231 - The Quest History and Meaning In Religion & Myths and Symbols, Studies In Honor of Mircea Eliade

The Quest History and Meaning In Religion
By Mircea Elade
180pp Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1969 $4 95.

Myths and Symbols, Studies In Honor of Mircea Eliade
Edited by Joseph Al Kitagawa and Charles H Long
438 pp Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1969 $10 00.

We often hear from commentators upon youthful disillusionment with contemporary society and culture that much of modern man's dilemma springs from his loss of intimacy with, and wonder of, "being." Mircea Eliade is preeminent as the scholarly prophet of a "new humanism" that it is hoped will bring man back to the "sacred" Eliade believes pre-modern man to have discerned in "being." If what is needed is that, in Theodore Rosak's words, "we make visible the submerged magic of the earth and bring closer that culture in which power, knowledge, achievement recede before the great purpose of life," Eliade in his many writings is reminding us of past man's vision of life amidst the sacred that present man must regain if there is to be future man.

One wonders if Eliade the quiet and self-effacing scholar and professor, the compiler of myths, the student of antiquity, the erudite seeker after a hermeneutic proper to his academic discipline, ever realizes the prophetic role that he has taken upon himself or, perhaps like the sacred that ensnares the shaman, that has captured him. He would be the first to deny the prophetic mantle. His academic stature as a Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago is hardly congruous with the activities of a prophet. Nevertheless, for those of us who continue to read Eliade because of his almost unique scholarship

232 - The Quest History and Meaning In Religion & Myths and Symbols, Studies In Honor of Mircea Eliade

there is something more than mere scholarship that unfolds before us. Even when we suspect him of allowing a certain "prophetic license" to influence his scholarship at times, the depth and complexity of homo religiosus and his awareness of the sacred brings a wonderment, perhaps nostalgia, not usually associated with serious scholarly studies of antiquity or of tribal man. These two books serve two admirable purposes. They bring a clearer understanding of the scholarly activities and concerns of the discipline in which Eliade is an acknowledged leader, and they furnish his fellow scholars and interested laymen with insight into Eliade the man.

Myths and Symbols is a collection of essays in Professor Eliade's honor on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday. Like all such collections the essays are diverse in their subject matter and varied in their quality. Divided into three categories-phenomenological and theoretical, historical, literary-the first two groups reflect the separate scholarly interests of their authors as well as the broad unity that underlies contemporary research in a discipline still seeking an appropriate designation-Religionswissenschaft, the Comparative Study of Religions, the Phenomenology of Religion, the History of Religion, etc.

While no individual author's consideration of his subject may properly be identified with Professor Eliade either in approach or in conclusion, the phenomenological and theoretical studies continually reveal the understanding and appreciation of the "sacred and profane" that Eliade has made the theme of his many writings for almost four decades. The perception of the sacred within the not-merely-human personality that reveals the ultimate nature of being to his fellow humans; the apprehension of sacred being in art and ritual through concrete form that is of the material earth with which man is so closely related; the understanding of time in its different modes as permeated with the sacred that bestows being and destroys ephemerality; the mythological and, therefore, ontological relationship between being within man and ultimate being that is the sacred-these and other matters so central to religious man in different cultures and at different times are presented briefly and clearly.

The essays that have been classified as historical by the editors take the reader into a wide variety of religious cultures and subjects. Here there is something reminiscent of Eliade's Myth of the Eternal Return and the place of myth within the human apprehension of sacred being to which he has given so much attention. But this is not all. The student of religion who is excited by pre-modern cultic and intellectual reactions to awareness of the sacred within life will find much that interests him. The interested layman and the youth who finds so much of con-

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temporary religion sterile and without value as he seeks the purpose of life will discover in these essays something of the depth of religious experience that is being made so vivid by the "scientific" study of religion for which Eliade is so eloquent a spokesman.

The final essays, labelled "literary," open up an aspect of Mircea Eliade little known to his American admirers. We may have known that he wrote novels in his native Romanian, but since we could not read them and have not sought out their translations into other European languages, their relation to his scholarly works has been little recognized. This is not necessarily to suggest that either is dependent upon the other but, rather, to make clear as one author puts it "that the two types of work are carried on alongside each other." The American student of Eliade the scholar is not surprised to discover one essayist commenting that his "magnificent and unique novel, Foret Interdite, [is] an accomplished narrative synthesis of the fantastic and the real in history and myth through the tortured drama of the human existence of its characters." "The destiny of his principal protagonists, the logical culmination of the tension of their terrestrial existences, allows each one of them to glimpse the open horizons of a necessary plenitude. . . . They are tormented precisely by the problem of time which is a problem lived as a unique drama, a vast metaphysical drama, a tormented existential drama. . . ." Eliade the novelist and man of letters and Eliade the scholar and writer of learned tomes are not two men, but one who through his combination of sensitive, empathetic scholarship, and aesthetic appreciation and insight recognized the ultimate nature of the sacrality of being, and the terror of man when the sense of that sacrality is lost.

The Quest, mostly a collection of previously published essays by Eliade, is well suited to be read in conjunction with the essays of others to which we have been referring. The essays treat scholarly matters and they reflect Eliade's primary concern to make "the meanings of religious documents intelligible to the mind of modern man." Throughout the essays he is expressing his hope that "the historian of religions will inevitably attain to a deeper knowledge of man" and his conviction that on the basis of such knowledge "a new humanism on a world-wide scale could develop."

Throughout the whole of this small book there is the prophet-I trust I do not offend him-saying in a myriad of striking ways that "the awareness of a real and meaningful world is intimately related to the discovery of the sacred. Through the experience of the sacred, the human mind grasped the difference between that which reveals itself as real, powerful, rich, and meaningful, and that which does not-i.e., the chaotic and dangerous flux of things, their fortuitous, meaningless appear-

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ances and disappearances." This is the quest for being to which Mircea Eliade persistently points.

Philip H. Ashby
Princeton University
Princeton, New Jersey