From the most elementary hierophany — e.g. manifestation of the sacred in some ordinary object, a stone or a tree — to the supreme hierophany (which, for a Christian, is the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ) there is no solution of continuity. In each case we are confronted by the same mysterious act — the manifestation of something of a wholly different order, a reality that does not belong to our world, in objects that are an integral part of our natural "profane" world.
Mircea Eliade in The Sacred and the Profane
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An interesting quote...but I wonder. In fact, I do not wonder, I nitpick. But wonder is more polite. The nitpick: the sacred is most certainly a part of our world! To dissociate the sacred from the profane from the hermeneutic position the author takes is to create two orders of material. Why should the sacred invest any time in the profane, what can they have to do with one another if the sacred is part of some other ontological world? Please excuse the bluster, I'm late for dinner or I'd help this whole thing land more gracefully.
Ontological is an awfully largesome word and I'm not certain you should have let your dinner wait even that long over it.
But I would suggest that perhaps, whether or not Eliade had ontology in mind (I don't think he did and the poor man is dead or we could ask him), we could conceive of the sacred and profane in other than ontological terms. Just as the good Doctor Luther reimagined 'flesh' and 'spirit' not as material and immaterial or body and soul but as the whole human person, in this world, eating and drinking either to the glory of God and the building of the Kingdom or to the glory of oneself and the construction of Babylon.
The 'sacred' and the 'profane' may be categories of seeing. They may be ways of describing the particularity of some manifestations of God in his creation. They may be the terminology of subcreation.
And after all, in the end, the bush was burning, the dove descended, and the Lord is risen.
You have, however, anonymous though you be, inspired a poem:
"Heirophany"
If
at my meal the same
bush burns
dove descends
Lord rises
then
it might be no more
but it is certainly
no less.
now i begin to wonder...
Perhaps (i got this on, i think, the 8th reading of the quote) the point that pricks me the wrong way is the idea that the sacred does not "belong" in the profane world. Mr. Eliade seems to want to clear the murkiness from the world and make sense of spirituality in a higher contrast. But I think the world is a muddy place, and hierophany takes place constantly. Turning up the contrast helps us see only the most obvious examples (the bush and Christ you mentioned) but it tunes out the essential graying of our material, physical world which, though tainted, shimmers incessantly with the light of God.
In the Holy
of Holies perhaps
we find a mirror
and in that mirror
the echoes of Eden
Or as a better poet put it ...
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and of our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.
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