But premodern religion deliberately humanized the sacred. The Brahman was not a distant reality but was identical with the atman of every single creature. Confucius refused to define ren (later identified with “benevolence”) because it was incomprehensible to a person who had not yet achieved it. But the ordinary meaning of ren in Confucius’s time was “human being.” Ren is sometimes translated into English as “human-heartedness.” Holiness was not “supernatural,” therefore, but a carefully crafted attitude that, as a later Confucian explained, refined humanity and elevated it to a “godlike”
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