Time and History in the Conceptual Plan of the Sacred: Four Stories

Abstract

The article is dedicated to the problem of “sacred time” and analyzes the variable relations between the sacred, time and history. Starting from the controversy with Mircea Eliade’s popular idea that sacred time represents the archetypal eternity opposed to profane duration, the author underlines extremely peculiar character of this idea and considers several others in order to show that this problem could be solved differently. In Durkheim’s theory the place of sacred time is occupied by collective “total time” as a social cycle that suppresses and incorporates all the individual cycles. In the theory of Hubert and Mauss the sacred reproduces itself in the ritual, which is based on natural cycles, i.e. revolution of the seasons. Bataille’s views on the temporal and historical dimensions of the sacred were constantly changing, so in the late 1930s he appealed to the time of “eternal recurrence” and then in his later works he consistently contrasted the sacred timelessness to the profane duration, which takes shape in the positioning of the instrument of labor and the distance between the goals and the means. Caillois equated the meanings of the archaic holiday and modern war, pointing to the evolution of the sacred in the recent history, and Girard regarded the sacred time as a kind of cyclic “loops” appearing in the ordinary time and believed that the Christian revelation deprives the sacred of its power and moves the history to apocalypse. All this allows the author to draw a conclusion about the relativity of sacred time as a concept and relativize it as a research tool.