Introduction

Abstract

In his seminal study of 1912, Les Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse, Émile Durkheim argued that, since the dawn of human communal living, the basic habitat of religions has been the public domain; Durkheim located the notion of sacredness at the nexus of human practices and social projects. As far as the European continent is concerned, religions have been, indeed, molded within foro externo, as symbolic constructions of ‘collective identity’, closely related to the cultural construction of modernity and its institutionalization in nation-states. Even in the present time of post-modernity, they still bear, according to Jürgen Habermas, a valuable semantic potential for inspiring other people beyond the limits of a particular community of faith, once that potential is delivered in terms of its ‘profane truth content’. This notion is best exemplified in the case of religious cultural goods. The latter manifest an aesthetic synthesis of the sacred/profane qualities, since it is in their very nature to embody a complicated amalgam of the aesthetic and the numinous.

Remnants of things that have passed away,

Fragments of stone, reared by creatures of clay

The Siege of Corinth, 1816

Lord Byron