Where is the human spirit? Where is beauty? Where is sacredness?

“Where is the human spirit? It is not, contrary to Descartes, in the pineal gland. It is not in the heart. It is not in the pituitary gland, the liver, the stomach. Take a person apart and it is not there. Reductionism holds that if something exists, we can extract it, isolate it, separate it out. (Notice that here again, religion agrees with science. The soul is distinct from the body and can be separated out.)

Where is beauty? It is in a butterfly, but when we chloroform it, lay it out on the dissecting table, and cut it apart, beauty is gone. Beauty is in a poem, but when we over-analyze the poem to find exactly what is beautiful about it, beauty disappears from that too. Beauty is in a painting, but can we reduce it to quantitative measures of color and proportion, and then apply these to the standardized production of beauty? No. Beauty is a relationship, not an objective property, and the mass-production of generic relationships produces, necessarily, an aesthetic that is equally phony, generic, and cheap.

Where is sacredness? Following the same deep ideology as their scientific brethren, the religious authorities have sought to isolate sacredness as well, limiting it to Bibles, crosses, and churches. The furthest extreme of this separation coincides in its genesis with its scientific counterpart, originating in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Protestant movement progressively excluded the divine from more and more of the human world. Earlier, the Catholic church had removed divinity from ordinary people; now the Protestant reformers began to remove it from Mother Mary and the saints as well, so that all that was left of our original panentheistic world was a single, isolated mote of divinity embodied by Jesus Christ.”

by Charles Eisenstein

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