How the Sacred and Profane Worlds were Joined

This is an abridged and retitled version of a chapter in The Sacred History of Being, which explores  interconnections between earthly and Divine realities in antiquity. A key thing to observe is that the idea of such interconnections is established on logical grounds. The reality of the Divine world is inferred, on the basis of the visible imperfections of profane reality, but the two worlds must be connected in some way if reality itself is not to be necessarily irrational in nature (this also was argued on logical grounds). Establishing the connection between the worlds was a major preoccupation in antiquity: things should ‘meet and agree’. 

The original chapter contained footnotes, which I have removed for ease of reading. I’ve reduced the number of modes of connection which are discussed also. The essential argument of the chapter however remains the same.

TY February 18, 2018.

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Since the world of the divine is a transcendent reality, the nature of that reality is not going to conform to our secular understanding of the existent world. This is an important point, which would have been considered in antiquity. Thus, there is no reason to presume that extension is represented or has reality in the same way in which extension exists in normal space. There is also no reason to presume that time is represented or has reality in the same way in which time exists in the secular world (the secular world being, by definition, the world of time, or the world existing in time). 

Almost every aspect of the world of existence will have a different nature in the divine world, to the point where we would find it difficult or impossible to establish the connection between one and the other. We are not accustomed to imagining that the ancients thought in such terms, except perhaps within the Academy, or within Parmenides circle.

There are many conceptions which are associated with the divine reality. This may seem a strange way to understand the world of the divine. But it is no more a species of imprecision to do this than it is to create a pantheon of gods, all of which have something of the divine about them. The problem with the divine is that it is forever beyond our capacity to fully understand, by definition. Therefore we can only say things about it from a particular point of view, at a particular time, and under certain circumstances. All within the limitations of the human understanding. Beyond that our interpretation is more or less imperfect. This means that our understanding of the divine is forever contingent – in essence a species of conjecture rather than full understanding.

This is a difficult idea to communicate, given the last two thousand years of theological speculation, and religious struggle in the world. It may seem an unimaginable idea – that the theological ideas of the ancient world were understood to be conjectural, and ultimately contingent on the limitations of the human understanding.

For us, even before the advent of the empirical approach to knowledge during the European enlightenment, we attempted to construct our notions of the world and what is real on what could be established as far as possible, whether what was established was on the basis of logical inference or deduction, on the basis of experience, or was revealed to us by the divine. Conjecture might have been tolerable (or even encouraged to an extent) within the church school and the seminary, but only in so far as it was desirable that scholars produced by religious institutions should be able to use their critical faculties to the best of their ability, in the service of Church and state. But in the end, conjecture is not something we generally wish to face as an important component of our picture of the world.

In constructing ideas of the gods, and creating images of them, the ancients were engaging in the enterprise of framing their understanding of the divine world. They did this on the basis of the idea that the realm of reality (which we have spoken of as Being earlier in this essay), being unchanging in its nature, must still stand behind the world of appearance and existence. This latter world is an image of it, but is not a perfect representation of it. The realm of reality embraces it, but the world of appearance and existence is necessarily a lesser world. However, because it is a good semblance of it, there must be the possibility of aspects of the realm of the reality being manifest in the world. On the basis of their ideas about the nature of the divine, of the supremely perfect Being, we might ask what they would look for in the world which would represent the presence of the supreme Being, woven all through the world, as the soul is woven all through the world in Plato’s model. They would ask: where is it? What shape does it have? How big is it? What properties does it have? And so on.

This is an incomplete list of items which were identified in antiquity as representing what we might term ‘bleedthrough’ from the divine reality. These were things which were regarded as of great importance – in a sense, of more importance than the gods themselves, in that they were aspects of the divine which had reality in our world, and did not depend to the same extent on human conjecture. They are therefore more profoundly real than the gods.

1. Limit: Before the idea of Being, there is no reason to have a sophisticated attitude to limit. One can have the idea that things are separate from other things, or must be separate from other things, and that there is a point of demarcation which marks off where one thing ends and another begins. It is also possible to have the conception that it might be desirable or even necessary to move from one side of the limit to the other. It is also possible to imagine the divine as having existence on the other side of a limit, without there being anything very sophisticated in the conception. A sophisticated conception of a modus operandi of contact with the divine however will not emerge from this, until an intellectual basis for there being a reason why things should be connected is understood. Before Being, one side of the limit or border is the concern. However, once the idea of Being is in play, then the limit itself becomes the focus of interest. The existence of a sophisticated idea of Being means that what exists is understood to be less real than reality itself (the idea of Being from St Anselm onwards was not very sophisticated).

2. Perfection: Before the idea of Being, talking of perfection is focused on the subjective notion of perfection, and the term is used either rhetorically, or refers simply to quality of workmanship or quality of action. It has no bearing on ideas relating to the divine, or to reality. The idea may however be extended to application to the divine and to the gods. By analogy, something which has great perfection will come to be understood to transcend other objects or works of a similar kind, and this transcendence will come to be applied to the divine. It is however a long step to realizing that a proposed perfection means that the divine is actually unintelligible to us, and that the divine is Being itself, beyond any fixed or rigid attributes. Perfection as a quality which may actually connect with the divine, rather than merely showing transcendence of other lesser perfections, is an idea which is dependent on the concept of the divine as Being.

3. Completion: The idea of completion is related to the idea of perfection, particularly in connection with the nature of the divine. However completion as a concept relates more closely to the idea of limit, in that it is a property of the concept of Okeanos in Greece, and the all-enveloping Apsu in Mesopotamia. It is an interesting concept in connection with the idea of a circle, since it is impossible to determine the beginning or end of a circle, at least when it is unbroken. The concept may be used in a great many ways, from indicated the completion of a form, nature, or the performance of ritual and liturgy, and so on. It might also be used to indicate the end of a life, or a process. What is completed has some property in connection with the divine, some participation with it, in that the realm of the divine must be complete as opposed to the world of existence, which is incomplete in its general nature. I suspect that the idea of completion was one of the first mundane properties in the world to be identified as a potential access point to the divine world.

4. Excellence: Excellence is a concept which the Greeks had a particular interest in, but it is an idea which, like the ideas of completion and perfection, is referred to throughout the ancient world. To excel is to exceed something. So something which possesses excellence transcends the excellence of some other thing. This is its comparative use, but it is also used intransitively, so that something can be said to have a special excellence of its own, irrespective of the qualities of other things. Hence its use by Aristotle in his moral and ethical treatises. Ultimately it is about transcendence, whether of oneself or of other things. The world of the divine is both more excellent than the secular world, but it also possesses a special excellence of its own. Excellence is something which exists in the world of existence which has a connection with the reality which stands behind it.

5. Greatness: the idea of greatness as we have seen an idea which was pressed into service in the Middle Ages to try to prove the existence of the supreme Being. Greatness is naturally something which the human understanding would wish to associate with the supreme Being. It has been in the past associated with the gods – Herodotus refers to the rituals associated with the cult of the great gods on Samos, without going into any detail, which is frustrating. The great gods were known as the ‘Kaberioi,’ which indicates a near eastern origin for this cult, since kbr is the semitic root for ‘great’. Great however is an imprecise term, merely indicating that these gods transcend other gods, or that that their special excellence is their greatness. It is however an appropriate term to describe men who might be classed in this way, who, through the quality of their greatness, on the field of battle, in their wisdom, and a thousand other attributes, might be understood to have some empathy with the gods.

6. Justice: the focus on justice in the ancient world in general, and not simply among the Greeks, might indicate to the cynical modern sensibility only that justice was in short supply. It might indeed be the case that it was much referenced precisely because there was little access to it. However the discussion of the subject in Plato makes it clear that it is an idea which has its place in this exploration of the earthly corollaries of aspects of the divine nature which have some form of existence here on earth. Justice was presumed to be something which was perfected in the divine world, but justice in the secular world is a different matter. The very nature of the world of existence means that justice – true justice is unobtainable. What we can access is a poor copy of something which can only exist elsewhere. It is interesting that both in Mesopotamia and in Greece it was the Sun god (Shamash and Apollo respectively) which were responsible for the dispensation of justice on earth.

The gods might know what is just, but our capacity to discern it is limited, and the dispensation of justice by the gods is sometimes hard for man to understand and accept. One of the images of the dispensation of justice, is of the participation in battle of the sun god. Assyrian reliefs show Shamash hovering above opposing forces in the winged circle. The meaning of this is at least two-fold: the god is involved in the outcome of the battle, which represents a way of dispensing just decision; and the to-ing and fro-ing of battle represents the difficulty of apportioning justice in the world of existence. It also means that the engagement in battle was understood by kings, priests and generals as a legitimate way of establishing right. In Homer, there is a famous passage where opposing forces are described as being bounded by ropes, which are pulled this way and that in the course of the battle.  These ropes are also found in the iconography of Shamash.  The underlying idea is the same.

7. Proportion: aspects of the divine reality can exist in the secular world expressed in terms of proportion. Thus, in a figure, a side which bears a proportionate relationship to another side, can be regarded as an image or representation of it, in a way similar to the understanding that the image of a god bears a relation to the god itself. Proportionate relationships in a structure, object or image could therefore be used as a way of enhancing the meaning of images and representations which bore a relationship with the divine reality. This is an enormous subject, worth a monograph on its own.

8. Purity: Purity is an attribute which might be associated with the idea of perfection, and often was. But purity can be attributed to things in a different way – not everything which is pure is to be regarded as a perfection. Something which is perfect is just that. Purity on the other hand, is an attribute which can be put on and put off in a way which perfection cannot.  This distinction is of great importance in the Assyrian and Babylonian contexts, since in order to create divine statues, the craftsmen required to be given a temporary divinity. Thus the purity, a temporary perfection, can be put on for the purpose of the work. This was achieved through the perfection of the appropriate ritual. Afterwards it was removed by the performance of another ritual.

9. Wholes and Totalities. Things which are whole are regarded as participating with one another, in that they share the property of wholeness, or totality. This idea is a strong pointer to the essentially subjective nature of the model of the world in which these things are important, since the wholeness of something is sometimes attributed, rather than being a property of an entity. There is a doctrine associated with wholes and totalities, which is attributed to Pythagoras. It is also referenced by Plato. The doctrine however is much older than the middle of the first millennium B.C.E.

Those are nine phenomena which can appear in the world of existence, which were understood to allow and enhance connection with the divine reality which stands eternally behind the physical world. This is an edited list, but it is sufficient to illustrate what was in the mind of man attempting contact with the divine.

Other things which we might consider, which were of great importance in the ancient world, include the idea of reduplication, principally of concepts, attributes and properties. The point of reduplication is emphasis. Two collocated symbols, meaning the same, could be understood to double the power of the image and the connection.

Another related idea is ‘collection’, sometimes expressed in ancient texts as ‘heaping up’. This refers to the bringing together, usually of good things (but not always), sometimes in the context of an altar and a priest. There may be several reasons for creating such a collocation, depending on the objects involved, but ‘heaping up’ is a good thing in itself, if the intention of the supplicant is to multiply and reduplicate the offering. It is obvious from the study of ancient iconography that many images are reduplicated directly, in a way which does not amount to a purely aesthetic distribution of images, and in addition, the meaning of symbols and tableau are reduplicated using different images. The effect is of reduplication, and to make such assemblages identifies to the informed viewer, what is the same among what is apparently different. These assemblages are of course addressed to the gods, and the divine.

Another action which was understood to convey an aspect of the divine world in the physical world is ‘division’. This concept is very closely associated with the ideas of justice and of decision, but it is possible for division to be separated from these ideas, in that division can take place without the wish or need for justice, or of decision. At least in terms of our modern understanding of what justice is. Ultimately the connection between the ideas is about ‘good order’, and ‘meeting and agreeing’.

The association of justice and the power of division with kingship is very strong in the ancient near east – the sun god Shamash is often represented as holding a saw, and the Egyptian kings were also represented with the symbol of the Neteru (axes). In both cases, the instrument for deciding the fate of anything is clearly not a weapon but a tool (though weapons of war also were understood as legitimate tools of the gods). If it is possible to understand the creation and generation of the world as a decision of the gods, then the nature of reality has been divided, at least insofar as there is now a world of existence which has descended into secular time, and which is cut down from Being itself. The power of kings to deal justice comes from their participation in the nature of the divine Being, though they live and function in the world of existence.

Division is also important in gaining an apprehension of what is real and what is not, and in understanding how one thing is different from another. Ultimately it is the basis of logic and classification which we find in developed form among the Greeks in the middle of the first millennium B.C.E. Sumerologists were puzzled to find tablets listing things together which to us had no meaningful connection, such as a large list of objects which have the property of ‘being white’. To the Sumerian scribe who assembled this list, the characteristics of whiteness would have determined the worth of the list. The items were separated out from a (hypothetical) list of all known items, and collected together as a classification of items of the same property. These properties are in a sense subjective, but only because we do not know the function of white objects in the Sumerian model of the world.

Another notion of great importance in antiquity is the idea of ‘drawing near’ to a god. This might be represented by proximity to an altar or symbol of the god, or by the device of showing the supplicant being introduced to the god by a third party, whether another god or by a priest of the divine cult. There is however a technical idea behind this concept. The idea is that by being near, you already participate in the nature of the god, to a limited extent. The connection is open, even if transaction with the divine is not in operation. Drawing near can be achieved through a collocation of offerings, through benefactions to the priesthood and the temple, through other good works, the virtue of the individual, and so on.