Mircea Eliade

Mircea Eliade (born March 9, 1907, Bucharest, Rom.—died April 22, 1986, Chicago, Ill., U.S.) was a historian of religions, phenomenologist of religion, and author of novels, novellas, and short stories. Eliade was one of the most influential scholars of religion of the 20th century and one of the world’s foremost interpreters of religious symbolism and myth.

Life and works

Eliade studied philosophy at the University of Bucharest, receiving an M.A. in 1928 with a thesis on Italian Renaissance philosophy from Marsilio Ficino to Giordano Bruno. After studying in Calcutta primarily under the Sanskrit scholar Surendranath Dasgupta (1928–30), he spent six months practicing Yoga at Rishikesh under the direction of Swami Shivananda (1930–31). Returning to Bucharest, he wrote a dissertation on the comparative history of techniques of Yoga, for which he received a Ph.D. in philosophy in 1933. Appointed assistant to Nae Ionescu, the scholar he most admired, Eliade joined the faculty of the University of Bucharest and taught courses in philosophy, religion, and Hinduism and Buddhism. In the 1930s he became an influential literary figure in Romania, especially after publication of his hugely successful novel Maitreyi (1933; Bengal Nights). During World War II, Eliade served as cultural attaché with the Royal Legation of Romania in London (1940) and in Lisbon (1941–45).

Starting in the late 1980s, scholarship on Eliade and his legacy has often focused on charges and countercharges about his political life and views, especially his political writings and involvement in Romania in the 1930s and in London and Portugal during the war. Critics charge that Eliade hid his past in which he was a sympathizer, participant, and defender of right-wing, antidemocratic, intolerant, xenophobic, violent Romanian fascism and anti-Semitism. Defenders, while conceding youthful indiscretions and some indefensible writings, argue that the political charges have been exaggerated and should not negate the significance of Eliade’s scholarly and literary contributions.

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In the decade after the war Eliade lived in Paris, where he established his international reputation as a historian, morphologist, and phenomenologist of religion. In 1956–57 he was appointed visiting professor and then professor and chairman of the history of religions department at the University of Chicago, where he taught until his retirement in 1983.

An extremely prolific writer, Eliade spoke of his “dual vocation” as a fiction writer and scholar. He viewed his literary and scholarly concerns as autonomous but complementary and as necessary for his spiritual equilibrium and artistic creativity. His works of fiction were written in Romanian, and his major scholarly works were written in French; some 35 of his books have been published in English.

While in Paris Eliade wrote four major scholarly works: Traité d’histoire des religions (1949; Patterns in Comparative Religion), which signalled his arrival as a major scholar of religion; Le Mythe de l’éternel retour (1949; The Myth of the Eternal Return, also translated as Cosmos and History), which he described as his favourite book; Le Chamanisme et les techniques archaïques de l’extase (1951; Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy); and Le Yoga: Immortalité et liberté (1954; Yoga: Immortality and Freedom). His three-volume Histoire des croyances et des idées religieuses (1978–85; A History of Religious Ideas) was another major scholarly achievement. Eliade also founded and coedited the journal History of Religions (1961) and served as editor in chief of the 16-volume The Encyclopedia of Religion (1987).

Eliade wrote many popular books, such as The Sacred and the Profane (1959), and published collections of articles, mostly on myth and symbolism, in books such as Myth and Reality (1963) and The Quest (1969). His most ambitious and challenging novel is Forêt interdite (1955; The Forbidden Forest), which he considered his literary masterpiece. This novel takes place between 1936 and 1948 and includes some of Eliade’s views on the historical tragedy and destiny of the Romanian people. It also reveals Eliade’s key mythical and symbolic transhistorical structures and meanings and the central belief that religious meanings are hidden and camouflaged in contemporary Western experiences.

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Eliade always kept a journal, and he published autobiographical volumes and collections of essays containing personal reflections on his own life and works as well as on scholarly, religious, social, and political developments in Romania and the world. These books include Autobiography. Vol. I: 1907–1937 (1981) and Autobiography. Vol. II: 1937–1960 (1988); Journal I, 1945–1955 (1990), Journal II, 1957–1969 (1989; originally published as No Souvenirs, 1977), Journal III, 1970–1978 (1989), and Journal IV, 1979–1985 (1990); and Ordeal by Labyrinth (1982).

Approach to religion

Eliade’s scholarly and literary approaches to myth, symbol, and religion are defined by several key assumptions and principles. First, he argued for “the irreducibility of the sacred.” He believed that religious phenomena must be understood as uniquely and irreducibly religious, as expressing meaning on a religious plane of reference. Eliade frequently criticized those who attempted to reduce religion to psychological, social, economic, historical, or other nonreligious phenomena. According to him, they failed to do justice to the unique, irreducible essence of religious experience: the sacred.

Second, the religious can be distinguished from the secular because it expresses a universal, essential structure that Eliade called the “dialectic of the sacred and the profane,” or the “dialectic of hierophanies” (manifestations of the sacred in the world). This dialectic involves the experience of the transcendent in which the sacred (infinite, eternal, nonhistorical) paradoxically manifests itself through ordinarily profane (finite, temporal, historical) phenomena. What is paradoxical, illogical, and incomprehensible to the rational, conceptual, natural, scientific, secular, human understanding is how a transcendent, perfect God can appear in ordinary human and worldly forms; how what is absolute and eternal can be expressed in limited words, in trees and rivers, in historical beings and animals, and in dreams and other human experiences. In this sense, the supreme Christian mystery of the Incarnation, in which God assumed human form, is no more paradoxical than the universal dialectical structure of all religious manifestations.

Eliade’s approach is also grounded in his claim that there are essential, universal, coherent, symbolic systems that provide the framework for interpreting religious meaning. Religious language is symbolic, always pointing beyond itself to transcendent sacred meanings. Eliade understood human beings as religious beings (homo religious) and as symbolic beings (homo symbolicus). Human beings necessarily use language to express themselves, and it is the capacity to express things with symbolic language that allows humans to experience deeper meanings and to unify experiences in terms of coherent, symbolic, structural worlds of meaning. As symbolic, religious beings, humans were also viewed by Eliade as “mythic beings.” Myths are symbolic, sacred narratives of what took place in primordial, mythic time. They provide exemplary sacred stories that allow religious people to make sense of and deal with their existential crises, such as experiences of our historical and temporal limitations, of senseless suffering and arbitrary and tragic death, and of alienation and the lack of deep meaning in our lives. Myths are reenacted through rituals and other sacred activities. According to Eliade, creation myths (cosmogonic myths) and other myths of origins provide the most significant lessons for religious people. They provide accounts of the primordial time; describe the transformations that explain the nature of human existence in the world; and help humans return to the sacred origins, overcome sin, and become renewed by participating in the primordial sacred fullness of being.

Finally, it should be noted that Eliade was not a detached scholar. He was deeply concerned about what he perceived as the arrogance and provincialism of modern Western culture. Declaring that there was an urgent need for a “cultural renewal” and a “new humanism,” he held that individuals should reconceive themselves as global or planetary beings. He called for a “creative hermeneutics” that would decipher the sacred hidden in the modern profane and establish a dialogue with the symbols, myths, and religious phenomena of non-Western cultures.