Starting
from an animal in crisis
The human reality starts from an
animal in crisis. As long as life coincides with itself it is only animal life.
It is in the distance from the life with itself that lies the chance for
the emergence of the human realm. It is the gaping chasm that provokes it to move beyond. Then begins the long story
of a certain living being who is defied through a long succession of
differential crises. That was not possible without a large provocative power.
Only the sacral ‘fascinosum’ and ‘tremendum’ could dislocate the animal and open
in this primate the gaping infinite dimension. The ‘same’
was unable to defy
it. It needed the ‘other’. One needed the great sacral difference to
cause man to sacrifice his animal reality.
It is the provocative ‘Other’ who
defies him to go beyond. It is through the extreme tension of sacral
verticality that man is born as a man. The sacred in its first sense is
properly a crisis of the childbirth of man. Only the `divine' is able to open
the difference through which humanity can occur and cause the
exodus of this primate towards authentic humanity.
Thereafter, the history of man is
inseparable from the history of his gods. Of his God of which he knows he is the
image. Consequently man humanizes himself when he gets divine.
The crossing of sacredness is deeply
and basically founder of difference and distance in the middle of
the simply biological reality. The world is less than the world. The world is
more than the world. Man is less than man. Man is more than man. Sacredness
begins with the experience of this strange `other’ frightening and fascinating
at the same time. This mysterious difference crosses life very concretely.
Sacredness
is a crisis of the world so that the humanity emerges. Man is given birth through
a crisis. Man is born as a man in the sacral crisis of life. As long as the life
coincides simply with itself it is only animal. In the non-coincidence of life
with itself lies the chance of the emergence of specific humanity.
Thus a negative space opens, to some
extent an anti-space compared to the natural space, an antithetic space where
new creation is possible not first by filling up but by opening a vacuum. The
sacred is founder of such a space.
We do not know when
that started. Undoubtedly nobody can know it. But the accession of a certain
primate to humanity remains incomprehensible otherwise. For that the sacral
‘fascinosum’ and ‘tremendum’ were necessary. Finiteness was not sufficient to
defy him. Neither could it be the ‘same’. The ‘other’ was needed as the great
antithesis infinitely open and the provocative difference of
humanity.
Culture starts
with worship. However antiquated it is, the
worship rite is archaeological praxis of humanization. Worship celebrates and
punctuates the difference between nature and culture, between necessity and
freedom, between order and creation. In an archaeological perspective the rite
brings up to date the bio-cosmic drama and the victory of life over death.
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