Mircea Eliade Research Paper

1. Life

Mircea Eliade was born in Bucharest on March 9, 1907. He began writing for Romanian weeklies as a teenager. In 1925, after completing the lycee, he entered the University of Bucharest and received an MA for his thesis on Italian philosophy from Ficino to Bruno. His mentor was the philosopher Nae Ionescu. While at university, he continued writing regularly—short stories, scholarly articles, reviews, and translations. He also founded a journal.

In 1928 Eliade went to India to study Sanskrit and Indian philosophy with Surendranath Dasgupta of the University of Calcutta. He aspired to become sufficiently trained linguistically to secure a professorship in comparative religion at the University of Bucharest—an especially ambitious goal since no chair in the field existed at the University at the time. Daring to hope that one would be created for him, he immediately immersed himself in Sanskrit grammar. He also discovered the world-affirming variety of yoga known as Tantrism. This outlook came to ex- press Eliade’s view of religion universally: that the sacred is to be found within the profane rather than outside it.

Impressed by Eliade’s diligence and enthusiasm, Dasgupta soon took him into his household and treated him almost as an adopted son. When Dasgupta discovered that Eliade was having an affair with his 16-year-old daughter, Maitreyi, under his own roof, he threw Eliade out of his house, and the two parted ways forever. Undeterred, Eliade proceeded to spend six months in the ashram of Rishiskesh, learning the practice, not merely the philosophy, of yoga. Even during his time in India, which constituted his field-work, he recognized that his heart lay in comparative religion rather than in any single religion. While in India, he continued writing, turning out newspaper columns and magazine articles about his travels, scholarly articles on yoga, and several novels. After three years in India, he returned to Romania, pressured by his father to undertake his already deferred year of military service. He intended to return to India but never did.

Back home, Eliade worked on his doctoral thesis on yoga, which he had begun in India, and simultaneously published articles, wrote novels, worked for journals, gave radio talks, and/organized public lectures—all on a host of topics. He came to be considered the leading cultural figure of his generation of young Romanians. In 1932 he did his year of military service, largely doing translations. In 1933 he received his doctorate. In the same year he published the novel Maitreyi, about his love affair with Dasgupta’s daughter. The book won a prize and became a best seller. It was the Romanian literary sensation of 1933, and Eliade became famous.

At the end of 1933 Eliade began teaching at the University of Bucharest. He had hoped to be offered a lectureship but had to settle for serving as an assistant to Ionescu. He held the post for five years, lecturing on various topics in both religion and philosophy. Ionescu, whom he continued to idolize, was the intellectual mentor of the Iron Guard, the Romanian counterpart to the Nazis, and wrote diatribes against Jews. Proclaiming that Jews deserved to suffer because they had rejected Jesus as their savior, he demanded that Romania rid itself of all Jews by any possible means. In his autobiography Eliade self-servingly emphasizes his own break with Ionescu over the status of Jews, but recent research has uncovered scores of viciously anti-Semitic newspaper articles written by Eliade himself (see Berger 1989; see, in reply, Rennie 1996, Chap. 13). Eliade associated Jews with everything foreign to true Romanian culture. In stock anti-Semitic fashion, Jews were blamed for communism, materialism, democracy, and modernity. Eliade’s official biographer, M L Ricketts, uncritically accepts Eliade’s own presentation of his position (see Ricketts 1988, II pp. 903–12). According to both, the fervently Romanian nationalism that Eliade espoused was spiritual rather than political. The Government nevertheless arrested and detained Eliade in 1938 because of his zealous support for the Iron Guard. Eliade was subsequently transferred to a sanitarium.

In 1940 Eliade was allowed to leave the country to serve in the Roman Legation in London, and in 1941 he was transferred to the Legation in Lisbon, where he remained until the end of World War II. He returned only once to Romania. Had he returned after the war, he would have faced arrest as a collaborator. He left for Paris in 1945, where he spent 10 years writing the scholarly tomes that made him internationally famous. In 1946 he served as a visiting professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes of the Sorbonne. In 1956 he was a guest lecturer at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago, and the next year he became a permanent Professor of the History of Religions. In 1962 he was named the Sewell S. Avery Distinguished Service Professor. He co-founded the journal History of Religions. He became the best-known scholar of religious studies in the world and the leading advocate of the field. He retired in 1983, at the age of 76, and was honored with the establishment of an endowed chair in his name. He died in Chicago on 22 April 1986. Shortly afterwards, there appeared the culminating opus of his career: the 16-volume Encyclopedia of Religion, edited by him.

2. Theory Of Religion

The tradition perpetuated by Eliade goes back at least to the nineteenth-century comparativists Friedrich Max Muller (1823–1900) and C. P. Tiele (1830–1902) and was continued by such figures as P. D. Chantepie de las Saussaye, Nathan Soderblom, Gerardus van der Leeuw, W. Brede Kristensen, and Raffaele Pettazzoni. This tradition, alternatively called comparative religion, phenomenology of religion, the history of religions, and, most simply, religious studies, maintains that religion is religion and little, if anything, else. Accordingly, religion is not the subject of anthropology, sociology, psychology, or economics. It is the subject of religious studies alone. The focus of religious studies is less on the truth of religion than on its origin and function. Religion, according to this tradition, arises for the distinctly religious purpose of making contact with God.

The tradition is, however, ambiguous about its aims. Sometimes it claims to be merely presenting the adherent’s point of view, which purportedly deems religion a route to God. Other times the tradition claims to be endorsing the adherent’s point of view. Now religion really does serve to make contact with God. The tradition thereby ceases to offer a mere description of religion and now offers an explanation, or a theory, of religion. But then the issue of the truth of religion proves difficult to sidestep. For if religion succeeds in making contact with God, God must exist.

Eliade’s own position is unclear. He himself wavers between presenting and endorsing the believer’s point of view. Typically, he declares modestly that ‘The ultimate aim of the historian of religions is to understand, and to make understandable to others, religious man’s behavior and mental universe’ (Eliade 1959a, p. 162). In contrast to the theologian, from whom he repeatedly distinguishes himself, the historian seeks only to explicate, not to advocate, the adherent’s point of view: ‘The procedure of the historian of religions is just as different from that of the theologian. All theology implies a systematic reflection on the content of religious experience, aiming at a deeper and clearer understanding of the relationships between God– Creator and man–creature. But the historian of religions uses an empirical method of approach. He is concerned with religio-historical facts which he seeks to understand and to make intelligible to others’ (Eliade 1959a, p. 88).

Yet in actuality Eliade ventures far beyond the mere presentation of the believer’s point of view. He does not hesitate to discuss dead religions, whose adherents are scarcely available for consultation. His chief source of information for even living religions is not informants but their texts and practices. Moreover, he is prepared to grant that the meaning of all religions is partly, even largely, unconscious. Of religious symbols, for example, he states that ‘we do not have the right to conclude that the message of the symbols is confined to the meanings of which a certain number of individuals are fully conscious, even when we learn from a rigorous investigation of these individuals what they think of such-and-such a symbol belonging to their own tradition. Depth psychology has taught us that the symbol delivers its message and fulfills its function even when its meaning escapes awareness’ (Eliade 1959b, pp. 106–7). Eliade goes as far as to assert that even most professedly non-religious moderns are in fact religious: ‘The majority of the ‘‘irreligious’’ still behave religiously, even though they are not aware of the fact …. [T]he modern man who feels and claims that he is non-religious still retains a large stock of camouflaged myths and degenerated rituals’ (Eliade 1959a, pp. 204–5). Eliade outright bars any exceptions: ‘[E]ven the most avowedly non-religious man still, in his deeper being, shares in a religiously oriented behavior’ (Eliade 1959a, p. 211). In imputing to avowed atheists a religiosity of which they are wholly unconscious and which contradicts their own conscious one, he is doing more than describing the actor’s point of view. His defense of his view of religion as irreducibly religious cannot therefore be that it is so for actors themselves. It must be that religion is itself irreducibly religious. He must be offering a theory, not just a description, of religion.

The aspects of religion on which Eliade focuses are myths, rituals, and symbols. All are means of encountering God. Religion for Eliade arises not from an encounter with God but from a yearning for an encounter. Religion provides both places and times for the encounter. It demarcates as ‘sacred’ those places, or spaces, where God has previously appeared. Adherents assume that God, who is elusive, will more likely appear where God has already been than in a new place. Even if adherents believe that God is everywhere, they still go to church to seek out God. Similarly, religion sets off as sacred those times, always long past, when God most often appeared. Because adherents believe that God was closest at hand during or just after creation, they use myths about creation not merely to tell them when God was nigh but, more, to carry them back to that time: ‘It is easy to understand why the memory of that marvelous time haunted religious man, why he periodically sought to return to it. In illo tempore the gods had displayed their greatest powers. The cosmogony is the supreme divine manifestation, the paradigmatic act of strength, superabundance, and creativity. Religious man … seeks to reside at the very source of primordial reality, when the world was in statu nascendi’ (Eliade 1959a, p. 80). Myth works like a magic carpet.

In the tradition of religious studies, Eliade maintains that the quest for God, or the sacred, is not a means to an end but the end itself. Adherents seek the sacred because they seek the sacred, not because they seek something else through it. Religion can have anthropological, sociological, psychological, and economic benefits, but those benefits are considered to be only the consequences of a quest for the sacred and not the purpose of the quest. Furthermore, Eliade tolerates no reciprocal causality, the way, for example, Max Weber does. Religion can have non-religious effects, but not vice versa. Other scholars in the field of religious studies do allow for multiple causes as well as for multiple effects of religion, but they still insist that the main cause is the religious one. For the uncompromising Eliade, the sole cause of religion is religious. Somehow religion cannot arise for both religious and non-religious reasons.

Because Eliade pits the religious cause against all other proposed ones, he pits the field of religious studies against the social sciences, which he continually faults for accounting for religion non-religiously, or ‘reductively’: ‘… a religious phenomenon will only be recognized as such if it is grasped at its own level, that is to say, if it is studied as something religious. To try to grasp the essence of such a phenomenon by means of physiology, psychology, sociology, economics, linguistics, or any other study is false; it misses the one unique and irreducible element in it—the element of the sacred’ (Eliade 1958a, p. xiii). Eliade takes for granted that, as disciplines, the social sciences stand committed to a non-religious account of religion.

Only once, in all his writings, does Eliade qualify his condemnation of the social sciences as resolutely reductive in their approach to religion. In fact, the qualification comes in an otherwise unbending indictment of anthropologists for spurning the adherent’s point of view, which he assumes to be religious: ‘Indeed, as it is well known, the main interest of the western scholars has been the study of material cultures and the analysis of family structure, social organization, tribal law, and so forth. These are problems, one may say, important and even urgent for western scholarship, but of secondary importance for the understanding of the meaning of a particular culture, as it was understood and assumed by its own members (broader, sympathetic and intelligent studies like those of Marcel Griaulle, E. G. [sic] EvansPritchard or R. G. Lienhardt, and a few other cultural anthropologists are rather exceptional’ (Eliade 1967, pp. 502–3 [italics in original]).

Eliade’s characterization of anthropology was outdated even when he wrote the essay, and it has become ever more outdated ever since. At best, his characterization, which borders on caricature, applies to the British brand of social anthropology influenced by A. R. Radcliffe-Brown. But the interest of British social anthropologists in social structure has rarely been at the expense of an interest in religion, as the cases of Evans-Pritchard and Lienhardt, as well as that of Radcliffe-Brown himself, conspicuously attest.

More important than the accuracy of Eliade’s depiction of anthropology and of other social sciences is his argument. For him, the social sciences wrongly disregard the believer’s point of view. But in fact they do not. Far from ignoring, let us even suppose, the religious nature of religion for adherents, social scientists begin with it. The actor’s point of view constitutes the data to be accounted for. If social scientists ignored ‘the meaning of a particular culture, as it was understood and assumed by its own members’, they would have nothing left to account for. Why religion has meaning for adherents is what social scientists want to know.

Yet if social scientists necessarily turn to adherents for the data to be accounted for, they do not necessarily turn to adherents for an account of the data. Believers are akin to patients; social scientists, akin to doctors. It is not that religion is a disease to be cured but that religion is better understood by doctors than by patients. Patients may provide their own diagnoses of their ailments, but the final diagnosis rests with the doctor. That a patient rather than the doctor has the disease does not make the patient an expert on it. A patient’s own diagnosis may turn out to be correct, but not because it is the patient’s.

Eliade’s indictment of anthropologists for spurning the actor’s point of view is even more tenuous because as noted, he himself spurns it. If he is entitled to find a religious function in the professedly non-religious activities of avowed non-believers, why are social scientists not entitled to find non-religious functions in the professedly religious activities of avowed believers? In truth, both are entitled to venture beyond the actor’s point of view.

Eliade’s additional argument for accounting for religion religiously is that an account of any phenomenon must match the phenomenon being accounted for. Just as an account of a work of literature must be literary, so an account of a religious belief or practice must be religious. Eliade is right to insist on symmetry between an account and the subject of the account. But he is wrong to assume that the phenomenon being accounted for can be characterized and thereby accounted for in only one way. A ‘literary’ work such as a novel can alternatively be characterized as a work of history, sociology, or autobiography, and can then be accounted for accordingly. A Freudian account of religion characterizes a believer’s relationship to God as a child’s relationship to the child’s father, and then attempts to account for that relationship psychoanalytically.

For Eliade to reply that God is more than a human being would miss the point. Freud never claims to be able to account for all aspects of God, only for father-like ones. He never claims that his characterization of the relationship between believer and God as filial is exhaustive. As a whole, social scientific accounts of religion claim at most to be offering necessary, not sufficient, accounts of religion. Freud recognizes the gap between a father and a God, and he is prepared to turn to religious studies to close it. He claims only to be demonstrating how father-like God is. Eliade, however, would bar Freud from offering an account, whether necessary or sufficient, of any aspects of God, and would do so on the question-begging grounds that religion is religion and not psychology.

Bibliography:

1. Allen D 1998 Myth and Religion in Mircea Eliade. Garland Taylor and Francis, New York
2. Berger A 1989 Fascism and religion in Romania. Annals of Scholarship 4: 455–65
3. Eliade M 1954 The Myth of the Eternal Return. Trans. Trask W R, Pantheon Books, New York (also published 1955 Routledge and Kegan Paul, London; reprinted as 1959
4. Cosmos and History, Harper Torchbooks, New York; reprinted as 1971 The Myth of the Eternal Return, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ; 1991 Princeton University Press Mythos Series)
5. Eliade M 1958a Patterns in Comparati e Religion. Trans Sheed R, Sheed and Ward, New York (reprinted 1963 Meridian Books, Cleveland; reprinted 1974 New American Library, New York)
6. Eliade M 1958b Yoga: Immortality and Freedom. Trans. Trask W R, Pantheon Books, New York; Routledge and Kegan Paul, London (2nd edn. 1969 Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ; reprinted 1970 Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ; 1990 Princeton University Press Mythos Series)
7. Eliade M 1959a The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion. Trans. Trask W R, Harcourt, Brace, New York (reprinted 1961 Harper Torchbooks, New York; reprinted 1968 Harvest Books, New York)
8. Eliade M 1959b Methodological remarks on the study of religious symbolism. In: Eliade M, Kitagawa J M (eds.) The History of Religions: Essays in Methodology. University of Chicago Press, Chicago
9. Eliade M 1963 Myth and Reality. Trans. Trask W R, Harper, New York (also published 1964 Allen and Unwin, London; reprinted Harper Torchbooks, New York, 1968; reprinted 1975 Harper Colophon, New York)
10. Eliade M 1964 Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. Trans. Trask W R, Pantheon Books, New York; Routledge and Kegan Paul, London (reprinted 1970 Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ)
11. Eliade M 1967 On understanding primitive religions. In: Muller G, Zeller W (eds.) Glaube Geist Geschichte: Festschrift fur Ernst Benz. Brill, Leiden, The Netherlands
12. Eliade M 1969 The Quest: History and Meaning in Religion. University of Chicago Press, Chicago (reprinted 1975 University of Chicago Press Phoenix Books, Chicago)
13. Eliade M 1972 Zalmoxis: The Vanishing God: Lomactive Studies in the Religious and Folklore of Dacia and East Europe. Trans. Trask W R, University of Chicago Press, Chicago (reprinted 1978 University of Chicago Press Phoenix Books, Chicago)
14. Eliade M 1978–85 A History of Religious Ideas, 3 Vols. Trans. Trask W R (Vols. 1 and 2) Hiltebeitel A, ApostolosCappadona D (Vol. 3), University of Chicago Press, Chicago (also published 1979–85 Collins, London)
15. Eliade M 1987 (ed.) Encyclopedia of Religion, 16 Vols. Macmillan, New York
16. Eliade M 1981 Autobiography, I: 1907–1937, Journey East, Journey West. Trans. Ricketts M L, Harper and Row, San Francisco (reprinted 1988 University of Chicago Press, Chicago)
17. Eliade M 1988 Autobiography, II: 1937–1960, Exile’s Odyssey. Trans. Ricketts M L, University of Chicago Press, Chicago Idinopoulos T A, Yonan E A (eds.) 1994 Religion and Reductionism: Essays on Eliade, Segal and the Challenge of the Social Sciences for the Study of Religion. Brill, Leiden, The Netherlands
18. Leach E R 1966 Sermons by a man on a ladder. New York Review of Books 7 October 20: 28–31
19. Rennie B S 1996 Reconstructing Eliade: Making Sense of Religion. State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
20. Ricketts M L 1988 Mircea Eliade: The Romanian Roots, 1907–1945, 2 Vols. East European Monographs, Boulder, CO