Peter L. Berger And Mircea Eliade: A Comparative Analysis
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The word ‘sacred’ in a religious matter could easily be defined as a “devoted or dedicated to a deity or to some religious purpose; consecrated”(Dictionary.com). Two diverse pieces of writings brought my attention to their usage of the word ‘sacred’ in a dissimilar matter. The author of The Sacred Canopy, Peter L. Berger and the author of The Sacred and the Profane, Mircea Eliade, both interpreted the word differently to fit their arguments. While Eliade states that the scared is “
Thus causing both pieces of writings to share a common understanding however creates two completely unlike arguments despite the commonality they share.
To begin breaking down both texts, let us understand the message given or taken from each individual text. Firstly analyzing the author’s point of view and background knowledge to compare their arguments. Mircea Eliade, the author of The Sacred and the Profane is a Romanian historian that studied religion, fiction writing, and philosophy. He was a professor at the University of Chicago as well.
The Sacred and the Profane separates people into two…show more content… The nomos is a product of a long chain of series created from human choices that could have been chosen to create a different outcome. What society tries to plant in humans is the idea of nomos being true and unchangeable, thus allowing it to be taken for granted to its full extent, thus being successful at this. He then goes back to the point of how the connection of humans having weak instinctual patterns is the reason why humans do not know what to do exactly. This is why humans constantly depend on parents, guardians or elders to learn from, thus becoming unaware of a certain ‘degree of freedom’ to go against the nomos. Since the environment and the people are constantly changing then the nomos is not