Theology Today - Vol 44, No.2 - July 1987 - CRITIC'S CORNER

251 - Mircea Eliade: A Retrospective

Mircea Eliade: A Retrospective

WHEN Mircea Eliade died on April 22, 1986, at the age of seventy-nine, the field of religious studies lost probably the last great encyclopedist. His works are not only replete with references to all major religions, but to many of the religions of antiquity and an even greater number of preliterate cultures. The range of sources cited is equally phenomenal, for Eliade drew his information from journals, books, and monographs published in many languages, fields, countries, and eras. His capacities for researching, retaining, and synthesizing vast amounts of material from all types of religions throughout recorded (and excavated) history were astounding-especially without benefit of computer banks, programs, and retrieval systems.

Eliade undertook to comprehend and integrate the whole of human religious history, a task that is mind-boggling in its ambition and seemingly foolhardy in its execution. In an age of increasing specialization, Eliade appears like a person born out of due time, the last survivor of Renaissance aspirations. To make his self-appointed task more improbable, he was more than just a collector of miscellaneous information, more even than a cataloguer of systematized information-like Stith Thompson and his Motif Index of Folk Literature. Eliade was primarily concerned to discern, within the seemingly infinite variety of religious phenomena, important c6mmonalities and interrelationships. He was, in the twentieth century, a figure in the field of comparative religion comparable to Arnold J. Toynbee in history, C. G. Jung in psychology, Max Weber in sociology, and Albert Einstein in physics. Eliade shared with such visionaries the goal of embracing the totality of relevant phenomena in a set of unifying patterns and principles. He wrote of his method:

I also share the conviction of those who think that the study of Dante or Shakespeare, and even of Dostoevski or Proust, is illuminated by a knowledge of Kalidasa, the Noh plays, or the Pilgrim Monkey. This is not a matter of vain and, in the end, sterile pseudo-encyclopedism. It is simply a matter of not losing sight of the profound and indivisible unity of the history of the human mind.¹

Conrad Hyers is Professor and Chair of Religion, Gustavus Adolphus College, Saint Peter, Minnesota. He is the author of The Comic Vision and the Christian Faith (198 1), The Meaning of Creation (1984), and God Created Laughter: The Bible as Divine Comedy (1987). Introduced to Eliade during his doctoral studies, Dr. Hyers has been studying and interpreting him over the years as well as referring to him in his own books.

¹Mircea Eliade, A History of Religious Ideas, Vol. I (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. xvi.

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Both the enterprise and its comparative conclusions have been questioned, if not flatly dismissed, from many quarters. The sheer amount of detail that has been generated by specialists would seem, in itself, to defy assimilation by a single intellect, requiring a kind of omniscience and ornnicompetence that is unlikely even if that detail were to be fed into a carefully programmed computer. Beyond this, however, the drift of the academic world has been away from the generalist to the specialist who becomes ever more specialized. Those who would stray out of their subdisciplines are under suspicion by those in authority in the next subdiscipline, let alone in some other discipline, or with expertise in some other language, culture, or historical period. The specialist can easily reject any cross-cultural comparison as being like tailored clothing that is said to fit all sizes and shapes.

Eliade's response to such criticism was along the lines of the aphorism about not seeing the woods for the trees. The specialist is adept at seeing particular trees, and seeing them in all their particularity. What does not stand out at close range are the common patterns between trees, or the configurations of groups of trees, or the interrelationships between trees and all other aspects of the environment. Eliade insisted, "the strictest specialization does not absolve the scholar from situating his researches in the perspective of universal history."² One can recognize in this debate several long-standing discussions over the universal and the particular, rationalism and empiricism, the synthetic and the analytic, absolutism and relativism.

Freeman Dyson has recently correlated these issues with the history of science, but they apply as well to the history of religions. Dyson argues that modern science is the result of two contrasting tendencies, the one represented by the "unifiers" and the other by the "diversifiers."³ The passion of the unifier is to discover general characteristics, principles, and laws that unite the diversity of phenomena. The unifier uses a wide angle lens which, while missing the fine detail, encompasses the whole vista. What such a lens makes clear is not the intricacy of each object, but the total setting and its interconnectedness.

The passion of the diversifier is to focus in at very close range upon the detail of a specific object and its immediate environs. The diversifier is suspicious of apparent similarities and grand generalizations that seem to blur the specificities of each particular. The forte of the diversifier lies not in discovering larger unities but in sorting things out, painstakingly distinguishing one thing from another, delighting in the uniqueness of every phenomenon which resists being swallowed up into some universal. The diversifier is like the Eskimo who uses fifty-two different words for "snow," which more accurately reflects all types and conditions of

²Ibid.

³Freeman Dyson, "Manchester and Athens," in The Aesthetic Dimension of Science, Deane W. Curtin, ed. (New York: Philosophical Library, 1980), pp. 47ff.

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crystallized moisture, while the unifier sees them as instances of a common phenomenon (snow/snowing) governed by common principles.

While the unifier finds the most important realities and truths at the level of larger and larger unities, the diversifier finds reality and truth at the level of smaller and smaller particulars. For the diversifier, variety is not just the spice of life but the stuff of life itself. The unifier tends to see particulars as variations on major or minor themes, like Bach's thirty-three Goldberg Variations, with the variations having at best a derivative and secondary significance.

In biology, Charles Darwin's theory of evolution through natural selection offered a grand unifying vision to a rapidly increasing knowledge of the prodigious variety of living things. A common process with common mechanisms was seen as embracing all forms of life, forms so varied, so diverse, and so "fixed" in their differences as to suggest the opposite of a unifying vision. On the other hand, there have been many biologists, while not necessarily contesting the broad outlines of evolutionary history, who have preferred to concentrate their energies on a detailed investigation of the peculiarities of a single organism or ecosystem at one point in time. Karl von Frisch, for example, says of his own noted research:

The layman may wonder why a biologist is content to devote fifty years of his life to the study of bees and minnows without ever branching out into research on, say, elephants, or at any rate the lice of elephants.... The answer to any such question must be that every single species of the animal kingdom challenges us with all, or nearly all, the mysteries of life.⁴

In these terms, Eliade was clearly a unifier, though he did not deny the importance of the diversifier on whom he had to rely for most of his information. A passage in one of his early works clearly reveals his personal inclinations. He is comparing religious belief and practice among hunters and cultivators:

There are differences in religious experience explained by differences in economy, culture, and social organization-in short by history. Nevertheless... there is a similarity of behavior that seems to us infinitely more important than their differences: both live in a sacralized cosmos.⁵

Eliade's career was motivated primarily by the quest for those impulses and themes that might be said to be common to all: a sense of mystery, the experience of the sacred, the ritualizing and mythicizing of existence, the symbolism of the axis mundi, the distinction between sacred and profane, the motif of the primordial fall, initiatory patterns, etc. Whether one was investigating Australian aborigines or Scottish Presbyterians, these were for Eliade-in the words of Joseph Campbell-like "the common strains in a single symphony of the soul."⁶

⁴Karl von Frisch, A Biologist Remembers (Elmsford: Pergamon Press, 1967), p. 12.

⁵Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1959), p. 17.

⁶Joseph Campbell, ed., Myths, Dreams and Religions (New York: Dutton Books, 1970), p. 141.

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If we pursue the biological analogy further, much of Eliade's work, like Darwin's, was also concerned with the broad middle ground between universal principles and the uniquenesses of particular forms. Darwin, for example, was not interested only in developing a general theory of evolution but was led to this, in part, by detailed observation of the peculiarities of the many varieties of finches and other creatures that were adapted to the variety of ecological niches in the Galapagos archipelago. The observation of idiosyncratic development did not negate the possibility of certain common drives (for example, survival) and processes (natural selection) or origins (the first finches to reach the islands).

Darwin also had the classificatory work of Linneus behind him with its distinctions between various species and genera. As the system has been further refined, it moves, on the one hand, to smaller and smaller groupings, but, on the other, to larger and larger groupings: variety, sub-species, species, genus, family, order, class, phylum, kingdom. At the one end of the spectrum is life itself with those characteristics common to all life forms from bacteria, fungi, and algae to humanity. On the other end of the spectrum is the phenomenal diversification of life into the millions of forms that exist or have existed, with each form further diversified individually-as evidenced in the genetic particularity of each instance of a species, At the level of infinite diversity, every fingerprint is unique-just as every snowflake has its distinctive pattern; but at other levels, there are important connections, relationships, and unities among all life forms.

Eliade attempted to develop a similar taxonomy of religious forms. But because his interests were primarily in the direction of the universal rather than the unique, he worked largely on the more generalized end of the spectrum. Here he was able to bring remarkably diverse phenomena together. The symbolism of the axis mundi, for example, was seen as uniting a range of disparate phenomena: yoga, the mandala, the cross, sacred mountains, holy cities, temples, Zen meditation, and mythical motifs such as the world navel and the cosmic tree. All were seen as sharing in a fundamental religious desire to have access to the center and source of all being, meaning, and power.

Eliade was not interested primarily in diversity and particularity as such, but rather in the ways in which they illustrate commonalities. His passion for unification did not lead him to make distinctions much beyond the biological equivalent of kingdoms and phyla. He does, for example, allow for certain major divisions in religious experience and expression, such as between prophetic and mystical religion. But even. here his sympathies are unmistakably on the side of the mystics, since mysticism itself aspires to the vision of the Oneness of all things. The same may be said for the related distinction between historical and ahistorical religions. Personally, Eliade preferred the latter. He wrote frequently about the "terror of history" and the religious desire to

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"negate history," "transcend temporality," and "escape from the ravages of time."

This mystical, ahistorical bias often leads to a blurring of important distinctions and to exaggerated claims for the universality of certain myths, rituals, and symbols. The myth of androgyny, for example, has been used by mystics as symbolic of the original Oneness that must be recovered. Though the myth may be found in many cultures world-wide, it is not thereby universal. It is, as Eliade well knew, one of many origin myths, each with differing religious implications. Eliade, like Jung, treated the myth of androgyny as archetypal, common to homo religiosus. This in turn leads to an interpretation of a creation myth, such as the garden story of Genesis 2, as a variant of the myth of androgyny. Eve's extraction from Adam's rib cage is read as the splitting apart of an androgynous Adam, whereas the concern of the passage is quite different. The Yahwist is affirming by the rib episode that male and female are of the same order of being and suitable as companions." 'This at last is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh....'Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh" (Gen. 2:23-24). This is not a mystical, primordial oneness which physical union tries in vain to recover, but a prophetic, historical oneness. And it is not a fallen state but a created state.

III

Eliade's quest for universals has also been challenged by some on philosophical grounds as part of a discredited Platonic rationalism and essentialism. It is to be expected that process philosophers, existentialists, pragmatists, linguistic analysts, empiricists, deconstructionists, and Marxists each has reason to question the enterprise. Though it is true that Eliade was very sympathetic with Platonism and its mystical philosophy and made frequent reference to it, he saw himself offering empirical verification of his position by drawing upon a large sampling of cultures and religious phenomena. If anything, he is closest to structuralists, such as Levi-Strauss, and psychoanalysts, such as Jung. Some of the "traites," as he called them in French, have a more plausible claim on universality than others: the sense of mystery, hierophanies, the symbolism of the axis mundi, rites of passage. Other traits seem less than universal and are instead patterns found commonly among instances of a certain type of religion.

If it is appropriate to use biological analogies for Eliade's work, it should be noted that the status of classification in biology has long been a topic of vigorous discussion. The term "polythetic," for example, has been used in zoology to deal with groups of life-forms which seem to belong together but which share no single attribute in common and are linked together instead by a kind of spectrum of attributes, like Wittgenstein's "family resemblances." This term (and concept) has, in turn, been introduced into anthropology by Rodney Needham who has argued that comparative classifications of any aspect of culture must

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recognize that a common core of structures, motifs, or functions may not exist, but rather a series of overlapping traits, none of which is shared by all and none of which can be said to be the original model or prototype for subsequent variations.⁷ A similar view has been argued recently with respect to myth by Gabriella Ferro-Luzzi, who has challenged the belief in universal themes or meanings among myths. Some themes and meanings may appear more frequently than others, but "no motif or combination of motifs is essential."⁸

Various religious critiques have also been advanced against Eliade's universalism. Religious communities often have the keenest awareness of their particularity and uniqueness, and of their differences from other communities. The Jew is most vividly conscious of being a Jew, a Muslim of being a Muslim, a Christian of being a Christian-and indeed of being a particular type of Jew, Muslim, or Christian. Ecumenical affirmations among Christians, or among Christians and Jews, or among the major religions, let alone all religions whatever, are secondary or tertiary, if they are imagined at all. And religious communities, especially among the world religions, often want to insist that their differences represent those higher truths and values to which they are specially privy.

With respect to these concerns, Eliade argues that there is a universal religious history to which all religious communities "belong" and within which they share various common impulses, rites, and themes. This universality does not negate the particularity of each community; rather, it is the basis upon which, and the context within which, the particularities of each tradition develop. Eliade believed that the broadest comparative study reveals "above all the fundamental unity of religious phenomena and at the same time the inexhaustible newness of their expressions."⁹

Two "totalities" are involved here. There is the totality of all religious traditions and phenomena, in which Eliade is primarily interested with a view to discerning whatever commonalities there might be. But there is also the totality of a particular religious tradition that forms the community of faith and life within which one is immediately and self-consciously religious. This specific totality, like a specific biological organism within the specific grouping of like creatures of which it is a member, and within a specific ecosystem to which it belongs, is not a collection of miscellaneous elements but an integrated whole. Religion, as it is believed, experienced, and lived, is done so individually and collectively within a particular tradition, community, place, and historical context.

The two totalities, however, are not unrelated. Unless one can

⁷Rodney Needham, "Polythetic Classification," Man 10 (N.S.), pp. 349-69.

⁸Gabriella Ferro-Luzzi, "Strands Versus Structure in the Theory of Myth," Anthropos 78 (1983), pp. 437-458.

⁹Eliade, History of Religious Ideas, p. xv.

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demonstrate the complete isolation of specific religious communities from all other religious communities, past and present, every religious community is part of a concentric series of larger and larger wholes. The local bullfrog in the village pond may think that the small pond is the totality of the ecosystem, and for immediate purposes it is. Yet there are larger and larger ecosystems which move from the surrounding countryside to the continent to the whole earth. These larger relationships are there, even though the frog is unconscious of them and their implications for a froggish existence.

As a Presbyterian, I am part of a Scottish as well as American tradition, which is part of the Reformed tradition, which is part of the Protestant Reformation, which is part of Western Christianity, which is part of the Christian tradition as a whole, which is part of a family of prophetic religions (Christian, Jewish, Zoroastrian, Muslim), which are part of the "axial age" of religious revolutions in the first millenium B.C.E., which in turn developed relative to a surrounding animism and polytheism, challenging their pluralistic interpretations of the sacred while at the same time preserving considerable common ground and history.

There may be few whose religious awareness gets much beyond the smaller concentric circles, but this does not invalidate Eliade's vision of larger concentric circles which ultimately include the entire religious history of the human race. As Eliade puts it in the introduction to his three-volume History of Religious Ideas, "consciousness of this unity of the spiritual history of humanity is a recent discovery, which has not yet been sufficiently assimilated. "¹⁰ He puts it mildly. The reason that such a consciousness is possible at all is, of course, the result of the new globalism made possible by rapid technological advancement, the dramatically increased interactions between formerly distant peoples and cultures, and the extensive researches over the last two centuries into all forms of religion, past and present, prehistoric and modern, East and West. After all, only three centuries ago, some Western travelogues were picturing people in faraway India as feathered monkeys. Still, the question remains whether this totality involves elements of unity, and if so, what may be said to constitute that unity.

Another major objection to the kinds of religious universals for which Eliade searched has come from neo-orthodox Protestantism as part of its critique of the liberal belief in a religious a priori. From this perspective, if there is any validity in Eliade's references to humanity as homo religiosus, it is as instances of human rebellion against God. The unity of religion is the unity of sin and pride, of idolatry, and of the common attempt at self-salvation. Similar critiques could also be made-though with very different implications-from Buddhism, Vedanta, or Yoga, where religious beliefs and practices are seen as representing varying

¹⁰Ibid., p. xvi.

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degrees of maya (illusion) and avidya (ignorance). Here, too, religion is a manifestation of a "fallen" condition, in this case a fall into the world of discrimination, which is also the world of matter, time, and history.

It should be noted that Eliade had a doctrine of the fall-two falls, in fact. He wrote at length about what, for him, is the universal sense of a primordial fall, informing all religion. The realization of a fallen condition is, in Eliade's view, part of the universal consciousness of homo religiosus, and therefore an a priori of religious sensitivities-though it is difficult to see where the commonality lies when "fallenness" is interpreted in such opposite ways.

Eliade also wrote about a second fall, one which he felt characterized much of modern consciousness: the fall into a largely secular, desacralized existence. For many, life is no longer centered in or determined by the overarching reality of a sacred cosmos. Homo religiosus was not, for Eliade, strictly a universal designation, for there are those whom Eliade would designate as nonreligious. They have abandoned or lost access to the sacred sources of meaning, being, and power. Yet the awareness of an absence is nevertheless present. "In his deepest being, he still retains a memory of it, as, after the first 'fall' his ancestor, the primordial man, retained intelligence enough to enable him to rediscover the traces of God that are visible in the world."¹¹

As with Paul Tillich, even nonreligiousness was not, for Eliade, without its religiousness, realized not so much in its having but in its not-having. "A profane existence is never found in its pure state."¹² The sense of absence or loss or rejection could, furthermore, generate its own false gods and pseudo-religion. But it could also lead to a rediscovery of the sacred as an indispensable dimension of human life, as indispensable as the human concern for truth, beauty, and goodness-and, for Eliade, their ultimate basis.

¹¹Eliade, Sacred and Profane, p. 213.

¹²Ibid., p. 23.