Consecration

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Consecration is the rite by which a person, place, or object is set apart from common use and dedicated to the sacred. The Latin consecrare — to make wholly holy — names the act and its claimed result at once: something that was ordinary is declared no longer so, and is thereafter handled, guarded, or approached by different rules. What changes is not the thing’s appearance but its status, and the change is held to be effected by the rite itself rather than merely announced by it.

The pattern is older than any one religion and recurs almost everywhere people mark off a zone of the holy. Ancient temples were dedicated to their gods with prescribed formulae; altars, images, priests, kings, and ground were all brought across the same threshold by ritual. The means are remarkably consistent across traditions: a setting-apart in words, the laying on of hands, washing, and above all anointing — the pouring of oil that gives the Hebrew mashiach and Greek christos, the anointed one, their names. To consecrate was characteristically to mark a boundary and to commit what lay inside it to a power.

Traditions divide over what the rite is taken to accomplish. In much of Christianity consecration effects a real change: the bishop’s words at the Eucharist were held to make the bread and wine the body and blood of Christ, and a consecrated church or vessel cannot afterward be returned to profane use without a further rite of deconsecration. The treatises ascribed to Dionysius the Areopagite read the church’s consecrations — of the altar, of the chrism, of the ordained — as visible signs of an invisible hierarchy descending from God. Other traditions weight the act differently, as dedication or as the invocation of a presence into an image; the late-antique theurgists described the consecration of statues as drawing divine power into matter prepared to receive it. In Reformed Christianity the same word often means something nearer solemn setting-apart than any change wrought in the thing.

Scholarship treats consecration as a clear instance of ritual’s capacity to alter social and sacred status by performance — a thing made holy by being treated as holy, within a community that agrees to the change. Practitioners have meant a great deal more: that the rite does not describe a transformation but causes one, and that what has been consecrated is genuinely no longer ordinary, no longer available for common use as before. The two readings need not be reconciled to see what the rite was for. A line is drawn; what falls inside it is given away.

→ In the library: Dionysius the Areopagite (Parker) — incl. the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy · Iamblichus on the Mysteries (Taylor, 1821)

→ Related: Anointing · Sacramental · Substance