Ústav
religionistiky
Peter L. Berger: Religion and World-Construction, in: Peter L.
Berger, The Sacred Canopy. Elements of a Sociological
Theory of Religion, Doubleday: New York 1990, s. 3 - 29
FRVŠ
1890/2005
Téma: Náboženství jako sociální konstrukt
Every human society is an enterprise of world-building. Religion occupies a
distinctive place in this enterprise. Our main purpose here is to make some general statements
about the relationship between human religion and human world building. Before this can be
done intelligibly, however, the above statement about the world-building efficacy of society
must be explicated. For this explication it will be important to understand society in dialectic
terms (1).
Society is a dialectic phenomenon in that it is a human product, and nothing but a
human product, that yet continuously acts back upon its producer. Society is a product, of
man. It has no other being except that which is bestowed upon it by human activity and
consciousness. There can be no social reality apart from man. Yet it may also be stated that
man is a product of society. Every individual biography is an episode within the history of
society, which both precedes and survives it. Society was there before the individual was born
and it will be there after he has died that is more, it is within society, and as a result of social
processes, that the individual becomes a person, that he attains and holds onto an identity,
and that he carries out the various projects that constitute his life. Man cannot exist apart
from society. The two statements, that society is the product of man and that man is the
product of society, are not contradictory. They rather reflect the inherently dialectic
character of the societal be understood in terms that are adequate to its empirical reality (2).
The fundamental dialectic process of society consists of three moments, or steps. These
are externalization, objectivation, and internalization. Only if these three moments are
understood together can an 'empirically adequate view of society be maintained.
Externalization is the ongoing outpouring of human being into the world, both in the physical
and the mental activity of men. Objectivation is the attainment by the products of this activity
(again both physical and mental) of a reality that confronts its original producers as a facticity
external to and other than themselves. Internalization is the reappropriation by men of this
same reality, transforming it once again from structures of the objective world into structures
of the subjective consciousness. It is through externalization that society is a human product.
It is through objectivation that society becomes a reality sui generis. It is through
internalization that man is a product of society (3)
Externalization is an anthropological necessity. Man, as we know him empirically,
cannot be conceived of apart from the continuous outpouring of himself into the world in
which he finds himself. Human being cannot be understood as somehow resting within itself,
in some closed sphere of interiority, and then setting out to express itself in the surrounding
world. Human being is externalizing in its essence and from the beginning (4). This
anthropological root fact is very probably grounded in the biological constitution of man (5).
Homo sapiens occupies a peculiar position in the animal kingdom. This peculiarity manifests
itself in man's relationship both to his own body and to the world. Unlike the other higher
mammals, who are born with an essentially completed organism, man is curiously
"unfinished" at birth (6). Essential steps in the process of "finishing" man's development,
which have already taken place in the foetal period for the other higher mammals, occur in
the first year after birth in the case of man. That is, the biological process of "becoming man"
occurs at a time when the human infant is in interaction with an extra-organismic
environment, which includes both the physical 'and the human world of the infant. There is
thus a biological foundation to the process of "be-coming man" in the sense of developing
personality and appropriating culture. The latter developments are not somehow
superimposed as alien mutations upon the biological development of man, but they are
grounded in it.
The "unfinished" character of the human organism at birth is closely related to the
relatively unspecialized character of its instinctual structure. The nori-human animal enters
the world with highly specialized and firmly directed drives. As a result, it lives in a world
that is more or less completely determined by its instinctual structure. This world is closed in
terms of its possibilities, programmed, as it were, by the animaľs own constitution.
Consequently, each animal lives in an environment that is specific to its particular species.
There is a mouse .. world, a dog-world, a horse-world, and so forth. By contrast, man's
instinctual structure at birth is both underspecialized . and undirected toward a speciesspecific
environment. There is no man-world in the above sense. Man's world is imperfectly
programmed by his own constitution. It is an open world. That is, it is a world that must be
fashioned by man's own activity. Compared with the other higher mammals, man thus has a
double relationship to the world. Like the other mammals, man is in a world that antedates
his appearance. But unlike the other mammals, this world is not simply given, prefabricated
for him. Man must make a world for him self. The world-building activity of man, therefore,
is not a biologically extraneous phenomenon, but the direct consequence of man's biological
constitution.
The condition of the human organism in the world is thus characterized by a built-in
instability. Man does not have a given relationship to the world. He must ongoingly establish a
relationship with it. The same instability marks man's relationship to his own body (7). In a
curious way, man is "out of balance" with himself. He cannot rest within himself, but must
continuously come to terms with himself by expressing himself in activity. Human existence is
an ongoing "balancing act" between man and his body, man and his world. One may put this
differently by saying that man is constantly in the process of "catching up with himself." It is
in this process that man produces a world. Only in such a world produced by himself can he
locate himself and realize his life. But the same process that builds his world also "finishes"
his own being. In other words, man not only produces a world, but he also produces himself.
More precisely, he produces himself in a world.
In the process of world-building, man, by his own activity, specializes his drives and provides
stability for himself. Biologically deprived of a man-world, he constructs a human world. This
world, of course, is culture. Its fundamental purpose is to provide the firm structures for
human life that are lacking biologically. It follows that these humanly produced structures
can never have the stability that marks the structures of the animal world. Culture, although
it becomes for man a "second nature," remains something quite different from nature
precisely because it is the product of man's own activity. Culture must be continuously
produced and reproduced by man. Its structures are, therefore, inherently precarious and
predestined to change. The cultural imperative of stability and the inherent character of
culture as unstable together posit the fundamental problem of man's world building activity.
Its far-reaching implications will occupy us in considerable detail a little further on. For the
moment, suffice it to say that, while it is necessary that worlds be built, it is quite difficult to
keep them going. Culture consists of the totality of man's products (8).
Some of these are material, others are not. Man produces tools of every conceivable
kind, by means of which he modifies his physical environment and bends nature to his will.
Man also produces language and, on its foundation and by means of it, a towering edifice of
symbols that permeate every aspect of his life. There is good reason for thinking that the production
of non-material culture has always gone hand in hand with man's activity of
physically modifying his environment (9). Be this as it may, society is, of course, nothing but
part and parcel of non-material culture. Society is that aspect of the latter that structures
man's ongoing relations with his fellowmen (10). As but an element of culture, society fully
shares in the latter's character as a human product. Society is constituted and maintained by
acting human beings. It has no being, no reality, apart from this activity. Its patterns, always
relative in time and space, are not given in nature, nor can they be deduced in any specific
manner from the "nature of man." If one wants to use such a term as designating more than
certain biological constants, one can only say that it is the "nature of man" to produce a
world. What appears at any particular historical moment as "human nature" is itself a
product of man's world-building activity (11).
However, while society appears as but an aspect of culture, it occupies a privileged
position among man's cultural formations. This is due to yet another basic anthropological
fact, namely the essential sociality of man (12). Homo sapiens is the social animal. This means
very much more than the surface fact that man always lives in collectivities and, indeed, loses
his humanity when he is thurst into isolation from other men. Much more importantly, the
world-building activity of man is always and inevitably a collective enterprise. While it may
be possible, perhaps for heuristic purposes, to analyze man's relationship to his world in
purely individual terms, the empirical reality of human world-building is always a social one.
Men together shape tools, invent languages, adhere to values, devise institutions, and so on.
Not only is the individuaľs participation in a culture contingent upon a social process
(namely, the process called socialization), but his continuing cultural existence depends upon
the maintenance of specific social arrangements. Society, therefore, is not only an outcome of
culture, but a necessary condition of the latter. Society structures, distributes, and coordinates
the world building activities of men. And only in society can the products of those
activities persist over time.
The understanding of society as rooted in man's externalization, that is, as a product of
human activity, is particularly important in view of the fact that society appears to common
sense as something quite different, as independent of human activity and as sharing in the
inert givenness of nature. We shall turn in a moment to the process of objectivation that
makes this appearance possible. Suffice it to say here that one of the most important gains of a
sociological perspective is its reiterated reduction of the hypostatized entities that make up
society in the imagination of the man in the street to the human activity of which these entities
are products and without which they have no status in reality. The "stuff" out of which
society and all its formations are made is human meanings externalized in human activity.
The great societal hypostases (such as "the family," "the economy," "the state," and so forth)
are over again reduced by sociological analysis to the human activity that is their only
underlying substance. For this reason it is very unhelpful if the sociologist, except for heuristic
purposes, deals with such social phenomena as if they were, in actual fact, hypostases
independent of the human enterprise that originally produced them and keeps on producing
them. There is nothing wrong, in itself, with the sociologisťs speaking of institutions,
structures, functions, patterns, and so on. The harm comes only when he thinks of these, like
the man in the street, as entities existing in and of themselves, detached from human activity
and production. One of the merits of the concept of externalization, as applied to society, is
the prevention of this sort of static, hypostatizing thinking. Another way of putting this is to
say that sociological understanding ought always to be humanizing, that is, ought to refer
back the imposing configurations of social structure to the living human beings who have
created them (13).
Society, then, is a product of man, rooted in the phenomenon of externalization, which
in turn is grounded in the very biological constitution of man. As soon as one speaks of
externalized products, however, one is implying that the latter attain a degree of
distinctiveness as against their producer. This transformation of man's products into a world
that not only derives from man, but that comes to confront him as a facticity outside of
himself, is intended in the concept of objectivation. The humanly produced world becomes
something "out there." It consists of objects, both material and non-material, that are capable
of resisting the desires of their producer. Once produced, this world cannot simply be wished
away. Although all culture originates and is rooted in the subjective consciousness of human
beings, once formed it cannot be reabsorbed into consciousness at will. It stands outside the
subjectivity of the individual as, indeed, a world. In other words, the humanly produced
world attains the character of objective reality.
This acquired objectivity of man's cultural products pertains both to the material and
the non-material ones. It can readily be understood in the case of the former. Man
manufactures a tool and by that action enriches the totality of physical objects present in the
world. Once produced, the tool has a being of its own that cannot be readily changed by those
who employ it. Indeed, the tool (say, an agricultural implement) may even enforce the logic of
its being upon its users, sometimes in a way that may not be particularly agreeable to them~
For instance, a plow, though obviously a human product, is an external object not only in the
sense that its users may fall over it and hurt themselves as a result, just as they may by falling
over a rock or a stump or any other natural object. More interestingly, the plow may compel
its users to arrange their agricultural activity, and perhaps also other aspects of their lives, in
a way .that conforms to its own logic and that may have been neither intended nor foreseen by
those who originally devised it. The same objectivity, however, characterizes the non-material
elements of culture' as well. Man invents a language and then finds that both his speaking and
his thinking are dominated by its grammar. Man produces values and discovers that he feels
guilt when he contravenes them. Man concocts institutions, which come to confront him as
powerfully controlling and even menacing constellations of the external world. The
relationship between man and culture is thus aptly illustrated by the tale of the sorcerer's
apprentice. The mighty buckets, magically called out of nothingness by human fiat, are set in
motion. From that point on they go about drawing water in accordance with an inherent logic
of their own being that, at the very least, is less than completely controlled by their creator. It
is possible, as happens in that story, that man may find an additional magic that will bring
back under his control the vast forces he has unleashed upon reality. This power, though, is
not identical with the one that first set these forces in motion. And, of course, it can also
happen that man drowns in the floods that he himself has produced.
If culture is credited with the status of objectivity, there is a double meaning to this
appellation. Culture is objective in that it confronts man as an assemblage of objects in the
real world existing outside his own consciousness. Culture is there. But culture is also
objective in that it may be experienced and apprehended, as it were, in company. Culture is
there for everybody. This means that the objects of culture (again, both the material and nonmaterial
ones) may be shared with others. This distinguishes them sharply from any
constructions of the subjective consciousness of the solitary individual. This is obvious when
one compares a tool that belongs to the technology of a particular culture with some utensil,
however interesting, that forms part of a dream. The objectivity of culture as shared facticity,
though, is even more important to understand with reference to its non-material constituents.
The individual may dream up any number of, say, institutional arrangements that might well
be more interesting, perhaps even more functional, than the institutions actually recognized in
his culture. As long as these sociological dreams, so to speak, are confined to the individuaľs
own consciousness and are not recognized by others as at least empirical possibilities, they will
exist only as shadowlike phantasmata. By contrast, the institutions of the individuaľs society,
however much he may dislike them, will be real. In other words, the cultural world is not only
collectively produced, but it remains real by virtue of collective recognition. To be in culture
means to share in a particular world of objectivities
with others (14).
The same conditions, of course, apply to that segment of cultures we call society. It is
not enough, therefore, to say that society is rooted in human activity. One must also say that
society is objectivated human activity, that is, society is a product of human activity that has
attained the status of objective reality. The social formations are experienced by man
as elements of an objective world. Society confronts man as external, subjectively opaque and
coercive facticity (15).
Indeed, society is commonly apprehended by man as virtually equivalent to the
physical universe in its objective presence - a "second nature," indeed. Society is experienced
as given "out there," extraneous to subjective consciousness and not controllable by the latter.
The representations of solitary fantasy offer relatively little resistance to the individuaľs
volition. The representations of society are immensely more resistant. The individual can
dream of different societies and imagine himself in various contexts. Unless he exists in
solipsistic madness, he will know the difference between these fantasies and the reality of his
actual life in society, which prescribes a commonly recognized context for him and imposes it
upon him regardless of his wishes. Since society is encountered by the individual as a reality
external to himself, it may often happen that its workings remain opaque to his understanding.
He cannot discover the meaning of a social phenomenon by introspection. He must, for
this purpose, go outside himself and engage in the basically same kind of empirical inquiry
that is necessary if he is to understand anything located outside his own mind. Above all,
society manifests itself by its coercive power. The final test of its objective reality is its
capacity to impose itself upon the reluctance of individuals. Society directs, sanctions,
controls, and punishes individual conduct. In its most powerful apotheoses (not a loosely
chosen term, as we shall see later), society may even destroy the individual.
The coercive objectivity of society can, of course, be seen most readily in its procedures
of social control, that is, in those procedures that are specifically designed to "bring back into
line" recalcitrant individuals or groups. Political and legal institutions may serve as obvious
illustrations of this. It is important to understand, however, that .the same coercive objectivity
characterizes society as (Z whole and is present in all social institutions, including those
institutions that were founded on consensus. This (most emphatically) does not mean that all
societies are variations of tyranny. It does mean that no human construction can be accurately
called a social phenomenon unless it has achieved that measure of objectivity that compels the
individual to recognize it as real. In other words, the fundamental coerciveness of society lies
not in its machineries of social control, but in its power to constitute and to impose itself as
reality. The paradigmatic case of this is language. Hardly anyone, however far removed from
sociological thinking, is likely to deny that language is a human product. Any particular
language is the result of a long history of human inventiveness, imagination and even caprice.
While man's vocal organs impose certain physiological limitations on his linguistic fancy,
there are no laws of nature that can be called upon to explain the development of, say, the
English language. Nor does the latter have any status in the nature of things other than its
status as a human production. The English language originated in specific human events, was
developed throughout its history by human activity, and it exists only insofar and as long as
human beings continue to use and understand it. Nevertheless, the English language presents
itself to the individual as an objective reality, which he must recognize as such or suffer the
consequences. Its rules are objectively given. They must be learned by the individual, whether
as his first or as a foreign language, and he cannot change them at will. There are objective
standards for correct and incorrect English, and although there may be differences of opinion
about minor details, the existence of such standards is a precondition for the use of the
language in the first place. There are, of course, penalties for offending against these
standards, from failing in school to social embarrassment in later life, but the objective reality
of the English language is not primarily constituted by these penalties. Rather, the English
language is real objectively by virtue of the simple fact that it is there, a ready- made and
collectively recognized universe of discourse within which individuals may understand each
other and themselves (16).
Society, as objective reality, provides a world for man to inhabit. This world
encompasses the biography of the individual, which unfolds as a series of events within that
world. Indeed, the individuaľs own biography is objectively real only insofar as it may be
comprehended within the significant structures of the social world. To be sure, the individual
may have any number of highly subjective self-interpretations, which will strike others as
bizarre or as downright incomprehensible. Whatever these self-interpretations may be, there
will remain the objective interpretation of the individuaľs biography that locates the latter in
a collectively recognized frame of reference. The objective facts of this biography may be
minimally ascertained by consulting the relevant personal documents. 'Name, legal descent,
citizenship, civil status, occupation-these are but some of the "official" interpretations of
individual existence, objectively valid not only by force of law but by the fundamental realitybestowing
potency of society. What is more, the individual himself, unless again he encloses
himself in a solipsistic world of withdrawal from the common reality, will seek to validate his
self-interpretations by comparing them with the objectively available coordinates of his
biography. In other words, the individuaľs own life appears as objectively real, to himself as
well as to others, only as it is located within a social world that itself has the character of
objective reality (17).
The objectivity of society extends to all its constituent elements. Institutions, roles, and
identities exist as objectively real phenomena in the social world, though they and this world
are at the same time nothing but human productions. For example, the family as the
institutionalization of human sexuality in a particular society is experienced and apprehended
as on objective reality. The institution is there, external and coercive, imposing its predefined
patterns upon the individual in this particular area of his life. The same objectivity belongs to
the roles that the individual is expected to play in the institutional context in question, even if
it should happen that he does not particularly enjoy the performance. The roles of, for
instance, husband, father or uncle are objectively defined and available as models for
individual conduct. By playing these roles, the individual comes to represent the institutional
objectivities in a way that is apprehended, by himself and by others, as detached from the
"mere" accidents of his individual existence (18). He can "put on" the role, as a cultural
object, in a manner analogous to the "putting on" of a physical object of clothing or
adornment. He can further retain a consciousness of himself as distinct from the role, which
then relates to what he apprehends as his "real self" as mask to actor. Thus he can even say
that he does not like to perform this or that detail of the role, but must do so against his willbecause
the objective description of the role so dictates. Furthermore, society not only
contains an objectively available assemblage of institutions and roles, but a repertoire of
identities endowed with the same status of objective reality. Society assigns to the individual
not only a set of roles but a designated identity. In other words, the individual is not only
expected to perform as husband, father, or uncle, but to be a husband, a father, or an uncleand,
even more basically, to be a man, in terms of whatever "being" this implies in the society
in question. Thus, in the final resort, the objectivation of human activity means that man becomes
capable of objectivating a part of himself within his own consciousness, confronting
himself within himself in figures that are generally available as objective elements of the social
world. For example, the individual qua "real self" can carryon an internal conversation with
himself qua archbishop. Actually, it is only by means of such internal dialogue with the
objectivations of oneself that socialization is
possible in the first place (19).
The world of social objectivations, produced by externalizing consciousness, confronts
consciousness as an external facticity. It is apprehended as such. This apprehension, however,
cannot as yet be described as internalization, any more than can the apprehension of the
world of nature. Internalization is rather the reabsorption into consciousness of the
objectivated world in such a way that the structures of this world come to determine the
subjective structures of consciousness itself. That is, society now functions as the formative
agency for individual consciousness. Insofar as internalization has taken place, the individual
now apprehends various elements of the objectivated world as phenomena internal to his
consciousness at the same time as he apprehends them as phenomena of external reality.
Every society that continues in time faces the problem of transmitting its objectivated
meanings from one generation to the next. This problem is attacked by means of the processes
of socialization, that is, the processes by which a new generation is taught to live in
accordance with the institutional programs of the society. Socialization can, of course, be
described psychologically as a learning process. The new generation is initiated into the
meanings of the culture, learns to participate in its established tasks and to accept the roles as
well as the identities that make up its social structure. Socialization, however, has a crucial
dimension that is not adequately grasped by speaking of a learning process. The individual
not only learns the objectivated meanings but identifies with and is shaped by them. He draws
them into himself and makes them his meanings. He becomes not only one who possesses these
meanings, but one who represents and expresses them.
The success of socialization depends upon the establishment of symmetry between the
objective world of society and the subjective world of the individual. If one imagines a totally
socialized individual, each meaning objectively available in the social world would have its
analogous meaning given subjectively within his own consciousness. Such total socialization is
empirically non-existent and theoretically impossible, if only by reason of the biological
variability of individuals. However, there are degrees of success in socialization. Highly
successful socialization establishes a high degree of objective/subjective symmetry, while
failures of socialization lead to various degrees of asymmetry. If socialization is not successful
in internalizing at least the most important meanings of a given society, the latter becomes
difficult to maintain as a viable enterprise. Specifically, such a society would not be in a
position to establish a tradition that would ensure its persistence in time.
Man's world-building activity is always a collective enterprise. Man's internal
appropriation of a world must also. take place in a collectivity. It has by now become a social
scientific platitude to say that it is impossible to become or to be human, in any empirically
recognizable form that goes beyond biological observations, except in society. This becomes
less .of a platitude if one adds that the internalization of a world is dependent on society in the
same way, because one is thereby saying that man is incapable of conceiving of his experience
in a comprehensively meaningful way unless such a conception is transmitted to him by
means of social processes. The processes that internalize the socially objectivated world are
the same processes that internalize the socially assigned identities. The individual is socialized
to be a designated person and to inhabit a designated world. Subjective identity and
subjective reality are produced in the same dialectic (here, in the etymologically literal sense)
between the individual and those significant others who are in charge of his socialization (20).
It is possible to sum up the dialectic formation of identity by saying that the individual
becomes that which he is addressed as by others. One may add that the individual
appropriates the world in conversation with others and, furthermore, that both identity and
world remain real to himself only as long as he can continue the conversation.
The last point is very important, for it implies that socialization can never be
completed, that it must be an ongoing process throughout the lifetime of the individual. This is
the subjective side of tbe already remarked-upon precariousness of all humanly constructed
worlds. The difficulty of keeping a world going expresses itself psychologically in the difficulty
of keeping this world subjectively plausible. The world is built up in the consciousness of the
individual by conversation with significant others (such as parents, teachers, "peers"). The
world is maintained as subjective reality by the same sort of conversation, be it with the same
or with new significant others (such as spouses, friends, or other associates). If such
conversation is disrupted (the spouse dies, the friends disappear, or one comes to leave one's
original social milieu), the world begins to totter, to lose its subjective plausibility. In other
words, the subjective reality of the world hangs on the thin thread of conversation. The reason
why most of us are unaware of this precariousness most of the time is grounded in the
continuity of our conversation with significant others. The maintenance of such continuity is
one of the most important imperatives of social order.
Internalization, then, implies that the objective facticity of the social world becomes a
subjective facticity as well. The individual encounters the institutions as data of the objective
world outside himself, but they are now data of his own consciousness as well. The
institutional programs set up by society are subjectively real as attitudes, motives and life
projects. The reality of the institutions is appropriated by the individual along with his roles
and his identity. For example, the individual appropriates as reality the particular kinship
arrangements of his society. Ipso facto, he takes on the roles assigned to him in this context
and apprehends his own identity in terms of these roles. Thus, he not only plays the role of
uncle, but he is an uncle. Nor, if socialization has been fairly successful, does he wish to be
anything else. His attitudes toward others and his motives for specific actions are endemically
avuncular. If he lives in a society which has established unclehood as a centrally significant
institution (not ours, to be sure, but most matrilineal societies), he will conceive of his whole
biography (past, present, and future) in terms of his career as an uncle. Indeed, he may even
sacrifice himself for his nephews and derive consolation from the thought that his own life will
continue in them. The socially objectivated world is still apprehended as external facticity.
Uncles, sisters, nephews exist in objective reality, comparable in facticity to the species of
animals or rocks. But this objective world is also apprehended now as subjective meaningindividual
meanings that remain outside of or marginal to the common nomos. Indeed, as wilt
be seen a little later, the marginal experiences of the individual are of considerable importance
for an understanding of social existence. All the same, there is an inherent logic that
impels every nomos to expand into wider areas of meaning. If the ordering activity of society
never attains to totality, it may yet be described as totalizing (25).
The social world constitutes a nomos both objectively and subjectively. The objective
nomos is given in the process of objectivation as such. The fact of language, even if taken by
itself, can readily be seen as the imposition of order upon experience. Language nomizes by
imposing differentiation and structure upon the ongoing flux of experience. As an item of.
experience is named, it is ipso facto, taken out of this flux and given stability as the entity so
named. Language further provides a fundamental order of relationships by the addition of
syntax and grammar to vocabulary. It is impossible to use' language without participating in
its order. Every empirical language may be said to constitute a nomos in the making, or, with
equal validity, as the historical consequence of the nomizing activity of generations of men.
The original nomizing act is to say that an item is this, and thus not that. As this original
incorporation of the item into an order that includes other items is followed by sharper
linguistic designations (the item is male and not female, singular and not plural, a noun and
not a verb, and so forth), the nomizing act intends a comprehensive order of all items that
may be linguistically objectivated, that is, intends a totalizing nomos.
On the foundation of language, and by means of it, is built up the cognitive and
normative edifice that passes for "knowledge" in a society. In what it "knows," every society
imposes a common order of interpretation upon experience that becomes "objective
knowledge" by means of the process of objectivation discussed before. Only a relatively small
part of this edifice is constituted by theories of one kind or another, though theoretical
"knowledge" is particularly important because it usually contains the body of "official"
interpretations of reality. Most socially objectivated "knowledge" is pretheoretical. It consists
of interpretative schemas, moral maxims and collections of traditional wisdom that the man
in the street frequently shares with the theoreticians. Societies vary in the degree of
differentiation in their bodies of "knowledge." Whatever these variations, every society
provides for its members an objectively available body of "knowledge." To participate in the
society is to share its "knowledge," that is, to co-inhabit its nomos.
The objective nomos is internalized in the course of socialization. It is thus
appropriated by the individual to become his Own subjective ordering of experience. It is by
virtue of this appropriation that the individual can come to "make sense" of his own
biography. The discrepant elements of his past life are ordered in terms of what he "knows
objectively" about his own and others' condition. His ongoing experience is integrated into the
same order, though the latter may have to be modified to allow for this integration. The future
attains a meaningful shape by virtue of the same order being projected into it. In other words,
to live in the social world is to live an ordered and meaningful life. Society is the guardian of
order and meaning not only objectively, in its institutional structures, but subjectively as well,
in its structuring of individual consciousness.
It is for this reason that radical separation from the social world, or anomy, constitutes such a
powerful threat to the individual (26). It is not only that the individual loses emotionally
satisfying ties in such cases. He loses his orientation in experience. In extreme cases, he loses
his sense of reality and identity. He becomes anomic in the sense of becoming worldless. Just
as an individuaľs nomos is constructed and sustained in conversation with significant others,
so is the individual plunged toward anomy when such conversation is radically interrupted.
The circumstances of such nomic disruption may, of course, vary. They might involve large
collective forces, such as the loss of status of the entire social group to which the individual
belongs. They might be more narrowly biographical, such as the loss of significant others by
death, alien forces of chaos. This chaos must be kept at bay at all cost. To ensure this, every
society develops procedures that assist its members to remain "reality-oriented" (that is, to
remain within the reality as "officially" defined) and to "return to reality" (that is, to return
from the marginal spheres of "irreality" to the socially established nomos). These procedures
will have to be looked at more closely a little later. For the moment, suffice it to say that the
individual is provided by society with various methods to stave off the nightmare world of
anomy and to stay within the safe boundaries of the
established nomos.
The social world intends, as far as possible, to be taken for granted (31). Socialization
achieves success to the degree that this taken-for-granted quality is internalized. It is not
enough that the individual look upon the key meanings of the social order as useful, desirable,
or right. It is much better (better, that is, in terms of social stability) if he looks upon them as
inevitable, as part and parcel of the universal "nature of things." If that can be achieved, the
individual who. strays seriously from the socially defined programs can be considered not
only a fool or a knave, but a madman. Subjectively, then, serious deviance provokes not only
moral guilt but the terror of madness. For example, the sexual program of a society is taken
for granted not simply as a utilitarian or morally correct arrangement, but as an inevitable
expression of "human nature." The so-called "homosexual panic" may serve as an excellent
illustration of the terror unleashed by the denial of the program. This is not to deny that this
terror is also fed by practical apprehensions and qualms of conscience, but its fundamental
motorics is the terror of being thrust into an outer darkness that separates one from the
"normal" order of men. In other words, institutional programs are endowed with an
ontological status to the point where to deny them is to deny being itself-the being of the
universal order of things and, consequently, one's own being in this order.
Whenever the socially established nomos attains the quality of being taken for granted,
there occurs a merging of its meanings with what are considered to be the fundamental
meanings inherent in the universe. Nomos and cosmos appear to be co-extensive. In archaic
societies, nomos appears as a microcosmic reflection, the world of men as expressing
meanings inherent in the universe as such. In contemporary society, this archaic cosmization
of the social world is likely to take the form of "scientific" propositions about the nature of
men rather than the nature of the universe (32). Whatever the historical variations, the
tendency is for the meanings of the humanly constructed order to be projected into the
universe as such (33). It may readily be seen how this projection tends to stabilize the tenuous
nomic constructions, though the mode of this stabilization will have to be investigated further.
In any case, when the nomos is taken for granted as appertaining to the "nature of things,"
understood cosmologically or anthropologically, it is endowed with a stability deriving from
more powerful sources than the historical efforts of human beings. It is at this point that
religion enters significantly into our argument.
Religion is the human enterprise by which a sacred cosmos is established (34). Put
differently, religion is cosmization in a sacred mode. By sacred is meant here a quality of
mysterious and awesome power, other than man and yet related to him, which is believed to
reside in certain objects of experience (35). This quality may be attributed to natural or
artificial objects, to animals, or to men, or to the objectivations of human culture. There are
sacred rocks, sacred tools, sacred cows. The chieftain may be sacred, as may be a particular
custom or institution. Space and time may be assigned the same quality, as in sacred localities
and sacred seasons. The quality may finally be embodied in sacred beings, from highly
localized spirits to the great cosmic divinities. The latter, in turn, may be transformed into
ultimate forces or principles ruling the cosmos, no longer conceived of in personal terms but
still endowed with the status of sacredness. The historical manifestations of the sacred vary
widely, though there are certain uniformities to be observed cross-culturally (no matter here
whether these are to be interpreted as resulting from cultural diffusion or from an inner logic
of man's religious imagination). The sacred is apprehended as "sticking out" from the normal
routines of everyday life, as something extraordinary and potentially dangerous, though its
dangers can be domesticated and its potency harnessed to the needs of everyday life. Although
the sacred is apprehended as other than man, yet it refers to man, relating to him in a way in
which other non-human phenomena (specifically, the phenomena of non-sacred nature) do
not. The cosmos posited by religion thus both transcends and includes man. The sacred
cosmos is confronted by man as an immensely powerful reality other than himself. Yet this
reality addresses itself to him and locates his life in an ultimately meaningful order.
On one level, the antonym to the sacred is the profane, to be defined simply as the
absence of sacred status. All phenomena are profane that do not "stick out" as sacred. The
routines of everyday life are profane unless, so to speak, proven otherwise, in which latter case
they are conceived of as being infused in one way or another with sacred power (as in sacred
work, for instance). Even in such cases, however, the sacred quality attributed to the ordinary
events of life itself retains its extraordinary character, a character that is typically reaffirmed
through a variety of rituals and the loss of which is tantamount to secularization, that is, to a
conception of the events in question as nothing but profane. The dichotomization of reality
into sacred and profane spheres, however related, is intrinsic to the religious enterprise. As
such, it is obviously important for any analysis of the religious phenomenon.
On a deeper level, however, the sacred has another opposed category, that of chaos
(36). The sacred cosmos emerges out of chaos and continues to confront the latter as its
terrible contrary. This opposition of cosmos and chaos is frequently expressed in a variety of
cosmogonic myths. The sacred cosmos, which transcends and includes man in its ordering of I
reality, thus provides man's ultimate shield against the terror of anomy. To be in a "right"
relationship with the sacred cosmos is to be protected against the nightmare threats of I
chaos. To fallout of such a "right" relationship is to be aban-doned on the edge of the abyss of
meaninglessness. It is not irrelevant to observe here that the English "chaos" derives from a
Greek word meaning "yawning" and "religion" from a Latin one meaning "to be careful."
To be sure, what the religious man is "careful" about is above all the dangerous power
inherent in the manifestations of the sacred themselves. But behind this danger is the other,
much more horrible one, namely that one may lose all connection with the sacred and be
swallowed up by chaos. All the nomic constructions, as we have seen, are designed to keep this
terror at bay. In the sacred cosmos, however, these constructions achieve their ultimate
culmination-literally, their apotheosis.
Human existence is essentially and inevitably externalizing activity. In the course of
extemalization men pour out meaning into reality. Every human society is an edifice of
externalized and objectivated meanings, always intending a I meaningful totality. Every
society is engaged in the never completed enterprise of building a humanly meaningful world.
Cosmization implies the identification of this humanly meaningful world with the world as
such, the former now being 'grounded in the latter, reflecting it or being derived from it in its
fundamental structures. Such a cosmos, as the ultimate ground and validation of human
nomoi, need not necessarily
be sacred. Particularly in modem times there have been thoroughly secular attempts at
cosmization, among which modern science is by far the most important. It is safe to say,
however, that originally all cosmization had a sacred character. This remained true through
most of human history, and not only through the millennia of human existence on earth
preceding what we now call civilization. Viewed historically, most of man's worlds have been
sacred worlds. Indeed, it appears likely that only by way of the sacred was it I possible for
man to conceive of a cosmos in the first place (37).
It can thus be said that religion has played a strategic part in the human enterprise of
world-building. Religion implies the farthest reach of man's self-externalization. of his
infusion of reality with his own meanings. Religion implies that human order is projected into
the totality of being. Put differently, religion is the audacious attempt to conceive of the entire
universe as being humanly significant.