|
|
597 - A History of Religious Ideas, Volume 3: From Muhammad to the Age of Reforms |
A History of Religious Ideas, Volume 3: From Muhammad to the Age of Reforms
By Mircea Eliade
Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1985. 360 Pp. $27.50.
The recent death of Mircea Eliade marked the close of a most remarkable career. Eliade, who left Rumania to teach at Paris and then at the University of Chicago, was the most influential and widely read scholar of a fledgling discipline, the comparative study of the history of religions. The book under review is a translation of the third volume (a fourth was projected but remained unfinished at his death) of the Histoire des croyances et des idees religieuses, Eliade's attempt to apply his insights and theories to the entire history of the human religious experience. The series is well worth reading by specialists and general readers alike, although a good dictionary will help when Eliade occasionally indulges in jargon. Such an ambitious goal required a breadth of erudition that few but he possessed. In many ways, as in the first two volumes, the apparatus is the most valuable part of the work. The "Present Positions/Problems and Progress/Critical Biographies" format provides an informed introduction into the literature on each religion and religious movement dealt with in the book.
The third volume covers the period from late antiquity through early modernity for Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. In addition, there are chapters on Eurasian and Tibetan religion. Eliade's treatment of Islam and Judaism is a model of conciseness and clarity. His comments on Eurasia and Tibet are fascinating and, for an understanding of his own preconceptions and predilections, invaluable. But his discussion of Christianity leaves grounds for uneasiness and dissatisfaction. In a work which covers so wide a field geographically and chronologically, one must expect errors of detail. Unfortunately, some of Eliade's lapses impair important arguments. While his belief that Frederick II conquered Jerusalem, was crowned and lived there for fifteen years seems a harmless conflation of the real Frederick with the apocalyptic Frederick of popular millenarianism, his treatment of the relationship between the Bogomils and Western dualistic heresies is seriously misleading. The exact influence of the Bogomils on the twelfth century Cathars is still much debated, but there is no evidence of such interaction with the dualist heretics of Orleans in the early eleventh century (not the twelfth century as Eliade has it).
This points up two main difficulties with Eliade's approach. First, Eliade is relatively unconcerned with the temporal flow of events and his unconcern is reflected in his haphazard use of chronological relations. Secondly, in part as a result, Eliade is often ready to ascribe (a never closely defined) "influence" to one religion or group on another with no evidence save the similarity of concepts and expressions. This in turn
|
|
598 - A History of Religious Ideas, Volume 3: From Muhammad to the Age of Reforms |
supports one of his major concerns, ecumenism and the universalist impulses found in most of the world's religions. For, while Eliade is careful to emphasize the peculiarities of the various religious (or " ethnic") traditions, it is really underlying universal religious structures that hold his interest. The concrete, the particular, the time-bound are mere evanescent manifestations of larger impersonal realities. But if one is tempted to classify Eliade with those proponents of the longue duree, the French Annales school, his fascination with religious "genius" (e.g., Muhammad) points in another direction-German Romantic Idealism. With his emphasis on mysticism, literature (for example, "courtly love" as religious phenomenon), and magic, Eliade may best be described as a student of religious high culture. Even his treatment of Eurasian traditional religion is cerebral. It is hard to believe that any but a small fraction of Europe's medieval population had an informed participation in most of the Christianity that he describes. We are all of us prisoners of our sources, but Eliade seems unaware or unconcerned by the problematic relationship between what he refers to as "archaic structures" and " oral literary expression" in the study of religion. The reliability of the sources and the extent to which any of the beliefs and practices were actually popular are issues which Eliade never addresses. The book, nonetheless, remains an interesting survey of certain types of religious traditions. As such, it is a valuable addition to the literature.
R. EMMET McLAUGHLIN