Miejsce sacrum w religii i kulturze

Abstract

[The place of the sacred in religion and culture]

In the paper the author discusses various definitions of ‘culture’ and ‘the sacred’, placing them in a broader context of culture and religion. She points to three main sources of religiousness, namely: natural, psychic and social. Regardless of its source, each religion is formed by a doctrine, a system of moral values and a cult. Therefore, religion is one of the most significant and powerful cultural and social phenomena while sacredness is its core and most primeval element. The feature of sacredness is vested in God, but also in people, objects, animals, plants and actions.
Many scholars in the field of religiology have dealt with the issue of the sacred, the most outstanding expert and theoretician of them being the Romanian Mircea Eliade. Religion is a historical, universal and diversified phenomenon. Due to its numerous changes and constant development, it is now considerably sophisticated and complex. However, regardless of its stage of development and principles, its main and basic distinguishing feature is the sacred, which, despite its diversity, is the underlying structure of each religion and a condition of its existence and development. This issue has been made use of in many fields of arts, one of them being literature.