Each place has a voice. No matter where we find ourselves, the search for the sacred has belonged to human culture since the beginning of time. Along with this search, the building of sacred places has been an essential part of the pursuit of religion. The rising of these physical idols, these dwellings of the divine, are what the ancient Greeks used to call ‘temenos’, meaning a piece of land dedicated to a god or sanctuary. Within this holy precinct, the land is allowed to sing, voicing its quiet hymns to reclaim the air itself. This momentum, defined by space rather than time, is what allow humans to enter into contact with a reality greater than themselves. In fact, it should not be regarded as a breach in the veil of reality but rather as a transversal distention that coincides with the land itself, that follows its gentle swellings and its grieved recesses. In the Western world, we have reached an age where religion, according to some, has been relocated. In this sense, ‘religion’ has not been lost: it has just changed its form to reach a state in which we do not recognise it as such anymore. The human search for sacredness, however, makes it impossible to abandon the need to transcend one’s self and rip open the burning hole at the heart of the ego.
Transcendence is a concept which has been recently developed by the Austrian philosopher Alfred Schutz. According to his phenomenological view, transcendence can be conceptualised as a multi-levelled mode of human experience, which reaches into a reality greater than its own. In this sense, transcendence should be envisioned as a span which is shifting from a greater to a smaller level in the modern world. Small transcendences, according to Schutz, are thus similar to the experience of forgetting a book in another room: this transcends us because we cannot reach it immediately, but it is within potential reach and the boundary is easily crossable. Intermediate transcendences, on the other hand, relate to other human beings whose experience we cannot know as our own, but whose understanding we can share through communication and sympathy. In our everyday experience, we constantly tread the path of otherness, by crossing the bridge to the other person’s experience. At last, great transcendences are defined as experiences which go beyond the everyday, such as art, myth or religion itself. These lead us to different states of consciousness beyond our usual, engaging us with realities bigger than those of the inner self. In the mundane reality of our modern Western world, the primacy of the self has taken root. We no longer question our experience of reality nor the legitimacy of its pre-eminence, but we take this for granted. The triumph of the ego has killed some gods, the weakest and most human-like. Nonetheless, some others have learned to survive in a hostile world: nature, amongst other things perhaps, has collected their weight and significance to repropose them in a new light. The secular society that is being fostered today often pours its religiosity into various things: some hear the calling of art, others answer the thrills of nature. Everyone, however, is searching for the same thing: that is, for something that reaches beyond us, that gives meaning to the whole, the sacred thread that pulls reality together into sense. The antipode of transcendence is immanence, which the history of humankind has left behind in a presumed march towards progress. With the rising of modernity, guided in particular by the Judeo-Christian notion of linear time, cultures have abandoned the primitive beliefs of magical immanence where the cosmos is interpreted as a fusional relationship between nature and its components, the divine is depicted through anthropomorphic and monistic features, and the monolith of society is unravelled as a myth. This recent ‘techno-spiritual monoculture of our species’, as defined by Viveiros de Castro et Danowski, has also neglected the notion of space, creating a multitude of ecological concerns as a consequence of such conception. Space has in fact been regarded as a pagan, hence unsound, dimension in se, incapsulated by Hegel’s claim that ‘’The truth of space is time’’. In this sense, time as a linear (not circular) conception has trumped all power that was given to space in the past, thus bringing forth the values of celerity, productivity, praxis. Time as a circular notion, brought forth by Buddhist or Taoist religions for example, has also been problematic and excluded from the metaphysics of modernity as this collapses time and eternity, thus violating the superiority of a god that exists in eternity, not in time. As a consequence, the finitude of these notions is in such a great opposition to eternity, that transcendence is not destined to the world we inhabit. Also the notion of spatiality, which is connected to different techno-spiritual values, has been severed in its entirety and put to rest by a general secularisation of social living. This opposition of chronos and topos, kairos and chora, time and necessity, need not become a conflict: the urgency of space, however, must remind us of our place, of the here and now that we stand upon regardless of the time frames we envision. Space, in its material certainty and its visible body, grants us the touch of truth. Perhaps this may be why some of the most secular societies of the modern world have rendered the mountain their religion. May it be a church or a forest, we must learn to root our religion in the spaces we inhabit, where the divine is allowed to survive and flourish as the wild stalks that fight their way through the cracks in the cement of unquestioned existence. Georg W. F. Hegel, 1972. Phänomenologie des Geistes. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1972. Viveiros de Castro, E. and Danowski, D., 2020. The Past is Yet to Come. e-flux journal, 114. Thurfjell, D., Rubow, C., Remmel, A. and Ohlsson, H., 2019. The Relocation of Transcendence. Nature and Culture, 14(2), pp.190-214.
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