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Document Details : Title: Religion and the Dialectics of Sport Author(s): HÜBENTHAL, Christoph Journal: Louvain Studies Volume: 45 Issue: 3 Date: 2022 Pages: 226-243 DOI: 10.2143/LS.45.3.3291394 Abstract : In this paper, the relationship between religion and sport will be elucidated by referring to the so-called transcendentals. In scholastic theology, the transcendentals stood for the super-categorical attributes of the divine. Particularly truth, goodness, and beauty were seen to be the transcendental properties of God. At the same time, however, scholastic theologians also emphasized that creatures participate in the divine attributes, which is why there is also creaturely truth, goodness, and beauty. Building on these premises, this paper seeks to show first that in sport, some truth can indeed be found. For the sportive competition puts on stage an undramatic enactment of the drama of human life, which tells a true story about what it is to be a human being. But, due to the fact that the human body in action is always a semantically underdetermined sign, this true story can be overwritten by, for instance, political or commercial messages which sometimes turn out to be false. So, there is truth in sport but also a kind of epistemic resentment. Secondly, it will be shown that goodness can likewise be found in sport, since sport makes possible the experience of a resonating unity between self, environment, and others in motion; and this experience can be taken as a particular mode of happiness. On the other hand, however, sport also displays a kind of ethical resentment in that it claims to be a world-on-its-own. Originally developed to defend sport against leftist intellectuals, this claim now turns out to be an immunization strategy against all forms of ethical critique. In a third section, the paper focuses on beauty in sport. Here, it will be shown that sport is indeed the bearer of beauty for it is able to generate effects of aesthetic presence. Furthermore, it can produce highly complex narrative and visual forms. As with the other transcendentals, however, even in the aesthetic realm, sport also shows a kind of resentment. For example, consider the ways in which sport prevents the full integration of people with disabilities (even in the problematic form of the Paralympic Movement). So, the assumption is that sport could be more beautiful when exercised both by people with and without disabilities. In the last section, of course, the question must be raised regarding how truth, goodness, and beauty in sport relate to the divine transcendentals. The simple answer will be that sport, rightly understood, can evoke the desire for absolute truth, infinite goodness, and eternal happiness and therefore prepare an openness for salvation. As an effect of the resentments just mentioned, however, sport sometimes tends to pretend that it is a salvific reality, which is not true. For sport is never to be equated with religion. |
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