‘The hand of God’: hierophany and transcendence through sport

ABSTRACT

The designation of Diego Maradona’s ‘handball’ goal, that it was an intervention by God himself, brings the phenomena of sport and religion into an interrelationship. The basic thesis of this paper is that, despite many of their phenomenal similarities, explicit religion is not, and cannot be, substantially related to sport, as the two manifest themselves in different ways of being. This thesis is supported by arguments from three philosophical areas: 1. The ontological dimension of the manifestation of the sacred in the profane through the process of hierophany in sport does not refer to a specific deity or God, and is therefore not a presentation but an indirect representation of the sacred; 2. The epistemological perspective of the intentional relation of consciousness to religious ritual justifies the necessity of situating them in an overall horizon of references and meanings to the horizon of the lifeworld; 3. The existential and experiential aspects of transformative sport experiences transform the horizon of meanings of empirical reality, but lack the sacramental perspective. Implicit religion as a possibility of transition on a continuum of complementary existential states is a suitable explicative framework for analyzing the phenomenal similarities and essential differences of religion and sport.

KEYWORDS:

• Religion
• spirituality
• sacred
• profane
• philosophy of sport

Introduction: ‘the hand of God’

Diego Maradona made football (soccer) history in the 1986 World Cup quarter-final match between Argentina and England with his famous 51st-minute goal. The referee failed to notice his hand strike the ball and Argentina won the match. However, the most interesting moment came when Maradona was confronted with television footage, when it was clearly proven that the goal was scored with his hand. Maradona defended this ‘handball’ style by explaining that it was an intervention of God himself, that the goal was not scored by him but by ‘the hand of God’. The controversy thus stirred up can be evaluated in different ways with regard to whether the player deliberately controlled or, on the contrary, did not control his behavior, i.e. whether he played with his hand willfully or accidentally. The answer to whether or not a soccer player has committed an ethical violation depends on how much people believe in free will, since the more individuals believe in it, the more they attribute intentionality to other people’s behavior (Genschow, Rigoni, and Brass 2019). ‘The hand of God’ has thus become a classic example for deeper reflection, especially in the discourse of sport ethics. The unintentional transgression or deliberate violation of the rules (in soccer, a goal cannot be scored with the arm or hand – even if unintentionally) leads to extensive reflection on cheating, fair play, and sports behavior, and Maradona’s words have become a symbol, an apt shorthand to describe the entire field of sports ethics (Tamburrini 2000).

However, the ethical interpretation of Maradona’s deception and violation of the rules of soccer is not relevant to my topic, nor is the fact that much later he admitted to scoring the goal with his hand, apologized, and said that if he could turn back time, he would not repeat the action. In the context, even possible politological connections, such as the possible interpretation of Argentina’s sporting victory over England as partial retribution for its defeat in the Falklands/Malvinas Islands war in 1982, are not relevant. I am interested in a different meaning of Maradona’s justification, which may be broadly interpreted as the role of religion and spirituality in a sporting environment. Thus, I will look at the theme of ‘the hand of God’ from three perspectives, namely: 1. ontological, 2. epistemological, and 3. existential, experiential. First, however, I must briefly define the way in which I am using the term ‘sport’ here and in what sense I am using the term ‘religion’, so as to avoid unnecessary controversy or an inaccurate understanding of the substance of the argument.

‘Definitions’ of basic terms

The philosophical question ‘What is sport?’ is one of the fundamental themes of the entire field of philosophy of sport, and from its beginning to the present day, the topic has remained alive. I am inclined to the view that the conceptual analysis of the term ‘sport’ and the rich argumentative discussion can be continued in the analytical tradition following Aristotle and the principles of formal logic (Morgan 1977), in the ontological inquiry relating sport to play, whereby these phenomena are wholly compatible but not coextensive (Kretchmar 1972), and in the terminological consideration of the triad of sport, game, and play (Suits 1988). A quite contemporary complex argumentative contest leads, among others, to a concentration of the topic on Olympic sport (Parry 2023), thus rejecting the phenomenon of e-sports and culminating in a definition of sport as a combination of six criteria: ‘institutionalized, rule-governed contests of human physical skill’ (Parry 2019, 4). These features or characteristics of sport thus exclude a number of other physical activities that are commonly referred to as sport, but can be included in other areas of movement culture, especially physical recreation, such as jogging, mountaineering, field sports, or hula-hooping all of which are mentioned in the Parry’s article.

It is easy to criticize the definition. For example, the problematic aspect of physicality and the exclusion of all mindsports can be rejected in the light of a monistic conceptualization of the human way of being, i.e. the interconnectedness of mind, body, and the world (Scott and Punch 2023), or the specific relations between physicality and virtuality in the digital world and the bodily engagement of e-sports practitioners (Ekdahl 2022). Or that the notion of sport here is too narrow and the definition does not sufficiently represent sport outside the Olympic context, or that this description lacks emphasis on the game and play-like structures that are inherently present in sport, including Olympic sport (Mareš and Novotný 2023). This very caveat may indicate that the aforementioned definition is rather narrow for the purposes of considering the relationship between religion and sport. However, this very topic has been receiving much more attention in the last decade than it did in the past (Sofyan et al. 2023). Indeed, the linking of physical activities, races, and festivals in conjunction with game and play points in its prehistoric origins of human culture to a direct connection also with art, drama, cult, and thus religion (Gadamer 1987; Huizinga 1955).

I confess that terminological battles and analysis of concepts, traditional tools of analytical philosophy and philosophy of language, leave me somewhat cold, especially in comparison with those trends of philosophical thought that perceive the phenomenon of sport as full of symbolic meanings, transcending the fixed boundaries of the definitional area by a multitude of interpretations. It is not that the search for an adequate definition is a futile attempt or a mere intellectual exercise, but conceptually precise and theoretically informed, unquestionable knowledge is not possible with the visual imagery and symbolic representation of complex social phenomena, among which sport undoubtedly belongs. This is not an anti-essentialist stance as much as it is an assumption that the essence of a phenomenon as ambiguous as sport cannot be definitively and once and for all grasped through the superordinate genus and generic difference that is the traditional Aristotelian characteristic of definition.

The living human experience cannot be fully contained in quantified data or unquestioned definitions, but thinking must also be enriched by the psychoanalytic depths of visual symbolism (Jung 1964), as images, symbols, and myths are not mere creations of the human psyche but functions to lay bare the ‘most secret modalities of being’ (Eliade 1961). Therefore, I will not attempt to formulate a precise definition defining sport sensu stricto and emphasize that the meaning, purpose, and highest value of sport movement thus lies in the pursuit of maximum performance and victory in competition according to standardized rules, and together with other types of human movement activity (preferring a different meaning of movement, e.g. the educational potential, the recreational dimension, the rehabilitative value of health, or the aesthetic dimension of beauty) I will place it in the cultural subsystem of movement culture (Jirásek 2006).

All the more so, however, symbolic interpretation and mythological pre-philosophical wisdom cannot be omitted from the second of the basic concepts, namely religion. This very complicated phenomenon is studied by the discipline of religious studies, in the form of various analyses of religious ideas, concepts, and systems of thought, but also other phenomena and facts that relate to human relations to God, the gods, or the sacred, including historical and cultural contexts. In the Czech Republic, for example, only 9% of the population of young people aged 19–26 currently adhere to religion, while in Israel the figure is 99% (Bullivant 2018). The degree of religiosity may not indicate the overall value and depth of religious belief, but everything associated with the experience of religion is so all-encompassing, phenomenally variable, and culturally diverse that it certainly cannot be tied into a single definition.

Understanding religious phenomena involves different levels of reality, such as human attitude (belief, piety), action (worship, service), attributes (sacredness, holiness), psychological attributes (self, meaning), sociological aspects (caste, church), social roles (parenthood, priesthood), a specific space and time (feast, temple), ritualized events (death, weddings), cultural products (music, writing), material objects of veneration (crucifix, taboo), or people (saints, prophets), and certainly others (Heller and Mrázek 1988; Sokol 2004; Štampach and Ivan 2008). It is quite obvious that in this paper it is not possible to conceive of religion in all its breadth and depth. I will therefore focus only on a few selected facts that can be related to the world of sport. These are the ontological questions of the existence of God and the possibility of conceptualizing it through philosophy. Then there is the sphere of the sacred and its manifestations in the profane world, i.e. the topic of hierophany. The phenomenon of the sacrament in the example of the Eucharist, the theme of prayer, and religious experiences in distinction with the spiritual cannot be omitted. All, of course, in the context of the reception of these religious experiences in the analysis of sport.

On the level of methodological clarification, I must commence by mentioning that the disciplinary discourse through which I will be looking at these topics is not theology, which mediates in rational language an understanding of the subtle phenomena of the themes of the existence of God and religious experiences with the assumption of the ontological certainty of the being of God. Philosophy is characterized by a certain distance and personal detachment, permanent doubt, and methodological critique, and therefore the theses presented can be understood more in connection with the scientific field of religious studies, not in terms of personal faith or theological disputation.

Ontology: hierophany and sport

In the context of the concepts thus defined, the first sub-theme associated with Maradona’s self-defending expression ‘the hand of God’ is related to God Himself. If it was the hand of God, can it be argued that God directly intervenes in the sporting contest? And an even more fundamental question: in what way does God exist? The fundamental ontological problem in religion is the question of the existence of God, or the Holy. This problem is solved by theology, but philosophy, including the philosophy of sport, can address this issue in terms of asking what the mode of being of God is. Indeed, the concept of God is not only familiar to religious individuals – the concept is also perceived and understood in some way by atheists. If in the past the understanding of god or God prevailed in the metaphysical definition of a primary cause (Aristotle 1998), after the discoveries of subatomic physics, undermining the universality of causality, such a characterization can no longer be consensually accepted. However, the biblical revelation ‘I am who I am’ (Ex. 3:14) opens up a different understanding, more closely related to modern philosophy.

From the perspective of phenomenology, an extremely interesting question is the link to the ontological difference between beingness and being (Heidegger 2008), which illuminates the existence of god, God, or the Holy precisely in relation to being, but at the same time makes a significant distinction between the Christian God as revealed and thus experienced by the religious attitude of faith and the notion of ‘God’ as thought of by theology and philosophy: ‘What is essential in the question of “the existence of God” stems less from “God” than from existence itself, therefore from Being. (…) Dasein precedes the question of “God” in the very way that Being determines in advance, according to the gods, the divine, the holy, “God,” his life and his death. “God,” aimed at like every other being by Dasein in the mode of a placement in parentheses, submits to the first condition of possibility of an idolatry’ (Marion 2012, 41 and 43). If God were equal to being as the source of all that is, then pantheism would be the consequence, since all beingness participates in being. An interesting attempt to think of God without being, with support from the characterization ‘God is love’ (1 Jn 4:8), is to interpret God as self-giving, unconditional, and self-transcending love without any limit or restriction, that is, without limitation by the necessity of being (Marion 2012).

However, it seems that such an interpretation is too closely tied to the Christian religion. Thinking of love without being is a serious philosophical problem that opens up in such an interpretation, as love presupposes not only a lover and a beloved (Plato 1951), but also a space ‘between’ I and Thou (Buber [1923] 1996). Although neither love nor God nor the Holy is among things, beingness, without being and the fact of occurrence, it is difficult to imagine them within philosophical inquiry. ‘Life is not a gift of love by a personal God, but a gift of love by Being. Being is not meaningless, it is a source of meaning’ (Evink 2018, 276). However, if the fundamental expression of Christianity in sport were truly love, then the realization of this religious value would benefit not only the teammates, but also the opponents of the Christian athlete or team (Jirásek 2018).

When considering the religious aspects of sport, we cannot avoid the fundamental ontological demarcation of these two spheres of being, namely the question of how the divine, sacred, sacral domain of religion can manifest itself in the secular, profane domain of sport. From the perspective of religious studies, the sacred is ‘ganz andere’, wholly other (Otto 1958). The substance of the sacred, the numinous, is not reducible to any feelings, thoughts, or sensory stimulation; it can only be evoked in a person. It is an ineffable mystery, at once terrifying and fascinating, presented in all religions. Can we have such an experience in sport that is at the same time exciting and terrifying? Undoubtedly yes; all adrenaline or risk sports, all challenges, as well as outdoor activities within experiential education can be characterized by such a quality of experience and can therefore be described as implicit religion (Jirásek 2020b). However, this is something that I will address later, when analyzing the existential and experiential link between religion and sport. At the moment, I am concerned with ontological characteristics and must therefore deal with the distinct mode of being of the sacred as opposed to the profane. The sacred appears as a mystery, as an ontologically quite different reality, an actuality outside the order of human nature. The divine is characterized by an entirely different mode of being than the human.

As early as medieval philosophy, in referring to the attributes of God’s existence, the divine, the term ‘transcendentals’ was used to denote characteristics of reality that transcend human sensory experience. Of these, besides the most essential unity, three in particular were referred to, which, according to Christian philosophers, directly denote God’s mode of being: absolute truth, infinite goodness, and eternal beauty. Creation participates in these attributes only imperfectly, so that if we want to look for these religious values in sport as a paradigmatic example of human existence, we can find them there only incompletely. Sports drama highlights the true story of what it means to be human, as well as the experience of the goodness of the harmonious unity between person, environment, and others in motion, and the beauty of aesthetic presence in the production of complex narrative and visual forms – but this is not sufficient to label sport as a salvific reality (Hubenthal 2022). Nevertheless, in the postmodern situation following the ‘death of God’, new attempts to find and postmodern salvific moments, including the sacralization of sporting events, are emerging. This, however, is itself evidence of the semantic context in which Nietzsche uttered his words about the death of God: it is not his death, but murder, for we have killed him (Nietzsche 2001). These words should not be understood as stubborn atheism, but rather as brilliant intuition. Indeed, it seems that the lifting up of sporting heroes and their veneration as ‘fallible gods’ (Grimshaw 2000) and the lifting up of sporting events as a specific sacred religious phenomenon (Chris and Mellor 2014) can be read directly as a parallel to the metaphor of killing the true God, which is very often engaged in by Christians and sport theologians themselves.

What is essential to the search for the ontological links between religion and sport is the recognition that the sacred, this absolute other, manifests itself in human life precisely in the profane as something that points beyond the mere sensory registration of given realities in the process of hierophany (Eliade 1959). The sacred does not reveal itself; it is revealed through profane objects and phenomena. This paradox of something ontologically distinct being manifested but revealed precisely in the profane objects of ordinary experience, but with reference to something beyond the objects themselves, leads some scholars to consider sport as a setting for the revelation of the sacred as well, as a form of religion, or to attribute religious characteristics to it.

From the perspective of philosophical argumentation, however, sport as religion can only be seen in the mode of metaphorical, not literal, truthfulness. Although in the religious systems of all ancient cultures various physical activities (wrestling, dancing, running, games, and competitions) were part of religious rites and ceremonies, modern sport is not part of any religious system. The ritual and cultic activities of agrarian, pre-modern societies cannot even be called sport sensu stricto, because they were explicitly religious festivals, not profane sporting celebrations. Perhaps this is why, with reference to the ancient Olympic Games, the founder of modern Olympism, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, described modern Olympism as a religion, as ‘the religion of energy’, ‘the religion of the muscles’, in which athletes fulfill the role of ‘a sort of priest’ (Coubertin 2000; Müller 2000). Admiration for the ancient worship of Zeus in the sacred precinct of Olympia, however, is not sufficient for modern sport to become a true religion, deifying the performance of the human body and competition, that religio athletae. The athletes here do not worship commonly professed deities, but each retains his or her own religious faith or atheistic beliefs. What is more, ‘the modern athlete honors his country, his race, and his flag’ (Coubertin 2000, 580). This is not really sufficient to define the sphere of religion in the full sense of the word. Human energy and muscles do not in themselves represent a process of hierophany unless the sacred is manifested through them. But that is precisely what is meant by religio athletae: it is meant to be a secularized religion, a religion without a deity. This religious sentiment of Coubertin’s has already been repeatedly and variously interpreted with regard to the historical conditions of its emergence and possible ideological inspirations (Krüger 1993) and its educational potential and the moral values of sport (Parry 2007); it has been labeled as a substitute for religion (Nissiotis 1980), but it has also been vigorously rejected as a philosophically unacceptable concept and, from a theological point of view, as idolatry (Jirásek 2022; Moltmann 1981).

Philosophical inquiry into the way of being sacred in the world of sport is absent in the proponents of the idea of sport as religion; the ontological dimension is left aside in the statements, whether this is in the search for potentially new religions, such as the Aquatic Nature Religion stemming from surfing (Taylor 2007), or in understanding sport as a setting for the realization and cultivation of religious life. A well-known instrumentalization of sport from a religious perspective is Muscular Christianity, using sporting activities for evangelism and pastoral care (Alter 2004; Mazurkiewicz 2018; Meyer 2012; Watson, Weir, and Friend 2005). This Victorian British movement had a direct influence on the founding of the Young Menʼs Christian Association (YMCA) and other modern organizations, such as Christians in Sport in England and the Fellowship of Christian Athletes in the United States (Watson, Weir, and Friend 2005). It is also possible to see a type of succession in modern Olympism (Lucas 1976). Similarly, in the search for parallels between CrossFit and evangelicalism (Musselman 2019), or skateboarding and sacred space (O’Connor 2018), the ontological dimension of the existence of God, gods, or the sacred is not problematized and is assumed to be a self-evident and intuitively obvious fact. This, however, gives rise to a fundamental philosophical criticism that must be leveled against an account that is too glib and omits the ontological dimension of the problem. The extraordinary status of sport also leads to the specific labeling of sport with characteristics of the sacred, as ‘sporting sacred’ (Chris and Mellor 2014; Ellis 2019; Ncube 2017; Rubio-Hernandez 2011). If we were to take such a claim with full philosophical rigorousness, we would have to conclude that a sporting event is in effect a religious rite. But this is not the case.

We can declare the basic ontological differences between sporting and religious events with the example of the Eucharist. In this Christian sacrament, the empirical realities of bread and wine are used, which, however, do not lose their properties within the rite, but at the same time transform their essence into the body and blood of Jesus Christ. This transformation of substance, transubstantiation, cannot, of course, be rationally justified; it can only be accepted by faith in a religious attitude, or rejected in an atheistic attitude. From the point of view of hierophany, this is a clear example of the profane reality (bread and wine) presenting an ontologically different, transcendental reality of the sacred. Understandably, this reality is valid in the sense of existential openness to transcendence; in other words, it is grounded in religious faith. When this condition is fulfilled, in the religious rite of the Eucharist we can note the ontological transformation of the substance of the empirical realities found in the profane world of everyday procurement into something radically different. In the case of sport, however, no such essential transformation can be demonstrated. From the point of view of literal truthfulness, sport remains a profane activity and it is only in the discourse of metaphorical truthfulness that expressions such as ‘quasi-religious practice’, ‘something similar to worship’ can be used; sport can be ‘symbolic’, ‘ritual’, ‘mythical’, ‘mystical’, ‘special’, ‘potentially sacred’, and thus ‘marked off from ordinary space’, ‘seems apart from ordinary reality’. But this is insufficient for accepting the religious dimension of sport within a philosophical argument. In no way am I questioning the analogies, metaphors, or symbols that create distinct bridges of phenomenal similarities between sport and religion. However, from an ontological perspective, they are substantively and fundamentally different ways of being.

It seems, then, that the existence of God cannot be proved by pure philosophical speculation and conceptual analysis, for the essence of the nouminous is ‘wholly other’, inaccessible to reason and ineffable mystery. I conclude the section on the ontological dimension of the relationship between religion and sport by summarizing that if sport were to be the horizon in which the hierophany of the sacred occurs, it would still have to be something other than sport, but at the same time it would have to remain itself. However, since it exhibits quite different characteristics compared to, for example, the fundamental experience of the holy sacraments, this does not, I believe, allow sport to be seen as a full manifestation of religion, nor as a process of hierophany. Sport, in contrast to the historical experience of religious humans, when physical activities used to be part of religious systems, cannot in modern times become a direct presentation, but rather an indirect representation of the sacred (Jirásek 2023). The fact that we can perceive a number of phenomenal similarities and affinities between religious and sporting realities does not justify us in claiming that we can phenomenologically demonstrate an identical mode of being of these existential and social phenomena. If I want to meaningfully evaluate the aforementioned analogies, symbolic parallels, metaphors, and ritual and mythical similarities between sport and religion, I can state up front that sport exhibits features of implicit, not explicit religion. Before proving this claim by pointing to the transcendence and spirituality of sport, I will focus on an intermediate step between ontological and existential analysis, namely the epistemological dimension of the topic illustrated by the phenomenon of prayer, which can contribute to a deeper analysis of the phenomenon of ‘the hand of God’.

Epistemology: prayer and sport

The fact that sport cannot ontologically be considered as a process of hierophany pointing to a transcendent reality, because it cannot become a manifestation of the sacred, does not mean that other links between sport and religion cannot be sought. From the point of view of epistemology, the disposition of faith as a specific cognitive capacity, part of one’s own existence, accepting access to a numinous, absolutely other reality, turns out to be a fundamental assumption. To the case of ‘the hand of God’, one might add that if God were to intervene directly in a particular sporting contest, then it would be of great importance and meaning to try to influence that intervention by intercessory prayer. Before turning to the phenomenon of prayer, I must once again point to the sacrament of the Eucharist, but this time not from the perspective of ontology, but that of epistemology, since phenomenology is not concerned with the real or ideal existence of a noematic (knowable) object.

Phenomenology always presupposes intentionality, i.e. the relation of consciousness to its content: consciousness is always consciousness of something (Husserl 1999). The religious attitude towards the sacramental elements can be understood as an intentional act, the relationality of the individual and his/her consciousness to the content of the religious rite. An adequate understanding of its ideal content or meaning (noema) presupposes, in the signification of bread and wine, not only its meanings from ordinary language. Openness in the direction of transcendence allows that part of perception and judgment that provides an understanding of the character of the Eucharist, that is, the meaning of the act of mental processes, of what appears to my consciousness (noesis), to be filled not only with the empirical essence of bread and wine, but in harmonious integration with noema to open perception to something transcendent (Dahl 2010). The meaning of the Eucharist for the religious person, its noesis, or acceptance, is real in the sense that it is part of what takes place in the consciousness of the religious person, and it is in correlation with the noema. Thus, if an individual believes that the bread and wine are transformed into the body and blood of Jesus Christ, this belief is a real part of that person’s mental and conscious activity. This, however, derives its meaning from the general concept of religious faith, transubstantiation, and the Eucharist, which has an abstract or ideal meaning independent of what the individual in question means by this concept. This meaning is not only due to the present moment of the ritual, but also to a long tradition that makes sense of the entire process of liturgy, which recontextualizes the meaning of the piece of bread and the cup of wine and transforms its entire horizon of meaning. The meaning and significance of the Eucharist, as well as other religious but also sporting experiences, cannot therefore be considered as a subjective stream of immediacy, or a mere description of phenomena, to which the whole method of phenomenology of sport is often wrongly reduced (Halák, Jirásek, and Nesti 2014).

The same epistemological basis of the intentional focus of consciousness and its noetic-noematic structure can be applied to the phenomenon of prayer in sport. At this stage, I cease to concern myself with the ontological basis of prayer, i.e. the way of being of God to whom the athlete prays. However, prayer has a real experiential basis in the experiential schedule and the question becomes the meaning or reason for such a ritual in a sporting environment. Prayer is the most common religious practice used in sport and from a psychological point of view it serves as a coping technique for dealing with uncertain and stressful situations and nervousness and anxiety, but also as a motivational tool, especially at higher levels of competition; this is also why coaches provide athletes with time for prayer. However, again I must stress that this is a culturally and socially constructed issue: while 80% of young Czech people have never prayed, in the USA 40% of public high school football coaches reported that their team prays before a game (Utrup 2021).

Prayer, as part of worship, ceremonies, and rituals, is characterized by a structure of a call from the alien, holy, Other and a response to it, whereby the call is manifested and becomes explicit in and through the response, there is no other approach to the call (Dahl 2010). Although from an external perspective prayer presents itself as a monologue, the believer experiences it as a conversation, as a speech to an addressee who hears and listens, as a response to the gift of existence (Sokol 2004). Individual and communal prayer may use ceremonial traditional learned texts, but also free, spontaneous, and improvised private expression. The form and focus of prayer also distinguishes prayers of praise, thanksgiving, bidding, supplication, intercession, and others. In sport settings, prayer is seen as an important coping strategy (Daniel, Eklund, and Jackson 1993), with its importance, intensity, and frequency increasing with the importance of the game (Czech and Bullet 2007). However, prayer may not be used in sport exclusively in the context of explicit religion. Athletes pray to achieve secular goals, such as increased performance or victory, so it may be more of an expression of implicit religion and a search for life’s meaning in the secular world of sport (Aicinena 2017).

In addition to prayer, other practices are implemented, as the sporting environment is prone to adopting repetitive ritual practices and symbolic values. The emergence of rituality in the sporting context as a symbolic action can turn sport into a space of worship, a server of religion (Fernández and Cachán-Cruz 2014). Superstitious behaviors irrationally link two unrelated events as a product of magic and paranormal superpowers, suggesting that actors can influence this power through bizarre rituals related to specific food, ‘lucky’ clothes, verbal or spatial stereotypes, fetishes, etc. Such behaviors are enacted by athletes and fans alike (Wilson et al. 2013). Although religiosity does not contribute significantly to the overall rate of superstitious rituals use (Bleak and Frederick 1998), one may show their phenomenal similarities to prayer and other religious rituals. Like prayer, these activities may confer a sense of control in uncertain, unstable situations, although there is no logical influence or causal relationship between behavior and performance. Thus, there may be regulation of emotion and a placebo effect (Dömötör, Ruíz-Barquín, and Szabo 2016).

In addition to superstitions and prayer, practices from Eastern spiritual traditions, such as meditation, relaxation, contemplation, mindfulness, emptiness, deep breathing, and other spiritual, psychological, and mental forms of support are also presented among athletes’ coping strategies (Campbell and Andersen 2012; Jenkins 2008; Park 2000; Watson and Nesti 2005). Other culture-specific approaches also come into the context of prayer and include chanting, incantations, the sound of a drum, belief in ‘juju’ associated with herbs, and other ‘spirits in sports’ (Ikulayo and Semidara 2011). It is already evident from this overview that it is epistemologically insufficient to analyze the phenomenon of prayer itself, but also it is necessary to consider its contextualization within religious, magical and superstitious contexts. Indeed, there are some differences in meaning between superstition and religious ritual; they are distinct concepts and constructs, with different values in relation to the holistic development of the athlete and significant meaning for the lives of athletes (Maranise 2013).

Four main themes emerge from empirical research on athletes’ experiences of prayer (Czech et al. 2004):

1. Performance-related prayers: the aim is to cope with stress, nervousness, and tension and to ask for safety and for the best possible performance – prayers used before, during and after sports performance;

2. Prayer routine: prayers specific to group and individual rituals that are performed using the same pattern each time the individual or team plays;

3. Thankfulness: thanks and recognition for talent, ability, and performance;

4. Acceptance of God’s will: accepting the outcome as what God wants.

However, the authors seem to have failed to identify in the first thematic group a very important theme that defines a specific group of prayers in sport, burdened with a debatable epistemological and ethical dimension: prayers for victory. There is no doubt that the phenomenon of ‘the hand of God’ must be examined in this very focus: if it were the will and desire of God Himself (to play with the hand or to achieve victory), it is appropriate to pray for this very purpose, namely for assistance. Prayer for victory, however, is epistemologically and ethically a different category from the other types of prayer in sport mentioned above. This is one of the tensions concerning sport prayers connected to the theme of maturity (Hochstetler 2009), since seeking external assistance to win on the basis of religious devotion is problematic and perhaps even sacrilegious (Hoven et al. 2022). From an ethical perspective, praying for victory can be seen as helping out a non-participating party, as an advantage for some participants over others, and ‘such prayers are a kind of unsporting behavior, and thus they should be discouraged’ as it ‘indicates a willingness to seek an unfair advantage over her fellow participants’ and ‘attempting to cheat’, ‘even if it is unlikely that such prayers will have an affect on outcomes’ (Kreider 2003, 17, 18, and 23).

Epistemologically, it is not the results and consequences of prayer or other rituals in sport that are crucial, but the overall context of such events. More precisely, context presupposes the location of a given phenomenon in the reality of its relations with other phenomena, so it is more appropriate to consider not the context but the horizon of religious rituals in a sporting setting. The horizon is the necessary background of any phenomenon, the context of interrelations. In phenomenology (Husserl 1999; Patočka 1998), the horizon is that which extends the possibilities of actual experience and awareness of the living presence to include everything that is not directly experienced, but which participates in the ordering of meaning. That which stands outside the current focus, outside our attention, but which forms the background of present experience. The necessary incompleteness of our focus refers to the horizon of other possibilities, the horizon of in-actuality, as the horizon of all reality is determined as the lifeworld. The structure of our life is being-in-the-world (Heidegger 2008), but only a religious person can behold the hierophanic meaning and sense of the actual given (empirical realities) to the ungiven, the possible, to the horizon of in-actuals, to the transcendence of the sacred. The principle of access to the realization of the religious world is the repeatedly mentioned faith and modus of experience. This brings me to the third, existential dimension of the phenomenon of ‘the hand of God’.

Existence, experience: transcendence, spirituality, and sport

In the philosophy of sport, the phenomenon of the experience of sport and physical activity, with its memorable moments and meaningful encounters, is reflected in the connection to Dewey and the American philosophical tradition (Hochstetler 2022). However, I will adopt a different methodological approach, rooted in phenomenology, to search for the potential link between sporting and religious experiences. Human existence always takes place in bodily performances and is graspable from its experiences, whereas physicality is mainly the possibility of moving and movement is a real fact, inherent to real activities, not just a mere ‘subjective’ experience (Blecha 1995). If the task of phenomenology is to investigate the natural world as a philosophical problem, the task of existential phenomenology is also to investigate life’s shaking and transcendence, a turning away from the mundane business of everyday life, delineated by living in truth and caring for the soul (Patočka 1998). This is – according to Patočka – a fundamental characteristic of the third life movement (after anchoring in the past and self-projection in the present), the life breakthrough whose referent is the horizon of life in death and its overall meaning. This theme has also found an echo in the phenomenologically oriented philosophy of sport (Bednář 2006; Martínková 2006). The existential situation of Patočka’s third movement provides the deepest meaning, transcending the dimension of mere habit, and is recognizable in various cultural variations, forming the origin of ethics, philosophical wonder, but also religion. In care for the soul, philosophy and religion are combined, and even the ontological understanding of human existence can be conceived here as a secularized form of the Christian view of life, where ‘God’ is replaced by ‘Being’ and dogmatic faith is replaced by uncertainty (Evink 2018). The role of sport in the movement of human existence characterized in this way is highly visible.

Human life, existence, is a way of experiencing that is concerned with one’s own being, but thus with being in general, and thus with Being (Heidegger 2008). Being is not a property of beingness, it is not an object or a thing, but is that which gives a guarantee to all that exists that it does so. Being cannot be unraveled except through the interpretation of human existence, through which being reveals itself. Fundamental ontology unfolds the possible modes of human being in the mode of authentic and inauthentic existence in embeddedness in the overall horizon of being-in-the-world. For the philosophy of sport, this implies the task of uncovering human movement and sport as the possibility of inquiring into the meaning of human existence through the phenomena of human movement and to cultivate one’s own life into a form of authentic existence (Jirásek 2005). The sporting experience can undoubtedly reveal the deepest dimensions of human existence. However, sharing them through language, that is, ideas formulated in verbal utterances, is a very complicated problem. English does not distinguish between different modes of the term ‘experience’ in the sense of temporality, unlike some other languages, which distinguish between the present experience, an intense way of living, some event that affects a person (old Greek eforan, German Erlebnis, Czech prožitek) and the processed experience, knowledge, or wisdom gained through practice in some activity (old Greek empeiria, German Erfahrung, Czech zkušenost). The experience (in the first sense of the word) gained through a sporting event extends the possibilities of the currently given by in-actuality, transforming the horizon of life with such force that we can think about entering into another of the possible worlds, differing in some characteristics from the actual world of everyday mundanity. In such a possible world, some entities have different meanings from those they have in ordinary experience. The extraordinary experiences of extreme sports lead us into an experiential world with a different horizon of meanings, a different structure of inhomogeneous temporality, altered consciousness, and a crossing of the boundary of certainty and comfort (Jirásek 2007). Another of the possible worlds is religion, defining a horizon crossing the profane sphere into the sacred one, with its own ontological and epistemological qualities, as I have already stated above.

I suggest that sporting experiences are in many ways similar to religious ones, and this is the source of the repeated search for parallels between religion and sport. Religious experience, distinguished from the world of everydayness by a sphere of the absolutely other, by purposelessness and an attitude of celebration through ritual, is defined by an act of faith transforming the understanding of space and time, permeating all profane activities with a spiritual dimension (Eliade 1971). The change of the life horizon and of all values and the radical break in life characterizes the phenomenon of conversion, transforming the individual’s identity. Religious experience, however, has many layers and is richly structured, in the distinction of asceticism, love and mercy, or mysticism (James 1985). Something that is essential to the search for the links between religion and sport is the finding that experiences traditionally perceived as religious, mystical, and spiritual can be achieved by non-religious people in a state of full self-actualization. The term ‘peak experience’ has been coined for this modus of living (Maslow 1962, 1994), which has been repeatedly evidenced in sporting settings (Dodson 1996; Polyson 1985; Ravizza 1977). Another mode of experience is full immersion in the activity in which one is involved, flow, also observed in sports activities such as rock climbing, dancing, or basketball (Csikszentmihalyi 1975; Csikszentmihalyi and Csikszentmihalyi 1992). There are a number of other possible experiential dimensions, including peak performance (Boniface 2000; Privette 1983), which in many ways overlaps with both peak experience and flow (Jackson and Roberts 1992), peak moments (McInman and Grove 1991), being in the zone (Dillon and Tait 2000), plateau experience (Gruel 2015), holotropic experience (Grof 2003), and a range of other transcendent experiential states that transcend ordinary perception and experiencing (Yaden et al. 2017), for which more than five hundred different labels have been used (Bednář 2011). What is relevant to the existential theme of exploring the phenomenon of ‘the hand of God’ is the study of these experiential states in the field of positive psychology (Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi 2000) and the direct link between spirituality and the spiritual aspect of these types of experiences as evidenced by empirical research (Watson and Nesti 2005). What is relevant to the search for parallels between sport and religion is not the joy, fascination, rapture, loss of temporal orientation, or other emotional states associated with these experiences, but their transformative power. Therefore, I use the term ‘transformative experiences’ to refer to a variety of experiential situations that have the power to transform one’s life horizon (Jirásek 2020a).

And this transcendent experiential characteristic is very often presented as sufficient evidence for understanding sport as a religion. The world of sport provides an escape, a brief and often intoxicating respite from the complexities and confusions of everyday life (Segrave 2000); in football one can experience ecstasy, joy, and sorrow (Bain-Selbo 2008), while in surfing the athlete must focus their attention and live in the moment; surfing transforms consciousness, and the surfer can experience a sense of belonging and communion with other lives (Taylor 2007). Can these experiential states be seen as evidence that they are religious experiences? I think that, as with the ontological dimension of the topic, we can see many phenomenal similarities between the experiential and existential dimensions. These experiences are undoubtedly meaningful, intense, powerful, and ecstatic, and so they look religious, or are similar to some kinds of religious experiences. We can see them as mythic, spiritual, and, as the previous paragraph suggests, distinctly transformative. They expand and transform the horizon of life’s meaning and purpose. And yet: what is lacking here is completely unquestionable evidence of a religious experience sensu stricto, namely the evidence of a hierophanic entry into the realm of the sacred, the deity, the divine, God, characterized by religious faith. The experiences in question can be acquired by a believer or an atheist and therefore cannot be unreservedly described as explicitly religious.

Mystery is a necessary presupposition for the full experience of the holy, but it is not sufficient; it only circumscribes the registration of the formal interplay between the alien and the familiar, which can be responded to in philosophical wonder, as well as religious piety. (Dahl 2010, 45)

A common feature of similar transformative experiences is their ability to transcend the mundanity of the everyday world, to go ‘beyond’ physical empiricism, to offer something ‘more’. They can be achieved by believers and atheists alike, because the capacity for transcendence belongs to the general dimensions of the human way of being. What distinguishes a religious person from an atheist is the ‘sacramental perspective’, the capacity to mediate God’s presence. ‘From a sacramental worldview, all experiences in sport and life offer profound opportunities to reflect on God’s presence, and so one must seek to recognize this presence and interpret what these experiences mean’ (Hoven et al. 2022, 50-51). Spiritual transcendence in such an existential dimension turns into divine transcendence, an entry into an ontologically distinct realm of the sacred. In the section on ontology, however, I have shown that sport cannot easily be a means of hierophany analogous to the Eucharist, that it cannot be a presentation but rather a representation of the sacred. Sport is not a manifestation of God’s presence, but an indirect reference to the mystery, ‘wholly other’, through analogies and metaphors. In the section on epistemology, I have argued that it is not easy to account for what transcends the immanent process of experience in its intentional noetic-noematic foundation, and that religious practices in sport are intelligible only in the overall context and horizon of their application. The ‘sacramental perspective’ is thus related to the overall horizon of the religiously committed individual, whereas for the atheistically-oriented person such a worldview is closed.

An existential reference to the power of transformative experiences can help to distinguish these ways of being by using the category of spirituality to justify the transcendence of everydayness into a spiritual realm that does not simultaneously enter the realm of the divine. Spirituality, as opposed to religious belief, is a constitutive feature of humanity; spirit is the aspect of life that distinguishes humans from animals (Scheler 1981). Through transformative experiences (peak, flow, holotropic, etc.) the individual possesses of the spiritual capacity to transcend the world of everydayness and the profane sphere into a realm that transcends empirical reality, but at the same time does not enter the realm of the divine. Various philosophical contexts designate this horizon of reference as the sphere of the collective unconscious (Jung 1964), the morphogenetic field (Sheldrake 1988), the mundus imaginalis (Corbin 1976), etc. The term ‘implicit religion’ is most often used in the field of sport analysis to name this existential dimension, which can also be called secular faith (Bailey 2001).

Solution: implicit religion of sport

Implicit religion (Bailey 2002, 2010, 2012, 1983, 1990, 1997) is not merely the opposite or antithesis of explicit religions, but is defined by three characteristics: 1) commitment(s), the full spectrum of human intentionality at all levels of psychological dimensions, i.e. subconscious, unconscious, self-conscious, as well as super-conscious; it is the psychological and existential dimension of implicit religion; 2) integrating foci, the element integrating individual (intrapersonal) and group (interpersonal) life with the intersection of all dimensions of personal life within social relationships, from small groups to anonymous crowds; it is therefore a social, societal, and corporate dimension, as well as a rejection of the artificial separation between personal and social environments, since the human personality is necessarily a social being; 3) intensive concerns with extensive effects, an element of holistic functioning, a framework for empirical study that allows for a connection between the sacred and the secular (profane), which can be seen as an orientation towards religious study.

Bailey assumes such a potential connection to be always, moreover, valid for anyone, regardless of his/her religious grounding, since he sees the religious and the secular not as opposites but as two sides of the same coin, as complementary. He identifies implicit religion as their bond without a polar split, as the middle, the third element, for which he reserves the term ‘secular’ (usually synonymous with profane), as sharing both modes of existence somewhere in between. Instead of opposites of sacred and profane, he offers a continuum of sacred – secular (the basis of implicit religion) – profane, with the free and open possibility of transfer between these spheres by anyone, regardless of religious conviction. Implicit religion is thus a kind of anthropological constant, a neutral feature of the human way of being, like corporeality or sexuality (Bailey 2002). It is the deepest and most unconscious part of human identity.

In answer to the objection that everything and anything is therefore religious, he says that these characteristics are not mutually exclusive (for then we would arrive at the nonsense that either everything is only religious or everything only secular), but conditional; they are complementary qualities, both belonging to reality. Both characteristics are dimensions of the phenomenon rather than its objectification; both are necessary, mutually compatible (Bailey 2002). Explicit religion is therefore not the antithesis but always a correct expression of implicit religion (Bailey 2001), which can be understood as the core of not only religion (sacred, divine) but also secularity (profane, mundane) and can be used with the same neutrality as any other attribute of humanity. In other words, implicit religion is an anthropological constant, a feature of the human way of being, regardless of the religious grounding or philosophical background of any particular individual, so that religiosity in its implicit form is valid for anyone, atheists not excluded. Implicit religion is thus the deepest part of human life, hidden in the unconscious, a part of human identity, a quality or dimension of the human being, a space ‘between the worlds’ of profane and sacred ways of being.

The categories of implicit religion have been applied repeatedly for appropriate reflection on sport. Sport, through its ritualization that brings the world of chaos under control, can be understood as the secular equivalent of liturgy, glorifying not God but beauty and unnecessary creation, or all that is not God (Harvey 2012; Smith 2021). Sport in general and in relation to health and wellbeing can be seen as an implicit religion (Collins 2014), among other things because its ritualization is full of symbols and spectacularity (Cipriani 2012). However, similar optics can be applied to specific sports and physical activities, such as the Native American intertribal contest powwow, including dance (Aicinena and Ziyanak 2020), football (French 2002), or non-sporting physical activities such as the contemporary phenomenon of pilgrimage (Schnell and Pali 2013) and religious tourism (Hron 2017).

In the argument presented here, then, I conclude that sport and religion reveal many phenomenal analogies, but phenomenologically they are fundamentally different ways of being these phenomena. Given the ontological distinctions between hierophany and sport, the epistemological aspects of prayer and sport, and the existential and experiential distinctions of transcendence and spirituality in sport, it is not philosophically correct to label sport as an explicit religion or a specific domain of the sacred. What emerges from this philosophical argument, on the contrary, is the possibility of perceiving sport as an implicit religion, transcending the dimension of profane everydayness and empirical reality into a sphere that transforms the meaning horizon of the lifeworld of the athlete and the spectator.

Conclusion

Several summary conclusions emerge from this study:

1. Diego Maradona’s excuse defending the use of his hand in Argentina’s 1986 soccer match with England as ‘the hand of God’ illustratively extends the sporting event to include religious connotations. An appropriate assessment and evaluation of such a claim cannot therefore remain at the level of ethical discourse, but must be extended to philosophical and religious studies arguments.

2. There are a great number of phenomenal similarities between religious phenomena and sporting activities. These similarities are presented, from a superficial view, as the same essence of some of the meanings and purposes of the existential and social realities in question. A deeper look, however, points to the substantive difference between the two cultural subsystems.

3. The mode of being of religious realities differs radically from secular realities as a wholly other, a numinous transcendent mystery that does not reveal itself but is discernible exclusively through the process of hierophany in the profane world. From this general thesis it is possible to deduce that the revelation of the sacred (divine, sacral) is also possible in the profane (secular, mundane) sphere of sport.

4. In archaic cultures in which physical activities were part of religious cults, games, competitions, and matches, the emphasis on beauty and physical performance can be seen as a process of hierophany, always in exclusive relation to the particular gods worshiped by the cult. Modern sports, however, do not take place with the aim of actualizing religious values, but their definition emphasizes the activation of human physical skills in a rule-defined competition, organized in an institutional setting, with the aim of maximizing performance with the achievement of victories and records. Through their mutual proximity to the phenomena of play and games and their historical roots, they are also linked to art, drama, and cult and thus, indirectly, to the horizon of religion.

5. From the realm of ontology there stems an awareness of the different mode of being of sporting events compared to religious reality. Using the example of the Eucharist, it is evident that, unlike sacraments, the sphere of modern sport does not possess the power of presentation (making present) of the sacred, but rather the ability to represent it indirectly, by pointing to a transcendent domain beyond the empirical reality of physical activities.

6. The epistemological unfolding of the phenomenological structure of an intentional act of consciousness to the content of a religious rite points to the transcendence of the meanings of the empirical reality of sacraments with the openness of the content of the concrete consciousness of noesis in relation and correlation to the long history of sedimented noema towards transcendent otherness. Thus the religious meaning of the significance of the transmutation of the substance of bread and wine into the body and blood of Jesus Christ is determined by the meaning horizon of religion, not by a mere subjective stream of immediate perceptions.

7. The meaning structure of a prayer is determined by the response to the call by the divine, which, however, manifests itself exclusively through the response itself. The goal of prayer in the context of religious worship is praise, thanksgiving, supplication, and other relating of conscious cognitive processes to God or a deity. In sports, however, prayer plays the role of a psychological strategy with a focus on purely secular goals, such as the enhancement of performance or victory. But this is an ethically problematic part of linking the meaning horizons of religion and sport.

8. The ritualization and symbolic imagination of sporting events opens up the epistemological affinity of prayer with various superstitious behaviors, bizarre rituals, and fetishes, but also with diverse practices of Eastern spiritual traditions (meditation, relaxation, contemplation, mindfulness, etc.). For an adequate understanding, it is therefore necessary to relate a particular activity to the total horizon of references and meanings of the actual given (the empirical realities of sport) to the ungiven, the possible, to the horizon of the in-actuality, to the transcendence of the sacred, since the horizon of all reality is determined as the lifeworld.

9. The existential analysis of experience recognizes, alongside the lived everydayness, situations of life-quake and transcendence, a source of philosophical wonder but also of religious fervor. Extraordinary sporting experiences transform the horizon of meanings and the structure of inhomogeneous temporality, alter consciousness, and exhibit other characteristics of existence that in many ways resemble religious states. Differently used terminology (peak, flow, holotropic, etc.) refers to experiential situations that possess the power to transform the life horizon, and therefore ‘transformative experiences’ seems to be an appropriate summary term.

10. Sport undoubtedly offers opportunities to transcend the mundanity of the everyday world and to go ‘beyond’ physical empirical matters that can be pursued by believers and atheists alike. However, what is completely absent here is unquestionable evidence of a religious, or, to be precise, hierophanic, entry into the realm of the sacred, the deity, the divine, God, which is a characteristic exclusively of religious faith and the ‘sacramental perspective’. The category of spirituality is appropriate for describing and justifying the transcendence of physical reality into the spiritual realm without simultaneously entering the domain of the divine. Spirit and its manifestations are a constitutive feature of humankind.

11. Different philosophical contexts and approaches variously describe the ground of transformative and spiritual experiences as the space ‘between’ the sacred and profane dimensions (the sphere of the collective unconscious, the morphogenetic field, the mundus imaginalis, etc.). To name this existential dimension, which can also be called secular faith, the term ‘implicit religion’ is most often used in the field of sports analysis. The implicit religion approach is based on the analysis of the secular dimension (between the profane and the sacred), open to anyone, regardless of their religious or atheistic grounding.

12. In summary, ontological, epistemological, and existential analysis declares that sport does not have the characteristics of explicit religion in any of these areas, but for an adequate understanding of sport, it can be understood as implicit religion.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).