Brothers and sisters and ladies and gentlemen, I would like to start with some more technical suggestions. The first is about the discussion. I would suggest that you perhaps, during the lecture, take some notes and collect some poems for the discussion. And I would like to start the discussion tonight with collecting all those poems. And then it probably will come out that some points belong together. And so we have some groups of questions and problems. And then we can have a kind of order in our discussion, which, of course, doesn't mean that all the questions can be answered at all. And the second suggestion is, this morning the lecturer

[01:02]

unfortunately, will be rather long. So I could give you a... I could point to a certain chapter or section where we could have, if you want, just five minutes of... but not really long, I would suggest, just a few minutes, if you want. So, sacrality, sacredness. What does sacred and sacred mean? Now, as always, the best thing to do is to begin very close to everyday experience with a look at the phenomenon itself. So, at what you can see. I remember the year 1948 end of May, Frankfurt, in Germany.

[02:06]

The city was still in ruins, but in the midst, the St. Paul's Church, wherein the first German parliament had met in 1848, already was reconstructed because of the celebration of the centenary. Now, like many other associations, the just-refounded German Writers' Club, to which I belonged, held a festive session in St. Paul's. Now, we strolled, somewhat curious, coming out of the warm spring day into that beautiful rotunda, some of us still candidly smoking their cigarettes. But then we were told, no smoking here, this is a church. Now, I doubt whether it was really a church. My neighbor said, how is this a church?

[03:07]

I conceded architecture alone does not make a church, certainly not. After a while again, my neighbor, and even if it were a church, why not smoke? Now, one year later, I happened to come across another ban on smoking. I was, as a guest professor, lecturing at the Free University of Berlin. And at that time, 1949, it was still possible to go, but just by subway, into the eastern sector, the Russian sector. I went to Treptow Park, where they have a huge Russian memorial cemetery for the Red Army. And I entered. And I was warned by the guard, no smoking here, in that huge park. And some years ago, again the same, in Israel, in our Jewish hotel, when the Americans and the neighboring table lighted their after-dinner cigarettes, the manager came, no smoking, please.

[04:23]

But why not? Now, of course, not of the space and the place this time, but because of the time. It was Friday night and the Sabbath had begun. So one thing is clear that in all these cases, the aspect of any expediency or hindrance, like in an auditorium or like in an operating room, All that is simply out of question here. And even less the aspect of danger of fire, let's say, in the airplane during start and landing. Neither is there in question any general depreciation, as if smoking would be something that probably should not be done. Nothing of that. The point is obviously to mark a borderline which separates a special place and a non-ordinary space of time from the average and normal anywhere and anytime.

[05:36]

And whoever transgresses the threshold to this different realm, he is expected to behave in a way that is different from what is normally the So whoever enters a mosque or the realm of a Hindu temple, he has to put off his shoe. And possibly in the latter case, Hindu temple, the borderline is so strict that the non-Hindu will not be allowed to enter at all. In such a case, after I had heard so much from the Neo-Hindus that more or less everybody is a Hindu, or to the Christians, I asked, how do you know that I'm not a Hindu? And the guard said, Sahib, your face has the color of a rose. Now, I knew. Now, in the Christian churches, men take off their hats.

[06:42]

And the same is usual at the open grave, but also when the national hymn is being sung. The Jew, as you know, on the other hand, covers his head, not only in the synagogue, but whenever he is praying. So again, in Israel, when I very candidly entered the enclosed square where Moses Maimonides has his grave in Tiberias, I didn't know, I was surprised, and so I just strolled in to that enclosed square. And the guard ran to tell me that I had no hat on my head. Then, in a ritual religious room, there has to be silence. Loud shouting, at least, and laughter are prohibited. At the portal of the Marcus Casino in Venice, many tourists, all too carelessly dressed, made the experience not to be allowed to enter at all.

[07:49]

And the instruments of the public curiosity usually are also looked at with some mistrust, at least. I was in New Mexico, we were visiting the sacred dances in Santo Domingo on St. Dominic's Day, and at the entrance already we got a sheet, please. No, absolutely no photography. Absolutely no tape recording and all that. The Pueblo Indians, they do not like a visitor with a camera even to approach the entrance of a kiva. It's an interfonzo. You cannot even take pictures of that huge plaza. So if the stranger, the outsider, the non-initiated would ask the question, what is the meaning of all these perhaps un-understandable and sometimes rather uncomfortable rules?

[09:03]

he would get, in spite of all concrete diversity, he would get one unanimous answer, namely, that the meaning of all this is to be a manifestation of respect and veneration. Respect for what? For something, anyway, which demands veneration and deserves it. If he would go on, the outsider inquiring what this venerable and respectable entity is like, then the answers, of course, would be certainly different. Still, they would have in common one thing, that there is in Christian something that in some sense is sacred or should be held sacred, whether in particular they would speak of

[10:05]

the majesty of death, or of the dignity of the native country, or of the honour of the fallen soldiers, or directly of an especially dense presence of the divine, or even of God himself. In any case, all these answers would presuppose one conviction, the conviction that there within the whole of the empirical space-time world of man, that there exist some different emphasized places and special spans of time, preeminent among what is always and everywhere, and therefore of special and exceptional dignity. And such a singling out, such a demarcation of something which is exceptionally respectable is also behind the original meaning of the corresponding vocabulary.

[11:10]

That is immediately, and it becomes immediately clear if you only have a glance at the referent books and dictionary. Hagios, for instance, the Greek term for sacred, implies the counter-distinction to koinos, and koinos means average, common, ordinary. And the piece of soil which is owned by the god and on which the temple or the altar has been built is called temenos, which means cut out, cut out of the normal In Latin, the verb sanctire, where from sanctus, holy, is derived, likewise means to delimit. And sanctio originally, for the ancient Romans, meant the delimitation of sacred places and their protection against violation and profane contiguity.

[12:21]

Now, as to the contemporary usage, things are not very different. In French, sacré means belonging. I took it just from a French philosophical dictionary. Sacré means belonging to an ordre des choses séparées. And the Oxford Dictionary has among the significations of sacred also set apart. The German usage is somewhat more complicated and also somewhat inconsistent. Even the philosophical usage, the term heilig, sometimes designates the moral perfection of man. And sometimes what we are speaking of here, So I said also in the philosophical usage, there is not much consistency.

[13:29]

For instance, Immanuel Kant, even he, he defines the concept Heiligkeit, holiness, by saying that it means, I'm quoting now, the complete agreement of the will with the moral law. That sounds rather exact, but some lines later he calls the moral law itself highly, holy. So that's a different meaning again. He certainly contradicts with his own definition, his own former definition. Now here then comes through the other, the non-moral meaning of highly. And this different signification means what the corresponding Greek and Latin terms also meant, namely, a dignity which excels and surpasses the normal, irrelevant, everyday, commonplace reality, and therefore rightly can demand a special form or special forms of respect.

[14:41]

So wherever something is being held sacred in this sense, there is presupposed, as I said, one basic conviction, the conviction that the world is not simply homogeneous, neither space nor time, though a sacred place is different from all other places. And if Easter and Christmas and Sabbath and Sunday really are a sacred span of time, then the meaning necessarily is, they are not a day like any other day. This, of course, is only a negative answer. And the question is still open, wherein this exceptionality, I should say, and the utterness of the sacred positivity consists.

[15:46]

and how it can be justified. And discussing this question, which is at stake here, we are, as everybody knows, no longer in a room of academic calm. We are in the arena of public debate. And the term desacralization has long since ceased to be just the neutral description of a social-historical process, which, to be sure, is speeding up more and more also. Now, it has become, this name, this term desacralization, has become the name of a programmatic purpose, which, moreover, nowadays appeals to theological, I would put that into quotation marks, theological argument. So we are told, for instance, that Christ has sanctified the whole world and therefore everything is sacred.

[16:53]

Others again insist on Christ having liberated world and man, as they say, to their true worldliness and profanity. And so it has directly been said that, I'm quoting a Protestant theologian, German, that, for us Christians, there cannot and must not exist anymore anything sacred. Now, if this would be so, if really, for whatever reason ever, either everything would be equally sacred, or everything equally profane, then indeed the distinction between sacred and profane would have become meaningless. It simply would have lost its objective. By the way, as to the term profane, I, and you may have noticed that, I did not use it myself up to now.

[18:04]

In its original signification there is not the slightest depreciative connotation. Profane does not mean anything but what lies locally, patially, before, pro, the sanctuary, the farnum, before its door, outside. But, as you know, the later usage in thinking and in speaking has departed rather far from this original meaning. And as things stand now, there is not much help anymore in the evasive suggestion of Roger Caillois. Roger Caillois is one of the very few writers, the French philosopher and historian, culture, who spoke or wrote explicitly on this subject. also on feast, he wrote a Theorie de la Fete.

[19:08]

Now, I say it is not much help anymore in his suggestion, though it is in its purely formal sense still valid in the suggestion that the only way, he says, of defining the sacred is to contrast it with the profane. One moment you cannot avoid to declare what you yourself substantially mean by profane as well as by sacred. At this point, I must confess that I would like to postpone this moment for myself a bit, this declaration, in order to consider two analogous distinctions. which likewise have become problematic and which are attacked nowadays as well. I am speaking first of the distinction between poetry and non-poetry, and on the other hand of the distinction between philosophy and science.

[20:20]

Point one, poetry and non-poetry. the explicitly non-Aristotelian poetics of Bertolt Brecht, for instance, about which the de auteur himself in its poetical practice fortunately never cared, but I mean in his theoretical writing. These non-Aristotelian poetics aim in the last consequence at nothing but the destruction of poetry. He says the result, what I would call the result of great poetry, let's say a tragedy, namely the catharsis, the purifying shock by the confrontation with the non-workery dimension of human existence. Now he denounced that as flight into illusion.

[21:24]

The spectator, he said, is to keep his cigar burning. That means he has to remain awake, critically awake for the political action of changing the world. So the idea is that there does not exist anything except the prose, let's say, of the class conflict, the class struggle, from which nobody can be dispensed, not even for an hour. But, of course, the prose, the explicitly non-poetical, can sail on the many different flags. Five years plan, for instance, or amusement, just amusement, not poetry either. Sensation, or just psychological description, or sociological, and so on. And now the correspondence or the corresponding negation of philosophy coming out, I would say, coming out more or less out of the same approach.

[22:42]

Philosophy, which means the pondering consideration of the whole of world and existence with regard to its last significance. Now, this confrontation of man's intellect and man's spirit with its true and, of course, unfathomable object, the totem of reality, all this is declared to be a meaningless business. The only legitimate way to deal cognitively with reality is exact science, they say. qualified by verifiable results. At bottom, as the early Rudolf Carnap says, who is, I think, very influential still in this country, he says, all human cognitive endeavor is nothing but physics.

[23:44]

And if it is not, then it is meaningless. So proclamations like this the negation of poetry, the negation of true philosophy, proclamations like this usually do not come down out of the blue sky. On the contrary, there are good reasons for the suspicion that they may be only an attempt to answer a wrong idea of poetry, a wrong self-interpretation of poetry. and philosophy as well. When you, for instance, remember the illusionary idealization of man and society, which in the 19th century was considered to be poetical, then the reaction of all the naturalisms and realisms and virisms, and the reaction of Bertolt Brecht too,

[24:50]

become more and more understandable, even more than understandable. And the insistence on the other side, philosophy and science, that the scientists and this kind of scientific philosopher, philosopher, there's Rudolf Karnap, that they insist on the empirical root of all human knowledge. That is, of course, absolutely right. against the fantastic claims of philosophy, to be, for instance, as Hegel said, to be the comprehension of the absolute, or in the words of Fichte, the anticipation of the entire experience. Now, this only as a side remark, and the connection to our subject is is the following, that it has its analogy in the interpretation of sacred and profane.

[25:59]

Everything must become wrong once you ignore or once you deny that poetry as well as prose, likewise, are an attempt to word reality. And once you do not see that in philosophy as well as in science the attempt is made to conceive the one great object, reality, everything must become wrong then. And in the same way, and for very similar reasons, everything must become wrong. Once you do not understand the distinction sacred profane, to be meant likewise as a difference within a commonness which includes both the sacred and the profane.

[27:03]

If it really would be true, as some authors believe, appealing to a questionably interpretation of what they call the mythical or magic or archaic worldview. If it really would be true that the sacred and the profane are related to each other like two fundamentally heterogeneous worlds, that is an expression already of Émile Durkheim, 19th century, or that they are related to each other like cosmos or chaos, or like the real and the non-real or the pseudo-real, and separated from each other, the sacred and the profane, separated from each other by a gulf. If that would be true, and if not, on the contrary, there would exist a natural, as the French theologian Odeh formulated it, a solidarité du sacré et du profane, a solidarity between the two.

[28:18]

If not, in other words, the world before the portal of the sanctuary would be good either by virtue of its createdness, for instance, and therefore even in a certain sense sacred to also the world before the portal. And in that foolish and heretical simplification would be true, according to which the profane is the word of the devil. Now then, indeed, for a Christian at least, the distinction sacred-profane would be plainly unacceptable. And if then, moreover, additionally, the sacred rightly would be primarily characterized by ostentatious splendor, or theoretic stiffness, strangeness of form, and so on.

[29:30]

All this has been said, and somewhat it has some historical reasons also, of course. I mean, if all this is true or would be true, then the cry for desacralization must become unavoidable and also conceivable. And nobody should be surprised by an argumentation like that of the French Jesuit Pierre Antoine, who wrote in the French periodical Etudes an article with the heading l'église est-elle un lieu sacré? Is the church a sacred place?" And he says, no. It is a functional, merely functional place. But he starts from this problematic definition, which I mentioned.

[30:31]

And then, after having, I would say, shamelessly exploited the fact of empty cathedrals in some French middle town, He comes to that conclusion, and nobody should be surprised about that, that the Church is by no means a lieu sacré, but no more than just a function of Rome. But an argumentation like this must hit, then, not only the pseudo-sacred, but the whole range of the concept sacred. in the legitimate sense, too, the truly sacred. Yet what is the truly sacred? Now, one point has to be clear, I think, from the beginning. Not God is sacred and can be called sacred.

[31:34]

Whenever we speak of something sacred, notabene in counter-distinction as it is being meant here, in counter-distinction against the profane. Whenever we speak of something sacred, we cannot reasonably intend to name by this word anything but the quality of a piece of this worldly reality, but never an essential quality of God himself. Though the terms sacred in the following argumentation are to designate neither the infinite perfection of God nor the moral greatness of a man, they explicitly are meant to express that certain empirically occurring things roles, times, actions, signs, vestments even, have the special quality to be in an exceptional way and in an exceptional degree connected with or ordinated to the divine sphere.

[32:59]

Also a man can possibly be called sacred in this special sense. But then we do not mean his moral perfection or blamelessness, which really may exist too. No, we again mean this special connection and relatedness to the divine sphere, one could say his ordainedness. Now, whoever is convinced that something like this really exists, not only the ordainedness, which means a special relatedness to the superhuman sphere, but also here and there an exceptionally intense presence of the divine, Whoever is convinced that something like this exists, though he will have no difficulty to understand and to respect the borderline between the sacred, in this special sense, and the profane.

[34:14]

Profane, once again, does not mean anything but the region of the ordinary, average reality. Profane is not necessarily identical with the unholy, although, of course, the unholy, the explicitly unholy, also exists, which then represents at the same time an extreme degree of profanity. But nevertheless, it certainly can be said with some justification that all bread is because it is created by God, because it gives life to man, and so on. This can be rightly said in spite of the fact that there exists a bread which is sacred in a unique and incomparable sense. And herewith, I shall say, some preconditions have been

[35:22]

have become clear, preconditions without which no understanding can be expected, neither of the sacred itself nor of the borderline which separates the sacred from the ordinary everyday fear. Now, these preconditions obviously are not realised not only in the case of the simple negation that there exists a superhuman divine entity at all. They are not realised either, these preconditions, if one would deny that there possibly exists, may exist, an exceptional intensity of the divine presence. said, horribile dictum, a dateable presence of God in the world of man, dateable, connected with certain special times, places, men, actions, and so on.

[36:37]

And he who doesn't realise these preconditions, he would be likewise blind for the phenomenon of which we are speaking here. And presumably this blindness is involved whenever the desacralisation, no matter with what argumentation, is made a programmatic aim. But still, I have first to discuss the phenomenon of the sacred a bit more in detail. Now, our usage is speaking of sacred places, sacred times, sacred actions, sacred signs, and so on. And the new Institutio Generalis of the new Ordo Missae even speaks what certainly displeases some people, of sacred vessels and sacred vestments. In the English translation, by the way, I saw that they, it is a heading of a chapter, sacred vessels, sacred vestments, and in the English translation they left out in the case of vestments the term sacred, so there is only vestments.

[37:59]

Maybe it is somewhat characteristic, I don't know. Now, the question is whether all the different members of this series have the same rank and dignity, or are there primary things and secondary things? This question, I would say, has to be answered by a very clear and definite yes, there are differences. And I would say that the axio sacra, the sacred action, evidently has the priority and the higher significance. This is already implied in the old sentence, something is called sacred because it is ordinated to the Celtic worship, sacrum dicitur aliquid ex hoc quot ad divinum cultum ordinatum.

[39:04]

And this sentence, I would say, is clearly confirmed not only by ethnology and history of religion, but also, and that's, I think, important for the modern theological discussion, also by the theological interpretation of the Old and the New Testament, which can be read in Kietho's Werther Buch zum Neuen, Theologisches Werther Buch zum Neuen Testament. Now, the meaning of the sentence is, if there exists a special exceptional divine presence within the historical human world at all, then it is realized in the intensest way in the sacred action. And only by virtue of their relatedness to the sacred action, to the axiosatra, also then places, times, vestments, vessels, persons even, can be called sacred.

[40:13]

Now, what is a sacred action? I think it is still somewhat difficult to find a man in our Western world who simply wouldn't know what a sacred action, a liturgical worship, is like. And liturgy is, as the Second Vatican Council says, accio sacra praece lenta, sacred action in a distinguished sense. I think this is, of course, this is said as a kind of side remark, but I think it is a fundamental thesis. I would place it at the side of, let's say, St. Thomas saying the sacrament belongs to the genus of science. It is a sign. So here it is said liturgical liturgy is

[41:18]

sacred action. In the English translation they say, sacred action surpassing all others. So sacred action is presupposed, the concept is presupposed here. So I think everybody knows that a sacred action, for instance, is not adequately performed by it just being managed, brought about, handled, settled, but a sacred action has to be celebrated and the term celebrare as a special scientific investigation has brought to light some years ago a German investigation Tukhilov Joseph Pasha celebrare from the earliest that is the let's say the result of that scientific book Celebrare, from the earliest classical Latin to the language of Christian liturgy, means the same, namely, the social or asocial body's festive performance of a non-everyday doing.

[42:33]

And as a social event, the sacred action, differently from a merely interior, inward act of prayer, of charity, of faith, and so on. Sacred action is a corporeal, visible doing, realized in conspicuous form, in the audible language of allocution, fusion, and answer, in bodily action and symbolic gesture, in proclamation and singing, but also in common asylum. whereby the active doing of the celebrant is accompanied by the analogous reading act of the congregation. Reading doesn't mean here reading in a book, but reading what is going on at the altar, let's say. This distinction has been made in the last utterance of Romano Guardino to this point.

[43:43]

He was already very sick and old and couldn't go to this convention in Mainz, and he wrote a letter to that on the Celtic Act. There he made this distinction, the act of the celebrant and the reading act of the congregation, which doesn't need a book, necessarily. But the main question, to be sure, is whether, let us say, a solemn high mass here in the monastery or in Maria Lake, or wherever, whether that is really more than just a kind of miracle play, an ingeniously staged religious drama, or whether it is, or for me, a show, an empty ceremonial theatre Now, curiously enough, then, Thomas Aquinas has formed this same objection against his own view, he says, in the Summa Theologica.

[44:55]

I don't like to quote him. When I talk to my students now of Thomas and the Summa Theologica, I say, that is a famous textbook for beginners, and I would love to... Now, in this famous textbook for beginners, he says, he asked himself, is not this theatrical character of the symbolic action incompatible with what he called the honorableness of the divine worship? And his answer is, poetry and worship, cult, have in fact this in common, that both have to express in sensible images what reason cannot completely grasp. But of course the contemporary objection is aiming at something quite different. It's not asking for the meaning of the sacred action, but for its reality, its real content.

[46:04]

It calls in question—oh, this is a mild expression, probably, calling in question—whether in how far in the sacred action something drastically and solidly real happens at all. So what is denied here is that in the performance of the sacred action something like the Divine Presence really should take place. In other words, what is denied here is the sacramental character of the sacred action. And I think here we are touching the decisive point. Of course, only on the basis of belief and of faith it can be said whether or not a certain empirical event has the quality of being a sacrament. and whether a sacrament does exist at all, and what a sacrament is, all that can be said only on the basis of belief and faith.

[47:14]

But nevertheless, I think the non-believer, the non-faithful, he perhaps may be expected to take notice, at least, of what, according to Christian faith, perhaps I should say here to Catholic faith, the category sacrament means. Now, it means that in this special, unique sense, in unique case, the symbols realized in corporeal doing and audibly spoken language do not only signify something, but in their performance What they signify becomes reality, objective reality. So, purification. Nullification of sin.

[48:15]

Nutrition by the true body of the Lord. And of course not because of the power of the human agents, and even less by virtue of the mere symbol, but through God's own power. who in the sacramental event is in truth the only agent. Now, the battle cry magic is, of course, already heard here. I should like to speak on this subject a bit later, but before that we can have a kind of fresh talk. But I would like to make before another point a bit clearer. Of course, even the mere idea sacrament is something so strange that one cannot try to persuade a man to accept it. But if the sacred action above all the Christian celebration of the Eucharist would not be a sacrament in this exact sense, which means if

[49:27]

In its performance, the special and exceptional presence of God would not really happen. Then, I would say, then indeed all the talk about sacredness, sacrality, would be at bottom, meaningless. And all forms of sacredness, in the first place the liturgical form, would be nothing but a piece of pious folklore. without any resisting reality. And although it may perhaps be considered to be something that ought to be preserved for aesthetical reasons, it certainly will disappear as a victim of the ruthless progress of history. And I do believe that behind all desacralization programs, especially behind those with theological argument.

[50:29]

The last theoretical foundation is nothing but this negation of the sacramentality, which means the conviction that the sacred action, which perhaps is still called so, in truth is a merely human enterprise in which objectively, independently from our consciousness, nothing really happens at all. And the unavoidable consequence of all that is evident enough. Not only has it become senseless, then, to consider the Church, the building, I mean, to be more than a mere functional place, there is also, and above all, not the slightest reason anymore to regard a priest as a sacred, which means an ordained person.

[51:34]

And I wouldn't be easily argued out of my conviction that the ultimate and perhaps the only reason of the much-discussed crisis of the modern priest image should be anything but the refusal—the refusal or the inability. I wouldn't like to judge that. in an individual case, of course not. The inability caused by several factors. The inability to see and to accept the connection between the sacramental consecratory act of the priest and God becoming present in the mystery of the Eucharistic sacrifice. Again, with one or more, even several, unavoidable results. The result that the distinguishing function of the priest must be defined anew and that his specific task must be considered to be something different from what has been said up to then or up to now.

[52:48]

something different, the mere service of the word, or the organization of the congregation, or social work, or even the revolution. And whoever, on the other hand, is convinced that in the performance of the sacred action, or more concretely spoken, in the celebration of the Eucharistic mystery, the absolutely uncommon thing really happens, God's corporeal presence among man, which is anticipated, desired for, and prefigured also in all cults of mankind. Who is convinced of that? For him it is simply a matter of course that at the same time the borderline against the region of everyday life becomes perceivable not only but also valid. Rapi, ut deum visibilita cognostimus in invisibilium amorem rapiam, or this word, rapi, means to be taken away out of the here and now.

[54:08]

Exactly this is for man. as the Church herself formulates it. You know, what I quoted is out of the preface of Christmas and also at the same time the preface of Corpus Christi Day, a specifically sacramental preface. I mean this rapi, I would say, to finish that sentence. That is exactly the impact of this divine presence to take us away out of this everyday world for a while. And by this, now the everyday world and life are not in the least depreciated. We are not invited, we are not even allowed to ignore them or to forget them. We are expected to transgress them and to transcend them. By the way, what the Greek church fathers said of the Celtic feast day is in a certain sense also true for the sacred action.

[55:18]

It does not really take place here and now, not in this eon, nor on this earth. In any case, we celebrate in the sacred action the real beginning and the pledge of the ultimately blissful life at God's table, the true inquatio vitae aeternum. And whether the congregation may understand itself as parochia, paroikia, which means a community of strangers, or a community of citizens of the future kingdom, In both cases, the congregation marks itself off from the normal and everyday forms of social life. And whether the liturgical celebration is held in a provisionary room of a slum's quarter, or in the ballroom of a village restaurant, or in a cathedral,

[56:21]

whose precious hall with its coloured windows symbolises the heavenly Jerusalem, or in the concentration camp where the living wall of bodies forms a kind of interior room, poorly protected for a while only against the control and the grip of the executioner, there is one thing with all these places have in common, all of them, by their poverty as well as by their splendour, distinguish themselves against the milieu of everyday existence, against its deadly recklessness and against its deceptive comfort. And nothing is more natural for man than, in such an enclosed realm, to behave differently Not in the same way as, let's say, on the sports ground, in a restaurant or on the marketplace.

[57:31]

Of course, men still speak a human language, a likewise human language, but nevertheless a different one. Different in the attitude of speaking, in the intonation, in the gesture, and in the vocabulary, too. Now, in opposition to this, the propagandists of desacralization suggest, as you know, to perform the Eucharist like a meal in a normal living room, without sacral language, language, again, taken under every possible aspect, gesture, vocabulary, intonation, attitude, and so on. The chairman, that's the favorite, you know, term, may welcome the participants and express his being pleased by their coming, unacquainted people may introduce themselves, and so on and so on.

[58:33]

And all this ought to be done solemnly, but by no means sacredly." That was a quotation out of a German Catholic theologian. And as you know, such suggestions are also practiced. Then one says good morning instead of the teeth of Christ we wish you or the grace of our Lord we wish you. And he dismisses the congregation. Oh, like the announcer at the television. Best wishes for an enjoyable weekend. Now, the meaning behind it is that at any price, the sacred action must be fitted into the practical everyday life, and thus be, as they say, humanized. Now, the truth is, as I would maintain, the truth is that the underlying conception is based on a terrible misinterpretation of the real man, whose nature does not want at all to be restricted to the mere human, and who, according to Blaise Pascal, infinitely transcends man.

[59:50]

The truly human sphere of existence includes still quite different regions, and their atmosphere is just the opposite of that of the living room. But in those regions is what possibly interests me in my neighbor, not his private or civil situation, nor his civil name, But his being a creature like myself, destined to die, created, fallen, redeemed, and now about to receive the bread of life at God's table, like me. And in this sense, I would say, whether I'm in Tokyo and don't know anybody, I feel in the same community. My neighbors are well known to me. And as to that contradistinction, sacral, solemn, I would suggest just to convert it, to convert that proposition.

[61:04]

Solemnity means threatening subjectivity, whereas the sacral attitude connects, I would say, the great superindividual form with that kind of non-excited sobriety which used to be the distinguishing mark of a man who deals with reality and not with ideas. And this, once again, this I think is a disastrous question. Do we in the sacred action deal with reality? or is it more or less a matter of ideal thoughts? It depends upon the answer to this question whether we are able or not to see that the borderline which separates the sacred and the non-sacred region does not only mean otherness of language, of behavior, but at the same time

[62:15]

a kind of barrier also, a fence, a hedge, a wall. So whoever enters from outside has not only to pass a gate and a line of demarcation. If he does not belong, he will not be admitted to the sacred action. That certainly is a statement which may be all too easily misunderstood, although its It's just a matter of course in all cult community. We just had this spring, I belong to an ecumenical group in Germany, which is working since 46. It is now 24 years. Well, some theologians on the one side, Catholic theologians on the other side, and you only name them there, so I have a kind of freedom of the fool to think they're sometimes rather unofficially. Now we had our last session on the on the matter on the subject of intercommunion and I was surprised even and very much impressed to see that the Protestant theologians they taught on that matter much more strictly than we do or we did or some of us do.

[63:37]

The early Christians as you know before the beginning of the celebration of the Eucharistic mystery, have banished even the catechumens, although they were preparing them for baptism, and in so far the worldly longing. And it has, the early Christendom has protected the celebration itself by a discipline of silence. But nevertheless, this is an important point, I would say, The belonging did not consider them that to be a closed group. On the contrary, everybody was able and invited to join them. But, that is true, but only on the basis of initiation, which means baptism. And this has yet been changed, I think, in principle up to this moment. although the question may be asked whether perhaps the official admission of the instrumentarium of the public curiosity has not been, or at least has prepared, a kind of break here.

[64:49]

The decisive point is again the degree of reality conferred to or on the sacred action. If it is only a mean arranged by man, even if possibly for religious reasons, then there does not exist any plausible reason why not everybody, if he is not just disturbing, should not participate. But if, on the other hand, in its performance the bodily presence of God really happens, and if the celebrating congregation with the sacred and in the sacred bread really receives the body of Christ sacrificed for us, then I think things become fundamentally different. And that's for two reasons. One, psychological. When the individual facing that partner and that counterpart puts off for this single time

[66:03]

what Thomas Mann has called the God's shame, his God's shame, and declares and reveals the secret root of his own life. If the individual does it, then he is in a state of extreme defenselessness and vulnerability, which does not allow a non-belonging observer. And the second reason, It would be a kind of blasphemy to let in explicitly. That's, of course, the question only. Explicitly let in. You cannot prevent people coming in. But to let in explicitly someone who admittedly does not take the sacred action as what it, according to the deepest convictions of the participant, really is. to let in someone who perhaps considers this so-called sacred action to be a more or less interesting case of practical magic.

[67:16]

And there we are again to that problem. Isn't all that simply magic? So at this point, if there is any need for just five minutes walking around So I think that this party could have that. And then I would continue with the question, is it magic? And what is magic? Good. Well, the question of magic isn't not simply magic. All we are talking about. God becoming present in the performance of an action celebrated by man.

[68:19]

And then, real union with Christ in the eating of the sacred bread. With Christ, in whom the divine lover had become man. Of course, this question, magic, cannot be meaningfully discussed unless we agree about the meaning, the exact meaning of the term magic. But one thing is clear already from the beginning. Magic is a blaming word. It's a name which implies a reproach. It designates something that should not exist. So what is magic? There is one useful definition that says magic is the attempt to dispose by certain doings on superhuman power for human purposes.

[69:23]

That's magic. Now taken in this sense, magic clearly is the exact opposite of a religious act. Religion means adoration, devotion, service. And magic is, au fond, an attempt to take hold of and to possession of something, to possess something. With this, something else is clear, too. Magic is by no means an exclusive subject matter of ethnology. It is an always possible perversion of man's attitude towards God. And it is not at all easy, I should say, to find out from outside whether a specific behaviour is religious or magic.

[70:24]

Now, of course, one could become here very concrete. There certainly exists among Catholics also a kind of Petition. Petition or prayer, which is at least very close to Matt, just an attempt to get it. What do we really do when we pray to St. Anthony to get back our damned camera, or we thank God, or what we lost? Now this, of course, is a... And I would say it is not easy either, to find out from outside what is going on in the sacraments, the performance of the sacraments and the reception. In any case, the magical misunderstanding and misuse is, I think, at least not impossible, not at all.

[71:30]

The misuse and the misunderstanding. And it is just the objectivity of what, according to our faith, happens in the sacrament. It is this objectivity which, on the other hand, is the presupposition of all sacredness. It is exactly this objectivity which possibly encourages, at the same time, a wrong objectivation, which isolates the sensible palpability of this definite ritual, of this definite space of time. In Israel, for instance, you can read it in the paper on Thursday always, when exactly, exact to the minute. The Sabbath begins in Tel Aviv and in Jerusalem, and it is different. 7.32 in Jerusalem, 7.37 in Tel Aviv, and so on.

[72:35]

So, up to this, not yet, not yet, but now. So I mean there is possible an isolation of the space of time, of the ritual, of the building, of the church, of the room, the vestment, of separation not only from the human act, the living human act, which of course in spite of the opus operatum is required in the sacrament, but also and above all from the reality of God himself. But after all, no theology of the sacraments has ever maintained that God in his activity is chained to the liturgy celebrated by man, to sacred places and to sacred times, which certainly does not mean either that we ourselves are not bound to one. But in conclusion, I should say, the adequate performance of the sacrament has clearly nothing to do with magic, if we accept that definition.

[73:46]

But there is another definition, according to which magic and magical is every supernatural power which is working in the human world. So magical are all effects and facts which have their origin outside the normal causality. That is a definition which I found in the most used German philosophical dictionary. Now, what is normal causality? It's immediately clear that everything we are discussing here has to be called magic land. and magical, because it is beyond the normal causality. And, of course, the negative connotation of that term remains valid, saying this time not so much that all this should not be, but that all this, although it may from a primitive point of view be considered to be something real, in fact does not exist at all.

[75:01]

And now I have to conjure this big shade that is standing behind all desexualization and demythologization. I have to quote Hildegard Bultmann here, who says, for instance, that of course the idea, I'm quoting him, that a preexistent divine being should appear on earth as a man, Or, quoting again, that a meal should convey spiritual strength, that all this, may it be called magical or mythical or archaic, belongs to the long list of the definitely outmoded ideas, erledigt, he says. All this is, exactly speaking, non-existent. Not even man in prayer is considered to be able to pierce vertically the closed human sphere, and only a moral political discussion of Vietnam or the class justice might possibly be called a prayer without magic.

[76:25]

You see, once this definition is taken into consideration at all, one already is about to deny, or at least to ignore that reality which is the foundation not only of the general conception of sacrality, but of the Christian worldview as a whole. In the case of desacralization, whether it is taken as a process or as a principle, there are involved, however, not only theological errors, but also philosophical ones, anthropological heresies, I should say. Whoever, for instance, does not realize that man is a being in whom there is nothing purely spiritual and nothing merely corporeal either, of course.

[77:30]

Whoever does not realize that He, for this very reason, is unable to appreciate that what Joseph Andreas Jungmann called the framework of visible and sensible forms which constitute the sacred action. The old sentence, anima firma corporis, always again forgotten. even proscribed within Western Christendom, but also every day anew confirmed by the empirical investigation of human nature. This old wisdom, anima forma corporis, Romano Guardini was absolutely right to call the foundation of all liturgical education. And it is indeed a kind of, I would say, a kind of key word.

[78:33]

Whoever has the key, he has access, and whoever hasn't the key, he has no access to the world of the sacred. Only on the basis of this insight, for instance, the strict and previously given form of the sacred language, gesture, sign, word, and so on, become conceivable at all. This fixed coinage has not only to do with the social character of the sacred action. Free and continuous improvisation is certainly possible only to the individual. But this is not the only reason, the social character. I would say it has much more even to do with the fixed coinage, this pre-givenness of the form.

[79:35]

has much more to do with that fundamental non-arbitrariness which does not allow to change a perfect point, also. So, that is a twofold truth in this sentence, anima forma corporis. It maintains the connection of soul and body as well as the priority of the spiritual soul, both. So this truth can naturally be denied also in a twofold way. The one way is a decided spiritualism, and the second way could be called corporealism, or something like that. Now, in the first case, the spiritual act is considered to be exclusively important. That's the only thing which really is important, and consequently the mode of expressing it is a merely external and therefore irrelevant matter.

[80:44]

In the second case, though for completely different reasons, likewise an insistence upon the radical irrelevance of the visible or sensible expression exists. So previously given forms are considered to be intolerable. Even common singing. I know of a student community in Germany. They say, singing? That's already manipulation. Instead, go as you please and take it easy. is glorified as something natural. That's natural and genuine. Now the disquieting thing is that both forms of negation of that old truth have almost the same result.

[81:49]

Neither spiritualism nor what I would call corporalism take advantage of that unique chance which for the individual is contained and offered in the challenge to grow beyond the narrow ego by flooding or flowing into the objectivity of a grade 3.4. There is, moreover, one other fundamental concept which necessarily must remain foreign to everyone who contest or contest the sentence anima forma corporea. You will never understand what a symbol is like, a symbol. You will never get an idea of why and how it is completely natural and completely human not to aim exclusively at the realization of purposes, but also, always again,

[83:01]

to make a sign, and be it only to light a candle, not in order to illuminate the room. Rooms may be light enough already, but in order to give expression, let's say, to the festive significance of the moment, or to the remembrance of a beloved one who died, or maybe to give expression to adoration or gratitude. Of course, this is deliberately useless then. I don't light the candle in order to illuminate the room. It is useless. Deliberately. But this reminds us of another element of the element of superabundance and exuberance, non-calculation even of weight.

[84:04]

The first portion of wine is not used, is not drunk, it is stranded to shed into the sea or on the floor as a libation in honor of the God. But it is in the same line Explicitly not to build a practical meeting room, but let's say the church of Rochamps or the cathedral. And of course the pier, the birth of Notre-Dame de Paris, never has served as a kind of time signal. Otherwise it would really have become needless by everybody's having a wristwatch. Now there is some German Bishop who said it, we don't need any more bell towers because everybody has a rich porch. Now this has been everything and still is an expression of wordless jubilation.

[85:12]

It is abundant. It is waste. But how then, of course, how about the counter-argument? that speaks of simplicity and of poverty even. Now, I definitely agree with that argument, but on the other hand, I do believe that both are right. Both arguments are right and both are necessary. Grandeur and austerity. And I believe also that the natural tension between them, between both, cannot ever be smoothed into an unproblematic harmony. It cannot be nullified. Even Joseph Andreas Jungmann, who wrote just some years before the Council—that is the reason why this essay is almost forgotten now—even he mentioned this polar tension among the six-seventh

[86:19]

which are, as he says, unavoidably connected even with the nature of the sacred action. So singing cannot be thriftied and still singing. That's not possible. On the other hand, grandeur is not necessarily identical with material expenditure, although it does not exclude it either. But by no means the waste of which we are speaking here is meant to be a mere display of money and wealth. It is meant to be a spontaneous manifestation of that richness which consists in the experience of God's real presence among man. And with this I have called again, by its proper name, the only core, the only resisting core without which all sacredness necessarily must become either a kind of violent strain or a matter of routine, and a perhaps still impressive but empty show.

[87:33]

At this point, also the picture of the ultimate human poverty comes into sight. Not man's material, but his existential misery, If it would be already desolate enough to live in a world wherein there would be exclusively usable, serviceable things, but nothing at which man could self-forgetfully rejoice, only scientific expertism, with no but no philosophical consideration of the whole of world and existence, no commentatio mortis, Only advancing research, but no remembrance. Only entertainment and fun, but no real feast. No great poetry, no great art or great music.

[88:37]

If that already would be desolate, desolate enough, then it would be even worse. It would be simply desperate to be involved in into a desacralized, nothing but worldly world without any opportunity to transcend always again and for a while the here and the now of what is just, now urgent and timely and topical today, and to enter that greater room of existence which also is intended for us. But now, not only in the way of philosophizing reflection, nor only by the shock of poetry, art views it alone, but realita in the performance of life itself, for instance, and above all, in the sacred action.

[89:45]

I would like to add here some remarks in order to answer a criticism published by a theologian in a periodical for priests. My critic, a German theologian, made two objections to what I said. First, he said that I ignore the present discussion. And second, that there is in my statement no biblical argumentation. Now, my answer is the following. What is the present discussion? In fact, the experience of a profound conflict of opinions gave me the first impulse to think about this subject. On the one side, I was noticing for some years a group of Catholic theologians propagating the idea of desexualization.

[90:53]

In spite of the ambiguity of this program, it is clearly directed against the traditional principle of chaotic celebration, against the sacral language of verba certa et volimnia, against the ritual form of symbolic gestures and actions, against the church as a building now, which is meant to be expressly different from residential or industrial or business building, against last not least, against the priest as a sacred person ordained explicitly for the celebration of the sacred action of the Eucharist. And on the other side, I perceived how emphatically the Church has served, in spite of all preparedness for changes in some particular respects, how the Church is insisting on all that, up to her latest statement, for instance, the decrees of the Second Vatican Council and the Institutio Generalis to the new Ordo Missae.

[92:06]

In these documents, I read, for instance, the liturgy in which the sanctification of man is represented as well as effectuated. by a sensible symbol is, in a particular sense, a sacred action, I quoted that already, and the culmination of all ecclesiastical activity and the source of all his things. For the celebration of the Eucharist, not only the exact text is prescribed, but also the particulars of standing and kneeling, of gesture, of kissing the altar, and so on. sign of the cross, and the church building is explicitly called Ede-Sapra, and its solemn consecration is indisputable, is as indisputable as that of the altar. And the dignity of the sacred place is spoken of.

[93:08]

And of course the priests are called in that context neither preachers nor managers nor nor even trespassers, but such as dotes at ministries sacred. Now this is the conflict of opinion, whose deeply disquieted spectator I am and I was, and this is why I felt obliged to speak. Of course, I do not consider that conflict of opinion, this conflict to be exactly speaking a discussion or debate between the Church when she is speaking as herself, On the view of a theological group, there cannot be a discussion in the proper sense, even if the group should be over-publicized to such a degree as this one is. And what I try to make clear is not meant either to be a contribution to a discussion,

[94:12]

My aspect is and was primarily a philosophical and anthropological aspect. It was my purpose to make clear two things. First, that the desacralization program, with its tendency to lay down this borderline between the sacred and the profane, happens to be in that strange neighborhood which revealed unexpectedly also its own questionability, namely the neighborhood of a poetics which denies the distinction between poetry and non-poetry, and here with poetry itself, and also in the neighborhood of a view which tries to reduce philosophy to science and therefore negates and denies and destroys philosophy. All these theories have one thing in common, They proclaim the undifferentiatedness of the closed world of man, in which case it makes only a verbal difference, I would say, whether the prose itself is declared to be poetry, and science to be philosophy, and the profane itself to be sacred, or vice versa.

[95:34]

That's only a verbal difference. That was one point. And my second point was to show how inhuman such equalization is. I tried to make clear above all how much the teaching and the practice of the Church, who from the earliest time persistently is maintaining and just realizing the right of the sacred, is in correspondence was the real man. In other words, how inviolably the law is valid according to which grace does not destroy but presuppose what is by nature. One does not have to be a Christian in order to know what a sign is, but he who does not know is unable to understand what a sacrament is.

[96:37]

And so I had to speak of some other pre-Christian, pre-theological category, Temenos, for instance, or anima pharmacoporis, or symbol, and so on. And perhaps this makes understandable also the lack of a biblical argumentation. In a primarily philosophical reflection, it would have been not only the curfews, but in the wrong place. But on the other hand, I have not the slightest doubt that the liturgy of the Church not only is based on a biblical argumentation, but that the liturgy itself is nothing but an authentic interpretation of the revelation of Christ. Authentic means here, guaranteed by the author himself. And it is, I think, not a good thing to see priestly theologians arguing against this interpretation.

[97:48]

Although the questionability of their biblical arguments, open or not, is visible at first sight. For instance, it was said, Jesus calls us his brothers. So that is this horizontal line. But he calls himself also a king. And he finds it right that his disciples address him as their master and their lord. And whenever his true nature becomes perceivable, the apostles fall down before him. And angels come to serve him. That's also New Testament. Or then they say the curtain rapture in the temple. that's regularly put on the table as an argument for the delimitation of the sacred. Now, I would say this interpretation is only one of a dozen traditional interpretations which sound quite different and no less convincing.

[98:55]

For the metaphor of God's temple which we should be ourselves. Now, this metaphor was already known in the Old Testament and to the Old Testament Jews, and had clearly nothing to do with any refusal of the liturgical temple piety, and so on and so forth. But nevertheless, in view, I should say, of the disturbing diversity of the exegetical information, the non-theologian, that may be the theologian too, We cannot do anything better than to rely upon that interpretation of the Holy Scripture which is given in the self-realization and the self-performance of the Church. and to regard with deepest despotism, I should say, every so-called biblical argumentation which is in contradiction to that interpretation which is given in the self-performing of the church itself.

[100:10]

Thank you.

[100:11]

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