Presented by Eric LaFreniere
6.21.09
Chalice Lighting: “Olympism [is] exalting and combining in a balanced whole the qualities of body, mind, and will”
Good Morning! And Happy Father’s Day. Father’s Day. I hope that a service on the relationship between sports and religion makes good sense on today in particular. Actually, I was inspired by an associate who, knowing that I’m not a huge fan of either popular religion or popular sports, sent me a youtube link to a commercial for a videogame called Blitz: The League II. In that ad, “football legend” Lawrence Taylor manhandles a pigskin while shouting these words from the center field of a CGI coliseum:
“Every Sunday, when America goes to church, we go to war!
While they pray for salvation, we play for survival.
This is our cathedral! The game is our religion!
And every religion has a judgment day.”
Which prompted me to ask myself: What does the coliseum have to do with the cathedral? Thinking about it, I realized that there are obvious major similarities between religion and sports: both excite our emotional core and mobilize masses of followers, both prescribe our thought and behavior and provide meaningful epics and exemplars, and both inspire us to create institutions dedicated to their orderly expression and perpetuation. Moreover, both religion and sports have been with us for as long as we can remember; they are beyond ancient – their beginnings are shrouded in the mists of prehistory.
Given the parallels between, and hidden origins of religion and sports, it’s tempting to treat them as if they’re actually the same thing, or as if one were a subset of the other. As it turns out that, some folks have espoused exactly those positions, but others have argued that the similarities between religion and sports are only superficial and that they’re essentially different.
But another approach is possible: using a broad evolutionary framework, we can say that religion and sports share a common ancestor – that is to say, they are simultaneously different but essentially related. Indeed, this service makes them out to be fraternal twins.
In the beginning, there was no religion or sports, because there was no self-awareness. Before “I” – which is no simple concept – proto-humans were undifferentiated from nature. Before language, nature was limited to exterior / physical forms, and there was only biological evolution.
With the emergence of language, however, nature began to assume interior / mental forms. As relatively rapid cultural evolution started among humans, language developed to the point of self-referential complexity, and self-awareness unfolded. A part of nature was now in a position to recognize itself as being apart from the rest of nature.
The initial division between nature and self-awareness marked the dawn of both religion and sports. Religion began as the mental or interior play of self-awareness. Sports began as the physical or exterior play of self-awareness. Both subjective impulses were originally spontaneous, unstructured, and ecstatic – but were destined to become the twin, complementary poles about which sophisticated cultural structures would evolve.
As language became more precise, self-awareness became more focused, and it increasingly perceived itself to be separate from nature, and indeed at its mercy. Thus ecstatic freedom gave way to existential dread. To reduce or channel the anxiety of self-awareness, cultural structures of metaphorical propitiation, consolation, and salvation evolved, typically around seasonal or other natural cycles. Religion became structured into rituals. Sport became structured into games. Thus through morals and rules, the religious and sporting impulses – both rooted in the natural life of the self-aware human organism, or the human spirit – were harnessed to enmesh the mind and body in structures of meaning.
A quick aside: note that the word “spirit,” which now connotes mind, derives from the Latin “spiritus,” which means breath. The respective Greek and Sanskrit equivalents are “pneuma” and “prana,” terms that have also originally meant breath but have come to connote mind. Thus etymology attests to the common root of religion (interior mind) and sports (exterior breath).
In any case, through the cultural sublimation of play, order was imposed upon chaos, uncertainty was vanquished, and death was denied – all of that, metaphorically, of course. For example, religious and sporting structures were seamlessly combined by function in the world’s first team sport, the pre-Columbian Mesoamerican ballgame: Playing ball engaged one in the maintenance of the cosmic order of the universe and the ritual regeneration of life. In its inherent duality, the game was a struggle between day and night – a battle between life and the underworld. During its three thousand-year history, the institution featured sports arenas, devoted fans, local rivalries, half-time shows, and rampant gambling. It also sometimes featured the ritual murder of losing players. Captives of war were treated similarly, and human sacrifice was associated with cannibalism.
It’s interesting to note that, in terms of in-group sacrifice, males are more disposable than females (in the case of war, everybody on the opposing side can be sacrificed). Death-denial already literally resides in females as the ability to produce new life.
A more obscure example of the structural-functional intertwining of religion and sports is the now-endangered n’gol practiced by the natives of Vanuatu’s Pentecost Island. As part of a seasonal fertility festival, ritually pure adult males climb specially built eighty-foot wooden towers – off of which they allow themselves to fall with vines tied about their ankles. By getting their hair to graze the ground, they ensure a good yam harvest and survival for their community. (Of course, bungee jumping is our secular, safer version of the n’gol).
The famous cliff-divers of Acapulco engage in a similar death-denying ritual / game by regularly diving a hundred feet into rocky, surf-tossed ocean. As they make their way across the cliff face to their diving perch, the normally cocky athletes stop to humbly pray at specially built shrines to the Virgin of Guadalupe. Locals often publicly join in prayer, or at least cross themselves. The divers help ensure a good tourist economy and prosperity for their community. Moreover, since the success of the divers is seen as something of a miracle, the sport serves to reinforce the metaphorically death-denying structure of propitiation, consolation, and salvation that is the Catholic Church.
The KaihÅgyÅ – Buddhist monks of Japan’s Mount Hiei – have developed possibly the most demanding institution of metaphorical death-denial. Their ultimate religious path is a total of twenty-seven thousand miles of power walking through mountainous terrain, summer and winter, light and darkness, with a bowl of rice and two hours of sleep per day. It takes aspirant-athletes seven years to achieve enlightenment / complete the ordeal, assuming they actually survive – the path is punctuated by memorials to those who have tried and died.
Self-sacrifice can reinforce cultural structures of salvation or metaphorical death-denial, allowing the literal destruction of an individual to strengthen society as a whole. Thus may be understood the debilitating injuries of modern-day gladiators such as boxers and football players, as well the death of modern-day charioteer Dale Earnhart.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. A very simple outline of the relationship between sports and religion in the West is in order.
On the island of Crete, archeological evidence indicates that Minoan youths somersaulted over the backs of charging bulls. While the acrobatic details are uncertain, the bull was sacred to the Minoans. Given that, historians speculate that bull-leaping was more than just a game practiced by headstrong adolescents – it was probably also an elite rite of passage. Thus game and rite functioned to metaphorically regenerate life – that is to deny death.
After their initial development, rituals and games had the potential to propel culture and self-awareness towards increasingly integrated and expanded states. For example, the Olympic games of ancient Greece originated alongside fertility rites designed to honor and propitiate Gaia – a Great Goddess – and “defeat in an athletic contest was the symbolic substitute for sacrificial death.” Later, the same games became associated with the famous Temple of Zeus at Olympia and with the athletes’ pursuit of the perfection of their bodies and skills so as to emulate the gods. That transition in patronage and purpose simultaneously reflected and catalyzed the evolution of Greek culture from the chthonic earth mother archetype to the rational sky father archetype, laying the groundwork for Western philosophy and science, as well as individualism and democracy.
Additionally, the tradition of the Olympic truce – intended to provide safe passage for the games’ athletes and visitors – promoted cooperation between the Greek-speaking city-states, and nourished their nascent sense of cultural identity and unity. That integration allowed them to repel the Persian Empire and to later establish their own. Note that he Greeks considered the Eleusinian Mysteries and the Olympics their two most fundamental institutions. That dyad of Dionysian rites and Apollonian games formed the beating heart of their culture, to which we owe so much.
Olympia aside, the guardians of ritual and game tended to be conservative or even regressive. Due to avarice and inertia, institutions that might have catalyzed culture and self-awareness frequently fostered stagnation or dis-integration instead. For example, Roman gladiatorial games originated alongside funerary rites designed to honor and propitiate the gods and the dead. Later, they expressed and reinforced the religiously sanctified power and authority of “the Senate and the People of Rome.” However, gladiatorial games eventually degenerated into public spectacles designed to distract and manipulate the mob, and contributed to the collapse of the Roman Empire, including its traditional religion. By that time, an institution of human sacrifice had come to feature product endorsement, ticket scalping, and fan riots.
In the West, nature’s foray into self-awareness culminated in a radical mind-body dichotomy, but in the East, the internal-external split never became radical. Cultural structures such as yoga and martial arts have always recognized religion and sports as the two most basic aspects of the human spirit, and practitioners still seek to harness their underlying unity. Perhaps a kindred understanding accounts for Saying 22 of the suppressed Gospel of Thomas: “Jesus said to them, ‘When you make the two into one, and when you make the inner like the outer and the outer like the inner…then you will enter [the kingdom].” There is also Saying 29: “Jesus said, ‘If the flesh came into being because of spirit, that is a marvel, but if spirit came into being because of the body, that is a marvel of marvels.'”
In any case, Christianity came to identify the mind or “soul” as good and the body or “flesh” as evil. As a result, the church chose to reject (rather than merely reform) the pagan games while emphasizing the development of its own elaborate rituals. Thus religious structures of propitiation, consolation, and salvation dominated the cultural life of Europe for over a thousand years, and sports was relegated to a folk activity.
Then came the Renaissance, at the center of which was a reappraisal of pagan culture, including its appreciation of nature’s exterior forms (and especially the human body). The Catholic Church’s cultural hegemony – including its religious monopoly – was questioned, helping to spark the Reformation. The stage was set for the reemergence of elaborate sporting structures.
The modern structures of both religion and sports have been shaped by the rise of capitalism, nationalism, and secularism. Capitalism has attempted to exploit the religious and sporting impulses for profit, nationalism has attempted to co-opt them for political gain, and secularism has attempted to keep them separate on principle. Thus, to varying degrees in different times and places, these structures have polluted and diluted the expression and association of both primal human impulses.
However, only secularism is entirely new to the world scene; the project to intentionally isolate, marginalize, or even annihilate religious structures is without precedent. By sometimes over-emphasizing nature’s external forms, secularism is responsible for, among other things, espousing and reinforcing the previously mentioned objection that religion and sports are essentially different.
Ironically, religious fundamentalists agree with secular fundamentalists on that point. To a religious fundamentalist, only traditional religion should be of “ultimate concern.” A secular fundamentalist rejects traditional religion, but might accept sports as a substitute or “civil religion.” However, dichotomy and dogma aside, the human spirit instinctively recognizes and responds to the common and complementary origin, function, and destiny of ritual and game.
While religion and sports have served to alleviate the anxiety of self-awareness by integrating the self into progressively expansive cultural structures, they also have a regressive tendency. That is to say, religion and sports can serve not just as ladders, but as chutes down which the individual and / or society can slide into atavistic or less conscious states, and even down into the muck of pure primate politics.
There is actually a natural tendency for this to occur, because life in general – and the human spirit in particular – is an energetic phenomenon subject to the law of entropy: without constant energy input, life and culture stagnate or dis-integrate. In non-self-aware systems the transfer of energy is more deterministic than in self-aware systems, and we call this difference “free will.” Simply put, humans can choose stagnation or dis-integration through mental and / or physical inertia. It requires less energy input. The fact that it requires prodigious energy to actually expand cultural structures only highlights the problem. And it requires much less energy to backslide down an already existing trail than it does to blaze a new one.
Speaking of cultural trailblazing, French nobleman Baron Pierre de Coubertin founded the modern Olympics to be a cultural institution through which the natural life of humanity could be expressed in a holistic fashion. The ideal of his modern Olympic movement was to pick up where the ancient Olympics left off, and to catalyze on a global scale the integration and expansion of culture and self-awareness via the balancing of ritual and game Рthat is to say, via the intentionally harmonious expression of both the religious and sporting impulses. Here the Greek concept of ar̻te Рor excellence through personal integration Рis clearly expressed. Most folks think of spirituality as involving some sort of supernatural, disembodied mind. Perhaps, instead, we should think of spirituality as involving the integrating function of the human will.
NOTES
In his seminal From Ritual to Record (1978) writer-scholar Allen Guttman claims that primitive religion and sports are essentially the same, while in his now classic The Joy of Sports (1988) theologian Michael Novak maintains that modern sports is a religion (pointedly referring to baseball, basketball, and football as “the holy trinity”).
In “Sport is Not a Religion” (1985) Joan Chandler strenuously argues just that point, as does Robert Higgs in “Muscular Christianity, Holy Play, and Spiritual Exercises: Confusion about Christ in Sports and Religion” (1983).
We take our cue from Brian Milton, who employs a highly productive structural-functionalist perspective in his master’s thesis “Sport as a Functional Equivalent of Religion” (1972).
Our model is Ken Wilbur’s groundbreaking Up From Eden (1983), a comprehensive study of the development of human consciousness.
In his lucidly accessible The Ape That Spoke (1991) author-journalist John McCrone points out that “the first hominids discovered upright walking and social graces, Homo habilis discovered tools, Homo erectus discovered fire, and Homo sapiens discovered language” (pp47-48).
It appears that even the relatively simple language of animals is enough to generate a degree of interiority. So, for example, a dog can exhibit sadness or a cat can act embarrassed, and we sense that there is a mind behind that behavior. Of course, without complex language, the animal mind is (for better or worse ) more or less stuck in the present moment and their natural play is more or less limited to unstructured / instinctive exterior forms related to, say, hunting, combat, and courtship (ibid, pp87-89).
Evolution became memetic rather than merely genetic. A meme – as defined by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene (1976) – is a language-based / -transferred idea or behavior. Like genes, memes are subject to recombination, mutation, and selective pressures.
In his controversial, interdisciplinary masterpiece The Origin of Consciousness (1976) psychologist Julian Jaynes contends that self-awareness as we know it emerged only recently. While humanity possessed the necessary neural hardware for tens of thousands of years, the linguistic software necessary to fully form the loop of self-awareness was not in use until the second millennium BCE. Before then, humans had an essentially divided consciousness. The hemispheres of the brain were dis-integrated – the human mind was “bicameral.”
Subjectively, communication between the hemispheres was experienced as the hallucinated voices of nature spirits, ancestral ghosts, physically absent kings, and patron gods. These voices commanded automatic, unquestioning obedience – individualism was nonexistent, as was heresy or rebellion. Socrates claimed he could still hear such a voice (his daimon), while in the bestselling Quiet Strength (2007) Tony Dungy could only long to do so: “When will I hear Your voice, Lord?” (p5, emphasis in the original).
The image of the Taoist yin-yang symbol is irresistible. Through their underlying unity and common natural origin, the two most basic aspects of the human spirit each contain the seed of the other – hence the close relationship and similarities between religion and sports.
According to this admittedly very broad understanding, penultimately fundamental cultural structures are permeated by the ultimately fundamental structures of religion and sports. Take art, for example. Paleolithic cave painting – probably the interior analog of human hunting activity – was mainly a religious activity, but it also had a sports component (spelunking) since it was performed in not easily accessible spaces. On the other hand, modern trumpet playing and interpretive dance both involve wildly varying ratios of religion to sports – that is, of sublimated internal to external play.
Similarly, fundamental cultural structures as antipodal as combat and courtship are permeated by both religious and sporting structures. Combat and courtship are also respectively informed by instinctive territorial and mating impulses that are far more primal – and less distinctly human – than the religious and sporting impulses, which arise only through self-awareness. Thus art, like religion and sports, is more distinctly human than either combat or courtship.
The cultural structuring (or creation) of time allowed humans to transcend the present moment. Memory and forethought greatly increased our adaptability, but they also greatly increased our anxiety, since suffering and death could now be viewed as inevitable – thus humanity was banished from the Garden.
Wilbur (chapters six and seven) explores the anxiety that underlies sacrifice, and elaborates on sacrifice as ritual. He also discusses murder and war as human sacrifice.
Dungy, p263: “God’s Son died too, but God willingly allowed Christ to die on the cross [propitiation] so that He could restore sight to the blind, heal broken hearts [consolation], and bring His children to Him for all eternity [salvation].”
Applying psychologist Howard Gardner’s model of nested minds – expounded in his book Leading Minds (1995) – to this outline, we can say that the religious and sporting impulses alike have their roots in humanity’s primate heritage. Thus we should not be surprised that the most basic cultural structures those impulses inspire, and through which they are first channeled and expressed, incorporate imitation and hierarchy (just as “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” during embryogenesis).
By definition, all successful life and culture is “death-denying” (or “death-defying” or “death-transcending”). With cultural structures, though, the question is: are they are more or less so? Religion and sports are cultural structures of metaphorical death-denial par excellence.
As a child recognizes its separateness from nature and its primary caretakers, that radical split thoroughly informs its dawning self-awareness, producing Gardner’s binary unschooled mind. At this stage, a child perceives things in starkly black-and-white terms, and it is highly susceptible to conditioning based on mythic narratives of good vs. evil and us vs. them (for example: life vs. afterlife, saints vs. sinners, heaven vs. hell, god vs. the devil, the elect vs. the damned, and Cowboys vs. Redskins). Society takes advantage of, and reinforces, the dualistic unschooled mind by indoctrinating the child with religious-based morals and sports-based rules.
A well-socialized child’s ontological shock is buffered by the artificial certainty of morals and rules, it naturally recognizes more and more those comforting prescriptions themselves, and comes to value their stability. Thus arises Gardner’s ten-year-old mind, which focuses intently on stories of “honesty, dutifulness, and fairness” (p51) – sometimes to a fault. At this point, social structures that evolved to keep subconscious urges and the anxiety of self-awareness in check have been internalized, and a child is likely to become keenly aware of any inconsistencies in the moiré pattern of morals and rules upon which it depends for security. Thus the ten-year-old mind seeks to minimize its own inconsistency, as well as that of others.
To be fair, that was only the latest iteration of a hoary metaphysical tradition which championed the ontological primacy of immaterial substance: number over object (Pythagoras), form over particular (Plato), essence over accident (Aristotle), spirit over flesh (Paul), mind over body (Descartes), reason over experience (Kant). Since the mind is the very seat of perspective, it tends to take its own projected and reified abstractions as the primary stuff of the cosmos. Thus the various species of subjectivism may be viewed as the cognitive equivalent of geocentrism.
Jesus Christ is the ultimate blood sacrifice – to keep the threat of inevitable death at bay – and metaphorical (or literal, if one subscribes to the doctrine of transubstantiation) cannibalism remains the central rite of Christianity.
Due in no small part to its lopsided cultural emphasis, nearly all of Christendom languished in physical discomfort during this time. Indeed, some Christians actually reveled in physical discomfort – and were revered as role models for doing so.
This implies that medieval sports was typically de facto (although certainly not defiantly) secular in character. However, while there isn’t any significant evidence for overlapping structures of religion and sports during that period, we can nonetheless probably safely assume that such overlapping occurred on an individual, rather than institutional, scale – personal prayer before a jousting tournament, for instance.
Capitalism’s greed is nearly as old as surplus wealth, and nationalism’s territorial imperative is even older. Only the scale represented by each is unprecedented.
Guttman, however, maintains that secularism was foreshadowed as far back as the ancient Olympics, when the emphasis began to shift from ritual propitiation to record preservation (hence From Ritual to Record). At that level of abstraction, sports started to become disentangled from religion – it came to be not so much about society appeasing supernatural forces, as about humans engaging in contests against each other. Perhaps inevitably, Protagoras mustered the humanistic audacity to declare: “Man is the measure of all things: of things which are, that they are, and of things which are not, that they are not” – thus boasting of fire stolen from the gods.
Critics sometimes disparagingly dismiss the triumph of the external as “materialism” – a fundamentalist or “crass” example of which might have been Behaviorism, a school of psychology that scrupulously ignores the mind.
Gardner’s fifteen-year-old mind is integrated enough to recognize that “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” Reasoning from experience, an adolescent knows that the sky will not necessarily fall if morals and rules are not always obeyed, and that all prescriptions are at least somewhat relative or arbitrary. Thus an adolescent is not afraid to question morals or change the rules – or to abandon a religion or a game altogether to take up a new one, or none at all (good luck). However, without morals and rules there is no basis for the evolution of culture and self-awareness. Since nature abhors a vacuum, a mind arrested at this stage of development can eventually fall prey to narratives of extreme relativism or fundamentalism, and nihilism can prevail.
Dungy repeatedly says things like “I think people care a disproportionate amount about professional football” (p313). That, from a man who spent so much time and energy coaching professional football – and preaching to others that “dads need to spend more time with their kids” (p199) – that he supposedly had no clue as to why his own son committed suicide.
We all (at least subconsciously) want to be part of something larger than ourselves, since Mother Nature is where we came from, as well as where we are going. Self-awareness is like the arc of a solar flare, dramatic and potentially destructive – and ultimately reabsorbed.
In religion there is much talk of “free will,” while in sports there is much talk of “will power.” (Philosophers used to talk of “Will”).
Inertia can be either mental or physical. One can be mentally energetic and physically lazy, or vice versa. Either way, personal integration is hindered.
Gardner’s mature mind transcends relativism through fully integrated self-awareness. Such a mind possesses freedom reminiscent of, but obviously superior to, that enjoyed by the pre-self-aware infant or the child on the cusp of self-awareness. A cognitively mature adult consciously chooses and defends the cultural structures it deems most valuable (that is, pleasurable, reasonable, compassionate, efficacious, etc), managing the religious and sporting impulses as tools, and recognizing morals and rules as contextual guidelines rather than absolutes. At its highest level of integration, the mature mind no longer merely selects stories – it synthesizes them.
Quick leader bio: 1863 – 1937. Born in Paris, the fourth child of a wealthy family. Rugby and scouting enthusiast. Visited American and British schools. Influenced by Dr. Thomas Arnold’s idea of sports as a character-building institution. Turned down military and political careers. Wrote book on athletics and education. Impressed by Dr. William Penny Brookes’ local revival of the Olympic games. Founded and headed the International Olympic Committee. Founded French scouting groups. Body buried in Geneva, heart at Olympia.
De Coubertin: “Holding an Olympic games means evoking history” (“Baron Pierre de Coubertin Quote,” Said What?, 2002).
De Coubertin: “The Olympic games are for the world and all nations must be admitted to them” (ibid). This inclusiveness contrasts sharply with that of the original games; the ancient Greeks tended to consider foreigners “barbarians,” and to treat them with disdain.
De Coubertin: “Olympism … exalting and combining in a balanced whole the qualities of body, mind, and will” (ibid, ellipsis in the original). Here the Greek concept of arête – or excellence through personal integration – is clearly articulated. Most people think of spirituality as involving some sort of supernatural, disembodied mind. Perhaps, instead, we should think of spirituality as involving the integrating function of the human will.