Ralph Eliade To The Sacred Analysis

550 Words2 Pages

Grasping the true meaning of the Sacred may be a challenge for some due to the fact that it is ever-changing in the many religions of the world. Livingston mentions that almost all scholars today agree that religion is a system of activities and beliefs that are centered around something considered to be sacred or of ultimate value and power. These things, which could be spiritual beings, cosmic laws, geographic places, people, ideas, or ideologies, are set apart as sacred. Since the Sacred is considered to be of ultimate significance, Rudolf Otto believes the Sacred is essentially a nonrational and indescribable event of human experience. Mircea Eliade builds on Otto’s view, stating that the Sacred always establishes itself as something nonordinary. Eliade points out that both natural objects and human artifacts are capable of and have been transformed from a common use to a sacred presence. Since Otto and Eliade have a somewhat different view of the Sacred, they seem to have a different view on the experience a human has when encountering the Sacred.
Rudolf Otto believes that an encounter with the Sacred is the deepest and most essential element in all strong and honestly felt religious emotion. He explains this type of experience in terms of a Latin phrase, mysterium …show more content…

Nothing can begin, nothing can be done, without a previous orientation-and any orientation implies obtaining a fixed point. The discovery or prediction of a fixed point is equivalent to the creation of the world. The imago mundi is another central tendency that Mircea Eliade presents as fundamental to religious beliefs. The imago mundi can exist on any mass of gauges without conflict. It replicates the choice to create a world and the disorder around it. A temple is a great example of an imago mundi. The temple was initially thought of as a home for the gods whose presence maintained the holiness of the surrounding

Open Document