraft), and cause atomization. If encounters with the Divine, God, the Mystical, etc. are not contained within a relatively “fixed” location, then everyone can come to entertain “a private spirituality” which means everyone having “their own religion,” and in this situation the social order can fracture. This suggests a danger with “Deleuzian Dividuals,” and yet this risk seems necessary. As we’ll get into, “created spirituality” or “created meaning” seems to have the risk of fragility and falling into nihilism, while “private spirituality” or “private meaning” seems to risk more atomization and making relationships more difficult.
Spirituality is indeed more private than religion, and “mystical experiences” are often if not always the experience of a single person (which paradoxically can dissolve the individualistic ego), but without religion it is hard to reintegrate spirituality and mystical experience into the society. Today, if religion is no longer “given,” it might be necessary for the processes of the integration and socialization of spirituality to be housed within people, which is utterly counter to understandings of religion as social. Individuals must socialize themselves and make themselves interrogatable with others, and yet everything within them will easily resist doing this, precisely because of the depths of power and their own spiritual and mystical experiences. “Character” can be viewed as this process of self-regulation, and if “Deleuzian Dividuals” or “Absolute Knowers” are somehow part of the answer to the problems explored in Belonging Again, then there will need to be a process of self-regulation incorporated into them. Is this Hegel’s “dialectic working through negativity?” Is this the intuition found in Bergson and Deleuze? Hard to say. Do we see today in Metamodernity the resources to address the human desire to feel like the universe is “founded?” If not, failure seems inevitable. Can we turn the subject into a “sign” capable of finding and creating “signs?” Can “the Deleuzian Dividual” accomplish this goal? The Overman and/or Child? The Absolute Knower?
Eliade stressessed that religion is a testament to what seems to be an innate and essential belief of humans that they don’t participate in reality unless they participate in Something beyond contingency, finitude, and the like. However, if humans can’t go somewhere “reliable” that provides them “good reason to think” they are participating in that Something, then this belief could be a source of torment, precisely because people know they need to “participate” in Something, yet they have no idea of when and where they can accomplish this goal. At the same time, if there was no Something (X) which humans could participate in, then humans could be miserable and overwhelmed by finitude, contingency, and nihilism. A dialectic between X and x seems needed, “a dialectic of participation” (X/x), and we should note that if humans have continually and emergently given rise to religions and hence societies of X/x, then we should not be so quick to assume that we can function with a society of “just X” or “just x.” Perhaps “human nature” has changed? Perhaps consciousness is more advanced? Perhaps, but such thinking is often dangerous, for we can find out we are wrong precisely when it is too late to change course.
If we believed in Something though and had no notion of how it worked, that would possibly make that Something a force of terror, hence why a religion is needed to help make that Something sensible and “uncontrollable but not random.” For Christians, though God is ultimately mysterious and alive, the Bible at least provides a sense of “what God is like” so that it doesn’t feel as if God is random and unpredictable. We do not want to end up like Josef K one day awakening and finding himself under arrest for a crime never identified; likewise, we don’t want to wake up one day and find that God has acted in a way that we have no way of comprehending or understanding. We seem to need a belief in X, but we also don’t want X to be utterly random. Omnipotent, yes, but not random. Hell is random.
Josef K in The Trial doesn’t know where he can go to see and understand the law, and this is part of his misery, for the law still has power and force over his life. Similarly, if there was a God but no “fixed point” of religious activity to learn about God and understand him, we could end up like Josef K. In society forming according to X/x, we avoid the problem of an X existing which could lead to a world of Kafka stories, and a world where all we have is a finitude which feels empty. Today, our world is “autonomously finite” (x), and the question we keep orbiting is if it is possible for an “Absoluter Knower” and Child who creates something which then that Child can feel as if he/she “participates in,” and in so doing somehow “participate in deepest reality?” Can we help create Something/something that we participate in and feel “real” in doing so? Can we create our own means of “participation?”
Eliade describes religion, spirituality, and rituals as existing together in a profoundly connected network that manages to convince people (via “plausibility structures”) of the possibility of discovering and participating in depths to reality beyond what constitutes our everydayness: religions work precisely when they don’t feel created and arbitrary. Yes, all religions are created, but they derive authority and legitimacy from also coming to seem as if they participate in Something beyond themselves, hence why they must make space for spirituality and mysticism, while at the same time not letting that spirituality overload the system. All of this was externalized in society for centuries; now, under this period some have called Metamodernity, the question becomes if we as individuals can house this entire network and system of operations within ourselves without ending up radically atomized. And the jury is still out.
.
.
.
Notes
¹Eliade, Mircea. The Sacred and the Profane. Translated by Willard R. Trask. Harcourt, Inc. Orlando, Fla, 1987: 21.
²Eliade, Mircea. The Sacred and the Profane. Translated by Willard R. Trask. Harcourt, Inc. Orlando, Fla, 1987: 68.
³Eliade, Mircea. The Sacred and the Profane. Translated by Willard R. Trask. Harcourt, Inc. Orlando, Fla, 1987: 22.
⁴Eliade, Mircea. The Sacred and the Profane. Translated by Willard R. Trask. Harcourt, Inc. Orlando, Fla, 1987: 23.
⁵Eliade, Mircea. The Sacred and the Profane. Translated by Willard R. Trask. Harcourt, Inc. Orlando, Fla, 1987: 27.
⁶Eliade, Mircea. The Sacred and the Profane. Translated by Willard R. Trask. Harcourt, Inc. Orlando, Fla, 1987: 28.
.
.
.
For more, please visit O.G. Rose.com. Also, please subscribe to our YouTube channel and follow us on Instagram, Anchor, and Facebook.