In the aftermath of the World Cup, Iwan Russell-Jones looks at the religious symbolism which surrounds the game and considers the 'pagan godliness' of modern sport.

Here in Britain, the sensitive souls at BBC Sports certainly understood that this was no ordinary moment. It had to be be marked in transcendent fashion. Their title sequence for the BBC's World Cup coverage suggested that there is nothing mundane about the Mondiale.

The lush, mystical strains of Fauré's Pavane swelled as the camera ushered us into the golden, lamp-lit glow of the Frenchest restauraunt there ever was. This was no corner caf serving up Parisian pub grub. It was a palace of the senses, a garden of delights.

And as we glided past rich wooden panelling and luxuriant foliage, the walls, windows, glasses and bottles burst into life, overflowing with memory and tradition: Bobby Moore savouring the glories of 1966, Cruyff moving effortlessly past mesmerised opponents, Gazza inconsolable at Italia 90, Pele crashing the ball into the back of the net.

Beneath a stained glass window of the object of our devotion, the Jules Rimet Trophy, a table, bathed in celestial light, was set for us. The feast was ready. Take, eat...

All of us – fans, commentators and players alike – speak quite naturally of the great shrines of our particular game, of devoted supporters, of coaches who have faith in their players, of teams who have experienced resurrection, of life and death struggles, of athletes who have achieved immortality. When sport is under consideration, gods and idols are never far away.

Is all this merely a manner of speech, an ironical use of language on the part of thoroughly secular people?

The American Catholic social critic, Michael Novak, author of The Joy of Sports, believes it is not. 'Sports,' he argues, 'flow outward into action from a deep natural impulse that is radically religious: an impulse of freedom, respect for ritual limits, a zest for symbolic meaning, and a longing for perfection.'

Novak is a real fan. He loves baseball, basketball and football – 'the three great American public liturgies' – and he writes beautifully and sympathetically about them. He is convinced that sports really do fulfil a religious function: 'they feed a deep human hunger, place humans in touch with certain dimly perceived features of human life within this cosmos, and provide at least a pagan sense of godliness.'

Back in the second century AD, the North African theologian, Tertullian, also drew attention to the religious nature of sports, although he certainly did not share Novak's enthusiasm for them. Writing about the public spectacles and contests of his day, he observed that they involved 'forms both of worship and of pleasure'. Through their ferocity, their injuries and their endurance, the contestants earned for themselves 'an eternity of fame, a resurrection by being kept in remembrance'.

Tertullian pointed out that the Greek games, the Olympics among them, were inextricably bound up with religion. They were held either in honour of the gods or of the dead and were consciously set up as 'sacred' events. Many of the contests were marked by extreme brutality. He explained that these were formerly rituals of human sacrifice, designed to appease the gods; over time they had become thinly disguised as entertainment.

Tertullian condemned them bitterly, for they disfigured and dishonoured the image of God in human beings, and he warned Christians to stay clear of such demonic entertainments. Two centuries later, Augustine of Hippo likewise dismissed the so-called sanctity of the games in a memorable phrase: 'God's majesty never can delight in that which pollutes human dignity.'

But on the whole, the objections that Tertullian raised against sports have been publicly addressed and dealt with. We have been freed from seeing the sporting contest as an appeasement of the gods or a sacrificial shedding of blood, and are able, with Michael Novak, to marvel at the accuracy of a quarter-back, the agility of a basketball player, the skill and power of an in-form batsman.

But the issue of sport as sacred ritual will not subside so easily. Augustine's objections to the great public spectacles went deeper than simply the question of violence and human degradation. It touched on our concept of time and the very meaning of human history.

Novak himself recognises that, as spectators of sports events, we are lifted out of our ordinary humdrum sense of time and are immersed into what is elsewhere called 'sacred time'. He says: 'sacred time is more like eternity than like history, more like cycles of recurrence than like progress, more like a celebration of repetition than like a celebration of novelty.'

Sports can effect something similar to what the historian of religion, Mircea Eliade, called an 'eternal return', the plunge of primitive peoples into their origins to re-enact the foundational myths of their people. In their way of thinking, to enter this circular, ever-repeated time, is to be really living, to become 'a contemporary of the gods'. But it is that time which is important, not ours.

Augustine protested against this cyclical view of time embodied in the spectacles, the rituals, the sports of his contemporary culture, and propounded by pagan philosophers.

For him, this form of existence – religious though it might be – denied the possibility of change and newness in the world, the reality of God's actions and of human freedom. He described it as imprisonment within a circle. 'Christ died once for our sins', he reminded his fellow-Christians. 'We refuse to walk in the circle with them. Let us follow Christ, our true way, and leave this circle or maze of the impious.'

Are we, in our increasingly sports-obsessed culture, imprisoned within a circle, locked in an action replay, captive to our own amusements? After the great global sacrament that is now drawing to a close, how many of us still feel strangely hungry?

© Ship of Fools 1998