Sacred Space, Holy Places and Suchlike
Published in On the Way to the Postmodern: Old Testament Essays 1967-1998, Volume 2 (JSOTSup, 292; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998), pp. 542-54Sacred space is a category lifted from the workbench of the phenomenologist of religions. In real life we encounter sacred space as holy places, familiar objects to us as Bible readers and perhaps even also as denizens of the contemporary world. But it is a category that deserves not only a phenomenological analysis but also a critical theological scrutiny.
1. Sacred Space in Comparative Religion
The 'most complete and sophisticated'/2/ account of sacred space available to us is, by common consent, that of Mircea Eliade, in his books The Sacred and Profane/3/ and Patterns in Comparative Religion./4/ According to Eliade, religious persons experience a fundamental distinction between the sacred and the profane; and one of the spheres in which that distinction is met with is the spatial sphere: all space is either sacred or profane. Eliade Þnds four principal characteristics of sacred space.
a. Sacred space differentiates space
'For religious man, space is not homogeneous; he experiences interruptions, breaks in it; some parts of space are qualitatively different from others.'/5/ At some points on the earth's surface it makes sense to say, 'Put your shoes from off your feet, for the place where you stand is holy ground' (Exod. 3.5). Such holy space is signiÞcant space, and its recognition, Eliade afÞrms, is 'not a matter of theoretical speculation, but of a primary religious experience that precedes all reþection on the world'./6/ Profane space, on the other hand, is homogeneous, neutral, without orientation, chaotic.b. Sacred space gives orientation to space
In so doing, it creates meaning within space. A holy place is often regarded as the centre or navel of the world, as an axis mundi, a centre about which the lived-in world revolves. 'Religious man has always sought to Þx his abode at the centre of the world',/7/ for that is the place of meaning that creates the lived-in world. There do indeed seem to be places of meaningfulness in the world of profane experience, 'privileged' places in Eliade's language, one's birthplace, the scenes of early love, foreign sights-but they are really crypto-religious experiences that identify such space as meaningful.c. Sacred space is a point at which two worlds meet
In the sacred space there meet the world of humans and the world of the gods. The Babylonian ziggurat was often called Dur-an-ki, 'the bond of heaven and earth'. As such it could become the vertical axis of communication between heaven and earth, a spot where trafÞc passed between two worlds, as on Jacob's ladder at Bethel. Not infrequently this vertical axis is represented ritually by a pole, as with the Kwakiutl people of British Columbia, who have the trunk of a tall cedar projecting through the roof of a ceremonial house. Candidates for initiation, who are living in the house, announce: 'I am at the Centre of the world, I am at the Post of the world'./8/
Such a point is typically determined and differentiated from profane space by a hierophany, which may be an unasked for sign or a provoked evocation. For example, a bull may be turned loose and then searched for. Wherever it is found it is killed and an altar is built. Whatever may be the means of identifying the sacred space, there is one certain principle: it is not for humankind to choose. The word of Deut. 12.13 would gain universal assent among religious people: 'Take heed that you do not offer your burnt offerings in any place that you see, but in the place which the Lord shall choose . . . there you shall offer your burnt offerings'.
Among the Arunta people of central Australia, a gum tree is carried around in their nomadic wanderings. It is the gum tree on which their divine ancestor climbed into the sky after establishing their world. They must carry this cosmic axis around with them, for, as Eliade says, 'it is around the sacred pole that territory becomes habitable, hence is transformed into a world'./9/ Where they should next move is determined by the direction in which the pole bends; and, should it be broken, their world collapses into chaos. Two anthropologists recount that once, when the pole was broken, 'the entire clan were in consternation; they wandered around aimlessly for a time, and Þnally lay down on the ground together and waited for death to overtake them'./10/d. Sacred space represents the primordial act of creation
Either the holy place is regarded as sacred from the very beginning of time, or else the act of its consecration mimics or replays the work of the gods in creating a cosmos: consecrating a territory is a cosmogonic act./11/ Because of the link to primordial time, sacred space also functions as a temporal bond between the present and the Great Time (illud tempus) of primaeval creation.
Eliade's analysis is not, of course, infallible, and even the outsider to the world of comparative religion studies may recognize some implausibilities in his account. Perhaps the most questionable of his assertions is that the religious person experiences profane space as homogeneous and without orientation, and that any apparent experiences of meaningfulness in the non-sacred sphere are to be regarded as 'crypto-religious' experiences. There is an unmistakable circularity of argument here.
This point in particular is taken up for criticism by Larry E. Shiner,/12/ who argues convincingly against the polarization of the categories sacred/profane with which Eliade works, and suggests rather that sacred space and meaningless profane space are at opposite ends of a continuum, the middle of which is 'human' or 'lived' space. Whatever may be the experience of the religious persons Eliade is describing, we can certainly be conscious, even if we are religious people, of non-sacred space as a meaningful environment which we inhabit. 'We are not "in" space as shoes are in a box.'/13/ We have more or less meaningful relations to the space we experience, whether familiar space or strange and novel space.
Lived space is known primarily through our moving about in it. The three-dimensionality of space is experienced through walking or moving through it-an experience that cannot be gained by mere perception. Town planners and architects explore the environment they intend to create by computer simulations that give the impression of walking through it. It is physical space, measurable space, metric space that is homogeneous; human space, on the other hand, is 'hodological'/14/ space, space humanized by the trackways we make through it.
Lived space or human space is also experienced not just as paths but as unitary wholes; the market square, the railway terminus, the hotel foyer, each distinguished qualitatively from the other and from others of the same level of generalization. Territoriality, as Konrad Lorenz/15/ and Robert Ardrey/16/ showed us in the 60s, is a fundamental aspect of human as well as of animal life. We have our 'own' street, neighbourhood, suburb and town that constitute in their complex interrelationship, our 'world' and make it meaningful.
Lived space, further, is not something handed to us on a plate by the divine: it is something we create by our movement, our territorial instinct-and by our shaping of our environment. The design and construction of the buildings around which our life revolves is a world-creating activity; Le Corbusier said, 'Architecture is one of the most urgent needs of man, for the house has always been the Þrst tool he has forged for himself'/17/-but planting a garden, arranging the furniture in a room or even the books on a shelf are world-creating activities too.
The point of all this is to deny some of Eliade's claims. It is true, no doubt, that sacred space differentiates space, but untrue that profane space is homogeneous or without meaning. Perhaps the old adage will suit our purpose best if we allow that Eliade is right in what he afÞrms-about sacred space-but wrong in what he denies-about non-sacred space.
2. Holy Places in the Old Testament
All of these aspects of sacred space are recognizable in the Old Testament literature.
1. Sacred space as the differentiation of space. There is one parcel of land that is a primary differentiation of space: the land of Israel. The patriarchs, for example, are always being found at holy places, usually places already known as holy in a pre-patriarchal religion. The movement of Abraham is from holy place to holy place, to the 'place' of Shechem, to the oak of Moreh (Gen. 12.6), to Bethel, 'God's House' (12.8), to the sacred oaks of Mamre by Hebron (13.18). The negative side of this is the wilderness wanderings that pass through an aimless space of no holy place, the stations on the route being names without signiÞcance, non-places. To create signiÞcance it is necessary to carry a portable holy place that will give orientation to the community.
2. Sacred space as the centre of the world. In cultic texts in particular, Jerusalem is conceived of as sacred space in typically mythical language. It is 'the city of God' (Ps. 48.1), the 'mountain of holiness' (48.2), the 'perfection of beauty' (50.2), the 'joy of all the earth' (48.2). More strikingly, it is 'in the recesses of the north' (48.2), an outcrop of Mt Zaphon, 'Mount North', home of the gods of Canaan, and though it is inhabited by mortals it is symbolically one with the mythological mountain of the gods. It is the highest place, 'beautiful in elevation' (48.2), the place that cannot be submerged by the þood of cosmic waters (46.2-3). It is, like every holy place, at the 'navel of the earth' (Ezek. 38.12)-just as is Shechem (Judg. 9.37). The mythic imagery depicts the holy place as the channel of vitality from the divine sphere to the human: 'as the umbilical cord is the source of the infant's life, so the world is formed and maintained around its navel'./18/
The idea of Jerusalem, or the land of Israel, as the centre of the world is not developed explicitly and at length in the Old Testament, but the well-known passage from Midrash Tanuma is undoubtedly in harmony with more venerable Israelite ideas:Just as the navel is found at the centre of a human being, so the land of Israel is found at the centre of the world . . . and it is the foundation of the world. Jerusalem is at the centre of the land of Israel, the Temple is at the centre of Jerusalem, the Holy of Holies is at the centre of the Temple, the Ark is at the centre of the Holy of Holies; and the Foundation Stone is in front of the Ark, which spot is the foundation of the world./19/
3. Sacred spaces as determined by the deity. Typically the holy place in Israelite religion is 'the place which Yahweh your God shall choose to put his name there' (Deut. 12.5), that is, the place of theophany. G. van der Leeuw echoes this commonplace of religious persons in writing: 'We cannot make shrines and cannot select their "positions", but can never do more than merely Þnd them'./20/ Israel is to 'take care' that it does not choose its own holy places (Deut. 12.13), every one doing what is right in their own eyes (v. 8); the criticism of other religions is that their adherents do not follow this fundamental precept, but worship wherever the fancy takes them, on the high mountains, and upon the hills, and under every green tree (v. 2). That is polemic, of course, which would be stoutly denied by every pious Canaanite; in reality Israelites and Canaanites are on the same side in this question: How do you decide where to worship? The answer for both is: Only where the deity has dictated.
4. Sacred space as a bridge to primordial time. The mythological language of the Psalms provides more than one illustration of how the holy place, Zion, is viewed as a replica or extension of primaeval Eden. In Ps. 46.4 we Þnd a 'river whose streams make glad the city of God'; physical Jerusalem has no real river, and certainly not one with 'streams' (pëlågîm), or delta branches into which that river divides. But Eden does; a river went forth from Eden to water the garden, and from there it divided and became the source of four rivers (lit. became four heads) (Gen. 2.10). In Ps. 36.8 those who take refuge in Yahweh 'shall be abundantly satisÞed with the fatness of thy house; and thou shalt make them drink of the river of thy pleasures'. God's house is poetically parallel with the river of pleasure, where the very name of Eden is the term used for 'pleasure'; through Zion, evidently, þows the primordial Edenic river of fruitfulness.
All these points at which Old Testament thinking blends with religions generally are means of afÞrming that sacred space really does exist, that God is really present in particular holy places. Indeed, as Karl Barth noted:The very passages which bear witness so emphatically to the general presence of God (Ps. 139.5ff., Amos 9.1ff.) do not make this a law which then Þnds special application also in his presence to man, or the people of Israel . . . On the contrary, it is in view of this special presence that His general presence is recalled and asserted . . . We must not think . . . that it . . . has to be understood only symbolically, pictorially and indirectly when . . . God is constantly characterized and described as the possessor of a place or location . . . If we read in Psalm 103.22: 'Bless the Lord, all his works in all places of his dominion', these places of His dominion may be inÞnitely many. Yet they are in no sense identical with the whole of created space, but are special places within this space. There exists a kind of rivalry between these places and other places. 'Why leap ye, ye high hills? This is the hill which God desireth to dwell in; yea the Lord will dwell in it forever' (Psalm 68.16)./21/
However, and this is where it begins to get interesting, the Old Testament breaks signiÞcantly free from the conventional ideology of sacred space, and presents what we may call, following Brevard Childs's term, 'broken myth'./22/ The mythological language is there, but Israel's heart is not fully in it. Three observations will substantiate this point.
1. The emphasis in the Old Testament is on sacred places as chosen by God rather than sacrosanct from of old. Of course, as we have seen, both these concepts are well attested in religions generally, but for the Old Testament, as far as I can see, the holiness of a place tends to be a quality acquired through becoming in history a place of divine manifestation rather than an inherent quality it has had from primaeval times. Zion is not a holy place since the Urzeit, but has become a holy place-for Israel-with experienced time./23/ Of course its holiness is older than David's time, but the Hebrew story is that the site of the temple was no sacred spot hallowed from time immemorial, but a place originally profane: a threshing-þoor belonging to a Jebusite (2 Sam. 24.15-25; 1 Chron. 21.15-16). It is not Zion, but God's heavenly throne, that is established from of old (Ps. 93.2).
2. While God is really present in particular places-as we have noted earlier-there is another strand in Hebrew thinking that claims that God will not dwell in temples. It expresses itself sometimes in the form of a tension between God's real presence and his equally real freedom to be absent from his temple. Solomon declares, 'I have surely built thee a house of habitation, a place for thee to dwell in forever' (1 Kgs 8.13), but-in almost the same breath-questions that same programme: 'But will God in very deed dwell on the earth? Behold, heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot contain thee; how much less this house that I have builded!' (v. 27). The theology of the 'name' of God which dwells on earth, while God himself dwells in heaven, is an attempt, though not a very convincing one, to handle this very problem. 'Let thine eyes be open', Solomon prays, 'toward this house night and day, even toward the place whereof thou hast said, My name shall be there: to hearken unto the prayer which thy servant shall pray toward this place . . . yea, hear thou in heaven thy dwelling place' (vv. 29-30).
3. We Þnd, principally in the prophetic literature, a critique of particular holy places. Such a critique undermines their very status as holy places. We saw in Deuteronomy 12 how the method of negating or desanctifying the holy places of another religion is to deny their divine origin and to make out that they have been casually lit upon by the whim of the worshippers who congregate in them. Within the history of one's own religion, it cannot be denied that 'the place' was chosen by Yahweh; but it is possible to criticize what the place has become, and attack that which denies its legitimacy as a holy place now. This is a prophetic action.
The classic expression of this criticism is in Jeremiah 7. The prophet is bidden to 'stand in the gate of the Lord's house, and proclaim there this word, and say, Hear the word of the Lord, all ye of Judah, that enter in at these gates to worship the Lord . . . Trust ye not in lying words, saying, The temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, are these' (7.2, 4). The prophetic oracle is that to identify the Jerusalem temple as Yahweh's house-that is, as a genuinely holy place-is a falsehood, not because it never has been Yahweh's house, but because its holy status is conditional and not inalienable. Its status as sacred space depends upon the ethical behaviour of those who frequent it. If they 'amend their ways and their doings' (v. 5) the temple may regain its holy status; but meanwhile the numinous is re-interpreted theologically-or rather, ethically.
3. Sacred Space in Christianity
The Christianity of the New Testament solves that tension within the Old Testament over the sacred by a simple yet radical more: it abolishes the distinction between holy and profane-not by making everything profane or secular but by extending the territory of the sacred.
1. The authorization for such a radical move arises from within the Old Testament itself. Christianity regards itself as the faith of the community of the new age, the end-time rather than the old-time religion. As such it can apply to itself out of the Old Testament prophetic hints of the new dimensions to which holiness can be expanded.
The two most striking examples from the prophets of an envisaged and longed-for expansion of the sacred come from Isaiah and Zechariah. In Isa. 19.24 the old distinction between the holy people in its holy land and all other profane nations is seen as due for abolition at the eschatological day: 'In that day shall Israel be the third with Egypt and with Assyria, a blessing in the midst of the earth; for that the Lord of hosts hath blessed them, saying, Blessed be Egypt my people and Assyria the work of my hands, and Israel mine inheritance'. And in Zechariah holiness spreads out of the temple to the domain of the profane: 'In that day there shall be upon the bells of the horses, Holy unto the Lord; and the pots in the Lord's house shall be like the bowls before the altar. Yea, every pot in Jerusalem and Judah shall be holy unto the Lord of hosts' (14.20-21). To be sure, there is not an absolute abolition of distinctions in Zechariah, for Jerusalem remains the centre of the world-as if the old mythological language still had some validity-the centre to which all the families of the earth must come to worship (vv. 16-17). And the extension of sanctity to every pot in Jerusalem and Judah seems primarily to enable the sacriÞces of universal humankind to take place in Jerusalem without pandemonium. But once holiness has started infecting horses and kitchen utensils, it is hard for it to stop; for the principle has been established that it is holiness and not its opposite that is contagious. In Zechariah's own day his rather less mystical colleague Haggai had relied upon the traditional answer from the priests about the nature of contagion: 'If one bear holy þesh in the skirt of his garment, and with his skirt do touch bread, or pottage, or wine, or oil, or any meat, shall it become holy?' (Hag. 2.12). The answer is a simple 'no'. On the other hand, 'If one that is a dead body touch any of these, shall it be unclean?' is equally clearly answered 'yes'. Zechariah sees a reversal of these answers for the eschatological age: 'in that day' it will be holiness that will be contagious and will bid fair to shrink the sphere of the unclean or the profane.
The New Testament does not explicitly take up these passages, but the wind certainly blows in the same direction. The terminology of the holy place, the temple, becomes applied to the community, its location as ubiquitous as the Christian diaspora. It is the Christian community that is the temple of God in which the Spirit of God dwells (1 Cor. 3.16); 'we are a temple of the living God; even as God said, I will dwell in them' (2 Cor. 6.16); 'ye are fellow-citizens with the saints . . . grow[ing] into a holy temple in the Lord' (Eph. 2.19, 21). The primary manifestation of sacred space, the temple, has been transmuted into a diffused community.
The very terminology of holiness is sparingly applied to places in the New Testament; only on six occasions do we read of the holy city (Mt. 4.5; 27.53; Rev. 11.2), the holy place (Mt. 24.15; Acts 6.13) or the holy mount (2 Pet. 1.18)-as if the sacredness of space were going out of fashion, under the impulse of a new kind of locus for the holy. And further, the predictions of the destruction of Jerusalem (in Mt. 24 and parallel) function as prophetic critique of sacred space. Any holy place marked down for destruction has already been in effect desacralized./24/
There is more in this strain from the New Testament. Holy places have their 'suchlike', their analogues, in the realm of the distinction 'clean/unclean' and in the application of the category of the holy to times and persons. The distinction clean/unclean is not the same as the distinction holy/profane, but it is analogous to it, and being 'clean' is a necessary though not sufÞcient condition for being 'holy'. Early Christianity shows where it stands on this issue by the story of Peter's sheet (Acts 10.9-16). 'Rise, Peter; kill and eat' is the divine word that abolishes the distinction; what God has cleansed may never again be called unclean (v. 14). And Paul can say, 'I know, and am persuaded in the Lord Jesus that nothing is unclean in itself' (Rom. 14.14). The category of the clean has not been abolished but extended.
It is the same with time. For one accustomed to 'remember the sabbath day and keep it holy' (Exod. 20.8) Paul has shifted his ground a long way to Þnd himself accepting the fact that 'One man regards this day as better than that; someone else considers all days alike' (Rom. 14.5). Both observing and abstaining are equally 'to the Lord' (v. 6)-the old sacriÞcial term-which is impossible so long as holy and profane are mutually exclusive categories. Only if all time is holy can it be equally acceptable to observe or not to observe; time, under this new regime, is no longer differentiated.
It is the same with persons. In Old Testament religion the holiness of the priests was of a different quality from the holiness of the people, just as in the spatial sphere there was a gradation of holiness from profane (non-holy) to holy, most holy, and holiest. In Christianity it is the whole community that is holy: the 'saints' at Corinth (1 Cor. 1.2) are the whole church and not some spiritual elite or persons appointed to 'holy orders'. The realm of the sacred has not been abolished, but extended. Even the unbelieving husband or wife is 'sanctiÞed' by the partner, and the children of such a marriage are 'holy' and 'not unclean' (1 Cor. 7.14). It is holiness that is contagious.
2. However, the abolition of the categories holy/profane or clean/ unclean does not mean that all becomes an undifferentiated unity, a homogeneous chaos without orientation, as Eliade has pictured the secular view of space. Karl Barth puts this in his own distinctive way: according to him, John 4does not mean that the divine presence in the world had suddenly become that of a mere undifferentiated ubiquity, and not of deÞnite and distinct places. The opposite of Jerusalem and Gerazim . . . of Rome, Wittenberg, Geneva and Canterbury is not the universe at large, which is the superÞcial interpretation of Liberalism, but Jesus./25/
Without swallowing Barth's excessive Christocentricity, let us say that the manifestation of God, which created holy places in the Þrst place, is still experienced in particular places at particular times.
Rejection of holy places, as Janzen says, does 'not take faith off the map: [it] redeems [it] from static attachment to certain holy places alone, so that the whole map can now become potential territory for . . . God's self-manifestation in our time'./26/ So Hicksville, Slough and Wagga Wagga can be redeemed from their banality and meaninglessness and stand beside Jerusalem and Geneva, beside Constantinople and Edessa as places where God has been truly present and known. Bethlehem and Nazareth are quintessentially Christian places-because of the impermanence of their contact with the divine. Bethlehem, too little to be a clan within Judah (Mic. 5.21), and Nazareth, from whence nothing good had ever come, þicker for a moment on the map as God-possessed places, points of divine revelation, momentary axes mundi, world-centres, navels of the earth, and then fade back into insigniÞcance-except as evocative memories, signals of transcendence. They are ordinary places, but as any ordinary place may be, they have been visited. And as well, on the other hand, Jerusalem and Rome and all the so-called holy places of Christianity can be seen for what they are also: places where the presence of God is not tolerated and therefore at the edge of the world. Jerusalem, the holy city, can also be 'the great city which is spiritually called Sodom and Egypt, where also the Lord was cruciÞed' (Rev. 11.8), getting its name in the atlas, like Pilate's in the Creed, for its failure. And just as the Þrst-century church in Rome knows that city simply as 'Babylon', so also Geneva may be called 'house of religious bondage' and Canterbury 'home of Erastianism'-and so on. Neither Hicksville nor Jerusalem, Wagga nor Nazareth, is a holy place in perpetual continuity, and so not a holy place at all in the conventional sense. Places of God's manifestation they have been and may be again, deo volente./27//