GREGORY ALLES
Mircea Eliade (1907–86) was one of the most influential historians of religions in the second half of the twentieth century. Following three years spent studying in India with the philosopher Surendranath Dasgupta as well as in an ashram in the Himalayas, he became intensely involved in the political and cultural struggles of Romania prior to World War II. He spent the majority of the war years as a cultural attaché in Portugal. After the war he accepted positions in the history of religions in Paris (beginning 1946) and Chicago (beginning 1957). His goal, as formulated in his maturity, was to foster a “new humanism.” By this he meant a humanism that differed from its Renaissance precursor in recovering the wisdom of a global rather than merely a European antiquity. Put differently: Eliade sought to redress what he perceived as the meaninglessness of secular modernity by recovering, through both scholarship and belletristic fiction (novels and short stories), fundamental religious forms that had been lost to modern consciousness. His major scholarly publications include (citing the first editions in English) The Myth of the Eternal Return (1954; also published as Cosmos and History in 1959), Patterns in Comparative Religion (1958), Yoga: Immortality and Freedom (1958), Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (1964), The Sacred and the Profane (1959; a once popular textbook), The Quest: History and Meaning in Religion (1969), and A History of Religious Ideas (three volumes, 1978–85). He also served as general editor of the first edition of the Macmillan Encyclopedia of Religion (sixteen volumes, 1987).
The connection between Eliade’s belletristic writings and his scholarship is intimate and complex, but our concern here is specifically with his theory of religion. What follows sketches out a system abstracted from Eliade’s mature scholarly writings. It cannot include every facet of Eliade’s thought. It also neglects changes that occurred over time, but perhaps that reflects the character of Eliade’s project. Eliade self-consciously attempted to produce an oeuvre, a unified life’s work, as well as to escape the ravages of time or, as he put it, the terrors of history.
STRUCTURE AND HISTORY
As a scholar, Eliade represented himself as a historian of religions. In part he was simply reflecting common linguistic conventions. During the nineteenth century in Europe and somewhat later in North America, historians and philologists had by and large developed the study of the religions of literate people.1 Their efforts helped constitute a field that became known as Istoria religiilor in Romania, l’histoire de religions in France, and “the history of religions” at some institutions in North America, such as the University of Chicago. At the same time, Eliade also used the designation “historian of religions” to distinguish himself from theologians. The latter could develop abstract systems of thought on the basis of key claims about God, human beings, and the universe. Historians of religions always had to ground their claims in an empirical investigation of what human beings actually said and did. Nevertheless, with the exception of the three volumes of A History of Religious Ideas, Eliade’s “history of religions” is not history in the ordinary sense of the word. Indeed, the lesson he drew from Freud was that a historian of religions was entitled to articulate the meaning of a symbol, regardless of whether any of the people using the symbol had ever consciously formulated that meaning as such. It can be difficult, then, to discern precisely how Eliade’s claims are grounded in empirical, historical data.
In addition, Eliade insisted that in the matter of discerning or deciphering religious meaning, the history of religions is superior to all other academic pursuits. He did recognize the need for work by philologists, historians, ethnographers, and others who carefully interpret documents and other data within their cultural contexts, but he faulted such specialists for being unable to recognize the more general structures that are accessible to historians of religions. He acknowledged that other disciplines such as psychology, sociology, and economics cast light on some dimensions of religious phenomena, but he faulted them for “reducing” religion to something that it is not, for example, psychological processes. In doing so, these scholars missed what makes religion religion. Finally, Eliade faulted other historians of religions for their philosophical timidity. In controversial phrases, he contended that in order to truly understand religion, one must understand the sacred on its own plane of reference. He compared historians of religions to art historians and literary scholars, who sought to understand art as art and literature as literature.
One may question to what extent understanding religion is identical with understanding the sacred, but even granting that identity, one needs to specify what it means to understand the sacred on its own plane of reference. Eliade was fond of citing Rudolf Otto’s account of religious experience as the experience of a wholly other that is both terrifying and attractive. For him, however, understanding the sacred involved something different from analyzing a religious person’s internal feelings and intuitions. He maintained that “the sacred” manifested itself through specific forms or patterns that appeared repeatedly throughout human history. Through what he called morphology he sought to identify the structure and meanings of these forms. (Because Eliade’s morphology resembles what others, such as Gerardus van der Leeuw, were calling “phenomenology,” Eliade is often considered a phenomenologist.) Furthermore, Eliade was not entirely clear about the ontological status that he assigned to the sacred. It is possible to read him as simply describing structures of the human mind, analogous to Kant’s a priori categories, such as time, space, and cause. This reading is compatible with Eliade’s insistence that the sacred is a structure of human consciousness. Nevertheless, to speak of the sacred as manifesting itself—as distinct from the mind constructing, projecting, or imagining the sacred—also seems to attribute ontological reality and independent agency to an object that exists separately from human mental activity.
In any case, Eliade’s writings do not generally share a historian’s concern for particularity, change, and subtle contextual analysis. Most of his writings in the history of religions focus instead on general forms or structures and propound a two-stage philosophy of history. The first stage is the stage of “archaic man,” the paradigmatic homo religiosus, “religious man.” The second stage is the era of modern humanity, whose relation to religion is more complex. In modernity people consciously reject religious structures but also retain them subconsciously, so that they appear in film, literature, comic books, and other artistic products. Such a two-stage model hardly makes for subtle history. In fact, one of Eliade’s defenders, Guilford Dudley, once suggested that Eliade would do well simply to stop presenting his work as history.
THE SACRED AND ITS MANIFESTATIONS
Eliade’s theory of religion centers on the experiences of “archaic man,” the paradigmatic homo religiosus. It is redolent with neologisms and Latin phrases that may give the impression of arcane, out-of-the-ordinary knowledge but that may also make reading difficult for those not trained in classical European languages.
The heart of Eliade’s theory of religion is the claim that the sacred manifests itself in the profane. (Aside from the observations that the sacred is the opposite of the profane but also that the sacred unites opposites, technically known as the coincidentia oppositorum, the meanings of these terms emerge only as they are used.) He refers to the manifestation of the sacred as a “hierophany,” a term coined from the Greek adjective hieros, -a, -on, “sacred,” and the Greek verb phainomai, “to appear.” In one particular type of hierophany, the theophany, the sacred manifests itself as a divine being. In another, the kratophany, it manifests itself as a powerful force. In any case, Eliade calls the process of hierophany “the dialectic of the sacred and the profane.” While the sacred is the opposite of the profane, it also always manifests itself through the profane. Thus, worshipers of Viṣṇu may find manifestations of the sacred in certain black stones known as śālagrāmas. Christians may find manifestations of the sacred in certain pieces of bread and certain cups of wine. In principle, Eliade claims, anything at all may and, over the millennia, probably has at some time or other served as a vehicle for the sacred. “Archaic man” desires to live in proximity to these manifestations of the sacred, for “he” finds in them the source of meaning, being, and truth.
As a historian of religions, Eliade seeks to decipher the meanings of the religious symbols through which the sacred repeatedly manifests itself. He finds symbols rooted in nature particularly important. Thus, Patterns in Comparative Religion discusses in turn the symbolism of the sky, the sun, the moon, the waters, stones, the earth (along with women and fertility), vegetation, agricultural fertility, sacred places, and sacred times. For example, water is an amorphous, ambivalent substance. Its shapelessness emblematizes the primal chaos, but it is also the source from which life and ordered existence emerge. To take another example: When the sacred manifests itself in space, it provides orientation. It marks out a sacred center that may be elaborated in terms of cardinal directions, an axis mundi (a vertical extension of some sort that unites various planes of existence, such as earth, atmosphere, and sky), or an imago mundi (an “image of the world”). Recall that in Eliade’s mind, Freud’s discovery of the unconscious means that historians of religions do not need to establish that any religious person was ever consciously aware of these symbolic meanings. Even if the meanings were never explicitly formulated, they are nevertheless present. Eliade also refers to these basic patterns as “archetypes,” inviting comparison with C. G. Jung. Somewhat at odds with his treatment of Freud, Eliade maintains against Jung that his archetypes do not reside in a collective unconscious. They are, rather, structures of human consciousness.
The forms through which the sacred manifests itself to human beings become realities in the lives of homo religiosus through myths and rituals. For Eliade the irruption of the sacred into the profane is a creative event; it produces cosmos (order) amid chaos (disorder). Here we encounter a different sense of the word “archetype”: homo religiosus finds in these irruptions the archetypes or models for his existence. He associates these archetypes with a special time, discontinuous from the profane duration of everyday life. This time is the time of beginnings, which Eliade refers to as illud tempus (“that time”). The events in myths take place in illo tempore (in better Latin, illo tempore, “at that time”), for, Eliade maintains, the primary myth in every archaic society is the cosmogony, the story of creation. Moreover, every creative act is a replication of the cosmogony. In this way, homo religiosus models “his” life on the patterns that were established at the foundations of the world.
If myth recalls the time of beginnings, ritual returns participants to it. It overcomes the disintegrative effects of profane duration and renders homo religiosus and his world present at the time of origins, the fons et origo (fount and origin) of the world. In other words, in Eliade’s view ritual effects a return of all of existence to its initial, pristine state. It brings about a regressus ad uterum (return to the womb), not just for human beings but for the cosmos as a whole. This “eternal return” endows homo religiosus with a distinctive understanding of time. Religious time is not linear, as in a ceaseless progression from past to future, but cyclical. It is an ongoing series of returns to the origin. In this way homo religiosus escapes from a world of secular, profane duration and eludes the terrors of history. Eliade finds such structures quite clearly in initiatory rituals, which utilize the symbolism of death and rebirth to return initiates to the womb and then “rebirth” them as new creatures.
Not all religions exhibit these archaic patterns. Many forms of Christianity do not, although Eliade insists that the “cosmic Christianity” of Romanian peasants does. Above all, however, it was the prophets of ancient Israel that effected a change from time characterized by repeatedly returning to the beginning to time as progression from beginning to end, the time of history and (for Eliade) its terrors. This shift in time would seem to have been the first step along the path to secular modernity, which no longer recognizes the manifestations of the sacred. Eliade calls this lack of recognition the second Fall. (The first Fall is the inevitable shift from the illud tempus of origins, mythical events, and rituals to profane duration.)
ASSESSMENT
A balanced assessment of Eliade’s thought has proven difficult. His ideas have provoked both sharp criticism and spirited defense. It is impossible to review all of the critiques and rejoinders here. What follows is intended only as a sampling.
Especially since Eliade’s death, much attention has focused on his youthful involvement in politics and its relation to his theory of religion. Among others, this work has been pursued by Ivan Strenski, Adriana Berger, Steven Wasserstrom, Daniel Dubuisson, and Russell McCutcheon. In various ways critics have tried to link Eliade’s views as an alleged ideologue for Romanian fascism in the form of the Iron Guard and his later analysis of religion.
Some of Eliade’s cultural and political writings from the 1930s are indeed shocking, even chilling, in their blindness to the potential for evil in fascism, their antagonism toward minority populations, including but not limited to Jews, and their bald advocacy of what we have come to know as ethnic cleansing. It is especially troubling that, despite the extensive publication of his journals and autobiography, Eliade never clarified his early complicity in one of the most heinous movements of the twentieth century, much less apologized for it. It is reasonable, although not inevitable, to read his assumed apoliticism after the war as hiding, perhaps even from himself, a past tainted by support for fascism and “Hitlerism” (his term). It is equally reasonable both to read his desire to escape the terrors of history as the longings of a guilty conscience and to postulate that there is some continuity between his early, political attempts to redress modernity and his later attempts to do so as a historian of religions. Furthermore, that Eliade makes Jews ultimately responsible for the terrors of history is suspicious, especially when read against the Romanian context.
Nevertheless, while not denying the significance of political criticism, one should also note that even if Eliade were the most politically admirable person of the twentieth century, one could still raise serious questions about his views on religion. The problems are both methodological and theoretical.
In terms of methodology, critics have called into question Eliade’s interpretive procedures, his opposition to history, his rejection of reductionist explanations, and what appear, despite his claim to be a historian, to be his theological interests. Consider, for example, Eliade’s claim that historians of religions are better positioned to understand religion than historians, philologists, ethnographers, or social scientists, because they alone seek to understand religion as a universal sui generis on its own plane of reference. It is far from clear that this is true. Take Eliade’s Yoga, a more specialized book that has been relatively well received. Scholars such as Richard Gombrich have charged that the book distorts Buddhism. The last chapter, on aboriginal India, shows almost no awareness of the work that had been done on “aboriginal” India by 1958, when the book appeared. The early parts of the book consist largely of close readings of Sanskrit texts, but even—or especially—in these parts it is not clear that Eliade’s perspective as a historian of religions is particularly illuminating. Nothing would seem to be gained, and arguably much muddled, when, after summarizing in the manner of philology the basic views of the Sāṃkhyakārikā in chapter 1, Eliade assumes his identity as a historian of religions and identifies puruṣa with the sacred and prakṛti with the profane.2 This identification, like much of Eliade’s analysis, simply seems to schematize other people’s beliefs and practices in his own terms.
The difficulty is not that Eliade has read the texts hastily or superficially; it is rather that his presuppositions about religion distort the interpretive process. Eliade has misconceived of religion as a natural kind, that is, as a universal object defined by an essence and so one whose properties can be inferred to be present wherever it is found. Moreover, the properties that interest Eliade seem to reflect very particular theological or religious interests. It is difficult to overlook the manner in which his view of religion resonates with the Christian idea of the incarnation (hierophany), the Orthodox Christian account of icons (cf. Ansgar Paus), the apostle Paul’s baptismal theology (death and rebirth), and Eliade’s own representation of the Christianity of Romanian peasants (an ahistorical openness to the meaning of the cosmos)—all combined with elements of a Platonizing esotericism (the archetypes). Somewhat predictably, the result is a schematization of the world’s religions in terms of what would seem to be a particular, complex religious vision.
Perhaps the most careful and powerful critic of Eliade’s theory, as well as of his methods and politics, has been Jonathan Z. Smith, a former colleague of Eliade’s at the University of Chicago. Taking up Eliade’s work with centers and sacred space, Smith suggested that, far from representing religion as a whole, Eliade’s account presented “a self-serving ideology which ought not to be generalized into the universal pattern of religious experience and expression.”3 Specifically, Smith offered an alternative to Eliade’s “locative” view of religious space, which he called “utopian.” In this orientation, always present as a possibility in opposition to Eliade’s locative view, human beings do not long for the unity defined by the sacred center but rebel against it, seeking escape and liberation. Not only does Eliade’s account of the sacred conceive of religion entirely in a conservative mold, but it makes that view normative, excluding much that otherwise goes by the name of religion. Smith also noted that these two options, locative and utopian, are insufficient, because on a number of occasions religious people occupy a middle position between the conservative establishment of order and its revolutionary overturning, a position represented by playfulness and celebration. Sam Gill has elaborated further upon this critique. He suggests that what Smith’s critique of Eliade has identified are not three different maps or conceptualizations of the world but three different attitudes toward it. The attitude that Eliade’s essentialist approach to religion has the most difficulty with is the one that, on some views, most characterizes human religious behavior: an attitude of playfulness.
It remains difficult to discern what Eliade’s long-term legacy will be. His dominance in the 1960s and 1970s has now generally given way to widespread rejection and antagonism. Nevertheless, it remains possible that his rich production, while not initiating the new humanism that he desired, will continue to exercise an effect.
NOTES
1. This is not to overlook the major contributions of ethnographers, ethnologists, and anthropologists, from whom most theories of religion derived.
2. Sāṃkhya is a dualistic philosophy that analyzes our experiences in terms of the intermingling, under conditions of mistaken identity, of a multiplicity of conscious observers (puruṣas) and a single, complex object-of-observation (prakṛti), which is the source not only of material nature but also of internal objects such as thoughts and desires. In less technical but also less serviceable terms, our world consists of a multiplicity of people, all of whom observe the same universe.
3. Jonathan Z. Smith, Relating Religion: Essays in the Study of Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 17.