Sacred/Profane

Gadamer says in his discussion of the ontology of art in Truth and Method (Continuum Impacts) , “It is quite in order that the opposition between profane and sacred proves to be only relative. We need only recall the meaning and history of the word ‘profane’: the ‘profane’ is the place in front of the sanctuary. The concept of the profane and its cognate, profanation, always presuppose the sacred. Actually, the difference between profane and sacred could only be relative in classical antiquity, where it originated, since the whole sphere of life was sacrally ordered and determined.”

But Gadamer sees a shift with the New Testament: “Only with Christianity does profaneness come to be understood in a stricter sense. The New Testament undemonized the world to such an extent that an absolute contrast between the profane and the religious became possible. The church’s promise of salvation means that the world is always only ‘this world.’”

This could be taken wrongly to imply that Christianity contains the seeds of secularization in the modern sense, Gadamer himself suggests this later in the same paragraph. That’s a mistake, but Gadamer is right that Christianity simplified the religious landscape by eliminating grades of sacredness. The stark distinction of sacred and profane, of inside and outside with no threshold or profanum for the semi-insiders, is a result of the gospel’s reorganization of priestly, sacred space.