Horror in the face of the divine

‘Moreover, the animal accepted the immanence that submerged it without apparent protest, whereas man feels a kind of impotent horror in the sense of the sacred. This horror is ambiguous.’(p.36)  The impotent horror that is experienced is not so much a horror in the face of the sacred, but rather of horror of ourselves as objects in a world of muck and misery. To what extent are we different from animals or are we at all? To conceive of a God, the human being must be relegated to a lower position, but one that is distinct from all other life on earth. A profound isolation must therefore ensue.

We find ourselves severed from all other sentient creatures, and held at bay from the divine spirits.

Man worships the divine spirit in order to affirm his divinity as separate from and greater than all other life but in so doing, we are necessarily estranged from our very nature. And what is that nature? It is our animality, which is repressed in culture, and the household. Civilization constantly reinforces a potent renunciation of the animal in man. We consume, shit, have sex, reproduce, experience hunger and pain and pleasure, just as animals do.  This disgusts the human being who seeks to move beyond his or her animalistic desires, fears, and instincts.

I am intrigued by the idea that we need the divine in order to separate ourselves from the beast within us that is so terrifying to encounter, while it is this divinity that contributes to an enhanced sense of horror at our profane and fallen world(to use Bataille’s words.). As Bataille says, ‘The reality of a profane world, a world of things and bodies, is established opposite a holy and mythical world.’(p.37). Hesitant whether or not to succumb to our animal nature, and degraded before the Gods, the human is at odds with both spirituality, as well as life on earth.

We are constantly on the brink of falling out of this world as from the first moment that we were cast from the garden of Eden.  It is perhaps what drives us to act, the tendency towards aggression and ultimately towards death itself. It is an animalistic instinct, which we attempt to subdue and codify in our culture. There must be religion in order to combat the disorder in our world, and our confounding position within all of it. I just finished Civilization and its Discontents and cannot help but think about Bataille in relation to Freud. In particular, the death instinct seems to have some bearing on what Bataille presents in his Theory of Religion. Freud says ‘..besides the instinct to preserve living substance and to join it into ever larger units, there must exist another, contrary instinct seeking to dissolve those units and to bring them back to their primeval, inorganic state. That is to say, as well as Eros there was an instinct of death.’(p. 114). And is this not the tendency that we seek to avoid with religion? We look upward for grace and the intangible sacred, fearing all the while an inevitable plunge downward into the abyss. We murder each other, kill other creatures and consume their flesh both raw and cooked; it is terrifying to recognize that we all have the capability, the drive and the desire to harm and to revel in the very act.

Religion allows us to turn our faces to the heavens, forget the body we have just consumed and the death of the creature that was slaughtered. ‘For ‘little children do not like it when there is talk of the inborn human inclination to badness’, to aggressiveness and destructiveness, and so to cruelty as well. God has made them in the image of His own perfection;’(Freud 116). Perhaps we are perfect creatures made in God’s likeness, but we were also cast out and relegated to the imperfect earth. The irrevocable fall from grace compels the human being to climb up and reclaim her divinity; however it seems that the Divine, as Bataille writes about it, only perpetuates the isolation that is experienced. It creates a terrible split between physical reality, our animal traits, and most importantly the divinity that exists on our earth. So, there is a separation of subject and object, wherein the subject, being the human being, withdraws from her world.  

Bataille says ‘In a sense, the world is still, in a fundamental way, immanence without a clear limit ( an indistinct flow of being into being- one thinks of the unstable presence of water in water). So the positing, in the world, of a “supreme being” distinct and limited like a thing, is first of all an impoverishment. There is doubtless, in the invention of a supreme being, a determination to define a value that is greater than any other. But this desire to increase results is a diminution.’(p. 34).  The human subject becomes further divided in the face of the divine, an odd consequence if one is to consider the dogma surrounding the institution of religion, for do we not seek to unify ourselves by adhering to its principles?  We search for meaning in this life, for something that might bind us, ground us, to our world, each other, and other creatures; however it seems and Bataille argues, religion as a means only leads us further towards the inevitable chasm.

           

Bataille writes, ‘Insofar as it is spirit, the human reality is holy, but it is profane insofar as it is real. Animals, plants, tools, and other controllable things form a real world with the bodies that control them, a world subject to and traversed by divine forces, but fallen.’(38).  Our corporeal reality becomes debased before a sovereignty.  It is in this way, I believe that one may experience a sense of horror in the face of the divine. 

Is there no melancholic elegance in our dirty position as creatures who cannot decide what we ourselves are?

The human straddles a crooked path between the omnipotent perfection towards which she strives, and the animal nature from which she runs. Throw her a piece of bloody meat and she will tear it to pieces, relishing the taste of flesh. But she might sit down on a Sunday morning and be lost for hours perusing one single poem of 30 lines. The morning may smell of oranges and coffee, a complacent peignoir draped over her supine body. Divinity disguised in lace and chins cups. (*See Wallace Stevens, The Palm At The End Of The Mind ‘Sunday Morning’ ). We have poetry after all do we not? Our sacrosanct existence cannot be diminished in the face of any God. The drive to return to a state of non-being, to consume and be consumed which is a part of us and runs in our nature,  too becomes divine within the human being. The human being, who is a manifestation of the divine?  It is the drive towards death in tandem with the light within the subject, that makes her human. It is despicable to tear apart carcasses with our teeth, but that it perhaps because we have renounced the part of our nature that impels towards death and destruction.   Divinity encompasses pleasure and pain, the deaths and births that mark a lifetime.

Wallace Stevens implores the reader to consider a paradise on earth that encompasses death and all of the suffering that it brings to us. But there is something sacred in the disintegration, a palpable divinity in the drab quotidian proceedings. ‘Death is the mother of beauty; thence from her, along shall come fulfillment to our dreams and our desires. Although she strews the leaves of pure obliteration on our paths,..’( Stevens, 7) Our flesh and blood and desires, objectification and waste, that is what marks this existence so full of despair and joy.  Stevens asks, ‘Shall our blood fail? Or shall the earth seem all of paradise? And shall the earth seem all of paradise that we shall know? (Stevens, 6).