mirrored file at http://SaturnianCosmology.Org/ 
For complete access to all the files of this collection
	see http://SaturnianCosmology.org/search.php 
==========================================================
_________________________________________________________________

The New Friesian
Theory of Religious Value

after Nelson, Otto, etc.
_________________________________________________________________

Religion contains a special domain of evaluation:  the holy or the
sacred. This category has two sorts of opposites and three forms of
opposition. The opposites are the polluted or unholy and what may be
called the common, mundane, worldly, or secular. The relationship
between the holy, the polluted, and the common is similar to that
between the beautiful, the ugly, and the plain in aesthetic value.
There are no degrees of transition between the beautiful and the ugly.
Something cannot really be both beautiful and ugly at the same time --
except in different respects, as in a portrait of an ugly person, e.g.
Socrates, that is nevertheless beautifully done or revealing of the
beautiful soul, e.g. Socrates [note]. On the other hand, there are
degrees of being beautiful or ugly, but both of them tend to the third
pole, the plain.

Similarly, something cannot be both sacred and polluted at the same
time, but there are degrees of sacredness and pollution, with each
tending to the third pole, the common and secular.

Religious value is more complex than aesthetic value because three
forms of opposition mark off each of the three poles of the sacred and
its two opposites. Thus, there is a difference between 1) the sacred
and the profane, 2) the clean and the unclean, and 3) the numinous and
the mundane.

What is holy is therefore sacred, clean, and numinous. What is
polluted or unholy is profane, unclean, and numinous. And what is
common is profane, clean, and mundane. In many ancient religions, one
of the most important oppositions is between the clean and the
unclean. Many of the rules in the Old Testament concern pollution and
cleansing; but cleansing, of course, does not make anything sacred, it
merely makes it worthy of becoming, approaching, or associating with
the sacred. In almost mathematical terms, nothing can exist on the
track expressing degrees of sacredness without leaving the track
showing degrees of pollution. The opposition between the sacred and
the profane is often confusing because of the bivalence of the
category of the profane. Webster's dictionary has one definition of
the profane that is mundane, "not concerned with religion or religious
purposes: SECULAR," one that definitely involves pollution, "serving
to debase or defile what is holy," and one that is mixed or the
profane proper, "not holy because unconsecrated, impure, or defiled:
UNSANCTIFIED." "Unconsecrated" and "unsanctified" will mean simply the
non-sacred, i.e. either unholy or mundane.

The third form of opposition, between the numinous and the mundane, is
essentially between matters of religious concern and those that are
not. Whether of the holy or of the polluted, religious valuation can
be said to possess "numinosity," an uncanniness, mystery, and power
set apart from common, ordinary, worldly, secular, and mundane things.
Holiness and pollution can both be dangerous, but the difference is
that pollution is not sought for its own sake but is often acquired
despite that (through spilling blood, having sex, menstruating, eating
the wrong things, etc.). Ritual actions are required to remove
pollution. Ritual actions are also required before dealing with holy
things, in part to remove pollution but also to prepare for the
dangers posed by holiness itself. There is nothing dangerous about the
merely mundane. It is just a kind of emptiness in comparison.

The holy and the polluted pose a threat to each other. The concepts
"defile," "debase," and "desecrate" reveal that even what is holy, as
well as what is clean and mundane, can be damaged by the unholy. If
the divine presence in a temple is of value to a community because of
the protection that the god provides, the desecration of the temple
may not harm the god, but it may certainly harm the community, as the
means of pleasing and accessing the god is compromised. On the other
hand, something may be so holy that it cannot be desecrated. Thus
Alfred Kohlatch [This is the Torah, Jonathan David Publishers, 1988]
quotes Rabbi Judah ben Bathyra as saying, "Words of the Torah are not
susceptible to uncleanness." Kohlatch adds, "No individual, not even
one who is ritually impure, can defile a Torah by touching or handling
it," and "the Talmud states clearly that a Torah scroll cannot be made
ritually unclean regardless of who handles it." On the other hand, the
holy is also definitely a threat to the polluted, as is well
illustrated in the Biblical destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.

A system of religious ritual prohibitions, like the Polynesian tapu
("taboo," the Hawaiian kapu) system, serves to keep the various
categories separate. The Hawaiian historian R.S. Kuykendall says:

In its fundamental meaning tapu [kapu] as a word was used primarily
as an adjective and as such signified that which was psychically
dangerous, hence restricted, forbidden, set apart, to be avoided,
because: (a) divine, therefore requiring isolation for its own sake
from both the common and the corrupt; (b) corrupt, hence dangerous
to the common and the divine, therefore requiring isolation from
both for their sakes. [quoted by Ralph S. Kuykendall, The Hawaiian
Kingdom, vol. I, U. of Hawaii Press, 1968, p. 8]

This illustrates nicely the two opposites of the sacred and the dual
nature of the barriers that must protect both the holy from everything
else and everything else from what is polluted. Hawaiian kapus had a
lot to do with eating, especially that men and women could not eat
together. The kapu system was overthrown in 1819 when the new King
Kamehameha II Liholiho simply sat down and ate with the court women.
This was before Christian missionaries had even arrived in Hawaii.

The similarity of the sacred and the polluted was already noted by
James George Frazer:

In general, we may say that the prohibition to use the vessels,
garments, and so forth of certain persons, and the effects supposed
to follow an infraction of the rule, are exactly the same whether
the persons to whom the things belong are sacred or what we might
call unclean and polluted. [The Golden Bough, A Study in Magic and
Religion, A New Abridgement by Robert Fraser, Oxford University
Press, 1994, p.175]

Frazer, however, thinks that this makes the sacred and the polluted
somehow ultimately the same thing:

The uncleanness, as it is called, of girls at puberty and the
sanctity of holy men do not, to the primitive mind, differ
materially from each other. They are only different manifestations
of the same myseterious energy which, like energy in general, is in
itself neither good nor bad, but becomes beneficent or maleficent
according to its application. [p.703]

Frazer has confused the boundaries, which are the prohibitions (the
kapus) connected with the sacred and the polluted, with the content of
that which is restricted. A separate vocabulary reflects the polarity
of the different contents. In Hawaiian, mana is divine, sacred,
miraculous power and authority, and ho'omana ("make divinely
powerful") is used to mean "religion," while another term, haumia, is
used to mean "unclean, defiled" [Mary Kawena Pukui & Samuel H. Elbert,
Hawaiian Dictionary, University of Hawaii Press, 1973, pp. 217, 57].
The real difference between the two, of course, is that the properly
protected force of the sacred is expected to produce good effects
(good weather, harvest, fertility, etc.), while the polluted will
blight these effects if not properly isolated. In short, prohibitions
of the sacred are intended to protect it, as well as protect others
from the ill effects of improper contact with its power, while
prohibitions of the polluted are intended entirely to protect
everything else from its danger. Frazer was carried away with the
analogy to energy and so neglected the polarity of value evident in
the rest of "primitive" vocabulary -- positive and negative charges,
not energy in general, are the suggestive analogy from science.

In Arabic there is a system of terms similar to tapu from the root
h.aruma, which by itself is a verb that means "to be forbidden,
prohibited, interdicted, unlawful, unpermitted." What can be forbidden
could be either sacred or polluted. On the sacred side we get h.aram
meaning "forbidden, prohibited, holy, sacred, sacrosanct" [from Hans
Wehr, A Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic, Cornell University Press,
1966, pp.173-174 for what follows]. It can be also used to mean
"wife"; and in the dual, 'al-H.aramān, "the two Holies," it means the
sacred cities of Mecca and Medina. Similarly there is h.urmah,
"holiness, sacredness, sanctity; reverence, veneration, esteem,
respect; that which is holy, sacred, inviolable; or a woman, lady, or
wife." H.arīm means "a sacred, inviolable place; sanctum, sacred
precinct; harem; female members of the family, women; wife." 'Ih.rām
means "state of ritual consecration of the Mecca pilgrim." 'Ih.tirām
means "deference, respect, regard, etc." Muh.arram is "forbidden,
interdicted," and the name of the first month of the Islāmic calendar.
Muh.rim is the "Mecca pilgrim who has entered the state of ritual
consecration." And muh.taram is "honored, revered, venerated,
esteemed, respected."

On the negative side, fencing off the polluted, we find h.arām,
"forbidden, interdicted, prohibited, unlawful; offense, sin," and 'ibn
h.arām, "son of the forbidden," "illegitimate son, bastard" (this ends
up as harāmzāda, with the Persian patronymic ending, in Hindi). An
adjective form of h.arām, h.arāmī, means "thief, robber, bandit." But
h.arām can also mean "sacred, sacrosanct," and the Bayt 'alH.arām,
"House of the Forbidden," is the sacred Ka'abah, the House of God in
Mecca. H.urūm means "excommunication." Tah.rīm means "forbiddance,
interdiction, prohibition, ban." When derivatives of the same root, or
sometimes the very same derived terms, can mean "bandit, sin,
bastard," etc. and also some of the most sacred things in Islām, we
certainly have the same kind of bivalent ambiguity as with tapu/kapu
in Polynesia and Hawaii. This ambiguity, however, is speedily
clarified when we move to the rest of the vocabulary. Quds, "holiness,
sacredness, sanctity," only applies to the sacred side of the
bivalence.

Religion has its numinous character whether the principle objects of
religion be immanent or transcendent, e.g. tangible fetishes, idols,
places, persons, etc., even states of consciousness, or a supernatural
God, heaven, etc. Religion possesses no special category of obligation
(i.e. the rites and objects mean nothing to anyone outside the
religion) but instead subsumes all the others, usually collapsing them
moralistically into the ritual requirements of the religion. The
"holy" is thus often equated with moral goodness or, when that sense
isn't so strong, with the beautiful or the sublime. Numinous value,
however, is polynomicly independent of other forms of evaluation:
religious practices may be repugnant, the gods (or God) may do bad
things, or sacred objects may be ugly or repulsive. The cleansing of
pollution and the preparations for sacred rituals may require moral
rectitude or beautiful costumes, or they may require appalling
mortifications, self-mutilations, blood sacrifices, etc. Ritual
practices simply may not make any sense.

THE "SUPERNATURAL" GOOD
THE NATURAL GOOD Religion, the sacred and the polluted; the view of
transcendent reality or of the ultimate meaning of all existence, free
of space and time: Pietatives
ETHICS Aesthetics,the beautiful and the ugly; the theory of art &
beauty, the worth of things independent of human purposes: Optatives
Morality of persons, Morality of things, right and wrong; Euergetic
Ethics, the good and the bad: Imperatives, Jussives, and Hortatives

Graphic Version of Table

This polynomic independence occurs to us as the problem of evil. If
God is omniscient, omnipotent, and benevolent, then why does evil
exist? He would know it exists; he would be able to get rid of it; and
he would want to get rid of it. The problem of evil, however, is more
general than a theological difficulty over a transcendent personal
God. Even without God, as in Buddhism, there is still birth, disease,
old age, and death. These were regarded by the Buddha as a problem.
They still are, and we must still ask ourselves why the world often
seems to be a "meaningless nightmare of suffering." If religion offers
consolation that the world makes ultimate sense and has a meaning or a
purpose, despite all evidence to the contrary, it is holy things that
present the tangible (or perhaps intangible) quality of that
consolation.

The confusing thing about the world does lie in the mixed signals
given us: because all the polynomic domains of value can vary
independently, the holy does not necessarily match up in the natural
occurrence of things with the right, the good, or the beautiful. We
want to know why the good suffer, when they do not deserve to; and why
the evil prosper, when they do not deserve to. All the polarities of
value -- pleasure and pain, love and hate, right and wrong, good and
bad, beauty and ugliness, holiness and pollution -- are like separate
rollers on a slot machine. Every pull of the arm gives us a different
combination. Religious faith is just that we would like to believe
that there is some deep connection between the pleasurable, the right,
the good, the beautiful, and the holy and that, beyond our reckoning,
all the positive aspects of value in some sense do collapse together
into one comprehensive form of value. We can live our lives trying to
put all the positive aspects together, trying to get the jackpot on
that slot machine, but we know that for ourselves and for the world we
can have only limited success. Religion therefore reassures us that
deep in the nature of things, whether here or in the hereafter, all
the positive aspects are together. For religion the holy is precisely
how the positive aspects of value are connected.

An important bit of evidence about the polynomic independence of
religious from the other forms of value, and about the role of
numinosity in answering the problem of evil, occurs in the conflict of
"faith versus works" in several religions. By the time of Augustine,
it is firmly established in Christianity that salvation is due to
divine grace, not our own efforts, and that our efforts to be morally
good are doomed anyway. As hopeless sinners, we can only be redeemed
from our sin by the sacrifice of Christ in the Crucifixion, and our
actual salvation, therefore, is independent of our ability to be good.
Mediaeval Catholicism tried to balance the requirements of morality
with the requirements of salvation by holding that salvation can be
achieved even through repentance in articulo mortis, at the moment of
death, but that the stain of sin must be worked off in Purgatory. The
repentant sinner thus did not receive a free ride to heaven. This
compromise was actually rejected by Martin Luther, who took Christ's
expiation of sin so seriously that sincere repentance truly did wash
one free of sin. Such "salvation by faith alone" even seems to turn up
in the third part of the Star Wars trilogy, The Return of the Jedi,
when the vicious tyrant, sorcerer, and mass murderer Darth Vader is
redeemed and transfigured at death into the moral equal of the heroes
Obi-wan Kenobi and Yoda.

Although such a dispute may be thought of as peculiarly Christian, it
is not. Islām in its early days had to deal with the claims of the
Khārijites that anyone guilty of a grave sin was no longer a Moslem.
The Orthodox answer came to be that only the sin of polytheism, which
would hardly seem to indicate Islāmic religious sentiment anyway, was
inconsistent with being a Moslem. Everyone else was actually saved,
although God might punish them for a while prior to admitting them to
heaven. Thus, in properly polynomic fashion, moral goodness varied
independently with the means of salvation. Even more interesting,
however, is the case of the Jōdo Shin, the "True Pure Land," Sect of
Buddhism in Japan. Shinran (1174-1268) founded Jōdo Shin in 1224 and
taught that rebirth in the Pure Land of the Buddha Amida could be
achieved by no efforts of our own, but only through absolute reliance
of the power of the Vow of Amida. This teaching, together with Jōdo
Shin insistence on our own sinfulness and worthlessness, persuaded
later Jesuit missionaries to Japan that Satan had taught the same
heresy to Shinran than he later taught to Martin Luther.

The problem of faith versus works often creates the same uneasiness as
other manifestations of the polynomic nature of value. The aesthetic
independence of art is bad enough, but many people, or the entire
religion of Zoroastrianism, find it hard to credit that God, or the
Buddha Amida, would reward people with Salvation for anything other
than moral goodness. At the same time, such a teaching addresses an
important aspect of the human condition: people often mean well but do
the wrong thing, or feel helpless and worthless in relation to their
own desires and temptations. Some people commit major crimes but then
seriously repent of them. Even if they are willing to face secular
retribution for such crimes, they desperately desire an avenue out of
eternal punishment. The promise of salvation by faith alone is that a
genuine change of heart, and a proper attitude now, can put things
right with Eternity, whether that is thought of as God or the Dharma.
Catholicism and Orthodox Islām thus would seem to represent a certain
sophistication, neither denying salvation nor trivializing moral
wrongs. Luther and Shinran, one might think, represent an overwhelming
insight into the polynomic independence of salvation, but an insight
that is so overwhelming as to create a moral distortion, like the
artist who thinks that moral wrongs are simply excused by the
production of good art. This seems strongly contrary to Otto's
convenient view that Protestantism is the most morally advanced form
of religion.
_________________________________________________________________

Faith, Works, and Knowledge

The "Need to Know" and the Meaning of Life

Cause and Purpose, The World Turned Inside Out

Myth, Religion, and Philosophy

Religious Value and the Antinomies of Transcendence

Thought Experiments on the Soul

Shame, Beauty, and the Ambivalence of the Flesh
* Pornography

Religious Morality and Discrimination

Philosophy of Religion

Value Theory

Home Page

Copyright (c) 1996, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2003 Kelley L. Ross, Ph.D. All
Rights Reserved
_________________________________________________________________

The New Friesian Theory of Religious Value, Note
_________________________________________________________________

While Socrates is ugly and beautiful in very different respects, i.e.
inside vs. outside, there is also the experience of things or people
that seem to be ugly overall or beautiful overall but have some
beautiful or ugly feature that redeems or compromises, respectively,
the effect. This can leave some uncertainty or ambivalence about the
impression of the whole. In such cases, and even where no particular
contrary feature can be identified, an initial impression of beauty
can progress to an impression of ugliness, while an initial impression
of ugliness or plainness can progress to an impression of beauty. The
later is what we see in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, where Mr.
Darcy's first impression of Elizabeth Bennett is that "She is
tolerable; but not handsome enough to tempt me" [1813, Penguin, 1972,
p.59]. Later we find him saying of her, "for it is many months since I
have considered her as one of the handsomest women of my acquaintance'
[p.290]. How it is that such progressions occur is a good question.
With people, it often seems that their expressions and manner are
taken to reveal such characteristics of their personality that put
what may be indifferent features in a different light, as it were.
With Darcy, he remarks that Elizabeth's "fine eyes" began to attract
him; but the reader, like Elizabeth herself, is free to judge that
Elizabeth, who was already regarded by most as good looking, actually
began to appeal to Darcy more as her personality was revealed through
conversation and other social interaction. She grew on him.

Return to Text