Awareness of the sacred (Christianity)

Although the sacred is experienced in the profane world as absence, nonetheless it is necessary for sense to be made of existence. The sacred only shows its true nature at the high points of human life (birth, falling in love, death, for example) and then withdraws. This gives the sacred the character of an event, which is further seen in the holiness of God as power intervening to shape history. In Christian terms, the definitive and universal salvation given in Jesus means that the holy and sacred are no longer set apart from the world. This was demonstrated symbolically at the moment of Christ's death when the temple curtain dividing the holy mysteries from the people was torn from top to bottom. The failure of Christianity to keep the non-rational element alive in religious experience is said to have given an intellectualistic and rationalistic interpretation of God. Holiness does not arise from ethics. The experience of the holy without ethics is referred to as numinous and, without the security that an ethical system arouses, is marked by dread. The natural sense of sacredness or holiness, whether within or outside of an ethical system, tends to be lost in modern, secularized society; humanity forgets the sacred and is indifferent to the grandeur and dread it represents, or if it recognizes the sacred at all looks upon it as totally "other" and apart from "normal" human life. But it is the sacred, the manifestation of the eternal and unchanging in the midst of time and of change, to which the individual responds in the search for what truly is. For, as Seyyed Hossein Nasr points out, it was to know the eternal and unchanging that human beings and their intelligence were created.