Sacred Space: A Theological/Aesthetic View ^†

Abstract

Both feeling and thought operate largely through a process of associations. Some of these are learned; some seem to be transcultural. In Western art it has long been assumed that certain arrangement of sounds, shapes, and colors evoke particular emotions and ideas. Rudolph Otto applies this idea also to the experience of the “Holy,” the “mysterium tremendum et fascinans.” This is a unique experience, irreducible to any other. However, there is a “law of associations” by which aesthetic and moral experiences evoke the “numinous” by a kind of analogy. Otto’s analysis raises the question whether there is in fact a specific experience of “the holy.” Is religious consciousness a sui generis experience, or is it rather an interpretation of experience? Is Otto’s notion of the numinous tied to a particular stage of religion? Post-Kantian transcendental theology proposes that “depth” or “limit” experiences are implicit in consciousness, and provide the basis for a variety of associations with the ultimate mystery of existence. The divine is anticipated as infinite transcendence that is at the same time radical immanence. The implicit intentionality of the divine can be implicit or can be formulated at different levels as feeling, image, concept, and transcendental intentionality. The “sacred” is an aesthetic construct signifying heightened awareness of the mystery. Sacred spaces are places consecrated to such awareness; they can be constructed in response to various aspects of communal awareness. All such aesthetic mediations of the sacred have an ambiguous relation to religious conversion.

In a well-known passage, Marcel Proust recounts how the taste of a madeleine dipped in a cup of tea awakened first feelings, and then memories:

I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate, a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but individual, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory—this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was myself. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I was conscious that it was connected with the taste of tea and cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savors, could not, indeed, be of the same nature as theirs. Whence did it come? What did it signify? How could I seize upon and define it? … suddenly the memory returns. The taste was that of the little crumb of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before church-time), when I went to say good day to her in her bedroom, my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of real or of lime-flower tea

(Proust 2003, p. 636).

Proust associates his sudden feeling of pleasure with a sensory stimulus, before it awakens the memory that is its apparent cause. Most of us have probably experienced something similar. I suddenly have a positive feeling when I smell a certain cologne; then I recall that it was used by my Great-Aunt Mildred. It pervaded her home. The odor brings me again into her smiling and loving presence.

This kind of seemingly natural association of feelings with experience is frequently claimed for music. In Dryden’s “Ode to St. Cecilia” (set to music by Handel), the poet asks rhetorically, “What passion cannot music raise, and quell?” and mentions examples. Similarly in Nicholas Brady’s “Hail Bright Cecilia” (set by Henry Purcell), the poet proclaims music’s

…mighty Art

To court the Ear or strike the Heart:

At once the Passions to express and move;

We hear, and straight we grieve or hate, rejoice or love:

In unseen Chains it does the Fancy bind;

At once it charms the Sense and captivates the Mind.

The so-called “doctrine of affects” (Affektenlehre) was widespread in musical theory of the Baroque era. Its idea was that musical sounds and arrangements of them can express emotions, and by doing so to produce the same feelings in listeners. Several 17th and 18th century theoreticians produced detailed descriptions of such methods. A similar idea was already present in ancient Greek, Chinese, and Indian musical theory. In a more individualized form, it emerged again in European Romanticism.

Pythagoras had long ago anticipated physicist Paul Dirac’s assertion that “God is a mathematician:“ the world is mathematical, and the human mind responds directly to what is numerically structured. Musical intervals sound harmonious and pleasing if they correspond to simple, rational numerical relationships, as in the ratios of the lengths of vibrating strings. The ratio 2:1 produces the octave; 2:3 to the fifth; 3:4 to the fourth. “The connection of numbers with music by the Pythagoreans gave numbers a [supra-mathematical] meaning and was used as a fundamental insight into the essence of reality, in the belief that [the physical order corresponds to] a metaphysical order [which] is expressed in… musical harmony.” (Chiotis 2021). Medieval thought connected this idea of Aristotelian cosmology, concluding that earthly music imperfectly reflects the “music of the spheres,” that is, the order of the cosmos, which is “mirrored” on various levels, in nature, history, and ideas. This notion was in turn connected to the Platonic idea of an “ascent” of the mind from creation to God. As Augustine said: “From the beauty of those things that are external we discover the maker, who is internal to us, and who creates beauty in a superior way in the soul, and then, in an inferior way, creates beauty in the body” (Augustine of Hippo 2008, p. 57).

Although medieval theory considered music the prime example of this reflection of divinely created order, the visual arts, including architecture, were thought of in a parallel way—indeed, as a different manifestation of the very same reflected order. Gothic cathedrals embodied the “ascent” of the mind especially by embodying the theology of light: physical light symbolizes the “light” of intellect, which is a participation of the divine Light. Pseudo-Dionysius writes:

Every divine procession of radiance from the Father, while constantly bounteously flowing to us, fills us anew as though with a unifying power, by recalling us to things above, and leading us to the unity of the Shepherding Father and to the Divine One.... For the mind can by no means be directed to the spiritual presentation and contemplation of the Celestial Hierarchies unless it use the material guidance suited to it, accounting those beauties which are seen to be images of the hidden beauty, the sweet incense a symbol of spiritual dispensations, and the earthly lights a figure of the immaterial enlightenment

(Dionysius n.d., pp. 2–3).

In European art and architecture, the Pythagorean/Platonic mathematical approach reached its apogee in the Renaissance. The proportions of buildings according to mathematical ratios make them literally music in stone. Even centuries later, Schelling and Schopenhauer both called architecture “frozen music” (erstarrte Musik or gefrorene Musik). From the 15th century onward, there was a “...new scientific approach to nature.... It was the artists, headed by Alberti, who had a notable share in consolidating and popularizing the mathematical interpretation of all matter. They found and elaborated correlations between the visible and intelligible world... Architecture was regarded by them as a mathematical science which worked in spatial units: parts of that universal space for the scientific interpretation of which they had been discovered the key in the laws of perspective. Thus they were made to believe that they could re-create the universally valid ratios and expose them pure and absolute, as close to abstract geometry as possible.” Moreover, “they were convinced that universal harmony could not reveal itself entirely unless it were realized in space through architecture conceived in the service of religion” (Wittkower 1988, p. 29). (In practice, however, what was crucial was not a building’s having the exact geometrical proportions, but rather its appearing to have them).

The theosophical movement of the early twentieth century ascribed to colors and shapes the same kinds of meanings and effects that earlier thinkers had associated with music and architecture. Theosophical doctrines formed the artistic theories of Wassily Kandinsky, father of abstract art (Kandinsky 2017). He believed that colors exercise direct influence on the human soul. Theosophical theory was also formative for other abstract artists like Melchior Lechter, František Kupka, Max Beckmann, Luigi Russolo, and Arnaldo Ginna. Empirical studies seem to bear out some of the intuitions of the artists: colors tend to produce particular psychological and biological reactions in viewers.

As with language and symbols, so with musical sounds, shapes, colors, and dimensions: there are reactions that appear to be to some extent trans-cultural. This is not surprising. Bodies and minds are similar in all humans, and we all have essentially the same genetic inheritance. But there are other reactions that are conditioned by cultural and individual differences. Thus it is possible to make some generalizations about common characteristics of certain kinds of experiences, while recognizing that there are differences that depend on physical, cultural, social, and individual circumstances and situations. Contemporary neuroscience recognizes the importance of associations in thinking, and has discerned areas in the cerebral cortex dedicated to that function (Banich and Compton 2023). While many details have yet to be worked out, descriptive neuroaesthetics recognizes that the perception of aesthetic properties also involves processes of association (Chatterjee 2014, p. 132).

What of religion, or spirituality—the encounter with God or the “Holy” or the ultimate reality? Are there specifically religious or spiritual experiences? Are there common features of such experiences? Are there specific spatio-temporal conditions that produce associations that favor such experiences?

1. Rudolph Otto and the “Law of Associations”

The theory of “associations” proposed by Rudolph Otto—echoed to some extent by Wasily Kandinsky, Maurice Denis, and other 20th century artists—suggests that such heightened consciousness is achieved through use of physical experiences and elements that are analogous to what he considers the special religious experience of “the holy.”

In his classic work The Idea of the Holy, Otto speaks of a “law of associations” between the religious and the aesthetic (Otto 1970). For Otto religion is grounded in the experience of the numinous or “the holy,” the mysterium tremendum et fascinans (the awesome and attractive mystery). This experience for Otto is sui generis: it cannot be reduced to moral or aesthetic or any other kind of experience. Nevertheless, the feelings produced by encounter with the Holy have analogies with similar feelings produced in other areas of human life by beauty, moral goodness, or truth.

Contemporary thought (including but not restricted to the “Postmodern” variety) introduces complications that raise difficulties for Otto’s theory. With increased knowledge of world religions and their histories, we are aware of several factors that Otto did not take into account:

• the plurality and relativity of experiences of the “holy,” corresponding to different conceptions of “the Ultimate” Reality. It is not always characterized as “tremendum” and “fascinans.” It may also be the ultimate “peace” (nirvana), or “Self” (atman) or Emptiness (shunya) or Beauty. Empirical studies can show some shared features in sense experiences that people consider to be spiritual or sacred (see Bermudez and Niermann 2023). But this leaves problems: the plurality of ideas of just what the “holy” is; whether people’s conception of it corresponds to reality; whether their reactions to it are appropriate; to what extent such reactions are consistent with other features of religion.
• the priority of partially incommensurable “languages,” and their formative influence on experience.
• the polyvalence and relativity of symbols (which of course does not imply an absence of any commonality among them.)
• most significantly: the theological difference between the concepts of the “holy” and the “sacred.” What is sacred in a particular context might be country, or family, or an oath of loyalty, or a flag, or some political principle. What one regards as “sacred” need not involve God or an ultimate being. “The Fatherland” can be considered sacred; family relations can be “scared;” “honor” can be sacred; an oath can be sacred.

The “holy,” as Otto uses the term, is defined in terms of the numinous. But we can see that Otto’s definition of the numinous is restricted in scope. The “holy” for Otto—the mysterium tremendum et fascinans—corresponds to the Biblical and Protestant idea of God as “Other,” “holy,” i.e., separate from the world. Moreover, Otto’s idea of “the Holy” corresponds to the Kantian notion of “the sublime”—das Erhabene—as distinct from the beautiful; as Edmund Burke points out, it is associated with terror rather than delight. But world religions and philosophies reveal also pantheistic or panentheistic ideas of “the holy” that emphasize the “immanence” of God.

Otto’s position also raises a question about aesthetic experience. Is it the emotional analogue of experience of the numinous, so that it works exclusively by such association of feeling; or can music and art in themselves be experiences of the holy? The question leads to a reexamination of Otto’s basic premise: is the human encounter with the Holy a separate experience, alongside those of the beautiful, the good, etc.—or is it rather identical with those experiences when seen in their deepest reality, as their transcendental ground?

2. Spiritual Experience as “Depth” Experience

While there is abundant anecdotal evidence of a certain validity to Otto’s idea of association of religious feelings, experimental work on the aesthetics of religion is comparatively new. It is well accepted that the brain/mind works in part by networks of associations. The associations between different kinds of experience (for example, color and tones) are not immediately given with the data. They are the product of our creative imagination (Planck 2022, p. 7). That such associations are common and frequently transcultural is due to both the nature of our common human receptive organs and brains, and the similarities in our experiences. Concrete de facto associations can be discerned empirically by surveys of populations. Some associations may be more or less universal; others are culturally conditioned. Empirical studies have shown associations of feelings between what people regard as “sacred” and certain types of spaces (see Bermudez and Niermann 2023).

Whether such feelings and associations correspond to an encounter with (or relation to) an extra-mental reality, is a question that cannot be decided on the basis of sense knowledge or its extension in empirical science. People may commonly associate certain physical conditions, or places, or times, with religious ideas and emotions. (It should be emphasized that these may be positive or negative: gods or devils, mystical prayer or demonic possession, or psychological derangement, or limited intelligence). But whether encounter with a supernatural reality takes place there is beyond empirical verification or falsification (although as an explanation of experience, it might be rendered suspect, to the extent that one accepts the principle of economy—Ockham’s razor). On the other hand, while they admit that “it is questionable whether brain states and processes can be correlated with personal descriptions of purported experiences of ultimacy at the present time, or ever,” Wesley Wildman and Leslie Brothers propose that the experience of the ultimate leaves “causal traces of a particular kind,” so that the genuineness of such experiences can be distinguished (Wildman and Brothers 2002, pp. 349, 353). However, this leaves undetermined what the cause of such traces is.

Empirical data of course are restricted to the physical realm. But their meaning involves interpretation. What people consider to be “sacred” is a matter of constitutive meaning. If people regard something as sacred, that makes it sacred—for them. But that does not mean that it corresponds to a genuine “Numen,” nor imply that it is good. For example, some religions have found sacredness in human sacrifice, including infanticide. Theologically we must distinguish between the sacred—a human construct corresponding to certain religious ideas and feelings—and the ontologically good or “holy.”

What is considered “sacred” in a particular society need not coincide with what it considers “holy” in either a moral or an ontological sense. It is true that we can (in principle) experimentally validate that certain material conditions produce feelings that some people associate with a transcendental reality. But these remain feelings. Do they correspond with the presence or the apprehension of something beyond themselves? In other words, we can experimentally show that certain material conditions are conducive to (or even produce) religious feeling. But is that good, or bad, or ambiguous, or perhaps irrelevant to our relation to the transcendent? Exalted feeling can proceed from natural causes, or even from what mythic consciousness regards as demonic, as well as from the holy. Like beauty, the sacred need not imply moral goodness. It can even be in the service of what is morally evil. We can use empirical investigation to find what people think of as sacred, and use this data to create conditions that bring about such a psychological state. But this remains tied to subjective feelings; and it is plural.

Thus the concept of the sacred calls for critical reflection on the ethical, aesthetic, and ontological levels. We can produce conditions favorable to religious “feeling.” But is religion always good? We might see a parallel in another attitude that is sometimes regarded as sacred: patriotism. The Nazis, Mussolini’s fascists, Russian and Chinese communists, all used patriotism and patriotic art very effectively to manipulate feelings and actions. The same can be true of religion (indeed, systems like Marxism can function as secular religions).

Without denying some validity to Otto’s notion of associations of feelings, operating on many different levels, it is possible to regard the experience of the absolutely Transcendent (as distinguished from the contents of explicit “religions”) not simply as a parallel experience, but more as a kind of meta-experience (in a way parallel to the experience of being in metaphysics). Otto’s theory is based on the perception of a numinous “object” in religious experience; this in turn seems to presuppose an explicitly religious consciousness. I suggest that we never experience “the Holy” in itself as an object of categorical experience. Rather, we consider things or events or places to be holy because of their mediation of another dimension, one that is non-objective and transcends categorical experience, while being present only in particular categorical experiences.

My proposal is based on the conviction that there is also an underlying “implicit” transcendental dimension of spiritual (or “metaphysical”) experience. Its “object”—or better, its implicitly prehended goal—is the mysterium tremendum et fascinans, that may be called “the numinous” in a religious context. This goal is ontologically identical with the ultimate foundation and “end” of aesthetic or moral or intellectual experience (as in the metaphysical theory of the “transcendentals”); it is never experienced simply in itself as a categorical object, but is always “co-experienced” as the dimension of mystery implicit in the highest forms of human knowing and loving; and it grounds the analogies that are in fact found in the human reaction to the beautiful, the good, the true, and the holy: awe, wonder, desire; on the other hand, peace, fulfillment; transcendence: at once detachment and engagement at the personal level. This proposal does not eliminate analogies or associations of either feelings or experiences. But the associations are between different mediations of the holy, not between an experience of the Holy itself and that of other non-holy realities. Some of these associated realities and experiences are implicitly “holy;” some are explicit. Some are religious; some are “profane.” But these categories are relative.

To name this kind of experience we might use the analogy of “limit” or of “depth.” It goes beyond the immediate appearances of things, the “surface.” Although always present, it is normally hidden “underneath” our normal sensations of things and our superficial reactions to them. like what is “deep,” it is hard to accomplish: we must dig for it, or dive into the depths.

In consequence, we can say that the explicitly religious can arise out of or focus on any of the implicit dimensions of encounter with ultimacy, what I have called “spiritual” experience. Spiritual experience is not defined a priori as a particular kind of experience: there are different genres of spiritual experiences. They can be centered around truth, beauty, goodness, unity, love… or any other aspect of transcendence. On the intellectual level, spiritual activity centers on seeking the real, rather than illusion; on the moral level, it centers on action motivated by universal good, rather than by egotism or bias; on the personal level, it centers on integrity, orientation to the whole (God and creation); on the aesthetic level, it is an orientation to the beautiful, rather than what is simply pleasant. Spiritual experience can also be centered around the absence of these, by way of contrast or need.

What Otto describes is not a direct experience of God, but is rather consciousness of limit conditions of the world—including the self—that we take to “point” to something ultimate beyond it. They are mysterious or awe-inspiring, and imply a source of awe; but they are not a direct categorical experience of that source. The numinous is always mediated by our tendency toward it: God is “anticipated.” The experience of the divine is always, as Hegel put it, a “mediated immediacy.”

This is why spiritual experience—for example, the experience of deep beauty—is often also one of yearning and a kind of disappointment, a lack rather than a completion. The poet Baudelaire writes: “When an exquisite poem brings tears to our eyes, those tears do not show an excess of joy; rather, they are the sign of a disturbed melancholy, a demand of the nerves of a nature exiled in the imperfect world, that would like to grasp a revealed paradise immediately, on this earth” (Baudelaire 1869).

Gerardus van der Leeuw writes of such sad longing as “the indescribable melancholy which all music leaves in the soul at the hearing of holy sounds, that God has already gone past” (Van der Leeuw 2006).

That our relation to the transcendent is always mediated by finite reality has an important consequence: these finite mediations of the holy can in principle be discerned; they will have certain characteristics, although perhaps very diverse; their presence can be investigated empirically and phenomenologically. But it is important to note that what can be discerned by introspection or by empirical study is feelings associated with the transcendent; never the transcendent itself, nor our relation to it.

This is not to say that there can be no way to the affirmation of the transcendent through the sensible world and the science that deals with it. Atomic physicist Max Planck insists that natural science always begins with sense knowledge and the measurements derived from it. But from there, the scientist may use inductive research “to seek to approach God and God’s ordering of the world as its highest, always unreachable goal” (Planck 1948, p. 148). God may be regarded as the source of the world’s order, or even as that order itself. Such an approach would effectively be a reasoning to God from order or from causality (as in the “cosmological proofs”). But causality (or sufficient reason) is itself a philosophical principle presupposed by empirical science, not demonstrated by it.

3. The Holy, the Sacred, and the Profane

The notion of God as ontologically transcendent—i.e., the pre-apprehended “beyond” of all finite beings—includes the affirmation of God as radically “immanent” to the world. This immanence/transcendence demythologizes the naïve objective notion of sacred space and time, making the sacred a function of “constitutive” meaning: significance that we create.

In mythic consciousness, the gods (and demons) are physically limited and located: either in nature (of which they are the personification and energy) or in places of powerful and power-filled events (principally forests, caverns, rocks, and mountains). Sacred space is where power is present and effective (Van der Leeuw 2014). Or it may be a position defined by orientation: pointing toward the locus of power (Mecca; the East, where the sun rises, where Christ will appear at the last day). In the first case, the location may be thought of as the actual place of dwelling or appearance of the divinity, and therefore the locus of encounter, because the deity is locally “there.”

In contrast, in ontological consciousness God is transcendent, and therefore both “everywhere” and “nowhere.” But God can also be thought of as “active” in history and in (and through) human consciousness.

In post-mythic consciousness, sacred space could be the place in which there is heightened consciousness of God’s omnipresence because of association of feelings or symbols that are remnants of mythic thinking. Or it might be the place in which there is heightened consciousness because of encounter with God, or attempt at such encounter. These two may be mixed; thus van der Leeuw associates Protestant church architecture with secularization, and complains that in Calvinist churches “people are generally quite contented with good acoustics and comfortable pews, wanting at most a bit more atmosphere.” Nevertheless, he writes: “Along with the name ‘house of God,’ the churches of the Reformation, even though they often became almost completely houses of prayer and even places of religious assembly, preserved much of the original power of the house of holiness” (Van der Leeuw 2006).

In critical thinking we can distinguish between the “holy” and the “sacred.” The “holy” is the religious name for the mystery itself. (As we have seen, it may have other names in different patterns of experience: the transcendent, the good, the true, etc.) The “sacred” is what is “consecrated,” at least implicitly, to being a mediation of the holy in some aspect: i.e., when it is made a symbol of a heightened consciousness of the transcendent. The symbol mediates a heightened “presence” to and of that reality.

On this basis, we may distinguish between religious aesthetics, some of which can be derived from and validated by empirical study, and theological aesthetics (Viladesau 2012). The latter term is sometimes used broadly. But insofar as a study is strictly theological, it depends on transcendental reasoning, as well as on concrete philosophical and religious notions that are neither empirically testable nor universal. For example, the very idea of “God” as a transcendent personal being active in history is typical of the Zoroastrian-Judeo-Christian-Muslim traditions, and is found in some schools of Hinduism. But it is less compatible with most Buddhist, Daoist, and Confucian thought. Most human religion was prehistoric, usually animistic, and pre-ontological in nature. The assertions of religious aesthetics could be true even if one denied the existence of God, or if they promoted a form of religion that is pre-rational, or ideological, or superstitious, or unethical. Critical theological reasoning is needed as a corrective to the empirical study of religion.

4. The Sacred as an Aesthetic Notion

These considerations lead to the conclusion that an ontological conception of God corresponds to an aesthetic notion of the sacred. The constitution of sacred space/time/action involves an appropriate and meaningful disposition of sensible elements.

In saying that consciousness of the sacred is an “aesthetic” matter, I mean two things: first, that this consciousness, while implicit and unthematic, is mediated by the sensible; second, that the divine or transcendent—i.e., the ultimate Truth and Goodness—is perceived in its encounter with us, as enticing, beautiful, desirable, enjoyable, fascinating: that is, as the implied or pre-apprehended source of those qualities. And also as sublime, mysterious, awesome, and perhaps even terrifying. Space and time are “sacred” when these categorical dimensions of existence realities are dedicated to heightening or deepening such consciousness of the divine; when they serve to bring it about, evoke it, remember it, and sustain it.

Such deepening involves “art” in the widest sense: activity aimed at heightening experience. Obviously, not all art seeks depth or spiritual experience or “beauty” or sublimity. Art can for example be a means of communication, bearing very diverse messages. It can be entertainment or distraction. And there are clearly multiple and diverse “associations” (in Otto’s sense) with the feelings connected with spirituality. Art that represents and/or produces feelings of peace, contentment, joy, unity, harmony—or, on the other hand, of striving, power, majesty, awe—may call to mind similar feelings that occur in non-artistic religious states of mind. There are also different levels of beauty: from mere prettiness or sensual enjoyment to the deepest and most mysterious attraction, in which there may be experienced a painful tension in the call to self-transcendence. Beauty at its profoundest may call for purification, discipline, and even renunciation: as Plato says, ‘χαλεπὰ τὰ καλά’ (“what is beautiful is difficult”). The kinds and levels in art can be “spiritual” to different degrees insofar as they reveal the transcendental orientation of mind.

A transcendental ontology allows us to distinguish the sacred from the profane on an epistemological basis. Teilhard de Chardin could proclaim the sacredness of the entire cosmos—for those who know how to see: “Everything is sacred for those who discern…” (Teilhard de Chardin 1972).

The recognition of the divine creative and inviting presence constitutes a different dimension of presence. In light of the omnipresent transcendence of God, “sacredness” can be recognized as a category that designates a constitutive level of meaning, not a mere objective statement of fact. The sacred is what raises the mind and heart to God (or whatever may be the “holy” for a particular community) in a purposeful and explicit way. That is, the sacred is what makes explicit the connection of things and of subjects to God that is implicit in their very being, and thus constitutes a new level of presence as presence-to or presence-for.

On this basis that we may distinguish the sacred from the profane, and may speak of sacred space and time. When these categorical dimensions of existence realities are “dedicated” to heightening or deepening our consciousness of the transcendent; when they serve to bring it about, evoke it, remember it, and sustain it; then and there we may speak of “sacred” places, things, events, actions, and times.

This leads to a question: if space-time is sacred by use, or by consecration, are there spaces or times that are more appropriate for this use? By what criteria?

As an aesthetic dimension of meaning, “sacred space” can be construed in several different but analogous ways. The post-Einstein notion of physical space suggests a possible analogy for sacred space-time as a “concentration of energy” achieved by the heightening of individual and communal consciousness of the sacred by aesthetic means.

How does one achieve this heightening of consciousness? We may say that what makes space (or time, or objects, or activities) “sacred” is a state of consciousness, or what phenomenology calls “intentionality.” This results in places, times, objects having a sacred function. The practical problem becomes: how does one produce or achieve that attitude artfully? How does that art relate specifically to spaces?

We should first note that a place of heightened consciousness may be natural: the same places that the ancients frequently found sacred—forests, mountains, the seas, the depths of the earth. These seem to produce feelings analogous to the sacred.

The heightening of consciousness may take place by meditation aimed at “mindfulness.”

It may also be achieved by more directly aesthetic means. But which?

In the Pythagorean/Platonic mentality, the emphasis was on harmony. Sacred space is harmonic space; the holy is the proportionate, in tune with universe and thus with its creator.

In modern thinking, often it is not harmony or beauty that is crucial in raising consciousness, but rather sublimity: what is terrifying, uncanny—rather than what we are “at home” with.

I believe that there is no single method. There are multiple kinds of experience that can raise the mind and feeling to the mystery of being: wherever finite existence raises ultimate question of being and meaning. And there are many levels of encountering that question.

5. The Ontological Meaning of Space

My considerations have concentrated on the notion of the “sacred,” using the example of sacred spaces. At this point one might further ask: what is “space”? I have been considering space in the context of place: location, surroundings, physical environment. But the term “space” is suggestive: it puts us in the context of a larger and most basic physical reality.

What is space physically? In ancient and classical physics, space is a category of the relation of bodies. For Newton, space in the absolute sense is the divine sensorium, by which God moves things and acts in world. For Kant, space is—along with time—an a priori of human sensibility. For Einstein, in contrast with classical physics, space-time is not the product of the relation of bodies, but vice-versa: physical bodies are fluctuations within an all-encompassing “field” of space-time. Local space is a particular field within the universal field—or the intersection of particular fields within the encompassing field.

Theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg applies this idea to spirit as well. Physical bodies and motions are concretions, concentrations, of a physical field of energy. Analogously, spiritual states can be thought of as concentrations of a more general “field” of grace, of the omnipresence of God, of “Spirit” in the absolute sense. What makes that concentration—what constitutes it—is heightened presence, heightened consciousness on a dialogical level (that is, not merely self-consciousness, but the sharing of consciousness with others in a mutual outgoing movement: love). Such a concentration of consciousness can happen in a variety of ways. Among them is art.

“Concentration of spiritual energy” may sound like a “new-age” concept. But it is simply another analogy for “grace.” Grace is not simply an entitative, objective quality, but a way of being: the way of being of God, self-giving love: beauty, joy, act. For us finite creatures, this means ecstatic being: existing “outside” oneself—transcendence beyond the individual self toward the transcendentals: truth, beauty, goodness, unity (communion). At the same time, transcendence for us always means the breaking away from a prior lack of transcendence. In our evolutionary world, transcendence is a breakthrough away from something anterior, simpler, and “lower.”

For Pannenberg, spiritual energy is not something absolutely different from material energy, existing alongside it, so to speak: human spirit is matter at a certain degree of organization and self-transcendence. It is matter with a degree of “form,” intelligibility, purpose and meaning. The “field” of spiritual energy is the ultimate intelligibility, goodness, beauty, creativity in the universe; it is “localized” in accord with creaturely achievements in a spiritual direction. Spiritual energy is therefore materially situated and mediated: in culture, religion, science, art. These are the “concentrations” in which the “field” of God’s love—absolute spirit—is “incarnated” or made real in finite form. “Sacred” space-time is the event where these concentrations become most explicitly self-conscious.

The physical field of energy and the analogous spiritual field are not two fields, but two “levels” of the one existential field. Grace builds on nature; consciousness builds on physical and bodily factors, beginning with neural activity, then sensation, memory, learning, language, symbolism, meaning, etc.

6. Sacred Space as Sacramental

This view implies an approach that allows for a “sacramental” idea of sacred space. At the same time it provides broad criteria for its aesthetic components. Space is not simply the “place” that a sign or message enters into: space-time is itself potentially “sacramental”—in its use, by the “density” of its signification (concentration of the field of energy, physical or spiritual), and therefore in connection with appropriate subjects. Sacramenta significando efficiunt gratiam (“the sacraments produce grace by signifying”).

This view is broad: it allows for the possibility of very different approaches to “the sacred,” while noting analogies between them. At the same time, it may be suggestive for post-modern artistic attempts at creating sacred spaces and times as places of “raising” the mind and heart to God. Sacredness of space can be constructed around aesthetic heightening of any aspect of experience of sacred. What makes space-time sacred is its actual use, or its suitability for use, in heightening consciousness. Some elements of this heightening may be empirically verified in psychic and bodily states. Crucially important is the recognition that space-time is created by relationality. (As Sarah Robinson points out, this is particularly true of the space-time of the arts, which build on affects that originate in the relation of child to mother). Hence sacred space also must be conceived in relation to sacred time, and both in relation to subjects performing sacred acts.

In this view, there is a certain relativity to the notion of sacredness. What “heightens” consciousness can vary among persons and cultures and eras. (Is the sea beautiful, or terrifying—the place of God, or of demons?) But there are also commonalities, both within cultures and trans-culturally. “Sacred” experiences are or point to “depth” experiences. Does this mean that the banal and the merely superficial are to be excluded? Or is it possible that there is so much diversity in cultures and in persons that these very terms become relative? Anyone who visits a store that sells religious art will immediately see that much—if not most—of what it on view is on a very low aesthetic level. On the other hand, the ordinary believer may have little or no appreciation for the great classics of religious art. “Depth” in one area of human existence does not always imply profundity in other aspects.

“Depth” experiences can be positive or negative: experiences of beauty, love, and fullness; or experiences of death and failure. Suffering can be sacred because it calls out for reversal, and is thus a cry toward saving love. And, as Solzhenitsyn has pointed out, suffering can be purifying (when it does not destroy).

My primary contention has been that sacredness is matter of raising spiritual consciousness. This may be done in a number of overlapping ways: by the elimination of distraction; creation of silence and repose; by direct address to God or the Holy: prayer; by representation of God or the Holy in word, image, or act; by non-representation: silence, absence; by functionality: by suitability for conveying sacred words and acts; by beauty; by sublimity; by the association of feelings; by symbolism; by contrast (the portrayal of evil and lack).

There are different forms and dimensions of sacred. Sacred speech and art may point to the immanence of God or may point to divine transcendence. Ontologically, these are the same. The difference lies in what aspect one attends to. “Analogy” is a mode of thought based on similarity in difference, and one may emphasize either the similarity or the difference; or one may engage in the silence of apophaticism. The aesthetic mediations, materials, and styles that one selects will largely depend on what situation one is addressing. Should one concentrate on secularization, and stress finding God in the ordinary and everyday, or should one strive to creating a sense of separateness and mystery? Quaker meeting halls, or Gothic cathedrals? Or something incorporating both? (Early Christians adopted for their worship the kind of building used as a secular meeting place; but then separated the altar with curtains and saw the eucharist in terms of mystery). In our day there is the additional challenge of serving diverse and pluralistic communities. Can one find a spiritual aesthetics that will address many different sorts and levels of spirit? Or must there be a plurality to serve different situations and tastes? It seems to me that there are permanent tensions in spiritual aesthetics that are not to be resolved, especially not by legislation. We must leave room for taste and for ambiguity.

For Christians, holiness is achieved in the love of neighbor, which is inseparable from the love of God. Hence “sacred” religious space will be a locus of love, on the levels of shared consciousness (including awareness of evil) and communion (including commitment to action). External rituals and forms are “sacred” insofar as they serve or symbolize these aims.

7. The Creation of Sacred Spaces

Finally, I return to the difficulties inherent in the attempt to create sacred space and time. In spirituality, there is a danger of mistaking the feelings associated with heightened presence for the presence itself. One may have exalted feelings produced by a church building, the smell of wax and incense, the peace and awesomeness of the surroundings, and yet be quite unconverted. It is notorious that religious art—the art that many people associate with worship or prayer—is frequently of very poor aesthetic quality: “l’art de Saint Sulpice.” (A character in Zola says, “tout cet art religieux est tombé à la banalité la plus écoeurante.”) (Zola 1898)). Similarly, one may be genuinely religiously converted, but not spiritually converted; one can be a religious fanatic. Aesthetic taste does not imply spiritual conversion; religious conversion does not imply intellectual or moral conversion, or good taste—or vice-versa. Religious, intellectual, aesthetic, and moral conversion call out for each other; but they can exist separately and to different degrees. Yet any of these can serve as a medium for transcendence, to some degree.

Hence even poor art can for some people mediate sacred experience. But there is a danger: a restriction of our human possibilities.

Another danger is found in the effort to be contemporary. This can result in art that is too localized: tied to particular time and place, unable to withstand passage of time. Yet another danger is found in art that draws attention to itself, rather than to the depth experience, or relation, that it is intended to mediate. This is perhaps a special temptation for “post-modern” art that exploits a sense of irony. Irony draws attention to the speaker or artist, for he or she is pointing out something about his or her communication.

From a phenomenological point of view, “authenticity” is not necessary to identify “ultimacy experiences.” One can be in love with the aesthetics of religion, without love of God or neighbor. In Sologub’s novel The Little Demon, one character asks another, “’If you’re a pagan, then why do you go to church?’ Lyudmila stopped laughing, grew pensive. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘one has to pray. You have to pray, to weep, to burn a candle, and do something for the dead. And I love it all, the candles, the image-lamps, the incense, the vestments, the singing—if the singers are good—the icons, with their trimmings and ribbons. Yes, all that is beautiful’” (Sologub 2022).

Physical spaces can provide contexts that permit and evoke religious, intellectual, and moral conversion, and at their best, support their integration. How they can do so is for us to discover in our particular circumstances.

8. Concluding Summary

One can show that certain sensible stimuli (natural phenomena or human constructs) are connected to certain religious attitudes, affects, and ideas. But the connection is between and among responses to categorical experiences. There seems by definition to be no way of testing whether they connect or correspond to any transcendental or even extra-mental reality, even if they point to one (note that not all religious interpretations do so. There are non-theistic religions, and there are idealist religious interpretations of experience, particularly in Hinduism and Buddhism).

The affirmation of a real ontological source of those feelings and ideas proposes a transcendental philosophical framework that validates the possibility for space-time to mediate the experience of the divine. A transcendental framework may be implied by the dynamism of wonder and questioning that is the driving force of inquiry. But by its nature it is not susceptible to empirical verification or even examination. Those are on a categorical level. Moreover, a transcendental or ontological notion of God differs from the mythic and common-sense religious notions. Religious experiences—including responses to theological doctrines—can be correlated to particular categorical conditions. Note: the responses to the doctrines: not the content of the doctrines. Insofar as it is genuinely theological, i.e., about the transcendent God, that content is beyond empirical investigation. Of course, theological assertions are also at least implicitly anthropological. On that level, their truth or falsehood may be indirectly implied. But it is not directly verifiable or falsifiable empirically, since it rests on transcendental ontological suppositions. In other words, one can empirically examine religion. But religion can be good or bad, intellectually responsible or stupid, enlightening or obfuscating, ethical or degrading, liberating or manipulative.

One can to some extent measure people’s feelings about what kinds of objects or spaces evoke the “sacred” for them. Measurement of brain activity can confirm that associations are taking place. But feeling does not guarantee correspondence with a transcendent reality or with “the holy.” (The latter is itself an ambiguous idea that can be defined in different ways). Whether a space or other aesthetic means connects a person with God (or the “Numen”) cannot be discerned empirically—nor even by introspection. Theologically, God is omnipresent. We can become conscious of God’s presence in different ways. How? That question is one of art; and art depends on purpose and context. It can be for learning, or for feeling, or for action. Sacred space can in theory promote any of these, or can simply be a place for one’s religious ritual, good or bad.