Part of the Casswiki article series Books
The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion is a scholarly work on spirituality by Mircea Eliade, first published in 1959. It consists of four chapters with an introduction and a chronological survey.
This study essentially picks up where Rudolf Otto’s The Idea of the Holy left off where the concept of the sacred is explicated through its relation to its exact counterpart, the profane.
As Eliade writes in his Introduction:[1]
After forty years, Otto’s analyses have not lost their value; readers of this book will profit by reading and reflecting on them. But in the following pages we adopt a different perspective. We propose to present the phenomenon of the sacred in all its complexity, and not only in so far as it is irrational. What will concern us is not the relation between the rational and nonrational elements of religion but the sacred in its entirely. The first possible definition of the sacred is that it is the opposite of the profane. The aim of the following pages is to illustrate and define this opposition between sacred and profane.
In this book, the author argues that any religious thought relies on a strict distinction between the sacred and the profane.
See also
References
- ↑ Eliade, Mircea. The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, p. 10. New York: Harvest Book, 1961.