SACRED PROFANITIES PT. 3

 One corollary result of my reading of Eliade's 1957 THE SACRED AND THE PROFANE is that I began comparing his ideas of primitive life with those of George Bataille, of whom I've written far more often here. One reason for this is that Bataille's philosophy concerns both religion and literature far more than most if not all Eliade works. Eliade did write fiction but as he was first and foremost a historian of religion, he did not work his thoughts about literature into his seminal works, whereas as Bataille, also a writer of fiction, did so.

So it would seem that Bataille had a rough contrast between "sacred" and "profane" activities in the formative eras of human evolution. But he did not speak, in any major way, of ancient man following what Eliade calls "paradigms." Eliade seeks to understand the phenomenon of religion from the imagined perspective of religious adherents, based more on custom than on direct testimony. Bataille follows the lead of the anthropologists he favored, such as Mauss and Durkheim, and so his analysis is more from the perspective of an outsider seeking to understand a phenomemon "from outside," to the extent that this was possible for Bataille. From my citation in BACK TO BATAILLE PT. 1:

“Human activity is not entirely reducible to processes of production and conservation, and consumption must be divided into two distinct parts.  The first reducible part is represented by the use of the minimum necessary for the conservation of life and the continuation of the individuals’ productive activity in a given society; it is therefore a question simply of the fundamental condition of productive activity.  The second part is represented by so-called unproductive expenditures: luxury, mourning, war, cults, the construction of sumptuary monuments, games, spectacles, arts, perverse sexual activity (i.e. deflected from genital finality) - all these represent activities which, at least in primitive circumstances, have no end beyond themselves.  Now it is necessary to reserve the use of the word expenditure for the designation of these unproductive forms, and not for the designation of all the modes of consumption that serve as a means to the end of production.”—Bataille, “The Notion of Expenditure.”

Obviously Bataille does not use the terms "sacred and profane," but he is in many respects duplicating the distinction between profane activity, which is pursued for "the conservation of life," for entirely practical reasons, and sacred activity, which involves "unproductive expenditures." Of those he lists, only the category of "cults" is expressly linked to religion, though anyone can think of ways in which such categories as war, mourning, monument-building, games and arts are linked to religious concepts and practices. 

Now Eliade focuses on paradigms because he theorizes that their appeal is that they depict some transcendental action taken by God or the gods that impinges upon human affairs. Eliade does not distinguish between hierophanies that benefit man in a practical way, as when a god gives a tribe the secret of cultivating grain, or hierophanies that imagine some more abstract process, like Marduk forging the world out of the corpse of a vanquished dragon-goddess. I might theorize that the more practical God-acts might not meet Bataille's definition of "unproductive expenditures," but I can't be sure based on the Bataille works I've read.

In contrast, Eliade lightly passes over what some would call the "Dionysian" aspects of religion; his concern is strictly Apollonian in nature. In fact, though I did not remember this when I began exploring my previous Bataille issues, to some extent I made a comparable comparison in BACK TO BATAILLE PT 1, in that I drew a possible contrast between Bataille and Joseph Campbell. (I briefly mentioned Jung in the section quoted but I did not explore any specific Jungian content.)

Bataille would probably have deemed both Joseph Campbell and his chief influence Carl Jung as overly oriented upon idealism, which Bataille despised due to both his personal history and his reading of Marx. But Jung and Campbell were far from being the foursquare defenders of Platonic Idealism that detractors claim. Both were invested in dynamic psychological processes akin to what Kendall calls “negotiation.” The principal difference between Bataille and Campbell is that Bataille focuses on images of destruction for his concept of expenditure, emphasizing customs like animal/human sacrifice and the Amerindian potlatch.  In contrast Campbell focuses on images of construction: on negotiating the identity of the world through piecing together its separable aspects: the cosmological, the metaphysical, the sociological and the psychological.

I have the general sense that Bataille was so obsessed with his concept of the Dionysian "sensuous frenzy" as it applied to both human psychology and religion that he would have had little patience with Campbell's epistemological patterns, and maybe even less with Eliade's definition of religion on the model of the Christian *imitatio dei* (which Eliade explicitly mentions on page 106 of THE SACRED AND THE PROFANE). Given my investment in the epistemological model-- which may theoretically subsume Eliade's paradigmatic model-- I must prefer Apollo over Dionysus. Still, Bataille's focus on "unproductive expenditures" does tie in to the fact that all religious activity is fundamentally impractical. This insight can be related to my assertions here and here, that although the epistemological patterns in literature are based on concepts of knowledge, they are not the same "truths" found in non-fiction, but become instead "half-truths" in a fictional context, allowing them to keep open the doors of affective freedom.