Today I will introduce readers to a man who became one of the best-known and honored Romanians in the world, Mircea Eliade. This academic and writer was an outstanding religious historian, philosopher, and author of several dozen books devoted to ancient and modern religions and myths of almost every nation in the world.
An international conference on “The History of European and Asian Religions” was recently held in Bucharest to mark the 20th anniversary of the academic’s death. Eliade’s profoundly scholarly and brilliant works on religion remind us once again that any religion may and must be the subject of unbiased scholarly research, all the more so as our times are consistently reverting to a “period of religious wars” and something urgent must be done.
Mircea Eliade (1907-1986) was born in Bucharest. His father, who came from a family of Moldavian peasants, was a military man. From his early adolescence Eliade was distinguished by his outstanding abilities, given by God. At the age of 13 he wrote a national prize-winning short story about the “alchemic transmutation of lead into gold, which was published in a semi-popular journal. He soon developed a strong interest in philosophy, the ancient Far East, and the history of religions while he was still a student at the lyceum. He also studied French, German, and Latin, and later learned Italian, English, Hebrew, and Sanskrit. In his youth he was attracted by rational research on the super-rational “Something” and the interpretation of humanity’s religious and mystical experience.
In 1925 Eliade began studying at the University of Bucharest. By this point he had already published more than a hundred articles on the history of religion, Eastern studies, and alchemy. When he was 20 years old, an Indian maharaja awarded him a grant to study in India. Eliade attended the University of Calcutta, where he studied Sanskrit and Eastern philosophies, and also traveled extensively to Indian villages and monasteries in the Himalayas, and consorted with well-known gurus.
Eliade spent five years in India. The result was his outstanding book Yoga, Immortality, and Freedom whose main idea is the assertion that the doctrines and practices of Hinduism are not exotic or the extravagance of a lagging civilization, but a valuable sacred world with much wider limits than those of modern Western society, because Hindu tradition allows the individual to exceed the limits of so-called reality. Eliade always considered that tradition and the world of tradition are not a passed stage of evolution but a full-fledged, profoundly rich reality.
After returning to Bucharest, Eliade started lecturing at the University of Bucharest, where he taught a course entitled “The Problem of the Devil in the History of Religion” and conducted a seminar on “The Causality Gap in Medieval Buddhist Logic.” He founded Zalmoxis, an international periodical on comparative religion (Zalmoxis was one of the gods of the Dacians, the ancestors of the Romanians, who was described by Herodotus). In the postwar years, when the phantoms of communism and fascism were wandering around Europe, Eliade was imprisoned in a concentration camp for his political views (he was a very bad politician). During his imprisonment the great scholar continued his life’s work, giving lectures to his fellow prisoners on metaphysics and religion, the symbolism of the Christian prophets, secret Christian teachings, and yoga. After several months Eliade was released without having been charged, and he was soon dispatched abroad as an attache.
This journey was the beginning of his international scholarly career. Eliade settled in Paris, where he was elected a member of the Asian Society of Paris. He gave lectures at the Sorbonne and established a Romanian Culture Center at the university. From 1957 he was a lecturer at the University of Chicago, where he was a professor in the Department of the History of Religions. There Eliade wrote his famous scholarly works, founded the periodicals History of Religions and The Journal of Religion, and was the editor-in-chief of The Encyclopedia of Religion. During this period he was awarded honorary doctorates by many of the largest universities in the world. His works The Forbidden Forest, The Sacred and the Profane, and his essay “The Yearning for Paradise in Primitive Tradition” became scholarly bestsellers.
Eliade defined the sense of a “living God” as a Deity that is “something completely different,” absolutely and utterly different from everything, not resembling either anything human or cosmic. In the face of this a person experiences a sense of worthlessness and feels like an animal, “dust and ashes” as the Bible’s Abraham says.
Thanks to Eliade’s works and intuition, the ancient aspects of culture, especially folklore and the creativity of “exotic peoples” (Africans, Australian aboriginals, Eskimos, etc.) were introduced to the common culture and scholarly discourse. Such terms as “initiation,” “the sacred,” “nostalgia for Paradise,” “mythological Time” etc. became commonplace not only among scholars. But Eliade’s principal achievement lies in the fact that with his perfect knowledge not only of developed religious teachings (Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism) but also so-called ancient cults, he generalized, systematized, and gave scholarly shape to the diverse and unique complex of scholar research that came to be known as the “the history of religion.”
One of Eliade’s last works was the three-volume A History of Religious Ideas that embraces the period from the Stone Age to the Reformation. Eliade had planned to complete this work by adding a contemporary chapter, but did not have time. He died in Chicago at the age of 79.
Besides scholarly works, Eliade is the author of many fantastic works that in one way or another are linked to the idea of “another” world hidden behind a person’s quotidian reality. These are philosophical novels and short stories, including Unbounded Light, Bengal Nights, The Hooligans, Wedding in Heaven, and others, which were widely read by intellectuals. Eliade’s works were translated into 18 languages.
Both in his scholarly works and works of fiction Eliade views the course of historical process extremely negatively: he considers it an involution, not progress. In Eliade’s works the main leitmotiv of Tradition (religious), which ignores time and the “terror of history,” is a positive pole enabling the world’s existence.
Eliade’s works demonstrate his profound respect for all of mankind’s religions, including “cults” (African, East Siberian, Polynesian, and Australian and Mongolian aboriginal). This distinguished scholar views all of them as carriers of “the sacred” — in other words, as a counterbalance to all secular, routine, and “profane” things. Any kind of sincere belief was sacred for Eliade, as a counterbalance to entropy.
