Sam Han

Spatial Secularization:
A Comparative Analysis of Religious Space in Mircea Eliade and Henri Lefebvre

Since the writings of Max Weber, though prefigured in the intellectual developments of

the West beginning with the Renaissance and reaching a boiling point with Nietzsche,

there has been a relatively widely accepted narrative of secularization and modernity.

Though philosophers and anthropologists of religion have debated the dynamics of such a

process, there has nevertheless been no serious disagreement with it. The narrative maps

the Weberian thesis of “rationalization” onto a certain Western civilizational

historiography, in which Europe rises up from the depths of what philosopher Charles

Taylor has called the horizontal medieval world onto the vertical world of modernity.1

The “secularization thesis” comprises of a variety of scholars that aim to tease out

the arguments which can be summed up by the formula: Secularization + Disenchantment

= Modernity.2 Since Weber’s description of modernity as the “disenchantment of the

world” [Entzauberung], which liberal French religion scholar Marcel Gauchet has

recently picked up on, there has been a general agreement in the social sciences and

humanities that the weakening grip of Christianity and its monotheistic brethren Islam

and Judaism, along with developments of technoscientific innovation are corollaries of

this process of modernization.3 Though the term Entzauberung refers to decline of

mysticism, one can easily make the argument that it resonates with Nietzsche’s earlier

pronouncement regarding the “death of God.”

1
See Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Belknap Press, 2007.
2
See Martin, David. On Secularization: Towards A Revised General Theory. Ashgate Publishing, 2005;
and Casanova, Jose. Public Religions in the Modern World. University Of Chicago Press, 1994.
3
See Weber, Max, Hans Heinrich Gerth, and Charles Wright Mills. “Science as a Vocation,” in From Max
Weber: Essays in Sociology. Routledge, 1998.

1
 Yet, there have been numerous, though perhaps unwitting, notable exceptions and

complications to the secularization thesis. One of the most famous of which is Marshall

Berman’s veritable phenomenology of modernity, which quotes Marx’s dictum that “all

that is solid melts into air.”4 Berman’s title is important as it highlights the rather startling

complexity with which Marx actually views capitalism. Shirking the cheap reading of

Marx that paints him as the reductionist bearer of the phrase: “opium of the masses,” the

lines at the beginning of the section on commodity fetishism in Capital I show a different

side, one that would go so far as to say that commodity fetishism displays “metaphysical

subtleties and theological niceties.”5 For Marx then, capitalism, though heavily reliant on

technoscientific innovation, also exhibits some spiritual qualities, especially in its system

of values, what Lukacs famously called “reification,” which as Nietzsche reminds us is

always a product of some form of monotheism.6

And indeed, it is the case that scholars of religion have taken note of the fact that

in the unfolding of capitalist modernity, there has not been a linear progression in the

form of “disenchantment,” or secularity. One could argue geopolitically that there has

been a reawakening of religious imaginaries in the Americas, Africa, Latin America and

Asia (but curiously not Europe).7 Many scholars, particularly of Islam have been very

attuned to the fact that modernity and religiosity are not necessarily in opposition to one

another, as some of the more hard-line (thus: more conservative) figures of the

secularization thesis would have it. Talal Asad, for example, has suggested “the secular”

4
Berman, Marshall. All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity. Penguin, 1988.
5
Marx, Karl. Capital: Volume 1: A Critique of Political Economy. Penguin Classics, 1992.
6
For Lukacs, see History and Class Consciousness: studies in Marxist dialectics. MIT Press, 1972.; for
Nietzsche, see On the Genealogy of Morals. Vintage Books, 1967.
7
PhillipGorski, among others, has suggested that Europe is exceptional when it comes to the level of
religious participation. Panel discussion “From the Square: Exploring the Post-Secular,” NYU, February
12, 2008.

2
is not a de facto space of the modern, but it is always in negotiation with the purported

“sacred.”8 Hence, the so-called resurgence of fundamentalisms of the Abrahamic variety

(Christian, Jewish and Muslim) in the late-20th century is not so much a return, as it is a

revelation to those of us in the Global North that have taken secularity for granted, and I

would argue at a great cost. My purpose is not so much to suggest that there has been a

great moral, intellectual and political failure (which undoubtedly there is) in the way that

the West has set a double-standard for Islam (as is the case in France regarding the

wearing of the hijab) but more so the a failure in looking at how specifically conceptions

of space have come to reflect and also complicate the Weberian thesis.

Why what will space contribute for the study of secularity? The importance of

space can be illustrated by the importance, and I would argue, reliance upon the language

“worlds” and “world-making” (or mondialisation as Jean-Luc Nancy has recently put it).9

This is a fact often overlooked in the contemporary discourse on “the secular” that has

made a strong return in very recently. It is unsurprising to a certain extent that the debates

have been organized wholly around the aspect of time implicit in the notion of

secularization. The –ization entails the progressive hegemony of secularity, that is, the

non-religious just as Rostow’s developmental notion of modernization entailed “stages of

growth.” And as the scholars who roundly criticized Rostow and his cohorts, the trouble

with any narrative of linear progression, whether it is with regard to economic growth or

secularity, it is a bit too neat so as to speak to the realities of the realm of social practice.

There have clearly been many scholars, theologians chief among them but not

exclusively, who have sought to free the secularization thesis from Weberian orthodoxy

8
Asad, Talal. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford University Press, 2003.
9
Nancy, Jean-Luc. The Creation of the World or, Globalization. SUNY Press, 2007.

3
using the analytic of space. One of the most well-received works of this trend-bucking in

the recent past has been Harvey Cox’s The Secular City: Secularization and

Urbanization in Theological Perspective (1965), which, as one can tell from just the title

of his book, is interested in the development of urban space.10 Indeed, Cox’s tract begins

with a theological claim which places the Bible squarely as the primary source of

secularization, going so far as to suggest that Creation is the beginning of the

disenchantment of nature. As he defines it, secularization, as distinct from secularism, is

“the liberation of a man [/woman] from religious and metaphysical tutelage, the turning

of his [or her] attention away from other worlds and toward this one.”11 Hence, he

maintains that secularization is an historical process that does not foreclose the possibility

of Christianity specifically (but it seems for other religions as well). In his words:

The forces of secularization have no serious interest in persecuting religion.

Secularization simply bypasses and undercuts religion and goes on to other things.
It has relativized religious world views and thus rendered them innocuous. It has
been privatized.12

So why does Cox’s definition of “secularization” differ so drastically from other

versions, especially that of Martin whose definition has arguably taken on canonical

status? Cox’s brief exposition of the root of the term “secular” gives us an angle to that

question.

The English word secular derives from the Latin word saeculum, meaning “this
present age.” . . . Basically saeculum is one of the two Latin words denoting
“world” (the other is mundus). . . The relationship between the two words is a
complex one. Saeculum is a time word, used frequently to translate the Greek
word aeon, which also means age or epoch. Mundus, on the other hand, is a space

10
Though it is no longer read with the same fervor, the best example of this is Cox, Harvey. The Secular
City. Macmillan, 1965.
11
Cox, p. 15.
12
Cox, p. 2.

4
 word, used most frequently to translate the Greek word cosmos, meaning the
universe or the created order.13

And thusly, Cox brings the discussion of the secular back to bear on the question of

space. He proceeds from the conceptual tension between saeculum and mundus to draw

various implications of Christianity in an increasingly secularized world.

The concept of space weaves through the entire frame of The Secular City, which

pushes reflects his definition of urbanization.

Urbanization means a structure of common life in which the diversity and the
disintegration of tradition are paramount. . .The urban center is the place of
human control, of rational planning, of bureaucratic organization—and the urban
center is not just in Washington, London, New York, and Peking. It is
everywhere. The technological metropolis provides the indispensable social
setting for a world where the grip of traditional religion is loosened, for what we
have called a secular style.14

For Cox, urbanization is reflective of a new world, which he dubs “the secular city” or

better yet the “technopolis.”

Though the specifics of Cox’s argument can undoubtedly be treated with some

correctives both theoretically and empirically, it seems though that his basic premise—

that secularization does not mean the end of Christianity or, for that matter, religion in

general but is the symptom of the rise of a different dominant worldview—is one that can

be further developed through the analytic of space. Additionally, despite the fact that the

urban question is indeed primarily one of space, Cox’s analysis does not take into

consideration (or at least focus on) the production of space itself in his figure of “the

secular city.”

13
Cox, p. 16. Italics in original.
14
Cox, p. 4.

5
 It is the aim of this paper to do just that—further investigate the conceptual

grounds upon which the notion of secularization by keeping in mind Cox’s rather

welcome corrective of Weber’s thesis regarding, what was for him, an impending

“cosmos” (one of his most often used words in his writings on religion) of rationality. It

will do so with specific attention paid to the analytic of space, using the work of Mircea

Eliade and Henri Lefebvre respective notions of “sacred space” and “absolute space.”

However, it is not simply the fate of so-called religious space in secularization that I am

interested in but in tracking the conceptualization of space in relation to social

experience, which Lefebvre quite simply (and effectively) conjoins as “social space.” In

other words, what does secularization mean for the concept of space as such?

Near the beginning of Heidegger’s Being and Time, there is a chapter entitled “The

Worldhood of the World.” In it, he ventures to ask a fundamental question regarding

Dasein: “What can be meant by describing ‘the world’ as a phenomenon?”15 What he

means to ask is: what separates the space of the “world” from its entities, those things

which are, in turn, “within-the-world.” Furthermore, how can the world be if indeed that

which perceives its existence is within it? But as usually the case with Heidegger, his

conclusion is already evident from the raising of the question itself. To ask about the

ontological status of the world—or “worldhood”—Heidegger is continuing his efforts

which span the entirety of Being and Time—to critique the metaphysics of Western

philosophy, which is to question the presupposition of the “world” itself, and

“unraveling” it.

15
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, Harper Perennial,
1962, p. 91.

6
 Neither the ontical depiction of entities within-the-world nor the ontological
Interpretation of their Being is such as to reach the phenomenon of the “world.”
In both of these ways of access to “Objective Being,” the “world” has already
been “presupposed,” and indeed in various ways.16

Hence, Heidegger goes on to argue for a study of environment which he admits does

contain the “suggestion of [Dasein’s] spatiality.”17 Yet Heidegger clearly favors

temporality as the most important for understanding the meaning of Being. But the

temporal argument in Being and Time should not be taken too far so as to suggest that

Heidegger squarely falls on the side of time at the cost of space. In my judgment, it is due

to a very specific philosophical objective in his discussion of “worldhood”—to critique

the Cartesian view of the world as res extensa—that he seems to be leaning on

temporality. Heidegger indeed does have an alternative spatial analysis of Dasein based

on what he calls “de-severing,” predicated off the Dasein’s “essential tendency towards

closeness.”18

If one were so inclined, the spatial dimension of Cox’s argument can be seen as

largely couched in the debate around what Heidegger in Being and Time refers to as

“worldhood.”19 In this line of thinking, Cox’s analysis is another way to ask Heidegger’s

question of the environment of Dasein. I’m positing that it is precisely this issue of

“environmentality” which is the key link weaving through social space and religious

experience, since it is the modulation of closeness that Heidegger sees as the central to

Dasein’s spatiality. Thus, I suggest we can fruitfully view the fate of “religious” space

and the process of secularization as defined by Cox through a Heideggerian turn to the

“everydayness” of Dasein by looking at Eliade and Lefebvre.

16
Heidegger, p. 92.
17
Heidegger, p. 94.
18
Heidegger, p. 140.
19
Heidegger, Martin, Being and Time, Harper Perennial, 1962, chapter III.

7
Mircea Eliade’s The Sacred and the Profane: the Nature of Religion (1959) offers a

conceptual grounding in religious space from which to work. Drawing on Durkheim and

Otto, Eliade reutilizes the sacred/profane juxtaposition for one principle theoretical stance

—that there are two modalities of being in the world.20 So then, what is the sacred?

The sacred always manifests itself as a reality of a wholly different order from
“natural” realities. It is true that language naively expresses the tremendum, or the
majestas, or the mysterium fascinans by terms borrowed from the world of nature
or from man’s secular mental life.21

For Eliade, the profane is the natural, phenomenological world. The sacred, on the other

hand, is of a wholly different order. “The sacred” is revealed to humans only through a

special process, through what he calls “hierophanies,” which can vary from

“manifestation of the sacred in some ordinary object, a stone or a tree” to Paul’s

experience on the road to Damascus. But, as Eliade is quick to note, hierophanies are

characterized by a paradox—“any object becomes something else, yet it continues to

remain itself, for it continues to participate in its surrounding cosmic milieu.”22

This paradox—of the hierophany maintaining itself and sanctity—does not cause

much distress for “archaic” or pre-modern man because all nature can potentially reveal

itself as cosmic sacrality for him.23 Eliade calls the world of pre-modern man “sacralized

cosmos,” whereas moderns live in a desacralized world.

The modern Occidental experiences a certain uneasiness before many

manifestations of the sacred. He finds it difficult to accept the fact that, for many
human beings, the sacred can be manifested in stones or trees, for example.24

20
Eliade, Mircea. The Sacred and the Profane, Harcourt, Brace & World, 1959, p. 14.
21
Eliade, p. 10.
22
Eliade, p. 12.
23
Ibid., p. 12.
24
Eliade, p. 11-12.

8
This is essentially the “abyss” that Eliade describes throughout his book, a difference in

what may be referred to for the purposes of this paper as worldview. Though

“worldview” has been adopted into mass culture as some general term for “philosophy,”

it has a rich history which begins, according to Alexandre Koyre, with Nicholas of Cusa

in late-medieval theology and begins a revolutionary transformation “from the closed

world to the infinite universe.”25 In many ways, Eliade’s analysis is a parallel account of

the fate of religion in modernity but with a focus on spatiality or “worldhood.” But unlike

the “world” described by Koyre, Eliade’s use of world is Heideggerian to the extent that

he looks at the everyday “environmentality” of religious people, which, however, does

not preclude the “grander” analysis of a figure such as Koyre.

I will go over a few of the key aspects of Eliade’s analysis of sacred versus

profane space before moving into detail regarding his thesis of the consecration of space

as fundamental ontology, which he calls “the creation of the world.”

The central feature of sacred space in Eliade’s scheme is heterogeneity. The

Euclidean model of homogeneous space does not work for the religious person precisely

because there are always sacred spaces such as holy sites. For example, before stepping

onto the ground of the Burning Bush God commanded Moses to remove his shoes.26

Hence, it is perfectly acceptable for space to exist in a differentiated plane. But more

significant than the simple fact of “spatial nonhomogeneity” is that it results “in the

experience of an opposition between space that is sacred—the only real and real-ly

existing space—and all other space, the formless expanse surrounding it.”27 Therefore,

Eliade’s claim of nonhomogeneity of religious space has larger significance for

25
Koyre, Alexandre. From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe, The Johns Hopkins Press, 1957.
26
As mentioned in Eliade, p. 20.
27
Ibid.

9
reconsidering what religious experience is. Though for moderns any space labeled “the

sacred” may intuitively feel far from the realm of what can be called “the real,” it is, so

Eliade maintains, the most real space of religious experience. This is because “the real”

in his language is akin to organized and fully oriented existence. Hence, sacralization of

space is described as a “revelation of an absolute reality,” what I would call, after

Heidegger and Koyre, a “world.”

Profane space, on the other hand, is homogeneous and neutral. Though he does

not call it by name, what Eliade has in mind, as I stated earlier, is Euclidean space in

which space can be “cut and delimited in any direction” without “qualitative

differentiation.”28 According to Eliade, profane space is a shattered universe of infinite

points, “an amorphous mass consisting of an infinite number of more or less neutral

places in which man moves, governed and driven by the obligations of an existence

incorporated into an industrial society.”29 Thus, “worldhood,” for Eliade, is the sole

property of sacred space, and profane space is not a world, properly speaking, because no

true orientation is possible due to a lack of center, which every manifestation of the

sacred has. Hence, the hierophany is the repetition of Creation, an ontological founding

of the world, constituted with an “absolute center.”30

Yet, there are some exceptions to the dichotomy that Eliade constructs. There are

elements of the sacred within the profane such as “privileged places” such as a birthplace

and other places with certain locational specificity that represent secular “holy places,”

which Eliade deems “crypto-religious behavior.” Thus, the “abyss,” which was how

Eliade earlier described the space between the sacred and profane, was a bit of an

28
Eliade, p. 22.
29
Ibid., p. 24.
30
Ibid., p. 21.

10
overstatement. And indeed, Eliade’s notion of the “threshold” is another example of the

intertwined nature of the sacred and profane experiences of space. The threshold is what

separates the sacred from the profane, representing the transcendent nature of sacred

space. This process Eliade describes as an “opening” or irruption, but it is no doubt a

recapitulation of his earlier pronouncement of the hierophany as fundamentally ontology

or “worlding.” But the hierophany is not a completely new world as it is an opening onto

the cosmic. Thus what makes a space sacred is not only its separation from the profane or

the chaotic but also the established connection to the cosmic.

The cosmos/chaos relationship is the spatial expression of the sacred/profane

relationship. But unlike the rather intertwined nature of the sacred/profane distinction,

chaos and cosmos display a far greater rigidity in opposition in Eliade’s formulation. This

is so because in traditional times there was not only a distinction but an opposition

between the inhabited space and the space of the unknown, which surrounds it. Eliade

describes this opposition thusly, using the language of “worldhood.”

The former is the world (more precisely, our world)), the cosmos; everything
outside it is no longer a cosmos but a sort of “other world,” a foreign, chaotic
space, peopled by ghosts, demons, “foreigners (who are assimilated to demons
and the souls of the dead). 31

What separates cosmos from chaos is not its “cosmicization”—the inhabitation and social

organization of space with the system of cultural meanings available to a certain group,

which Durkehim and Mauss famously called “collective representations” in Primitive

Classification.32 But rather, the inhabited space is made into “world” through

consecration. “The world (that is, our world),” Eliade writes, “is a universe within which

31
Eliade, p. 29.
32
Durkheim, Emile and Marcel Mauss. Primitive Classification. Trans. Rodney Needham. University of
Chicago Press, 1967.

11
the sacred has already manifested itself, in which, consequently, the break-through from

plane to plane has become possible and repeatable.”33 In all, the consecration of space

separates the sacred from the profane by transcending it, opens up the space for

communication with the world of gods and also repeats the primordial, cosmogonic act of

the gods.

An example of this cosmogony is the sacred pole that is erected in a space by

various archaic societies before inhabitation. The sacred pole acts as an axis mundi with

universal significance. To settle is to create; it is an ontological establishment of the

universe “in a particular place, organizing it, inhabiting it.”34 The pole or the axis is

crucial to establishing the sacred space because of its centrality in both metaphorical and

literal terms. As pointed out earlier, Eliade equates sacred space to “world” (more

specifically, our world) but one which contains an absolute center. That center is the axis

or the sacred pole as found in a range of groups such as the Kwakiutl, pre-Christian Celts

and Germans a well as the Nad’a of Indonesia.35

As pointed out earlier, one of the key aspects of sacred space is its capacity to

orient the universe and give it form. Consequently, the establishment of the axis mundi,

and “our world,” results in the centering of “our world.” The centering is important not

only for its representation of importance (the space and its inhibitors see as the most

important) but also its status at mediator between the two other cosmic planes—the most

obvious being Heaven and Hell. The founding of the axis mundi translates to “our world”

becoming the basis for an imago mundi. As Eliade explains using the example of

Palestine:

33
Eliade, p. 30.
34
Eliade, p. 34.
35
Ibid., p. 35.

12
 Whatever the extent of the territory involved, the cosmos that it represents is
always perfect. An entire country (e.g., Palestine), a city (Jerusalem), a sanctuary
(the Temple in Jerusalem), all equally well present an imago mundi . . . It is clear,
then, that both the imago mundi and the Center are repeated in the inhabited
world. Palestine, Jerusalem, and the Temple severally and concurrently represent
the image of the universe and the Center of the World. This multiplicity of centers
and this reiteration of the image of the world on smaller and smaller scales
constitute one of the specific characteristics of traditional societies.36

The reasoning for the concentric circles of the imago mundi for religious man was to live

as close to the Center as possible. His home, temple, city and country all become the

Centers. In other words, all of the various spaces that religious man occupied could only

be sacred; he could “only live in a space opening upward, where the break in plane was

symbolically assured and hence communication with the other world, the transcendental

world, was ritually possible.”37 It is of utmost importance that the religious person exist in

a total and organized space—a proper world.

Eliade points out that in the development of spatial practice and inhabitation can

not only be found in “traditional societies,” by which he clearly meant “primitive,” tribal

groups but also in ancient Rome. Though the cross-cultural nature of his argument is

questionable as it is clearly Eurocentric, he does provide the insightful example of the

Roman mundus—“a circular trench divided into four parts; it was at once the image of

the cosmos and the paradigmatic model for the human habitation.”38 This quadratic

schema of the mundus, Eliade argues, extends from Bali to pre-Christian Germans.

Whether this is empirically true is beside the point; the emphasis of Eliade’s point is the

basic point that any settling into a territory is a consecration of space. That is to say, any

36
Eliade, pp. 42-43.
37
Eliade, p. 44.
38
Ibid., p. 44.

13
form of inhabitation of space for religious persons is always of a sacred one, which

contains the cosmogonic moment—the foundation of a world.

He attempts to illustrate this point historically through the example of human

habitation, comparing traditional religious and profane behavior. Quoting Le Corbusier’s

famous description of the house as “a machine to live in,” Eliade launches a rather

conservative attack of industrial, mass society from an architectural stand point. He

mourns the triumph of function over form especially when it comes to the human home,

and thus views the Bauhaus as a symptom of “the gradual desacralization of the human

dwelling.”39

The critique of this “desacralization,” though given this nominal religious

framework, is still very much couched in the Weberian narrative of secularization, linked

to industrialization and the rise of scientific thought. But instead of “secularization,”

which places the “secular” as telos, Eliade chooses to use “desacralization,” effectively

overturning that particular teleology. Though his choice of words is no minor detail, it

nevertheless is undercut by proclamations such as this:

The process is an integral part of the gigantic transformation of the world

undertaken by the industrial societies, a transformation made possible by the
desacralization of the cosmos accomplished by scientific thought and above all by
the sensational discoveries of physics and chemistry.40

But let us return to “the creation of the world” as exemplified in human

habitation. Eliade notes that what cosmogony usually entails is the ritual of sacrifice.

Etymologically, “sacred” and “sacrifice” are linked of course. Sacrifice does not always

entail the sanctification through blood as is commonly thought in the Abrahamic

tradition. The cosmogony entailed in the sanctification of a living-space takes on two

39
Eliade, p. 50.
40
Ibid., p. 51.

14
types, which have been mentioned before: (1) assimilating the dwelling to the cosmos

through the axis mundi, which would include the symbolic designation of a pillar as

sacred (in the case of a house) and the institution of a center (in the case of a village) (2)

repeating the paradigmatic of act of the gods through the ritual of construction.41 Whether

certain groups choose the former or the latter types of sanctification, for Eliade, the

important point is that in traditional (religious) cultures, the dwelling attains sacred status

by its reflection of the world. Hence, what we see is that the cosmic symbolism is not

only found in terms of the structure of communal space but also in that of habitation.

Eliade’s spatial schema of the sacred and profane, though rather straightforward

provides us an important benchmark from which to view a theorist of space, Henri

Lefebvre, who is far more known for his spatial analysis. The comparison is not simply

for its own sake, but necessary for investigating the Heideggerian idea of “worldhood” or

environmentality as it relates to secularization. It is clear that Eliade believes modern,

non-religious man lives in a desacralized environmentality; he lives in an opaque, inert

and mute cosmos with no message.42 Modern Christianity, for example, has become

relegated to the “private experience,” completely devoid of “cosmic values” when

compared to its former (e.g., medieval) self. When space was sacred, existence was

sanctified (existence-God-cosmos). As an effect of desacralization, existence becomes

profanated (existence-God-history).

Let us now shift to the analysis of spatiality provided by Henri Lefebvre in his The

Production of Space (1974). The crux of Lefebvre’s argument of his magnum opus has

41
Eliade, p. 52.
42
Eliade, p. 178.

15
mostly to do with “social space,” which he defines through his conception of social

practice but throughout the course of his argument, Lefebvre ventures into some religious

territory as he explicates the important difference between representational space and

representation of space. The most important aspect of representational space is that is

lived. It is “the space of ‘inhabitants’ and ‘users’, but also of some artists and perhaps of

those, such as a few writers, and philosophers, who describe and aspire to do no more

than describe.”43 Under the category of representational space, he includes what he calls

“spaces of ideology.”

What is an ideology without a space to which it refers, a space which it describes,

whose vocabulary and links it makes use of, and whose code it embodies? What
would remain of a religious ideology—the Judeo-Christian one, say—if it were
not based on places and their names: church, confessional, altar, sanctuary,
tabernacle? What would remain of the Church if there were no churches? The
Christian ideology, carrier of a recognizable if disregarded Judaism (God, the
Father, etc.), has created the spaces which guarantee that it endures. More
generally speaking, what we call ideology only achieves consistency by
intervening in social space and in its production, and by thus taking on body
therein. Ideology per se might well be said to consist primarily in a discourse
upon social space.44

Representational space, in other words, is where ideology becomes materialized in to

practice. Furthermore, and perhaps most importantly, it is the place of ritualization.

Lefebvre, additionally, posits a historical transformation from absolute space to

abstract space. There are clear parallels between this formulation and Koyre’s notion of

“the closed world” to the “infinite universe.” Lefebvre equates “the absolute” with the

ancient Roman and subsequent Christian tradition, meanwhile “abstract” space begins to

form starting in the 12th century in Western Europe, and goes on to describe it as

“secularized space.”45 He speaks of this as “the flouting of established spatial codes and

43
Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Blackwell, 1991, p. 44.
44
Ibid., p. 44.
45
Lefebvre, p. 263.

16
the eruption of a natural and cosmic fertility generate an extraordinary and dizzying

‘infinitization’ of meaning.”46

The origin of absolute space begins as a residue of agro-pastoral space.

A moment comes when, through the actions of masters or conquerors, a part of

this space is assigned a new role, and henceforward appears as transcendent, as
sacred (i.e. inhabited by divine forces), as magical and cosmic. The paradox here,
however, is that it continues to be perceived as part of nature. Much more than
that, its mystery and its sacred (or cursed) character are attributed to the forces of
nature, even though it is the exercise of political power therein which has in fact
wrenched the area from its natural context, and even though its new meaning its
entirely predicated on that action.47

As Lefebvre notes, by the end of agro-pastoral spaces, there was already a trend towards

the sanctification of space, though he is quick to note that this process had a special

meaning for the relation between inhabited space and nature, as it resulted in nature’s

status as a magical force—an indication of the socio-historical roots of Romanticism.

Very similar to Eliade, Lefebvre suggests that one of its key aspects is the

institution of a “nucleus.”48 However, the two arguments do not resemble one another

exactly. As a matter of fact, Lefebvre’s conceptualization of “the nucleus” is far less

imposing that Eliade’s. Whereas Eliade’s “absolute center” held an importance of

ontological proportions, Lefebvre’s, a product of proper dialectics, was more wrought

with conflict. “In nearly all cases, however” he writes, “the political and religious centre

is marked by conflict between town and country, between urban space and agrarian

space.”49 To be fair to Eliade, it is important to note that he does have an oppositional

schema but it is not emphasized as it is in the work of Lefebvre. Nevertheless, the figure

46
Ibid., p. 232.
47
Ibid., p. 234.
48
Ibid., p. 234.
49
Ibid., p. 234.

17
of the center does hold much weight for Lefebvre’s idea of absolute space. Using the

example of the town, he states:

The city state thus establishes a fixed centre by coming to constitute a hub, a
privileged focal point, surrounded by peripheral areas which bear its stamp. From
this moment on, the vastness of pre-existing space appears to come under the
thrall of a divine order. At the same time the town, seems to gather in everything
which surrounds it, including the natural and the divine, and the earth’s evil and
good forces. As the image of the universe (imago mundi), urban space is reflected
in the rural space that it posses and indeed in a sense contains.50

It is the concept of the center which has great import as it later develops into the

representation of the imago mundi. What the center does for Lefebvre, and indeed Eliade

as well, is that it explains the “ordering” of the absolute space. It seems to me that both

Lefebvre and Eliade are attempting to build upon, but also critique the Durkheimian-

Maussian thesis of space as collective representations of the conscience collective. Their

respective criticisms are clearly different from one another. For Eliade, the ontological

dimensions of space are all but ignored in their work. Eliade’s charge is clear: they are

sticking too closely to epistemology. Lefebvre’s criticism, on the other hand, though

similar to Eliade’s, is focused more on social practice, specifically that of the body.

…In every society, absolute space assumes meanings addressed not to the
intellect but to the body, meanings conveyed by threats, by sanctions, by a
continual putting-to-the-test of the emotions. This space is “lived” rather than
conceived, and it is a representational space rather than a representation of space;
no sooner is it conceptualized than its significance wanes and vanishes.51

Absolute space is an activated with social energies and natural forces. It is

absolute but has no fixed place; it is everywhere, that is to say, it has a purely symbolic

existence, and is thus not tied down to physical locale. To put it another way, it is a

world.

50
Ibid., p. 235. Emphasis in original.
51
Ibid., pp. 235-236.

18
 Additionally, absolute space consecrates, allowing its metaphysical connection to

other holy spaces. “[T]he space of a sanctuary is absolute space, evening the smallest

temple or the most unpretentious village church.”52 Lefebvre identifies two mechanisms

of consecration—identification and imitation.53 Identification names the space as holy

and imitation demands ritualized practice. Ultimately, these mechanisms of consecration

generate forms, which various other subsequent spaces imitate, creating microcosms of

the universe through each consecration. Every consecrated place is the Cosmos in

epitome, much like the ancient Greek agora.

This adheres to Eliade’s assertion of connectivity between sacred spaces through

the institution of the axis mundi. Furthermore, Eliade’s emphasis of the ordering

capacity of cosmogony (which is really what I believe to be behind his insistence upon

calling it “ontology”) strongly resonates with Lefebvre’s main point regarding the unity

of absolute space. The condition of this unity is the capability for connectivity between

all absolute spaces. Indeed, this is one of Eliade’s main points about sacred space. All

spaces that are sanctified, which include the house and the city, effectively bring into the

same chain of communication different “orders,” as they become part of the same

“world,” or mundus¸ what Heidegger would refer to Gebild to imply systematicity.54 For

Lefebvre, it is the ever-increasing

In the West, therefore, absolute space has assumed a strict form: that of volume
carefully measured, empty, hermetic, and constitutive of the rational unity of
Logos and Cosmos. It embodies the simple, regulated and methodical principle or
coherent stability, a principle operating under the banner of political religion and
applying equally to mental and social life.55

52
Lefebvre, p. 236.
53
Ibid., p. 236.
54
55
Ibid., p. 238.

19
But what does the conclusive ending of the narrative between Eliade and Lefebvre mean?

What are the stakes for the profanation of space?

To approach these questions, it is necessary to return to the work of Cox. He

suggests that within religious discourse the profanation of space argument comes

wrapped in a package of anti-modern thinking, which advances a sedentary view of

space. Using the figure of the “cloverleaf,” Cox attempts to show that the increase of

mobility (one aspect of secularization that many scholars agree upon) in modern life is in

fact not undermining any Biblical understanding of the fate of humanity.

Many view the high mobility of modern life in the most negative possible light. A
whole literature of protest has grown up, much of it religious in nature, which
bewails the alleged shallowness and lostness of modern urban man. Countless
sermons deplore the “rush-rush of modern living” and the diminution of spiritual
values supposed to accompany the loss of more sedentary cultural patterns.56

Though sedentary life maybe argued religiously, Cox contradicts such claims by

suggesting that it is in fact ideological.

To be born and reared in the same clapboard house where one may even grow old
and die does have a certain cozy attractiveness. To work at the same job in the
same place through all one’s adult years might also provide elements of comfort.
But those who bewail the passing of the era in which this stable, idyllic condition
was supposed to have obtained forget one important fact: only a tiny minority of
people ever really enjoyed such pastoral permanence.57

Sedentary life, for Cox, is more than a little romantic and symptomatic of a “reactionary

mentality,” calling those who oppose mobility “guardians of the status quo.” Though

much of the proceeding criticism of the pro-sedentary religious sentiment takes this

charge of conservatism, Cox does indeed argue this point theologically by drawing

parallels to the ancient Hebrews in order to argue that mobility can be viewed positively

form a Biblical standpoint.

56
Cox, p. 43.
57
Cox, p. 45.

20
 One of the ways he does is by focusing what he believes to be the root of the

religious backlash. “Let us admit at once that high mobility does play havoc with

traditional religion,” Cox writes. “It separates people from the holy places. It mixes them

with neighbors whose gods have different names and who worship them in different

ways.” The separation from place is what Cox identifies as what is chiefly at stake. Thus,

Biblically, he says, the God of the Old Testament is a mobile god.

Yahweh . . . was not a place god. True, he had appeared at particular places such
as Sinai or in the burning bush, but He was certainly not restricted to these places.
He not only moved with His people, but “went before them.”58

Citing various examples from the Ark of the Covenant to changing meaning of “temple,”

Cox argues that the reasoning behind the divestment of spatiality in God was diverse.

Theologically, it meant that Yahweh could not be localized; socially, the view of Yahweh

as God of history met the nomadic conditions of the early Israelites. Only after

Christianity’s political triumph via Constantine did it spatialize, resulting in the concept

of Christendom, which limited its scope to Western Europe.59 It is clear that Cox sees the

profanation of space as no obstacle to faith.

Cox’s analysis of mobility, in the context of both modern urbanization and in the

Bible, offers a concluding question with regard to the fate of religious space in

modernity. Does the fact that many scholars—Eliade and Lefebvre among them—agree

upon the decline of religious space in modernity signify the victory of time? In other

words, has technoscience colonized space (including the cosmos) to the point where

“temporalization” has become the dominant logic of modernity? Cox’s insistence on the

conception of the “God of history” certainly supports this, as do the analyses of Eliade

58
Cox, p. 48.
59
Ibid., p. 50.

21
and Lefebvre. Though he rarely discusses religion, Zygmunt Bauman has articulated this

point most consistently, suggesting that “liquid modernity” is characterized by not only

the declining importance of hardware but also the devaluation of space, more generally.60

Keeping Bauman in mind, we may have to consider that space has not only shifted from

absolute to abstract (or sacred to profane), but also that it has ultimately been effaced by

the forces of modernity.

60
Bauman, Zygmunt. “Time and Space Reunited,” Time & Society (2000), 9:2-3, 171-185.

22