The Rationalization of the World and Trembling Before the Sacred Power

Alexandre Khmaladze    [email protected]

 

Abstract

The object of this article’s research is trembling before the sacred, examined as a particular form of human experience. The starting point of the text is the interpretation of trembling as the other side of fear - an interpretation fundamentally present in S. Kierkegaard’s work Fear and Trembling. A person may be gripped by the feeling of terror in the face of an obvious threat, yet the soul can experience a powerful shaking even when no immediate danger exists. This state is multifaceted and manifold. It may arise in an encounter with the sublime, in the act of religious faith, or in the moment of genuine philosophical insight. The article describes the manifestations of this experience in various spheres of human existence: the genesis of reverence and sacred experience, the metaphorical and symbolic expression of the feeling of reverence in the image of the “abyss,” and the Gnostic tradition that studies the feeling of reverence in and after the process of cognition.

In the modern world the sphere of trembling has narrowed considerably. In M. Weber’s expression, the “disenchantment” of the world has occurred, transforming the sacred into the merely rational and reducing transcendent experience to the status of psychological anomaly or cultural remnant. Yet the experience of sacred power - of holy trembling - endures as a distinctly human experience. The article demonstrates that the experience of trembling contains various modalities; in expressing the sacred it is inherently ambivalent. The experience of trembling may manifest as a face-to-face encounter and relate to both objective and subjective reality. It is an indicator of existential truth. The novelty of the research lies in the attempt to show the multidimensionality of this experience in relation to various spheres of human existence, and in the author’s argument that the desacralization of European human life - which drives the expulsion of trembling as an attribute of existential experience - represents a fundamental impoverishment of the human condition.

Keywords: Reverence, Fear, The sacred, Ambivalence, The holy, The sublime, Abyss, Truth, Gnosis, Existential.