The Sacred and the Covenant

The sacred is Janus-faced, writes Roger Scruton in Soul of the World(15): “Sacred objects, words, animals, ceremonies, places all seem to stand at the horizon of our world, looking out to that which is not of this world, because it belongs in the sphere of the divine, and looking also into our world, so as to meet us face-to-face.”

Our encounters with the sacred are moments of “pure subjectivity, in which nothing concrete appears, but in which everything hangs on the here and now.” Recovering this “moment of real presence” is the question for contemporary religion, and only when it is recovered can we ask “whether it is or is not a true revelation – a moment not just of faith but of knowledge, and a gift of Grace” (23).

He offers a similar description of our encounter with the sacred toward the end of the book. Citing the Muslim notion that God possesses an “inimitable tawhid or oneness,” he suggests that “we are attributing unity and identity to God conceived purely as a subject, and without reference to any facts in the order of nature, such as we might use of each other to recognize and attribute identity through time. We are raising the problem of personal identity in a form so acute that perhaps we can say nothing further in response to it. We are understanding God as, so to speak, the unclothed subject, from which all marks of identity have fallen away” (191).

This is not to say that the encounter with the sacred is wholly detached from what Scruton calls the order of the “covenant,” the order of obligations and demands that constitute social existence. The sacred breaks into the order of the covenant “when, in the midst of all our calculations, we set aside the order of the covenant and see the world, ourselves, and all that we have as given – as signs, so the Christian would put it, of God’s grace.” Sacred moments are not, pace Girard, preeminently moments of violence, but moments “in which the gift idea breaks through” (182). 

In the Old Testament, He points out, there is an order other than that of the covenant, which reveals itself especially in emergency moments “when we confront the truth that we are suspended between being and nothingness” (185). But the God of the Old Testament promises to be within the sphere of the covenant and to enter into covenant with Him (186). Though it erupts in the midst of the covenant, the sacred is an eruption, breaking open the covenant order to shine the light of the ineffable sheer gift-ness of our existence.

Rich and provocative as all this is, it doesn’t capture the radical disruption that biblical religion causes. For the Bible, we cannot encounter an unclothed God because God has clothed Himself. He is present to us not just within the covenant but as the Lord of the covenant, as the God identified by (or, following Jenson, with) His acts in the natural realm – His rescue of Israel from Egypt, His raising Jesus His Son from the dead. Scruton’s evocative discussion of the sacred would be more convincing if he had added, say, several heaping cups of Jenson.