In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

29 Chapter One Sacred Canopies I. A Theory of Sacred Canopies The phrase, sacred canopy, derives from Peter L. Berger’s book, The Sacred Canopy. The purpose of that book is to develop a theory of religion with the tools of sociology of knowledge; its argument is closely connected with the book Berger wrote with Thomas Luckman at about the same time, The Social Construction of Reality. Berger’s general thesis is that human beings need to order their experience, and do so by imposing subjectively constructed ordering ideas on reality. “A meaningful order, or nomos, is imposed upon the discrete experiences and meanings of individuals. To say that society is a world-building enterprise is to say that it is ordering, or nomizing, activity .”1 Although constructed by the human imagination, and thus subjective in this sense, the nomos imposed on the world is taken to be objective and people live according to it. The world, of course, has its own structure, which Berger calls “cosmos” in contrast to “nomos.” The human need for ordering experience in ways that relate to purposes of survival and flourishing is extremely practical. The human ordering of experience gives structure to everyday life and also copes with the terror so natural when people face a vast and violent cosmos unscaled to human interests. As people objectify the meanings they project on the world, they construe their nomos to be cosmos. They thus internalize the objective meanings they had subjectively invented and projected. A cyclical relation exists, Berger points out, between inventive subjective projections, objective construals of the world in terms of those projections, and the internalization of that objectified world so that people “know” the world in the terms they have invented for it. This is “the social construction of reality.” But reality has tough feedback and not every human imaginative construction can be lived with as objective meaningful fact. A rough fit is 30 v Ultimates required between actual “cosmic” structures and the “nomic” meanings by which people navigate the real world. So the objectified nomos is constantly being amended, which requires a new internalization, in turn stimulating new inventive subjective projections in an unsteady round of learning and inventing. Although Berger does not in this book relate explicitly to the pragmatic movement in philosophy, he is solidly within the pragmatic frame which says that people interpret reality by means of signs that frequently are amended so as to interpret better or that are abandoned because they miss what is important. The “social construction of reality” is not an idealist philosophy that represents human meanings as mere fictions with no relation to reality or that represents reality as a mere fiction. Rather, it is a realistic philosophy that provides an account for how reality corrects our interpretive, meaning-giving ideas. “Corrects” is not always the right word, however.Whatever the cosmic structure of reality, from the standpoint of human experience it is terrifying and “anomic” except insofar as the nomos shelters experience with its imposed meaning. “The sheltering quality of social order becomes especially evident if one looks at the marginal situations in the life of the individual, that is, at situations in which he is driven close to or beyond the boundaries of the order that determines his routine, everyday existence.”2 The perceived objective validity of the nomos is precarious in these marginal situations. Although the social world is supposed to be taken for granted, in marginal situations certain of its elements “stand out” as providing the worldmaking meaning on which the rest of social world’s nomos depends. These constitute what Berger calls the “sacred.” Religion is the human enterprise by which a sacred cosmos is established. Put differently, religion is cosmization in a sacred mode. By sacred is meant here a quality of mysterious and awesome power, other than man and yet related to him, which is believed to reside in certain objects of experience.This quality may be attributed to natural or artificial objects, to animals, or to men, or to the objectivations of human culture. There are sacred rocks, sacred tools, sacred cows. The chieftain may be sacred, as may be a particular custom or institution. Space and time may be assigned the same quality, as in sacred localities and sacred seasons. The quality may finally be embodied in sacred beings, from highly localized spirits to the great cosmic divinities. The latter, in turn, may be transformed into ultimate forces or principles ruling the cosmos, no...

Share