Mircea Eliade

Historian

• Born: March 9, 1907
• Birthplace: Bucharest, Romania
• Died: April 22, 1986
• Place of death: Chicago, Illinois

Romanian religious scholar and writer

Eliade examined the phenomena of diverse religious experiences, drawing on similarities within each. By looking at individual, sociopsychological manifestations against the “terror of history” in the twentieth century and expressing these in modes conditioned by his own spirituality and imagination, Eliade sought to say what makes religion universal.

Areas of achievement Religion and theology, scholarship, literature

Early Life

Mircea Eliade (MEER-chah ehl-EE-ah-duh) was born to Gheorghe Eliade and his wife, Ioana Stonenscu. Eliade’s family belonged to the cultural elite of Bucharest, capital of the twenty-year-old constitutional monarchy of Romania, a small crescent lying mostly north of the Balkan Mountains along the Danube River and south of Transylvania. Eliade was initially educated in the turbulent era of the Great War, experiencing the German invasion and the moving of the capital to Jassy, when Romania entered the war as Russia’s ally on August 28, 1916.

Three years later, Romania was nearly tripled in area and population by the incorporation of huge segments of the demolished Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empires. The result was a national mood of great expectations, and the competitive attractions of monarchy, liberalism, Bolshevism, and fascism were debated in the heady atmosphere of the University of Bucharest, where Eliade was a student of political philosophy and a budding author.

As part of completing his master’s degree, Eliade went to Benito Mussolini’s Rome in 1928, already familiar with Italian scholarship. His opposition to liberal historicism and its antifascism, of the kind of Benedetto Croce, the foremost Italian philosopher of the time, was a by-product of his intellectual encounter with Raffaele Pettazoni, a historian interested in the phenomenology of religion, with whom Eliade corresponded from 1923, though they did not meet until 1949.

A chance encounter at Rome with A History of Indian Philosophy (1922-1955), by the distinguished Sanskrit scholar Surendranath Dasgupta, made him aware not only of Indian thought but also of financial assistance from Dasgupta’s patron, the Honorable Maharaja Sir Manindrachandra Nundy. The maharaja made available a scholarship at the University of Calcutta from 1928 to 1931. Eliade was barely twenty-one years old when he became immersed in the eroticism of both the academic study of Tantra and Yoga, and the physical environment of India. Eliade’s love affair with Dasgupta’s daughter, Maitreyi Devi, is recounted in both his journals and the best-selling novel of which her name forms the title. He would eventually marry Nina Mareş, despite the opposition of his parents; she died of cancer in 1944.

After leaving the presence of Dasgupta, Eliade undertook two years of intensive training in the rigors of Yoga in the Himalayas. Gradually he made the transition as a Romanian intellectual from the role of a “cultural despiser” to that of a quiescently passionate student of both the archaic elements of Hinduism and those of the Romanian peasant expressed in Greek Orthodoxy. He returned to Bucharest with a dissertation written under Dasgupta on Yoga and received his doctorate in 1932.

In the development of his religious ideas, Eliade ascribes indebtedness to Rudolf Otto’s Das Heilige (1920; The Idea of the Holy, 1923), which he read as early as 1928 and of which his own Das Heilige und das Profane (1957; The Sacred and the Profane, 1959), written almost thirty years later, was meant to be a continuation. Some sketch of the morphological and methodological directions that Eliade was to take was given in lectures at Bucharest shortly after 1933, wherein the thought of Gerardus van der Leeuw was also acknowledged. He showed himself to be a serious religious man with a deeply rooted spirituality reflecting the passions of the Indian sojourn.

Life’s Work

Though principally an author, Eliade had associated status with the faculty of letters at the University of Bucharest until the outbreak of World War II. In this period, he was closely associated as student and then as junior colleague with Nae Ionescu, who blended orthodox piety with radical right-wing nationalism in a movement called the Legion of the Archangel Michael, Iron Guard.

With the coming into power of Adolf Hitler’s National Socialism, Romania was increasingly troubled by political anarchy, as foreseen in Eliade’s two-volume novel Huliganii (1935; the hooligans). After watching others undergo searches and arrests, he was himself placed in a prison camp for refusing to denounce Ionescu and the Legion.

Eliade might have languished in prison had not a professorial friend, Alexandru Rosetti, interceded by convincing the propaganda minister of the royal government to send Eliade to London in 1940 as a cultural attaché with the Romanian legation. Under the Ion Antonescu regime, Eliade was shifted to Lisbon, Portugal, as the cultural conseilleur and remained there until the Soviet occupation of his homeland terminated his status. He wrote in 1942 Salazar şi revoluţia în Portugalia (1942; Salazar and the revolution in Portugal), about António de Oliveira Salazar, whose brand of neutral national socialism he admired; in 1943 he wrote a brief history of the Romanians, whom he identified as the Latins of the East.

There is no doubt that Eliade perceived in the events of the interwar era the “terror of history” a notion that became central to his discussion of religion at the level of “the myth of the eternal return.” In autobiographical remarks, he noted several occasions wherein he had to escape from what he described as the prison of scholarly study to find the freedom that creative literary expression alone could provide. His early study (1929) of Sanskrit grammar and Samkhya philosophy was interrupted for the novel Isabel si apele diavolului (1930; Isabel and the devil’s sea) and in 1949 his study of shamanism for La Forět interdite (1955; The Forbidden Forest, 1978), a novel that many critics regard as his masterpiece.

At the end of the war, Eliade was but another displaced scholar at the Sorbonne, yet in 1950 he became president of the Centre Roumain de Recherches in Paris, a post he would retain until 1955. Eliade lectured intermittently at Ascona in Switzerland, where the interdisciplinary Eranos project is focused and from which came an annual yearbook. He continued these contacts throughout the rest of his life. The psychological priorities of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung made their special impact on his understanding of the function of myth and symbol in the human personality.

The whole period from 1932 to 1955 was one of intense publishing activity for Eliade. During this period, he published some ten novels, an equal number of treatises on religious symbolism, imagery, and myth, several collections of others’ papers, a plethora of lectures and articles, and ideological columns for the Romanian political press under the pseudonym of Ion Plǎeşu. Works on imagination were vital to Eliade’s perception of both religious studies and the methodology for understanding religion.

The sudden and unexpected death in August, 1955, of Joachim Wach, one of the leading scholars in the history of religions, left a major gap among the theological faculty of the University of Chicago. The scheduled appearance of Eliade as Haskell lecturer and visiting professor for 1956-1957 led to his succession of Wach’s position. By 1958, Eliade was not only a major professor but also the chair of the history of religions department at the University of Chicago, with additional ties to that university’s broader Committee on Social Thought. In 1963, Eliade was named the Sewell L. Avery Distinguished Service Professor. He lectured extensively at other American and European universities, and at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in Washington, D.C. He wrote a major study on aboriginal Australian religions in 1973 after completing a Fulbright Fellowship.

At Chicago, Eliade came into contact with Paul Tillich, the eminent systematic theologian and scholar of the interrelationship of Christianity and culture. While Tillich and Eliade differed significantly in their approaches to religious questions, both men profited from a seminar that they conducted together. Eliade always viewed “comparative religion” from an original Romanian perspective. He wrote his journals and memoirs and his works of fiction in Romanian and his treatises on religious phenomena in French. Eliade’s impact on students of comparative religion and theology grew steadily as his works were translated into all the world’s major languages.

By attending to occult, supernatural, and other folklorish dimensions in the experiences of Romanian Orthodox peasants and those nearly archaic peoples, still essentially Neolithic in outlook and lifestyle, whom he encountered in Hindu India, Eliade moved into and then created a direction for the development of a whole field of study. It was only after the massive impact of his role as a professor of history of religions in the divinity school of the University of Chicago that many readers outside his native Romania became aware of the other side of Eliade’s work the literary efforts that paralleled and complemented his productive scholarship.

Near the end of his life, Eliade was nearly blind and suffered greatly from arthritis in his hands, which made writing difficult. His second wife, Christinel Cottescu, whom he had married January 9, 1950, continued to play a major role in his work by reading to him, and, on the occasion of the establishment of the Eliade Chair in the History of Religions at Chicago in 1985, she was honored equally with him by its name. He died less than a year later.

Significance

Those at Chicago most responsible for bringing Eliade to that faculty saw in his arrival a watershed wherein divinity as a discipline passed from theology, sociohistorically understood, to religion, humanistically appropriated. Eliade’s more severe critics charged him with misleading a whole generation of students by promoting a methodology that obtained its comparative data from “zigzagging over the globe and through the known history” of humankind, without regard for the greater importance of unique and subtle differences. Some have gone so far as to call him the “anti-historian of religions.”

His final magnum opus shows a level of systematization that rebuts some of the criticism leveled against him and demonstrates the degree to which Eliade had a wide-ranging familiarity with all important aspects of Histoire des croyances et des idées religieuses (1976-1983, three volumes; A History of Religious Ideas, 1978-1985) worldwide and from the Stone Age to the Enlightenment. Had he lived to complete a projected fourth volume, he would have added the living primal religions and the atheism that he saw as prevalent in many industrialized societies. Eliade found in a very widespread audience the responsive chord, which contemporaries desperately sought to have touched, at the level of what was understood to be a religiousness, nostalgically recalled but permanently lost to the “terror of history” within the present epoch.

Bibliography

Dubuisson, Daniel. Twentieth Century Mythologies. Translated by Martha Cunningham. Rev. and expanded. Oakville, Conn.: Equinox, 2006. Investigates the theories of mythology propagated by three thinkers, including Eliade.

Eliade, Mircea. Autobiography. Vol. 1, Journey East, Journey West, 1907-1937. Translated by Mac Linscott Ricketts. San Francisco, Calif.: Harper & Row, 1981. A two-volume autobiography of Eliade that while unrevealing in some aspects, is indispensable, allowing readers to gain Eliade’s own perspective on his life.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Autobiography. Vol. 2, Exile’s Odyssey, 1937-1960. Translated by Mac Linscott Ricketts. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. The second volume continues the story.

Girardot, Norman J., and Mac Linscott Ricketts, eds. Imagination and Meaning: The Scholarly and Literary Worlds of Mircea Eliade. New York: Seabury Press, 1982. A valuable collection of essays, providing glimpses of Eliade the writer of fiction as well as Eliade the scholar of comparative religion. Includes several short pieces by Eliade.

Kitagawa, Joseph M., and Charles H. Long, eds. Myths and Symbols: Studies in Honor of Mircea Eliade. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969. Provides a variety of considerations of Eliade’s work and its impact on the field of history of religions, along with a comprehensive bibliography.

Rennie, Bryan, ed. Changing Religious Worlds: The Meaning and End of Mircea Eliade. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000. Essays analyzing the nature and significance of Eliade’s contribution to the understanding and academic study of religion in contemporary North America.

Ricketts, Mac Linscott. Mircea Eliade: The Romanian Roots, 1907-1945. 2 vols. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. This massive work provides the first detailed account of Eliade as a Romanian literary and political personality. Ricketts, one of Eliade’s former students, has translated several of his works into English.

Strenski, Ivan. Four Theories of Myth in Twentieth Century History: Cassirer, Eliade, Lévi-Strauss, and Malinowski. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1987. Chapters 4 and 5 seek to identify the underlying elements in Eliade’s “theory of myth,” by which one can grasp the interpretive viewpoint Eliade brought to his analysis of religions and religious experience. Strenski’s perspective is critical, and his bibliography is comprehensive.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. “Love and Anarchy in Romania: A Critical Review of Mircea Eliade’s Autobiography, Volume One, 1907-1937.” Religion 12 (1982): 391-403. While called a review article, this is a meticulous analysis of Eliade’s intellectual development, especially as it contributed to his becoming the major figure within the discipline of the history of religions.