The Sacred as Participatory Mattering: From Autopoiesis to Ultimacy

Vervaeke develops a naturalistic account of the sacred that begins not with theology but with the structure of life itself. The foundation is Autopoiesis: living systems, unlike merely self-organizing physical phenomena, are constitutively organized around what matters to them. Relevance is not a subjective overlay on a neutral world — it is built into the architecture of being alive. This structural Mattering scales through nested levels: biological self-maintenance, cognitive development through selective attention, and social existence where the question becomes not 'what is relevant to me?' but 'how am I relevant to you?' — the Agapic arrow.

From this base, the sacred emerges as a layered phenomenological structure. The first layer is Mattering: connection to something with reality and value beyond the egocentric frame. The paradigm is agapic love — wanting something to exist beyond one's own existence. The second layer is revelatory depth: when what matters also discloses reality, drawing one into deeper contact with what is real rather than functioning as distraction. The third and superlative layer is orientation toward ultimacy — when the revelatory connection points toward what is ultimately real. This is the experiential referent behind the names God, Dao, Brahman — understood not as supernatural entities but as designations for this culminating orientation.

Vervaeke names the whole constellation 'Religio' in its original Latin sense: binding and fitting together, the mutual conformity of mind and world. The capacity for agapic concern and orientation toward ultimacy are understood as exaptations of mammalian care structures — the sacred as nature's deepest expression, not its exception.

This framework also addresses a specific historical problem. Tillich's god beyond the god of theism was prophetic but structurally empty — it lacked the ontological machinery to become actionable. Vervaeke fills this gap by reinterpreting Tillich's 'inexhaustible' not as infinite quantitative extension but as generative emergent depth. The psyche, on this account, is not merely an epistemic instrument directed at the sacred but a participatory Symbol — a sacrament — whose very operation makes the sacred present. Intelligence and intelligibility are mutually constitutive; the grammar of cognition and the grammar of reality are isomorphic in a non-trivial sense.

The practical and civilizational stakes are explicit: without grounding participation in a robust ontology of Emergence and Mattering, no narrative or practice will generate the depth of commitment the current crisis demands. The diagnostic questions — What do you want to exist even if you don't? How real is it? How much difference do you make to it? — predict measurable harm when their answers are absent.