Abstract
From earliest times down to the present day, Jews, Christians, and Muslims have sought contact with “sanctity” or “holiness,” a quality or force inherent in the “sacred” or the “holy” and believed to derive from the Divine.1 Though Israelites, Jews, Early Christians, and Muslims were all hostile to pagan manifestations of the sacred, their own traditions provided tools and venues for its appropriation that were often similar to those of the pagans. As it was thought to come from the realm of the Divine, an encounter with the holy was deemed to require or entail at least a temporary, and in some cases even a permanent, separation from the domain of the profane or secular, and, of course, also a separation from anything polluted or impure. For our present purposes, the terms sacred, holy, and sanctified will be taken as roughly synonymous. Though in practice they are used differently (e.g., we refer to a “holy” man, not a “sacred” or “sanctified” man), all three terms are regularly employed interchangeably to refer to qualities associated with God or the gods. Among the ancient Greeks a tripartite schematization of sacred or holy, not-sacred or profane, and impure or polluted was the norm; and indeed (as we shall see shortly, though with important qualifications and with further exemplifications in the essays that follow), the same tripartite scheme appears to operate throughout most other cultures, and was certainly prominent throughout medieval and early modern Europe.
Provides an overview of various manifestations of the theme of the sacred and the secular in Western culture, from its roughly simultaneous appearance in ancient Greece and among the Israelite tribes and later Jewish urbanites depicted in the Hebrew Bible, through its development in New Testament and patristic times, and on into medieval and early modern European civilization. The survey and analysis demonstrate that the categories of the “sacred” and the “secular” are and have always been in flux, and that the critical methodologies for studying sacred and secular phenomena are correspondingly varied. In premodern Christian Europe, despite the overarching claims of many clerical authorities, the border between the spheres of the sacred and secular was always shifting; and even when it seemed to be most fixed, it very often exhibited a surprising degree of permeability. Historians (at least since Weber) have discussed and debated the timing and processes of “secularization;” without calling the importance of the latter phenomenon into question, we also need to pay attention (especially now) to the less often noted but also ancient and still ongoing phenomenon of “desecularization.”
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Notes
The definition of terms in this paragraph draws on Robert Parker, Miasma: Pollution and Purification in Early Greek Religion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), pp. 1–31;
and John Bossy, “Blood and Baptism: Kinship, Community, and Christianity in Western Europe from the Fourteenth to the Seventeenth Centuries,” in Sanctity and Secularity: The Church and the World, ed. Derek Baker, Studies in Church History 10 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, for the Ecclesiastical History Society, 1973), p. 129 [129–43].
On terminology in the field of sacred/secular studies (with special reference to Ancient Greece), see also Jan N. Bremmer, “‘Religion,’ ‘Ritual,’ and the Opposition ‘Sacred’ vs. ‘Profane,’” in Ansichten Griechischer Rituale: Geburtstags-Symposium für Walter Burkert, ed. Fritz Graf (Stuttgart: B.G.Teubner, 1998), pp. 9–32.
See the relevant entries in Theologisches Wörterbuch zum Alten Testament, ed. G. Botterweck et al., 10 vols. (in progress) (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1973), vol. 6, ed. George W. Anderson et al., 1989), cols. 1179–1204.
The angelic hymn in Isaiah 6.3 is sometimes referred to by its early Christian Greek name, the ‘Trisagion.’ In postbiblical Hebrew the verse came to be known as the Kedushah and achieved prominence in the Jewish liturgy (see the unsigned article in Cecil Roth and Geoffrey Wigoder, eds., Encyclopedia Judaica, 16 vols. [Jerusalem: Keter, 1972]), 10:875.
In Liturgical Latin the Trisagion was called the Sanctus (see Adrian Fortescue, “Sanctus,” in The Catholic Encyclopedia, 16 vols. (1912; repr. New York: The Encyclopedia Press, 1913, 13:432–34).
On the Trisagion as credo, prayer, and talisman in early Judaism and Christianity, see David Martinez, P. Michigan XIX. Baptized for Our Sakes: A Leather Trisagion from Egypt (P. Mich. 799), Beiträge zur Altertumskunde 120 (Stuttgart: B.G.Teubner, 1999). On the use of the term ‘Trisagion’ with reference to a different hymn in the Greek liturgy (the so-called Agios O Theos), see H.T. Henry, “Agios O Theos [O Holy God],” in The Catholic Encyclopedia, 1:211–12.
See Owen C. Whitehouse, “Holiness (Semitic),” in Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, ed. James Hastings et al., 13 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1913–27), 6:cols. 751–59;
and Baruch A. Levine, “The Language of Holiness: Perceptions of the Sacred in the Hebrew Bible,” in Backgrounds for the Bible, ed. Michael Patrick O’Connor and David Noel Freedman (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1987), pp. 241–55.
See Baruch A. Levine, “Biblical Concepts of Holiness,” in Etz Hayim: Torah and Commentary, ed. David L. Lieber et al. (New York: Jewish Publication Society [for The Rabbinical Assembly], 2001), p. 1441 [1440–41].
See the unsigned articles on “Holiness” and “Holy Spirit,” in Illustrated Dictionary and Concordance of the Bible, gen. ed. Geoffrey Wigoder (Jerusalem: The Jerusalem Publishing House, 1986), pp. 451–53; and R.H. Coats, “Holiness (New Testament and Christian),” in Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, 6:cols. 743–50.
On Greek and Roman conceptions of the sacred, see, respectively, Jan N. Bremmer, Greek Religion, New Surveys in the Classics 24 (1994; repr. with Addenda, Oxford: Oxford University Press [for the Classical Association], 1999);
and Jorg Rüpke, Die Religion der Römer: ein Einführung (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2001).
Ramsay Macmullen, Paganism in the Roman Empire (1981; repr. with corrections, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), pp. 34–42.
See Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981); and “The Saint as Exemplar in Late Antiquity,” Representations 1 (1983): 1–25.
See Robin Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians (New York: Knopf, 1987), p. 141.
R.A. Markus, The End of Ancient Christianity (1990; repr. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 16.
R.A. Markus, Gregory the Great and His World (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 58.
See E.K. Rand, Founders of the Middle Ages (1928; repr. New York: Dover, 1957), pp. 3–68, 102–34;
Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask, Bollingen Series 36 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953; first publ. as Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter [Bern: A. Francke, 1948]), pp. 72–74, 446–48;
D.W. Robertson, Jr., A Preface to Chaucer: Studies in Medieval Perspectives (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962), pp. 340–42;
and, more recently, Carolyn Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), pp. 22–23, 205–06.
Jerome, “Letter 70 (to Magnus),” in Epistulae, ed. I. Hilberg, CSEL 54 (Vienna: F.Tempsky 1910), 1:702; trans. W.H. Fremantle, A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, 14 vols. (1892; repr. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, n.d.), 6:149.
As demonstrated by Peter Brown in Brown, Cult of the Saints; R.A. Markus, “How on Earth Could Places Become Holy? Origins of the Christian Idea of Holy Places,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 2 (1994): 257–71;
Peter W.L. Walker, Holy City, Holy Places?: Christian Attitudes to Jerusalem and the Holy Land in the Fourth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990);
and Robert L. Wilken, The Land Called Holy: Palestine in Christian History and Thought (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).
Patrick J. Geary, “The Ninth-Century Relic Trade,” in Religion and the People: 800–1700, ed. James Obelkevich (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979), p. 18 [8–18, 289–91].
In addition to the studies by Peter Brown cited in p. 179, n. 15, above, see his The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988); Authority and the Sacred: Aspects of the Christianisation of the Roman World (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Caroline Bynum’s Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages, Publications of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, UCLA, 16 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982); Holy Feast and Holy Fast:The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women, The New Historicism, Studies in Cultural Poetics 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987); Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1991); The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336, Lectures on the History of Religions, n.s. 15 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995); Metamorphosis and Identity (New York: Zone Books, 2001);
and Bynum, Steven Harrell, and Paula Richman, eds., Gender and Religion: On the Complexity of Symbols (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986).
On medieval pilgrimage, see Jonathan Sumption, Pilgrimage: An Image of Mediaeval Religion (London: Faber and Faber, 1975);
Victor Turner and Edith Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture: Anthropological Perspectives (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978);
and Lenz Kriss-Rettenbeck and Gerda Möhler, eds., Wallfahrt kennt keine Grenzen: Themen zu einer Ausstellung des Bayerischen Nationalmuseums und der Adalbert Stifter Vereins (Munich: Schnell and Steiner, 1984).
As noted in Markus, “How on Earth,” pp. 264–67 (summarizing arguments in Jonathan Z. Smith, To Take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987];
and Gregory Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy, 2nd edn. [London: Dacre Press, 1945]).
R.C. Finucane, “Sacred Corpse, Profane Carrion: Social Ideals and Death Rituals in the Later Middle Ages,” in Mirrors of Mortality: Studies in the Social History of Death, ed. Joachim Whaley (London: Europa, 1981; New York: St. Martin’s, 1982), p. 41 [40–60].
On medieval death rituals, see also Jane H.M. Taylor, ed., Dies Illa: Death in the Middle Ages: Proceedings of the 1983 Manchester Colloquium, Vinaver Studies in French 1 (Liverpool: Francis Cairns, 1984);
and Frederick S. Paxton, Christianizing Death: The Creation of a Ritual Process in Early Medieval Europe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990).
Aviad Kleinberg writes: “The most important ‘symptom’ of sainthood, one that the historian can use, is the treatment of the saint as a source of supernatural spiritual power” (Prophets in Their Own Country: Living Saints and the Making of Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992], p. 8). Nevertheless, the notion that a saint is not merely a means of access to miraculous power but also a model for behavior can be traced back to Late Antiquity (see Brown, “Saint as Exemplar”). Tracing related cultural phenomena, Jacques Le Goff sums up the late-medieval move away from miracles as follows: “After the thirteenth century the marvelous seems to me to gain ground on the miraculous and the magical. Miracles become rarer, and magic is hotly contested. Does it make sense to speak of a ‘secularization’ of the supernatural?” (“Introduction,” in his The Medieval Imagination, trans. Arthur Goldhammer [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988]; first. publ. as L’imaginaire médiéval [Paris: Gallimard, 1985]), p. 12 [1–17]. The notion that an earlier Christian belief in saints-as-intercessors gave way to a later belief in saints-as-exemplars—with the shift occurring around the year 1150—was maintained by André Vauchez (in his Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages, trans. Jean Birrell [Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997]; first publ. as La sainteté en Occident aux derniers siècles du Moyen Age [Rome: Ecole Française de Rome, 1988]); but Vauchez later modified his position (see his “Saints admirables et saints imitables: Les Fonctions de l’hagiographie ont-elles changé aux derniers siècles du moyen âge?” in his Les Fonctions des saints dans le monde occidental (IIIe–XIIIe siècle) [Rome: Ecole Française de Rome, 1991], pp. 161–72. On saints’ images, “idolatry,” and iconoclasm in the West, see David Freedberg’s two important studies: Iconoclasts and Their Motives (Maarssen: G Schwartz, 1985); and The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), esp. pp. 378–428, 498–503; Michael Camille, The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-making in Medieval Art (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989);
and Alain Besançon, The Forbidden Image: An Intellectual History of Iconoclasm, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000; first publ. as L’image interdite: une histoire intellectuelle de l’iconoclasme [(Paris): Librairie Arthème Fayard, 1994]).
On the pervasive but conflicted late-medieval manifestations of image-worship (with special attention to the Lollards and their opponents), see Kathleen Kamerick, Popular Piety and Art in the Late Middle Ages: Image Worship and Idolatry in England, 1350–1500 (New York: Palgrave, 2002).
See Charles Homer Haskins, The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century (1927; Cleveland: World Publishing Company, 1972);
Marie-Dominique Chenu, Nature, Man, and Society in the Twelfth Century: Essays on New Theological Perspectives in the Latin West, ed. and trans. Jerome Taylor and Lester K. Little (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968; first publ. as La Théologie au XIIe siècle Paris: J. Vrin, 1957]);
the essays by various hands in Robert L. Benson and Giles Constable, with Carol D. Lanham, eds., Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983);
Giles Constable, The Reformation of the Twelfth Century (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996);
and R.N. Swanson, The Twelfth-Century Renaissance (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999).
See Chenu, Nature (as in n. 50, above), p. 65; and André Vauchez, The Laity in the Middle Ages: Religious Beliefs and Devotional Practices, ed. with an Introduction by Daniel J. Bornstein, trans. Margery J. Schneider (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993; first publ. as Les Laïcs au moyen âge: pratiques et expériences religieuses [Paris: Cerf, 1987], pp. 15–17).
Jacques Le Goff, “The Symbolic Ritual of Vassalage,” in his Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980; first publ. as Pour un autre Moyen Age: Temps, Travail, et culture en Occident, 18 essais Paris: Gallimard, 1977]), pp. 237–87, 354–67.
On the blending of sacred and secular motifs in medieval romance, see Derek Pearsall, “John Capgrave’s Life of St. Katharine and Popular Romance Style,” Mediaevalia et Humanistica 6 (1975): 121–37;
and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, “‘Bet…to…Read on Holy Seyntes Lyves…’: Romance and Hagiography Again,” in Readings in Medieval English Romance, ed. Carol Meale (Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK: Boydell and Brewer, 1994), pp. 83–97.
On the way in which “medieval poets expertly and consciously manipulated erotic, secular, and sacred motifs, conventions, and registers,” see Gail Sigal, Erotic Dawn-Songs of the Middle Ages: Voicing the Lyric Lady (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1996; quotation on p. 10).
On the appropriation of sacred motifs in the secular poetry of Chaucer and some of his contemporaries, see Lawrence Besserman, Chaucer’s Biblical Poetics (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998).
See Jœrgen Andersen, The Witch on the Wall: Medieval Erotic Sculpture in the British Isles (Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger, 1977);
Edward Lucie-Smith, Sexuality in Western Art, rev. edn. (1972; London: Thames and Hudson, 1991);
and Alexandre Leupin, Phallophanies: La Chair et le Sacré (Paris: Éditions du Regard, 2000).
For images of Christ with an erection, see Leo Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion, 2nd edn., revised and expanded (1983; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996);
but for a different interpretation of the pictures Steinberg adduces, see Caroline Bynum, “The Body of Christ in the Later Middle Ages: A Reply to Leo Steinberg,” Renaissance Quarterly 39 (1986): 399–439. More recently, however, Steinberg’s theory regarding the phallically marked sexuality of Christ has found support in the work of Leupin (as in n. 56), who has discerned additional “phantom” images of Christ’s erect phallus in Christian art from the second century CE, and into the modern period.
See Margaret R. Miles, “The Virgin’s One Bare Breast: Female Nudity and Religious Meaning in Tuscan Early Renaissance Culture,” in The Female Body in Western Culture: Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Susan Rubin Suleiman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), pp. 193–208; Camille, Gothic Idol (as in p. 182, n. 49, above), pp. 220–41;
and Klaus Schreiner, “‘Deine Bruste sind süsser als Wein’: Ikonographie, religiöse Bedeutung und soziale Funktion eines Mariensymbols,” in Pictura Quasi Fictura: Die Rolle des Bildes in der Erforschung von Alltag und Sachkultur des Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit, Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophisch-Historische Klasse, Forschungen des Instituts für Realienkunde des Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit, Diskussionen und Materialien 1 (Vienna: Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1996), pp. 87–127.
Quoted in Freedberg, Power of Images, p. 361, citing Irma A. Richter, ed. and trans., Paragone: A Comparison of the Arts by Leonardo da Vinci (London: Oxford University Press, 1949), p. 65 (Codex Urbinas 1270, Trat. 25). (I have restored several words omitted in Freedberg’s quotation from Richter.)
On the veneration of Christ and Mary from 800–1200, see Rachel Fulton, From Judgment to Passion: Devotion to Christ and the Virgin Mary, 800–1200 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). On late-medieval “affective piety” focused on the sufferings of Christ and Mary, see Vauchez, The Laity in the Middle Ages;
and Richard Kieckhefer, Unquiet Souls: Fourteenth-Century Saints and Their Religious Milieu (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).
On the popularity of “affective piety” in England in particular, see Andrew D. Brown, Popular Piety in Late Medieval England: The Diocese of Salisbury 1250–1550 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995);
Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, ca.1400–ca.1580 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992);
and Ann Clark Bartlett and Thomas Bestul, eds., Cultures of Piety: Medieval English Devotional Literature in Translation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999) (a collection of translated “affective” texts with commentary).
See Richard W. Pfaff, New Liturgical Feasts in Later Medieval England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970);
and Henry Ansgar Kelly, “Sacraments, Sacramentals, and Lay Piety in Chaucer’s England,” Chaucer Review 28 (1993): 5–22.
See Piero Camporesi, “The Consecrated Host: A Wondrous Excess,” in Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Part One, ed. Michel Feher, with Ramona Naddaff and Nadia Tazi (New York: Zone, 1989), pp. 221–37 (trans. Anna Cancogne, from La casa dell’eternità; [Milan: Garzanti, 1987]);
and Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
See Kelly, “Sacraments”; Duffy, Stripping, pp. 91–130; and Rubin, Corpus Christi. On “sacramentals, see R.W. Scribner, “Cosmic Order and Daily Life: Sacred and Secular in Pre-Industrial German Society,” in his Popular Culture and Popular Movements in Reformation Germany (London: Hambledon Press, 1987), pp. 1–16
(repr. from Religion and Society in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1800, ed. K. von Greyerz [London: George Allen and Unwin, 1984], pp. 17–33);
and R.N. Swanson, Religion and Devotion in Europe, ca. 1215–ca. 1515 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 183–85.
See Gordon Leff Heresy in the Later Middle Ages: The Relation of Heterodoxy to Dissent ca. 1250–ca. 1450, 2 vols. (Manchester, UK: University of Manchester Press, 1967), vol. 2, pp. 494–605;
and (more recently, and definitively) Anne Hudson, The Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), especially ch. 6, “The Ideology of Reformation: (i) Theology,” pp. 278–313 and ch. 7, “The Ideology of Reformation: (ii) Ecclesiology,” pp. 314–58.
On Lollard pedagogy as a challenge to the hegemony of the clerical establishment, see Rita Copeland, “Childhood, Pedagogy, and the Literal Sense: From Late Antiquity to the Lollard Heretical Classroom,” New Medieval Literatures 1 (1997): 125–56.
See (in addition to references in nn. 61–66, above) Ronald Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England: the Ritual Year 1400–1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); and Jean-Claude Schmitt, “Réalité matérielle et réalité symbolique: A propos du soulier du Christ,” in Pictura Quasi Fictura (as in p. 184, n. 59, above), pp. 73–85.
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Besserman, L. (2006). Introduction. In: Besserman, L. (eds) Sacred and Secular in Medieval and Early Modern Cultures. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403977274_1
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