Sanctity, as it appears across the depth-psychology and comparative-religion corpus, is not simply moral excellence or ecclesiastical designation but a charged ontological category whose boundaries are perpetually contested. The tradition inherited from Rudolf Otto insists that sanctity is irreducible to rational or ethical content; it belongs to the numinous, a sui generis mode of apprehension that precedes theology. Jane Ellen Harrison radicalizes this further, inverting the naive assumption that gods confer sanctity upon objects: primitive materials and places are experienced as sacred first, and deities emerge from that prior charge — le sacré est le père du dieu. Mircea Eliade deepens the spatial dimension, arguing that sanctuaries continuously resanctify a world otherwise liable to profanation. Within the Philokalic tradition, sanctity is an interior achievement: the complete mortification of sensory desire, purification from passion, and gradual participation in divine light — a definition sharply different from mere behavioral virtue. James reports visionary states in which sanctity is conferred directly through mystical union with the divine Persons. Hillman retrieves Jung’s clinical experience of ‘inexpressible sanctity’ and links it, via Heidegger, to the gathering depth of the colour blue — holiness as phenomenological quality rather than moral predicate. What unites these divergent accounts is the insistence that sanctity marks a boundary between ordinary and extraordinary being, a boundary that is simultaneously experiential, cosmological, and transformative.
a thing is regarded as sacred, and out of that sanctity, given certain conditions, emerges a daimon and ultimately a god. Le sacré, c’est le père du dieu.
Harrison argues that sanctity is logically and temporally prior to divinity — the sacred quality of objects and places generates gods, not the reverse.
, Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion, 1912thesis
He felt the presence of ‘inexpressible sanctity’ that had a ‘magical atmosphere.’ ‘I understood then why one speaks of the odor of sanctity, of the sweet smell of the Holy Ghost.’
Hillman, reading Jung’s near-death visions through Heidegger, reframes sanctity as a phenomenological quality of presence — holiness as the gathering depth that ‘shines forth only as it veils itself’ — rather than a moral or theological attribute.
, Alchemical Psychology, 2010thesis
the world is continually purified by the sanctity of sanctuaries. Another… it is by virtue of the temple that the world is resanctified in every part.
Eliade locates sanctity as a cosmological force: the sanctuary functions as the ontological anchor that continuously purifies and resanctifies an otherwise profaned cosmos.
, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, 1957thesis
it is not the goddess Pallas Athena who lends sanctity to the Palladion, it is the sanctity of the Palladion that begets the godhead of Pallas Athena.
Harrison illustrates her inversion thesis through a concrete case: the weapon’s inherent mana — its sanctity as a vehicle of power — precedes and produces the divine figure associated with it.
, Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion, 1912thesis
sanctification is truly the complete mortification and cessation of desire in the senses. When we have achieved this we assuage the uncouth turbulence of our incensive power.
The Philokalic tradition defines sanctity not as a bestowed status but as an achieved interior state — the total extinction of sensory desire — through which the passions are progressively stilled.
, The Philokalia, Volume 2, 1981thesis
Paul believes that the destruction of the church’s unity is a direct violation of the church’s sanctity. To divide the church over special teachers… is to destroy the temple of God and to violate its sanctity.
Thielman shows that in Pauline theology sanctity is corporate and architectural — the ecclesial body is itself the holy temple, and its fragmentation constitutes a desecration.
, Theology of the New Testament: A Canonical and Synthetic Approach, 2005supporting
the Son of God… presents her to God the Father, in that perfection of sanctity with which He had dowered her… she remained endowed with the plenary fullness of the blessing of Sanctity, bestowed on her by Omnipotence, by Wisdom, and by Love.
James documents a mystical experience in which sanctity is understood as a tripartite divine gift — conferred by each Person of the Trinity — illustrating the visionary, experiential dimension of sanctification in Catholic mysticism.
, The Varieties of Religious Experience Amazon, 1902supporting
this notion of the ‘sacred’ which we have resolved into the fearful and the effective… is wide-spread among primitive peoples and has given rise to an instructive terminology.
Harrison identifies the primitive substrate of sanctity in the dual affect of fear and efficacy — the sacred as that which simultaneously terrifies and empowers — and documents this across comparative ethnographic terminology.
, Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion, 1912supporting
In Minoan-Mycenaean times they had special sanctity, whence they have been called ‘horns of consecration’… Their usual position is upon an altar or a shrine. They are ‘the place of consecration’.
Onians traces the sanctity attributed to the horns of sacrificial animals to archaic beliefs about the life-substance contained therein, linking material sanctity to the pre-rational psychology of vitality.
, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988supporting
souls that are sluggish and indolent and do not seek… to achieve through patient endurance and long-suffering the heart’s sanctification not just partially but totally, cannot hope to commune in the Holy Spirit with full consciousness.
The Philokalia insists that sanctification must be total rather than partial — partial acquisition of grace without complete mortification leads to complacency and eventual loss of the gift.
, The Philokalia, Volume 4, 1995supporting
a t hunger common among the American Indians may Sanehy a useful varie… VI] Sanctity of Fruit-Trees 167 And of these
Harrison’s chapter heading ‘Sanctity of Fruit-Trees’ gestures toward the extension of the sacred-as-prior-to-deity thesis into the domain of vegetation and agrarian religion.
, Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion, 1912aside
What therefore must be the purity and holiness required of the priest who touches the divine body? And what boldness must he not have as mediator between God and man.
The Philokalia frames the priesthood as a vocation requiring a degree of sanctity analogous to angelic nature, since the priest’s mediatorial role requires contact with the holy body.
, The Philokalia, Volume 2, 1981aside