by David B. Harned

In Christianity and the Encounter of the World Religions, Paul Tillich suggests that a contemporary dialogue between the religious traditions of the world reflects the ways in which all of them have recently been attacked by "quasi-religions" such as nationalism and secularism. Consequently, he predicts that the dialogue will become less an investigation of theological niceties than an inquiry into the situation of the modern world, as "particular theological points become of secondary importance in view of the position of defence of all religions proper."¹ The forces that presently conspire against traditional forms of piety are the consequences of "the invasion of all religious groups by technology with its various waves of technical revolution. Its effect was and is, first of all, a secularization which destroys the old traditions, both of culture and religion."²

This sort of argument requires qualification. The processes of secularization are far more hostile towards ideology than towards religion; in the long run, they are most hostile towards the most conservative ideologies. To the extent that the quasi-religions of which Tillich writes are conservative ideological movements -- National Socialism, for example-- it would be difficult to trace their paternity to secularization. Secularism is both conservative and ideological. No matter how various and baneful some of the consequences of secularization may be, secularism is finally not one of them. It is important to recognize the tension between the two. Nevertheless, one strand of Tillich's argument is persuasive and significant-- the contention that secularization means the transformation rather than the demise of man's religiousness, although not in the direction of quasi-religious ideologies. Secularization deems dialectically related to religion: hostile towards tradition but hospitable to something new.

But the Dutch missionary theologian, Arend van Leeuwen, understands the modern situation in very different terms in Christianity in World History. He tells us of "the arrival of a new type of man" who views himself and his world without recourse to religious premises. Arend Van Leeuwen suggests that the technological revolution is only one aspect of a more complex movement that is rapidly destroying the cornerstone of all traditional forms of society, whether primitive or civilized religion. Man is homo religious no more. In this he sees no reason for lament, but argues that where the Christian message is belived, "there is the truth accepted that there can be no returning the age of 'religion.' "³

Secularization is a global phenomenon that profoundly distinguishes contemporary societies from their predecessors : it is an appropriate ground base for essays on the encounters of religious traditions in the modern world. The differences between Tillich and van Leeuwen reflect the thoroughly diverse assessments of secularization now current in the West. Some writers stress the hostility towards traditional forms of faith, whereas others find equal reason to emphasize its connections with the Judaeo-Christian tradition and often interpret this relationship in more or less nonnative terms. Some write of secularization in the context of an analysis of social institutions, whereas others understand it very differently because their concern is with the members of society.

The confusion suggests that we have not yet put our semantic household in order: the word is used in a bewildering variety of ways, and much the same must also be said of "religion." ⁴ Nevertheless, the differences between Tillich and van Leeuwen are more than semantic. With which one does the truth lie? Or is secularization so complex and ambiguous a phenomenon that their perspectives are complementary rather than conflicting? If so, what does this signify for the future of the religious traditions of man?

In the words of Peter L. Berger, secularization designates "the process by which sectors of society and culture are removed from the domination of religious institutions and symbols." He adds that "as there is a secularization of society and culture, so is there a secularization of consciousness." The latter often seems verifiable in the attitudes of our contemporaries and within ourselves, but with what accuracy or by what standards might one gauge the "secularization of consciousness?" Every attempt to measure it risks the danger of some restrictive definition of religion that would quite illegitimately exclude the creation of private structures of meaning which possess "ultimate" significance for individuals who are otherwise alienated from traditional religious symbols and establishments. It would be a mistake, for example, to employ a standard that would not admit the religiosity manifest in the ways in which institutions such as family or caste or nation are invested with mythic properties and function as objects of "ultimate" commitment.

There is considerable evidence that as the influence of traditional religious institutions declines, the secular aspects of society develop religious dimensions. In the United States, for example, a Manichean stance towards life that often appears in political affairs, a Pelagian faith in education as the panacea for all ills, a perennial tendency to celebrate the divinity of power, the sacralizing of the medical profession-- these and much else bear witness to a religious impulse as powerful as it seems ineradicable.

The putative "secularization of consciousness" may pertain to certain traditional system of symbols rather than to the character of man. The passionate and often eloquent romanticism evident in the dissenting movements of alienated students, the cult of the hero for a day drawn from the realm of entertainment or politics, the cult of youth with its pervasive cosmetic impulse and faith in drugstore magic, the Gnosticism manifest in certain types of reliance upon drugs, the hardiness of mythologies about sex and all of the vestigia religionis imbedded in popular music suggest that man is homo religious still.

If Tillich's argument requires the qualification that the process of secularization is hostile towards ideology, the argument is valid in other ways: religion may be transformed, it has scarcely disappeared. Many of its contemporary forms profoundly endanger the health of man and his society.⁶

As the removal of sectors of society, from domination by religious establishments and symbols, what secularization actually designates is institutional autonomy, Egengesetzlichkeit. Because of the impact of modernization and industrialization, segments of the social structure become independent. They liberate themselves from a "sacred canopy.”⁷ The legitimation of the economic system, for example, is no longer derived from beyond itself; it is justified entirely in terms of its own functional logic. As Robert Nisbet writes, "The time has passed when technology needs to justify itself by its contributions to other spheres of society. Today the ends of technology are sufficient and autonomous."⁸

The movement towards autonomy by the primary social institutions is inevitably accompanied with the development of institutional specialization in religion. In other words, because the traditional complex of "ultimate" means and norms is no longer disseminated and affirmed by the primary institutions, the main job must be done by a special organization. But when the latter voices many of these meanings and norms, they are exposed as "mere rhetoric." They are not necessarily contradicted by the standards and functional logic of the primary institutions. There imply no relation between the two at all.

Sooner or later, the processes of secularization seem dramatically and irremediably to undercut the credibility of religious institutions. As the liberation of economy and the State and other segments of culture from the comforts and constraints of a sacred cosmos, there is a sense in which secularization does mean the end of religion: primary institutions, if not individuals, become autonomous. This process eventually torpedoes the religious establishments it originally nourished. So van Leeuwen's comment, about "the arrival of a new type of man" have their justification. There is a new man abroad, indeed. He is new in the sense that the primary social institutions no longer function for him as they have for his ancestors. As Thomas Luckmann has phrased it :

Specific segments of an individual’s daily conduct derive their meaning from specific institutional norms, but mutually reinforcing institutions no longer endow the individual course of life with “ultimate” significance. The social structure ceases to mediate in a consequent manner between the sacred cosmos and subjective consciousness.⁹

Although the structures of society are becoming secularized, there is considerable evidence that the members of society are not. Nevertheless, secularization does involve the transformation of religion. Man's religious quest becomes a private affair in several different and unprecedented ways. It is scarcely nourished by a participation in the primary public institutions; most men must look elsewhere, if they are to find the meaning of their individual lives. "Personal identity becomes essentially, a private phenomenon. This is perhaps, the most revolutionary trait of modern society."¹⁰

Furthermore, the way that the quest is resolved depends more upon private preference than upon traditional prescription. It is difficult to invest much confidence in traditional religious institutions when their "comprehensive" claims and norms are relevant neither to the functional logic of the primary public institutions nor to the performance of the individual within them. In the end, men tend to invest certain aspects of their private lives with a new freight of significance. The private realm is sacralized as the public grows profane. Religion becomes an eclectic affair in which some residual traditional values are combined with others that are new and drawn mainly from the private sphere.

The social form of religion emerging in modern industrial societies is characterized by the direct accessibility of an assortment of religious representations to potential consumers. The sacred cosmos is mediated neither through a specialized nor through other primary public institutions.

It is the direct accessibility of the sacred cosmos, more precisely, of an assortment of religious themes, which makes religion today essentially a phenomenon of the “private sphere.”

The emerging social form of religion thus differs significantly from other social forms of religion which were characterized either by the diffusion of the sacred cosmos through the institutional structure of society or through institutionl specialization of religion.¹¹

Luckmann suggests that secularization can inspire a "mass withdrawal into the 'private sphere, 'while 'Rome burns.'"¹² Such withdrawal is essentially a religious phenomenon. It is a recoil from a system that offers the individual little in the way of either personal identity or structures of "ultimate" meaning. There is something Manichean about the sharp juxtaposition of two realms, one sacred and one profane, which must not be mixed because they have no intrinsic relation to each other.

There is something Gnostic about the flight from the constraints of the public sector into the illimitable privacy of the self, where illusions of individual autonomy can be savoured as shadowy compensation for the loss of real agency in the public sphere. Nor does the structure of "ultimate" meanings drawn from the private realm provide any motivation for greater involvement in the public realm, where individual agency has become problematical in any event. Religion becomes warrant for a flight from reality and social responsibility. The pressures of secularization render religion even more ambiguous a phenomenon than it is in traditional society.

If secularization has a profound impact upon individual and institutionalized religiosity, it also raises serious problems for the health and wholeness of the individual. As Gabriel Marcel writes in The Decline of Wisdom, the primary danger of our "modern" approach to the world is that reason tends to diminish to the proportions of functional reason. Reflection falls into discredit and both the wisdom it offers and the existential questions that it raises to the light of consciousness are no longer available to men. Vanished is the sense of wonder that sparks the awareness of transcendence in man's encounters with his world, with other selves, and with their ultimate source and end. The premium placed upon functional logic in the process of secularization precipitates a restrictive understanding of reason that vitiates man's ability to comprehend the depths of either himself or others.

A second problem is the privatization of the freedom of the individual. In secularized society, man achieves a new freedom and autonomy, but these are confined to the private sphere; in the realm of the public, he is patient rather than agent, and in his relationship to the functional norms of the primary institutions there is no trace of reciprocity at all. Julian N. Hartt writes:

Man does not get on with his proper business in a mood of unrelenting self-consciousness. Contemporary culture lays that mood upon us all. That is a major triumph of secularism as a paradoxically religious force. For if there is no one else to keep an eye on our interests we cannot afford even to close both eyes or even to wink promiscuously.¹³

Such seriousness is exacerbated by the tension between increasingly unlimited power and responsibility and, because of the autonomy of primary institutions, the suspicion that the control of such power no longer lies with the rational decisions of free and responsible men. Still another problem is the quantification of time, the tyranny of the clock that deprives men of spontaneity, further erodes their freedom, and imposes an alien and mechanical pattern upon the rhythms of truly human life. Under the impact of technology, the traditional rhythm of existence is sacrificed in favour of speed and "efficiency." Time becomes a continuum in which man is ineluctably driven towards the loss of power and function, rather than a structure that always affords a "right time” or kairos for some expression of the varied cadences of life.

For consequences of secularization are many and complex. For every society, the process is enormously beneficial. But all human affairs have their ambiguities. The reduction of reason to functional reason, the privatization of freedom and the quantification of the will serve to illustrate the ways in which some of the ambiguities of secularization pertain to the inner life of the self, the agency of the self, and the ambience in which the self exists. Secularization is accompanied with the emergence of protean forms of religiosity, and this is the result of a whole new social form of religion for which there is no precedent in human affairs.

Many of these versions of religiosity are retrogressive; all of them like the new social form of religion itself, can threaten the health and fulfillment of self and society. In this new situation, much that once was sacred has become profane. Much that once was profane has been sacralized. Consequently, the variety of "ultimate" meanings available to the individual bristles with inconsistencies and conflicts between the old and the new.

If this is in any way a persuasive account of the contemporary religious situation, it is evident that the distinctions between the religious and the secular and between the sacred and the profane require reassessment. It is not clear that, as conventionally employed, the polarities are useful for purposes of analysis. It is even less clear that the defence of the religious or of the sacred can be associated with commitment to the holy. Consequently, the life and teachings of Guru Nanak, from whom the Sikh tradition has derived its inspiration, contain a lesson of crucial importance. In this age of secularization, the lesson is no less relevant to the West than to the East.

Nanak's devotion to the holy led him outside the territories where the homines religiosi dwell and beyond the precincts of the sacred. Guru Nanak learnt that before the holy nothing is sacred and nothing is profane. Religious wiles do not suffice to attain the holy, nor do secular ways bar man from it. In a time when old religious institutions, customs and beliefs are crumbling while new forms of religiosity proliferate, the urgent need for sureness in spiritual discrimination is perhaps best satisfied by Guru Nanak's protest against the religious and the sacred, and his insistence that, in the end, nothing matters except God.

The distinction between the religious and the secular is unsatisfactory, because it contributes neither to the clarity of vision nor to the sensitivity of faith. What is conventionally regarded as "religious" is constantly a prey to various types of "secularizing." Religious obligations come to be performed mechanically, by rote, without passion and existential involvement. Motivation for their performance is secularized as the obligations themselves are understood in functional terms - not as expressions of devotion but rather for the sake of gain, sometimes transcendent adjustment.

So the "religious" is not religious at all. On the institutional level, the religious establishment becomes inextricably involved with the secular in many ways, representing and sacralizing the particular way of life of the people, serving purposes of social control and social integration, reaffirming common mores rather than exposing them to the Judgement of God.¹⁴

On the other hand, we have already commented upon the constant emergence of new forms of religiosity within the precincts of the secular. This is reflected in common linguistic usage; one can be "religious" in one's devotion to family or sports, to newspaper comics or to some particular brand of a commodity. Nor can religion be identified merely with certain rituals, for the secular has its rites and the most mundane activities are often highly ritualized. When "religious" is used, in any static or quantifying way, to designate existential participation in these, it has very little meaning. So the distinction between religious and secular leads nowhere except to confusion.

In the contemporary situation it is particularly dangerous, because it tends to involve the juxtaposition of public and private realms. Therefore it suggests a "religious" or divinely sanctioned basis for alienation and withdrawal from the “religious" public realm - and so Rome may burn, indeed. Most important, it obscures the fundamental truth that man finds freedom and fulfillment in God alone, and not in any variety of ortho-praxis or ortho-doxa.

The life and teachings of Guru Nanak offer consistent evidence of his distrust of rite and ritual; few have recognized so well that faith in God does not commit a man to travel down religious ways. Guru Nanak's protest is not directed against form as such, but against the assumption that certain forms have intrinsic and inalienable meaning simply because they are religious. His words, "At the place of pilgrimage, no bath avails without His favour,"¹⁵ betray neither romantic yearning for the boundless nor Gnostic recoil from the definite. His scepticism of the externalities of piety has a different focus: if religious practices have their own immanent and inalienable value, religion has dwindled to magic. It does not offer the individual access to the holy but bars him from it, by fostering the illusion that man can manipulate the will of God. At Hardwar,

Some people were throwing water toward the sun while they bathed in the ganges. “O men, what are you doing?” Said the Guru. “We are offering water to our dead ancestors living in the sun,” they said. At this, the Guru began throwing water in the opposite direction with both hands. When they asked what strange thing he was doing, he replied, “I am watering my fields of wheat in the Punjab.”¹⁶

When the crowd laughed, Guru Nanak suggested to the pilgrims that his watering was probably as effective for the wheat in the Punjab as was theirs for the ancestors living in the sun.

While Guru Nanak does not question the sincerity of the pilgrims at Hardwar, his protest against the formalities of religion in the Jupji recognizes the ways in which observance can be "secularized" until no trace of existential involvement remains:

Pilgrimage and penance and free-will giving
Gain for one no single grain of merit,
Unless one harken and his heart be loving,
Cleansed within by a meditative bath.¹⁷

But Guru Nanak's skepticism rests neither upon his conviction that forms are without meaning until they are invested with significance by human passion, nor upon his belief that religious forms contain no intrinsic power to offer man access to the Ultimate Reality. His protest is rooted in a profound sense of the holy, its ontological immanence and moral transcendence.

On the one hand, God pervades the whole world and dwells in the minds and hearts of the faithful. He creates, sustains and cherishes all things: "The whole creation that I see, it came of his exertion." ¹⁸ When the rites and rituals of the temple function to render men indifferent to what lies outside the temple, so that the pervasive presence of God and his concern for the world are forgotten, religion is the enemy of the holy. On the other hand, the Lord acknowledged in the temple is one whose moral demands confront the self in every situation, and "Men's deeds indicate if God is near or far." ¹⁹ As the story of Guru Nanak at Kurukshetra illustrates, when the practice of piety becomes surrogate for morality, religion has diverted men from the holy.

During a great fair, Guru Nanak was at Kurukshetra. He asked Mardana to go and get fire to cook his meal, and Mardana went and touched the fire of an "orthodox[brahmin]." The orthodox cried out in rage, and fell upon Mardana, whereupon the Guru said:

"The evil is still in his mind, hatred resides in his heart; and yet his cooking-square is pure! Of what use are these lines of the square when low-caste thoughts still sit with him in his mind."²⁰

In Nanak's own humility and teachings, there is a constant insistence on man's unworthiness before God and need for grace. This theme, more than any other, precludes every attempt to exalt the religious at the expense of the secular:

The Lord is true, plainly known, his living kindness infinite;
To those who crave and seek he gives, gives with full abandon.
What indeed must he be offered to throw his court wide open?
What words must lips be uttering to make his love responsive? ²¹

In the end, the paraphernalia of religion is unavailing if man is without grace, and unnecessary if man has received it. "All good is thine, no single virtue have I, and without it what avails devotion?" ²² What are the grounds for confidence in any forms or practices, when "He bestows the virtue in whose hand the power lies'?"²³ Consequently, a style of life that betrays no acquaintance with things religious need not separate an individual from the mercy of God, as the tale of Duni Chand and his wife suggests?²⁴ This emphasis upon grace contains no hint of antinomism, as the incident at Kurukshetra reveals; its source is simply an overwhelming sense of the holiness of the ultimate.

In the Christian tradition of the West, the fundamental justification of liturgies and other religious practices is that these represent the way of Jesus the Christ. In some sense, indeed, he is present within them. Their purpose is to acquaint believers so intimately with the Christ that they will be able to recognize and respond to the Christic shape of divine activity in the contemporary world. Liturgy and ritual, therefore, are oriented more towards the world than towards the temple; their meaning transcends the distinction between the religious and the secular. Nevertheless, these practices constantly become ends in themselves, their essential significance ignored; they afford opportunities for retreat from the world rather than resources offered for venturing into the world. Sociological studies of the social functionality of the churches and of the conduct of their members reaffirm the opinion of commonsense: the "orthodox" are with us always, and not only at Kurukshetra. And things religious offer no cure for what ails them.

Guru Nanak sensed the presence of God pervading all creation and he believed in the concern of God for everything that was created. So he was drawn outside the precincts of the hominess religiosi to espouse a sort of "holy worldliness." He was overwhelmed with the mystery and cruciality of grace. So he recognized the powerlessness of things religious to offer man access to the holy, His awareness of the susceptibility of religion either to secularization, or to declension into magic strengthened a skepticism that was essentially theological.

In the name of God, Guru Nanak became a critic of what was religious and a friend of what was not. He provides a paradigm for the man of faith in the modern world. The quest for the holy-as well as serious investigation of the actualities of our common life-- transcends and invalidates the distinction between the religious and the secular. In an age when religiosity assumes protean form; but remains largely anchored in the private realm, when religious institutions grow secular or irrelevant, the skepticism and worldliness of Guru Nanak provide two of the greatest resources in the struggle for the humanity of man. The polarity of the religious and the secular is foreign to the spirit of the Sikh tradition; the West will be better when it has been forgotten there, too. The religious cannot be identified with the holy. The non-religious cannot be identified as the enemy of God.

One who recognizes the tension between the religious and the holy is skeptical of either the emergence of new forms of religiosity on “secular” soil or the retreat from the secular to a private realm for “religious” reasons.

The commonness of both phenomena in the modern world confronts us anew with the distinction between the sacred and the profane. The inadequacy of this polarity is revealed by the fact that the sacred can be profaned until it is sacred no longer. Because it can be stained by dirty hands, the sacred is not essentially related to the holy. As Julian N. Hartt has well phrased the matter:

One might seriously believe that something really holy has infact been profaned by a religious insistence that it is sacred; and thereafter one might devote great energy and skill to attacking that barrier in the hope that holy might come into its own.

If, that is, one believed that sexuality were holy, one might attack the sacred institutions that have made it dirty or trite or both. And if one believed that freedom were holy, one might well feel inspired to attack the sacred institutions that have effectively corrupted it.

Thus the sacred emerges as that which men have arbitrarily demarcated as exempt from judgement and change; and thereafter used to protect a stake demonstrably narrower than the common goal of mankind. ²⁵

The sacred emerges as the unstable and arbitrary, a realm within which the exercise of human agency and inventiveness is suspect, if not stifled. Distinctions between what is sacred and profane lead ineluctably towards idolatry. The meaning of the latter is simply that the sacred is confused with the holy, the symbol identified with what it symbolizes, the transcendence of the holy over any and all of its manifestations forgotten. The sacred is intended to point towards an element of ultimacy in human life towards which man might otherwise be indifferent. But the perennial human predicament is one not of indifference towards "ultimate" meanings but of idolatrous reverence for what is not truly ultimate. The demarcation of sacred realms is scarcely a cure for the disease.

The same dialectic appears in the relation of the religious and the secular. On the one hand, the sacred is either profaned or eventually becomes an idol, just as the religious is vulnerable to secularization, or to declension into magic. On the other hand, what has been profane is sacralized, especially in a revolutionary situation when processes such as secularization engender a redirection of the search for "ultimate" meanings. Sacralization may be initiated as a response to the holy – or it may have important motivations. Certain mores or institutions may be deliberately designated as sacred for purposes of social integration or control, quite without concern for the will of God.

In any event the polarity of the sacred and the profane does not serve the interests of the man of faith. It blunts man's powers of discrimination, specially when employed in any static fashion. The distinction is invidious towards the profane and obscures the important truth that profanation can be and often is an act of obedience to the dictates of God. Man finds fulfillment only in the holy, not in the sacred. The sacred robs him of his freedom.

Modernization and industrialization liberate persons and societies in countless ways. But it is no less true that one of the salient marks of this age is an individual's loss of agency and autonomy in the public sector under the impact of secularization. Insistence that one comes to the holy by way of the sacred simply increases the loss of agency and autonomy, exempting still other areas from reconstruction by man's inventiveness. Men's eyes are turned away from public affairs as they search for some putatively sacred realm. So the sacred becomes one of the factors that conspire towards the dehumanization of man ; it is opposed to and by the holy, which is the source and sustainer of man's agency and freedom. A faith that transcends the polarity of the sacred and the profane is a necessary resource in the struggle against quasi-religions, such as nationalism. It is equally necessary for the articulation of strategies of human renewal that will be unencumbered by shibboleths concerning what might appear sacred but is neither sensible nor significant.

In the life and teachings of Guru Nanak, skepticism and a sort of holy worldliness were nourished and supported by a passionate mysticism. While the latter can be defined in many ways, essentially it involves the recognition of the inadequacy of the distinction between the sacred and the profane. It means a commitment not only to what lies outside the temple but also to what dwells beyond the temple. In the name of what is beyond, it is critical of what lies within the temple and the other sacred precincts in which hominess religiosi conduct their affairs. Although the quest of the mystic can be fulfilled only by grace beyond deserving, the preparation for the gift of God is an exemplary instance and vindication of the freedom and agency of the individual.

Among the tales of the boy Nanak, there is a memorable instance of profanation- an insistence, in the name of God, upon the profaneness of what is held to be sacred. The holy will of God cannot be adequately expressed by what is commonly regarded as the realm of the sacred nor satisfied by man's participation in the sacred. When the family Brahmin came to invest him with the sacred thread, he spoke again, subduing all that heard:

Oh, Brahmin! You have no sacred thread.
If you have, give me the forgiveness of the Creator.
Draw round me a sacred line that no desires cross,
Unfold the Divine in me,
Which then will be sacred thread-
Never showing wear or break.²⁶

When men are confronted by the mystery of the holy, faith calls them to venture beyond the precincts and distinctions in which they had once sought refuge or security. God discloses himself as omnipresent, pervading all of his creation as well as transcending it. He can be named in many ways and worshipped at many altars, but only when they are radically relativized by awareness that no name or altar excludes another, for the Lord is in all, beyond all, more than all:

There is no final knowledge of the forms He takes,
Nor any limit within which to know Him.
It is not possible to find His boundary,
There is no one this sort of end to know.
The more that is said leaves more yet for saying.²⁷

The sovereignty of God as well as his omnipresence renders suspect idea of the sacred. The Lord who cannot be localized in time or space does not give himself over to be contained within walls. The tale of Guru Nanak at Mecca suggests not only the folly of certain religious observances but also the irrelevance of the whole idea of the sacred and the profane. What is profane, when God indwells His whole creation and "everywhere is His seat and everywhere His home?"²⁸

Guru Nanak was at Mecca. He fell asleep with his feet turned inadvertently toward the Quaba, the House of God. The chief priest (Qazi) came and said threateningly: "O forgetful stranger! Awake and see your feet are turned toward the House of God!"

The Guru replied: "Is it so? Pray, turn my feet in the direction, where the House of God is not."29

In fact, nothing is profane, unless the hand or the eye of man renders it so; nothing is sacred, for those who will be content with nothing less than holiness.

The Lord who discloses himself as omnipresent and sovereign remains a mystery in his self-disclosure. No rite can capture his ways, no word or image expresses his nature. Even the richest wares in the realm of the sacred, therefore consist of no more than

Symbols which at most have partial value,
Falling short of power for describing
That which of itself assumes incalculable forms;
Who leans on words repents on their employment.³⁰

Whoever leans on knowledge or austerities, on rituals or acts of devotion, on the capacities of the self or of human institutions, repents of their employment. In the end. neither the religious nor the sacred avail at all. Nothing avails, or prevails, except the mercy and grace of Satguru. While He remains a mystery, there is nothing arbitrary in his ways. If faith can never dispel his mysteriousness, it can discover a mingling of Sovereignty with mercy that exposes the inadequacy of the idea of the sacred – just as faith has already discovered a constant and pervasive presence that transforms the profane into "many issues out of one source flowing --- a hundred thousand rivers from one spring."³¹

Much more will be written about the one who, in the words of Wilfred Cantwell Smith, "in spiritually passionate and directly personalistic poetry and in a life of humane and humble service, preached sincerity and adoration and the overwhelming reality of God."³²

In the context of commentary in recent social change, this paper is intended to portray a man who was grasped by the holy and led away from the distinctions between the religious and the secular and between the sacred and the profane. In that adventure of Guru Nanak, there lies a profound moral for our time and, perhaps, the greatest resources for the redeeming of the times. Guru Nanak found reason and strength in the holy to venture outside and to venture beyond the temple. Beneath his mixture of worldliness and mysticism lay the conviction that man is the architect of his own destiny on this earth, even though salvation comes from God alone. "A man's self sows and likewise reaps while under His command, saith Nanak.”³³ God does not seem to be associated with karma and transmigration; instead, He is the one who liberates those who trust him from the control of karma and the cycle of rebirth. The holy is the liberator. As one who frees, he inspires and legitimates entrance into the world that he pervades.³⁴

In commenting on the thirty-fifth through the thirty-seventh psalms of the Jupji, John Clark Archer writes:

Nanak proposes the superiority of the “way of truth,” which Nirankar(Formless One) commends, over the “knowledge portion” and the “action portion,” over the way of “knowledge” and the way of “works.” He even commends this way of truth as superior to the bhakti-way of salvation – truth is more valid than devotion!

And yet… Nanak was virtually preaching the bhakti or devotion way whose inspiration, support and destination would be realized, as he thought and said, in Sat Nam, True Name. The bhakti-marga is to Nanak, we might say, the true way if pursued in the true Name.

He proposed, even though not deliberately, a fourth way of salvation, more instrumental and effective than any one or all of the other three.³⁵ A fourth way?

Certainly a path that led outside the realm of the religious and beyond the sphere of the sacred, a way that rejoiced in the density and texture of what less discriminating eyes might have regarded as secular or profane, for Sat Nam, “Seest even the little insect that crawleth, and thus countest the corn he swalloweth with his little mouth.”³⁶

Perhaps what Archer suggests might be rephrased in this way:

- if the way of works is pursued in the name of Sat Nam, men will await the initiative of God in the confidence that it awards them liberty and agency of their own.

- if the way of knowledge is followed in the name of Sat Nam, men will recognize that what seems secular or profane has much to yield careful scrutiny.

- if the way of devotion means devotion of Sat Nam, men will be satisfied neither by the religious nor by the sacred but only in the holy.

Secularization is the dynamic within the revolutions of our time. Five centuries after his birth, Guru Nanak's life and teaching seem strangely contemporary, their relevance undiminished and, perhaps, greater now than hitherto. When a new social form of religion that is the offspring of secularization threatens to provide religious sanction for withdrawal from the public realm, we must recognize that defence of what is religious cannot be identified with commitment to the holy. When the conflicts that have ravaged the modern world have originated in the sacralizing of caste or class or nation, we must recognize that loyalty to the sacred cannot be identified with faith in God.

When secularization threatens much of life with dehumanization, we must recognize that God calls men outside the temple, pervades his whole creation, and acts to liberate men as agents there. When the religious is secularized while the secular engenders new forms of religiosity, when what once was, private and profane is sacralized while old ideas of the sacred dissolve, we must recognize that these polarities bring nothing to the clarity of vision or to the sensitivity of faith.

When secularization gives men reason to doubt the power of their agency in the public realm, the sacred looms as another barrier to that liberation of the self which represents the will of God. When the religious grows indistinguishable from magic and the sacred from an idol, the way of the mystic becomes the instrument of divine judgment and primary means of access to God.

Perhaps no Mardana will accompany us in our pursuit of the holy, but the music of the psalms of Guru Nanak haunts the world still. Let us sing with him.

NOTES & REFERENCES

¹ Columbia University Press, 1963, p. 63

² Ibid., p.12

³ Edinburg House Press, 1964, p.409.

⁴ For an interesting and persuasive argument against the usage of the word 'religion' see Wilfred cantwell Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion, (The Macmillian Company, 1962). On confusing and ambiguous usage of the word "secularization," see Larry Shiner, "The Concept of Secularization in Empirical Research", Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion VI (Fall, 1967), No. 2, pp207-220.

⁵ The Sacred Canopy (Doubleday and Company, 1967), p. 107.

⁶ The author has presented this argument more extensively in David Baily Harned, The Ambiguity of Religion (The Westminister Press, 1968).

⁷ For a discussion of industrialization and secularization in the recent history of Asia see Robert N. Bellah (ed.), Religion and Progress in Modern Asia, (The Free Press, 1965). For a collection of essays, both sociological and theological, on the meaning and implications of secularization in the West, see james F. Childress and David B. Harned (eds.), Secularization and the protestant Prospect, (The Westminister Press, forthcoming 1970).

⁸ Robert Nisbet, "The Impact of Technology on Ethical Decision-Making", In Robert Lee and martin Lee Marty (eds.), Religion and Social Conflict, (Oxford University Press, 1964), pp. 10-11.

⁹ Thomas Luckmann, "Secularization - A Contemporary Myth," a lecture delivered at the university of Virginia, May 1969. The lecture has not yet been published.

¹⁰ Thomas Luckmann, The Invisible Religion, (The Macmillian Company, 1967), p. 97.

¹¹ Ibid., p.103

¹² Ibid., p.111

¹³ Julian N. Hartt, Modern Images of Man, an article which has not yet been published.

¹⁴ The author has dealt more extensively with these and other aspects of secularization that are “dehumanizing” for the self in David Baily Harned, Secularization – Plight, Promise, or Nonsense, in the Virginia Quarterly Review, Vol. 45, No. 4 (Winter 1969- forthcoming).

¹⁵ The Japji, A Book on Psalms by Guru Nanak, tr. By John Clark Archer and comprising pp. 120-133 in John Clark Archer, The Sikhs (Princeton University Press 1946), Psalm 6. All references to the Japji are to this translation.

¹⁶ Puran Singh, The First master – Guru Nanak, (Punjabi University Press, 1969), p. 17.

¹⁷ Psalm 21.

¹⁸ Psalm 6.

¹⁹ Postlude to Psalms.

²⁰ Singh op. cit., pp. 17-18

²¹ Psalm 4.

²² Psalm 21.

²³ Psalm 33.

²⁴ Singh op. cit., pp. 8-9

²⁵ Julian N. Hartt, Secularity and the Transcendence of God, in James F. Childless and David B. Harned (eds.), op. cit.

²⁶ Singh, op. cit., pp. 3-4

²⁷ Psalm 24.

²⁸ Psalm 31.

²⁹ Singh op. cit., p. 16.

³⁰ Psalm 36.

³¹ Psalm 16.

³² Wilfred Cantwell Smith, op. cit., p. 67.

³³ Psalm 20.

³⁴ In this connection, Archer’s comments are particularly interesting: “The early records which do mention Nanak but put no stress on politics. Rather, they represent him as avoiding it. And yet, there was something in him, in his movement and in his times as he affected them, which was destined to be tested by political affairs of the state. Was there something worldly after all in Nanak? And are not politics in the long run inescapable and valid test of faith. The final estimate of nanak, therefore, is a matter of the centuries, including likewise the present fateful years, of india’s history”, op. cit., pp. 106-107

³⁵ Ibid., p.133

³⁶ Singh, op. cit., p.23.