Sacred and Profane: Idolatry, Antiquarianism and the Polemics of Distinction in the Seventeenth Century

Everyday life is not a place for the sacred. Instead, the sacred stands apart from ordinary, profane affairs: it finds its home in churches, mosques and synagogues, spaces sanctified by their connection to the world of the transcendent and dedicated to its honour. If this seems a rather pedestrian distinction, it is not. At the very least, it has been a distinction vital to the anthropological description of the world. 'In every primitive community . . .', the social anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski argued in 1925, 'there have been found two clearly distinguishable domains, the Sacred and the Profane'.¹ Despite their magically infused lives, the Trobriand islanders that he so famously studied never lost sight of these two domains. Ask any of these Melanesian farmers whether magic alone grew his crops and 'he would simply smile on your simplicity': if fields are parched, if fences break, 'he will have recourse not to magic, but to work, guided by knowledge and reason'.² This distinction between the ordinary world of work and the sphere of the sacred is thus primal to human existence: in anthropological terms, Malinowski insisted, all communities, all peoples, at all times, have used it to establish what the religious sociologist Mircea Eliade later called a 'fixed point' to guide action, organize internal life and establish societies.³ The French pioneer of sociology and anthropology Émile Durkheim was emphatic. 'In all the history of human thought', he declared, 'there exists no other example of two categories of things so profoundly differentiated' as that of the sacred and the profane.⁴

And the distinction has not gone away, either in ordinary speech or in contemporary anthropology. Even for such a prominent modern writer as Clifford Geertz, it is still active, if expressed in epistemological rather than natural terms. The sacred, he insists in a now famous essay, 'is what lies beyond a relatively fixed frontier of accredited knowledge that . . . sets ordinary human experience in a permanent context of metaphysical concern'. Without this frontier, without the distinction that the frontier metaphorically represents, 'the empirical differentia of religious activity or religious experience would not exist'. Without this frontier, in other words, religion would not be an object of knowledge. On one side of the frontier are 'transcendent truths'. On the other side there are the 'common-sensical, the scientific, and the aesthetic': precisely those aspects of human existence that enable the researcher to differentiate, isolate and describe 'the religious perspective'.⁵ The profane operates here as an unstated ideal, making the sacred legible to the anthropological eye.

But seen in the long term, these modern descriptions of the sacred and profane are rather peculiar. In patristic or medieval times, for example, the profane did not generally connote a space of human behaviour neutral as to religion, or outside it. Instead, it was a theological concept that described what was set against or in opposition to (pro) the temple (fanum). Translating the Greek bebylos (impure, unhallowed), it could be variously rendered as 'irreligious', 'contrary to the sacred', and so on.⁶ This was especially true of the verb 'to profane', which in English and Latin alike conveyed (and still conveys) a sense of desecration or violation of the sacred. At times, the 'profane' merely denoted what was 'for men' or 'human' as opposed to 'for the gods' or 'divine' — think of the term 'sacred and profane letters'. But even then, in the Christian world, the profane carried as much of the stigma of corruption as man himself did. 'Pagan' or 'gentile' letters always stood in distinction to the word of God and were, by implication, caught in the same pollutions of paganism. Historically, in other words, the profane was largely a force against religion, not impartial to it.⁷ Early Latin renderings of Psalm 89 condemned those who 'profane[d] [God's] laws', for example; while Eusebius denounced gentiles who 'offered execrable sacrifices on profane and impure altars', and Cyprian described apostates from Christ's Church as 'foreign . . . profane . . . enemies'.⁸

If the profane originally marked a theological distinction between true religion and...