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 animal's 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 species-specific 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 individual's 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 co-ordinates 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 sociologist's 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 non-material 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 individual's 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 individual's 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 individual's
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
individual's 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 individual's 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 reality-bestowing 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
individual's 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 will-because 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 uncle-and, 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 meaning- individual 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
individual's 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.