The Death of the Sacred

Vladimir Nemet

The Sacred That Cannot Be Named

Something strange has happened to modern man: he can speak about almost everything – except the sacred.

He can speak about identity, trauma, sexuality, power, desire, ideology, narcissism, relationships and the unconscious. He can deconstruct religion, morality, tradition, authority and metaphysics. But the moment he says that something might actually be sacred, he enters dangerous territory.

The sacred must immediately be explained.

It must be reduced to something else: a psychological projection, a cultural construction, an ideological instrument, an expression of power, an unresolved childhood need, a defense mechanism.

The possibility that something might actually be sacred is rarely allowed to remain standing on its own.

Perhaps this is one of the great unspoken taboos of modern thought.

The Sacred Became Unthinkable

Modernity did not merely separate itself from religion. It gradually transformed the very structure within which the sacred could be experienced.

The modern subject became autonomous. He no longer needed a transcendent authority to tell him what was true, good or meaningful. He became the measure of his own world.

Postmodernism radicalized this movement. It taught us to distrust grand narratives, universal truths, stable identities and claims to transcendence. Everything could be deconstructed.

Nothing was simply sacred anymore. There was always something behind it.

Power behind morality.
Psychology behind religion.
Desire behind love.
Ideology behind truth.
Trauma behind identity.

The sacred became suspicious precisely because it seemed to make a claim that modern thought found increasingly difficult to tolerate:

Something exists that is greater than me.

Psychoanalysis and the Suspicion of the Sacred

Psychoanalysis is particularly interesting in this respect.

Its great achievement was to show that human beings are often not transparent to themselves. What appears noble may conceal aggression. What appears religious may conceal dependency. What appears altruistic may conceal narcissism.

This suspicion was intellectually liberating, but suspicion can eventually become a prison.

If every experience of transcendence must be interpreted as a disguised psychological need, then the interpretation has already decided in advance that transcendence cannot be real.

The sacred is no longer something to encounter.

It becomes something to explain away.

Even idealization can suffer the same fate. If I experience another person as extraordinary, I may be told that I am projecting an ideal parental imago onto that person. If I experience a teacher, artist, philosopher or spiritual figure as greater than myself, the experience can be reduced to a developmental need.

But what if the need itself tells us something fundamental about human beings?

What if the human capacity to idealize is not merely a defect to be overcome?

Kohut and the Need for Something Greater

This is where Heinz Kohut becomes unexpectedly important.

Kohut took seriously the human need to idealize. His concept of the idealizing selfobject recognizes that the human being needs relationships with figures experienced as strong, admirable, calming or greater than the self.

The mature person does not necessarily eliminate this need. Rather, it becomes transformed and integrated.

Kohut therefore comes remarkably close to something that contemporary psychoanalysis often finds difficult to say openly:

Human beings need something to admire.

And perhaps they need something even more than admiration.

They need something that can be experienced as greater than themselves.

This does not necessarily mean returning to religion. It may be a person, an idea, a work of art, a moral ideal, a tradition, nature, or an experience of transcendence.

The important point is not what the sacred object is.

The important point is that the self is not the highest thing in its own universe.

The Narcissistic Consequence

Here we encounter one of the deepest problems of contemporary culture.

If nothing is greater than me, then ultimately everything must become part of me.

The other becomes my projection.
Art becomes my expression.
Tradition becomes my choice.
Love becomes my desire.
Truth becomes my perspective.
Identity becomes my construction.

The world becomes an extension of the self.

This is not merely narcissism in the clinical sense. It is a cultural condition.

The modern subject has been given extraordinary freedom, but freedom without transcendence can produce an unexpected burden: I become responsible for creating the entire meaning of my existence.

There is nowhere higher to look.

And yet the longing does not disappear.

The human being still wants to admire. Still wants to believe. Still wants to encounter greatness. Still wants to love something that cannot be reduced to possession.

The sacred may have disappeared from our vocabulary without disappearing from our psyche.

The Impossible Choice

This creates a strange dilemma.

The modern human being seems to have only two possibilities:

Either give up the sacred and accept that nothing is inherently greater, higher or more worthy of reverence.

Or return to the premodern sacred with its metaphysical certainties, religious doctrines and traditional authorities.

But this is a false choice.

Why should the return of the sacred necessarily mean the return of the premodern world? Why should we have to choose between dogma and disenchantment? Why should we have to choose between believing everything and believing nothing?

Perhaps there is another possibility.

The Metamodern Return

This is where metamodernism becomes philosophically important.

Metamodernism does not simply want to reverse postmodernism. It does not say that we should forget everything postmodernism taught us and return to an innocent belief in absolute truths.

It asks something more difficult:

Can we recover transcendence after deconstruction?

Can we experience something as sacred without pretending that we have never encountered doubt?

Can we idealize without becoming naïve?

Can we believe without becoming dogmatic?

Can we recognize something as greater than ourselves without surrendering our freedom?

This may be the deeper meaning of the metamodern return of the sacred.

It is not a return to the old sacred.

It is an attempt to make the sacred thinkable again.

The Return of Reverence

Perhaps what contemporary culture needs is not more information, more interpretation or more deconstruction.

Perhaps it needs the rediscovery of reverence.

Reverence is different from obedience. It does not require dogma. To revere something is simply to recognize that it is not equivalent to everything else.

A work of art can be sacred without being religious.

A person can be sacred without being divine.

Love can be sacred without becoming metaphysics.

A relationship can be sacred because the Other cannot be reduced to my needs.

And perhaps this is why the sacred is so difficult for contemporary thought. The sacred places a limit on the sovereignty of the self.

It says:

You are not everything.

There is something outside you.

Something greater.

Something you cannot possess merely by understanding it.

The Death of the Sacred

Perhaps, then, the death of the sacred was never simply the death of religion. It was the death of the possibility that anything could stand above the self without immediately becoming an object of suspicion.

Modernity liberated the individual from imposed transcendence.

Postmodernism liberated him from the illusions surrounding transcendence.

But both left an unresolved question:

What happens to the human longing for something greater?

Perhaps this is why the sacred returns. Not because humanity has suddenly become religious again. But because the need for transcendence cannot simply be deconstructed away.

The sacred may have been excluded from philosophy, psychoanalysis and much of contemporary culture. But the longing for it remains.

And perhaps this is the real task of metamodernism:

not to restore the old sacred, but to discover whether the sacred can return without bringing the old world back with it.

The death of the sacred may therefore not be the end of the story. It may be the beginning of a more difficult question:

Can we once again encounter something greater than ourselves without losing ourselves?

Perhaps that is the question modernity never learned to ask.

And perhaps it is the question metamodernism has been waiting for.

Metamodern Psychoanalysis

Perhaps this is where metamodern psychoanalysis acquires its deepest purpose.

Its task is not to make the patient religious, but to awaken the religious feeling — the fundamental human capacity to experience something as sacred, something greater than the self.

The analyst does not impose a doctrine or restore the old metaphysical order. Instead, he creates a relationship in which the patient can once again experience admiration, reverence, wonder and transcendence without having to reduce them to psychological projections.

The goal is therefore not to restore religion, but to restore the capacity for the sacred.

The patient must ultimately be able to say:

“I am my own person.”

and at the same time:

“There is something greater than me.”

Perhaps this is the deepest promise of metamodern psychoanalysis: to awaken the religious feeling without returning to the old religion.