The sacral difference

Humanity is child of the difference. The sacral reality opens the new space of humanity by laying down the great funding differences, between secular and sacred, between absolute and relative, between good and bad, between pure and impure, between permitted and interdict, between heaven and earth, and so on.

The world is less than the world. The world is more than the world. Man is less than man. Man is more than man. The sacred realm begins with the original experience of this strange difference. It is provocative difference which leaves indifferent only the animal.

The ‘divine’ opens this difference through which humanity emerges dialectically. History shows evolutions and ruptures from elementary spirits to mineral, vegetable and animal divinities, from agrarian divinities to a cosmic god, from idols to an invisible God, from family, tribal, national gods to an universal God, from a demiurge to a creative God, from numerous divinities to one personal God…

The great original difference crosses the world into two. The human reality arises through this cut. Without it, the indifference would let him go dangerously alongside the chasm of nothing and death. This originating sacral division of the being crosses the world vertically, gives it a solid axis, and saves it from nothingness. It’s more than simple `qualities'. It’s about forces. And these sacral forces are actively antagonistic, they can clash and fight. The pure ones must be victorious. From the beginning the sacral forces determine and govern the ontological levels of the world. For original men they represent also a permanent threat.

The fundamental religious act is founder of difference. Everything starts with Eros, this dynamic tendency of live itself. The religious act is primarily dialectical and basically - well before its constitution in `religion' - contemporary to the dialectical act of humanization.

This gaping of the world, this open gratuitousness in the middle of the universal necessity, indicates a sacral realm. The sacral axis is the fundamental differential axis of the distance and the difference which is man itself. It is the vertical differential axis on which is articulated the dialectical possibility.

The animal eros is strictly at home in the world. The biological loop is buckled on itself. As long as the life coincides perfectly with itself it remains simply animal. A certain animal can become man because the purely biological loop cannot be buckled any more on itself. That implies a crisis of Eros, a sudden appearance of a disproportion between Eros and the world.

In the human realm Eros is gaping. An `elsewhere' is opening. Without this gaping and without the dialectical possibility given in it, man could never have arisen. Never could ‘another' being than an animal one have emerged if Eros had not been dialectically provoked by a great contradictory power. The specific human reality is constituted through this opening, `culture' in opposition to `nature'.

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