The Holy Stanislav Máselník

The Holy

Stanislav Máselník

On first appearance, thinking of the holy is one of those themes belonging to a dusty antiquary and a theme for conversations between gray-haired academics in their ivory towers. In our time, we have forgotten about such matters in favour of ‘ more pressing issues’ and only the few poetic souls chime in that it is perhaps the holy that has abandoned us. And the numbers speak for themselves. While in Sweden, 52% identified themselves as Christian in a 2018 survey by Pew Research Center, far fewer regularly attend church (12%), as a key indicator of religious practice.1 The difference between those who were raised Christian in Sweden (74%) and current figures (52%) indicates that in terms of the official creed, Christianity is suffering net losses accompanied by net growth in the numbers of religiously unaffiliated people. Differences between Western European countries exist, but minor qualifications confirm the general trend, which is a decline. As a result, if we look at the holy through the prism of affiliation to Christianity, we are led to conclude that Europe is well on the path to a fully post-religious age. Might this be, however, a far too restrictive view? Firstly, as a glance at Islam and other traditions such as Buddhism or Japanese Shintoism attests, not all religions are pursuing the same path as Christianity in Europe. Secondly, Christianity itself is quite prospering on other continents, notably in Africa and Latin America. Thirdly, and crucially, the holy might not be the same as being attached to any official religion or even to having a faith, which would require us to look at its subsistence in Europe more closely. To find out if we as Europeans are losing access to it, we are pushed to seriously ask what the holy is.

Despite the above developments, it cannot be neglected that certain familiarity with a ‘higher plane of existence’ did not abandon our daily experience. In the form of an ill-defined sensation of anxiety or fear of death, it returns with a striking force in such tumultuous moments as we have been living through in the last two years. This does not come as a surprise if we, like Thomas Mann in The Magic Mountain, connect the passing of time with “the mystery that is man”.2 The time presented in this enchanting novel does not happen as a linear quantity: it has its instants when it drags in boredom, occasions when it seems to disappear in a heartbeat, but also junctures that are felt as historical. Mann’s time is the lived time: it is not a time of a mechanical clock, and for that reason only a war or a pandemic open up our eyes to the fact that some of its happenings are more profound. German philosopher Martin Heidegger thought in the same manner and put this even more simply: “time temporalizes itself only as long as there are human beings”.3 In other words: without humans there is no time and no sense of its importance, which comes together with our peculiar condition.

However, such lived time is not a given; it is not an ever-present feature of our experience. Instead, we tend to lose sight of it for ‘more pressing issues’ and to fall into “everydayness” as Heidegger called it in the book Being and Time. 4 We often happen to be awakened back to our fundamental condition only when the daily course of affairs is interrupted by a crisis. Such a krisis, if understood in the sense of the ancient Greeks, is not some new, groundbreaking turn of events: it is a decisive moment, but in such a way that we are thrown back and over against our own inner possibilities. Only because we are already morituri, 5 can we again grasp and realise that our time is finite.

Now, what do such heavy thoughts on time and human existence, carried by events we would rather forget, have to do with the holy? Should one rather not expect the holy to be something more spiritual, perhaps even joyful and lighthearted? Do we not feel closest to ‘beyond the ordinary’ when enjoying a drink and good music in a circle of friends, ‘spirited away on a cloud of fluff’ so to say? These two strands of thought do not have to be mutually exclusive. It might be that all such ways of being and experiencing, whether in anxiety or happiness, share the same ground, which is our human nature with its temporal character. This has been precisely the argument of Heidegger’s extensive work. Under the shadow of our finite existence, being itself resurfaces for us as a question. Even the most usual happening, because ‘it is’ , rather than ‘it is not’, can emerge as question-worthy and extra-ordinary. It is in this vein that Aristotle tells us that “every realm of nature is marvellous”, before he continues with a story of the ancient philosopher Heraclitus.6 Heraclitus, visited by curious strangers seeking a sample of the thinker’s reputed wisdom, found them perplexed when all he had to offer was an invitation to his stove, “for here too the gods are present.”7 Was it a false modesty, or a deeper understanding of what is at stake in our existence,

3 Heidegger [1953] 2014, 92 4 Heidegger 2008, 383 ff. 5 Latin for “those who are about to die”. 6 Aristotle 1912, V:645a 17 ff. 7 Ibid.

which people usually fail to notice? Similarly, in the hymn ‘At the Source of the Danube’ by Friedrich Hölderlin, we can read the following lines:

We name you, compelled by the holy, we name you Nature! And new, as from a bath From you emerges all that is divinely born.

In the extensive analysis of this poem, Heidegger remarked that in a later version, Hölderlin crossed out the word “nature” in favour of speaking of “the holy” alone.8 As nature – not only ours as humans but in the sense of everything that surrounds us and emerges into our life – is “older than the ages” and first of all makes everything appear. For that reason, it stands even “higher than the gods of Occident and Orient”, Hölderlin’s work teaches us.9 The holy, in other words, is not primarily an aspect or characteristic of a god, or of one religion or another. The holy is being itself, in its uncanny disposition to show itself to our understanding under a multitude of shapes – as questionworthy, if only we notice so.

Does it really have to take a crisis for us to come to this understanding? Are there not any lighter ways how we can take note of the ‘holy’ aspect of our existence? Perhaps there is no better example to look at than that of art. However popular subjectivist interpretations of art may be, whenever the community of artists, galleries, curators, and visitors meet, they expect to partake in something higher than someone’s self-expression. If the art were (only) an articulation of private thoughts or feelings, what reason do we have as the audience to recognise them as beautiful or, for that matter, even as ugly? Surely, one’s subjective expression in art presupposes that other, ‘individualised egos’ find a connection to it, and therefore must first identify what is being expressed and, secondly, in the ideal circumstance, accept that they share the offered interpretation. For that to happen, however, there must be some common ground between the artist and viewer. Otherwise, all attempts to glimpse beauty and sublime, or recognise the mastery of a craft, would turn hollow. They would have no meaning of their own, and any individual not suffering from ‘false consciousness’ would need to accept their true nature, which would be an expression of a feeling, thoughts, or will of another individual.

Yet, this is not the case. Despite the fact that subjectivism is taken almost for granted, in our actual behaviour we betray our quest for shared meaning and understanding, be it in art, or in life outside of it. This would hardly be possible if human beings did not share the same temporal nature, which has the capacity to reveal our surroundings and our existence in the aspect of the ‘holy. Whenever we sit down to a family table and submerge in a comfortable chatter with the closest ones, whenever we shiver in a small church when passing by burning candles (even if we are not believers), whenever all of us gather in a holy, yes, the holy, moment of joint admiration of works of art, in our deeds if not in our words, we partake in the silent beyond of our limited earth-bound selves.

Sources

Aristotle (1912), De Partibus Animalium. Translated by J. A. Smith and W. D. Ross. Vol. V. The Works of Aristotle( Oxford: Clarendon Press).

Heidegger, Martin (2000), Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry. Translated by Keith Hoeller. Amherst (New York: Humanity Books). ——— (2008), Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson.

——— (1953), 2014. Introduction to Metaphysics. Translated by Richard Polt and Gregory Fried. 2nd ed (New Haven and London: Yale University Press).

Mann, Thomas (1996), The Magic Mountain and The Making of the Magic Mountain. Translated by H.T. Lowe-Porter (London: Minerva). Pew Research Center (2018), Being Christian in Western Europe. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2018/05/29/ being-christian-in-western-europe/.

Stanislav Máselník, ‘The Holy’, series of digital photography, 2017–2022