La dimensione del sacro tra Oriente e Occidente. Contesto storico-critico

Abstract

Talking about the sacred represents a very complex and grueling effort. It is also a main topic in the debate by philosophers, poets and historians.As we know, the sacred is interpreted and understood in different ways. Religions, for example, have often identified the sense of the sacred in symbols, rites, places, icons and precepts.For this reason, it is difficult to elaborate a current analysis that could explain the persistence or disappearance of the sacred.It would be natural to attempt to make reference to the myth of Nietzsche’s eternal return, meaning that the eternal does not return to the cyclicality of history that repeats itself, but the return to models, exemplary actions, archetypes of almost archaic human existence, not as individuality and temporality, but because they are connected to roots that disregard them, or rather transcends them. The ritual is a memory of a mythical event, and a repetition of the event itself, at the same time.In this regard, Laura Tussi wrote in her thesis The symbolic and ethic-pedagogic meaning of the sacred (2001): “The event relives and repeats what happened in «illo tempore», in a past out of time. The original sacred event becomes a model, an archetype. Every ritual has a divine pattern, a paradigmatic archetype. It is supposed that all religious acts founded by gods, civilizing heroes, mythical ancestors, but also every human action, have meaning because they repeat the mythical action performed by the god, hero, ancestor, for which man repeats the act of creation. The religious calendar commemorates all cosmogonist phases from the beginning, for example the Jewish Saturday, as the «imitatio dei». The ecclesiastical liturgy is the total repetition of the life and passion of Jesus”.This work, therefore, aims to be a starting point for desired and renewed research on the complex and current theme of the sacred.