The Sacredness of the Secular and the Secularity of the Sacred
Raimon Panikkar
Secularity represents the conviction that the saeculum belongs to the ultimate sphere of reality. The saeculum is not a subordinate and/or transitory state of Being, insignificant before an eternal, divine or transcendent universe, but neither is it the only reality… While secularism absolutizes worldly reality, secularity relativizes ultra-worldly or “divine” reality. It tries to maintain a balance between being and not-being, eternity and time, world and God, using traditional terminology. According to this conception, for example, there was never a moment when God existed alone. God and the world are “contemporaneous”. God is a relative being, in relation to the world. He is God of the world and for the world — just as the world is of God and for God…
Contemporary sacred secularity prefers to enhance the sacred, divine or ultimate aspect of the secular, rather than underline the secular aspect of the divine, as has been done traditionally. To give an example, according to a traditional doctrine of some schools, Vedantic and others, this world is the Body of God. Now, however, the accent is not so much on the affirmation that the Body of God is this world, as much as the fact that this world is also divine. The centre of gravity has changed. The sufferings of the Mystic Body of Christ do not stand out so much as the sufferings of Jesus, so much as the suffering of the poor. These sufferings belong to divinity, that is to the ultimate order, and thus are less tolerable, because they are endowed with an ultimate character.
Sacred secularity accentuates as much the fact that God becomes man, as the fact that man is considered a divine being, not so much by descent or ascent, but by the fact that between them there is a constituent relationship. Said more philosophically: the accent is placed not so much on divine transcendence as on its immanence, not so much on divine transcendence as on human transcendence. The centre is man, but this man is something more (not less) than his psychosomatic nature. What man does, his action and his creation, is serious and important; it touches the ultimate sphere of reality — it is transcendent.
In a traditional framework, if a human being did not achieve his personal human fulfilment, that meant that his earthly pilgrimage had been a failure, but he could still reach heaven, enjoy the complete vision of God or have another chance in a future reincarnation or in purgatory, etc. In a word, all was not lost. But for a secular mentality, not to achieve human fulfilment on earth is equivalent to what the majority of traditions call hell, understood not so much as eternal suffering but as death, dissolution, a lack of achievement in Life: the state of a particular human being who will never reach that degree of humanity, divinity or fulfilment to which he was destined. Life can continue, my children may be better off, my “other more elevated being” may go towards other spheres, my “soul” may be saved, but I, my person, this concrete being, subject to the here and now, is lost. We previously referred to the meaning of tragedy. Heaven, the other life, the transmigration of the individual soul are, in the best of cases, palliatives and, in the worst, propitiatory victims. Human destiny acquires an ultimate character in its very worldly level. The kingdom of God is certainly to be found among us, in the interlude: it blossoms in the tempiternal instant — not in the non-temporal in nor in the merely historical between. Here, secularity becomes traditional, when it believes that there are very few who reach this height of salvation.
The secular can be sacred when it is seen and lived in all its profundity and cosmotheandric nature, but, detached from its roots, it can become profane. The sacred can, in turn, be found in the secular, but it does not identify with it. Physical integrity, to give an example, belongs to the sacredness of the human body, but it is better to enter the kingdom of heaven crippled or with only one eye than to be excluded. As I stated more than forty years ago in a polemical tone: “Christianity is not humanism”. In a word: the secular in its (cosmotheandrical) integrity is sacred, but the sacred can manifest itself independently of the secular structures of reality. …
In modern history, science and religion have had a strained relationship. To avoid writing an entire treatise, we will quote a phrase of Galileo Galilei: “Religion tells us how to go to heaven, but not how heaven goes”. In fact, this is dealt with by natural science. The great division between modernity and traditional religions lies precisely here. Modernity believes (ingenuously) in an anthropology which is independent of any cosmology. Everything is centred on man who continues to speak of heaven, although this heaven can not be found anywhere. …
Galileo wants to know how heaven moves, but independently of how to go to heaven. Man cuts his umbilical cord with the cosmos; he converts only in history. Cosmology has been substituted by anthropology. The danger lies in its ideological assumptions, that is in the belief that man, and therefore his destiny, are independent of cosmology. Man “unhooks himself” alone from the cosmos. It seems irrelevant how heaven works compared to what heaven is like and how we get there. This gives rise to a disincarnate spirituality.
Extract from Panikkar’s longer text on Sacred Secularity. Printed here with due permission from Dr. Milena Pavan, President of the Panikkar Foundation. — Anand Amaladass
