Crossing the Line: Blasphemy, Time, and Anonymity

According to anthropologists and sociologists, the sacred depends upon boundaries. “Things set apart and forbidden” is how Émile Durkheim defined the sacred in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1915), emphasizing that sacred things were set apart in such a way that they became the center of the social whole.¹ For Durkheim, religion began when social groups performed rituals as a way of binding together a community; these actions produced a sense of the sacred, rather than the other way around. The true content of religion was to be found, then, in the manner in which it enabled humans to represent to themselves the social unit of which they were a part. In his desire to sort the sacred from the profane, Durkheim almost certainly overemphasized the coherence of the social whole.² But the point remains that cultures, even loosely organized ones, depend upon separation, the demarcation of boundaries, and the leveling of injunctions against their violation.

Examples of such a dynamic abound. Early in Terrence Malick’s 2011 film The Tree of Life, for instance, a father tells his very young son Jack to stay out of the neighbor’s yard. He draws a faint line in the grass with a stick: “You see this line? Let’s not cross it. You understand?” We know, of course, that this is futile: no physical barrier exists here, just an imaginary line that no toddler will be able to comprehend, much less respect. Not surprisingly, the next scene shows Jack playing happily on the far side, and the father calling him back. There is a deep sense in which the father’s gesture is a futile one: to draw a line, or create a forbidden zone, is also to invite its violation. Indeed, transgression seems built into the idea of a boundary itself: we may know cognitively where the lines are drawn, but we don’t really experience their power until we cross them.

Later in The Tree of Life, Malick returns to the scene of transgression: driven by a need he cannot quite fathom, the teenaged Jack sneaks into the same neighbor’s bedroom and examines a woman’s undergarments, even laying a negligee carefully on the bed and stroking it reverently. Then, wracked with guilt, he tries to bury the offending item, and when that fails he throws it into a river and watches it float away downstream. The scene is easily read as Jack’s confused attempt to distinguish his feelings for his mother from his burgeoning sexual awakening, but the point to emphasize, again, is that the entire episode has been in effect prescripted by the father’s initial command not to cross the line.

Religious discourse provides some of the oldest expressions of this movement of separation, injunction, and transgression: in Genesis, God tells Adam, “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.”³ Here, too, the end of the story is built into its beginning. For the temptation of Eden is knowledge, and in succumbing to such temptation Adam and Eve acknowledge that Eden is not the whole world, not the fully complete place that it seemed. They knew, somehow, that there was more to know.⁴ According to the writer of the story, when they ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, “the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked” (Genesis 3:7). Then Adam and Eve hide themselves, and when God asks them why they are hiding, Adam replies that they are naked. God’s response is one of the strangest in all of Scripture: “Who told you that you were naked?” (Genesis 3:11). Since the only possible answer is “no one told us,” the question is sometimes interpreted as an allegory of the birth of self-awareness. It may be that knowledge is like nakedness: to learn it of oneself is to learn that it...