Eliade’s point was that much of human history has been the attempt to cultivate such experiences, to draw them out and bring them closer. Their efficacy is why the best of our churches, temples and mosques harbor a profound quiet and stillness that even an atheist like me can feel. The construction of those buildings reflects not only awful power politics and all it entails, these temples also contain our ancient and ongoing attempt to evoke the sacred in the world. If they didn’t, the populations institutional religion so often sought to control would never have shown up. Eliade has rightfully been criticized for implying a universalism to all those experiences. There are differences between cultures and ages, and those differences are important. But as writers like Wendy Doniger in The Implied Spider has shown, difference need not force away unity. As a scientist I know the world always pushes back and our response to the world—including the sacred character of experience—is one way it pushes back into us.
Eliade even had a word for the experience I had that day: hierophany. This was his expression for the eruption of the sacred into our lives. Just as an epiphany can relate to ideas, a hierophany relates to experience—the experience of the sacred.
It is at this point that we can see the connection, and the usefulness, of the sacred to a world saturated with the fruits of science. For all its usefulness in developing technology, science is elementally a path to hierophany. The insight and all-embracing vision of life (and cosmos) so apparent though science is also gateway to the experience of the sacred.
It always has been.
From the Pythagorean Brotherhood’s contemplation of mathematical beauty to Kepler’s elation on finding the true geometric form of planetary motion, science has provided us with experiences of the world as sacred. It is an experience that is not reserved for scientists.
The fruits of science manifest in culture in many ways: from HST images to the narratives of life’s origin. These fruits are often presented in a way that is meant to explicitly invoke that “oceanic feeling,” as Freud would call it. From NOVA programs to IMAX movies, we are often given our culture’s pathway to experience the sacred through science. If we cannot immediately recognize that science plays this role as hierophanic pathway in culture it is only because we have been steeped in a polarization between fundamentalist religion and science for so long that we have been trained not to see it.
The reflexive rejection of words like sacred by many who reject institutional religion is misguided. It is, without a doubt, true that a great and real danger we face today is the rejection of science by religious literalism. But to ignore the essential aspect of being human in these experiences—called sacred by some and spiritual by others—is to miss the ancient resonance in these words. They are, in their essence, atoms of a poetry to which we have always responded.
In this remarkable historical moment we face existential challenges that demand an informed deployment of science. In response, the question before us becomes how to marshal the resonance in words like “sacred.” We will, without doubt, need its poetics as we build the next version of culture our evolution now demands. Science reveals an elemental poetry in the world that has always been experienced as a hierophany. That essentially aesthetic economy of form and relation must now be recognized for what it is and what it always has been—a gateway to the sacred character of our own, inmost experience.
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