The Reality of the Sacred: Mircea Eliade

My duty is to show the grandeur, sometimes naive, sometimes monstrous and tragic, of archaic modes of being.

Mircea Eliade, Journal III: 1970–1978¹

For Max Weber, explanation is a kind of integration. Every human enterprise— past or present, social or individual—presents itself to us as a meeting place of multiple causes and effects. In social actions, this web of ideas, motives, conditions, and contexts is seamless. So whatever it is that we wish to explain—a religious ritual, a political event, a cultural or social trend—we cannot privilege one cause (or kind of cause) to the exclusion of all others. Religious behavior is undoubtedly affected by economic conditions, but we cannot simply reduce all of religion only to economics, as Marx contends. Religious belief clearly meets certain psychological and social needs, as Freud and Durkheim maintain, but again, we cannot trace all belief in God only to neurosis, any more than we can reduce all religious practice only to social commitments. Clearly, these underlying conditions and circumstances are important, but so are human ideas, beliefs, and intentions. No one type of causation can tell the whole story; each can tell only some of it.

Assuming this is so, perhaps we can go further. If it is true, as Weber claims, that ideas and beliefs matter in framing explanations, perhaps they are actually what matters most. Perhaps religious beliefs themselves are the “real and underlying” forces reductionists suppose they can find in functional explanations. If a theorist like Marx can insist upon an exclusively economic explanation of religion, can we not just as well advance an exclusively (or at least primarily) religious explanation of religion? It is by no means absurd, after all, to suggest that the best way to explain religion might just be the way religious people themselves explain it—by appealing first and fundamentally to their own ideas, feelings, and beliefs. That, in essence, is the position taken by the next of the

-193-

A genuinely multicultural scholar who spoke and wrote in several European languages, Eliade was born and educated in Romania, studied and taught in Western Europe, and completed his career in the United States. Although he had an array of intellectual interests and was also a talented writer of fiction, he chose to devote his life to the comparative study of religion, a field which, in keeping with European practice, he preferred to call “the history of religions.” As a young man he studied for a time in India, then carried on further research at home in Romania and elsewhere in Europe. For a time he held a university position in France. In the 1950s he moved to the United States, where, as a professor at the University of Chicago, he played a pivotal role promoting the study of religion in American universities. From the outset, Eliade developed his ideas in direct opposition to reductionist theories, which in his view seriously misunderstood the role of religion in human life. He advocated what he called a “humanistic” approach, and throughout his long career as a scholar he held steadfastly to the thesis that religion must always be explained “on its own terms.” His theory thus deserves our attention, not just on its own merits, but because it goes beyond Weber, issuing an even bolder challenge to all reductionist rivals.

Mircea Eliade was born in Bucharest on March 9, 1907, the son of an officer in the Romanian army. As a boy he loved quiet places, science, stories, and writing. In his autobiography he reports how at the age of eighteen he celebrated with friends the appearance of his one-hundredth published article!² Already at this young age, he was hired by a newspaper to write feature stories, opinion columns, and book reviews. Also among his recollections is a memorable incident from early childhood. He tells how one day at home, on entering an unused room of the house, he was startled by sunlight filtering through green curtains in a way that gave the entire space an unearthly emerald-golden glow. Dazzled and entranced, he felt as if he had been transported into an utterly different, transcendent world. Later, in words identical to those he used in his accounts of religious experience, he chose to describe his memory of this event as a profound “nostalgia”—a longing for a beautiful space of otherworldly perfection.³ This theme of otherworldly ideals was to run through his education as well. At the University of Bucharest and in Italy, he studied the mystical Platonist thinkers of the Italian Renaissance. While doing this work, he discovered Hindu thought, with its stress on spiritual union with the Supreme

-194-

Soul beyond the world. Soon he was setting off for India to study with the noted sage and scholar Surendranath Dasgupta. Arriving late in the year of 1928, Eliade enrolled at the University of Calcutta and worked with Dasgupta in his home. On a somewhat less spiritual plane, he also began an affair with his mentor’s daughter. An unpleasant separation from his teacher followed, and he moved on to train in yoga with a guru in the Himalayas.

In 1931, after three years away, Eliade returned to Romania to complete his military service. He continued to write, and in 1933, at the young age of twenty-six, he became a national celebrity by publishing a prize-winning novel, Maitreyi (in English, Bengal Night), based on his romance with Dasgupta’s daughter. This decade was eventful in other respects as well. His doctoral dissertation, Yoga: An Essay on the Origins of Indian Mystical Theology (1936), was published in French, the first of several works on the subject. On receiving his degree, Eliade began teaching at Bucharest as an assistant to the influential philosopher Nae Ionesco, who was also a leading figure in a Romanian nationalist organization known as the Legion of the Archangel Michael. Some members of this group, whose violent, terrorist wing was known as the Iron Guard, saw their role in Romania as similar to that of the Nazi party in Germany, and they showed some sympathy for Hitler. Eliade had other friends as well in this circle, though for his part he seems to have preferred intellectual life, editing a journal, writing, and arranging discussions of current issues and movements in literature, philosophy, and art. About any other activities he was always reluctant to speak, describing himself as a largely nonpolitical person.

During the years of World War II, Eliade was assigned by the Romanian government to a diplomatic post in Lisbon, Portugal. When the fighting ended,

-195-

The 1950s brought the last important change in Eliade’s scholarly career. After lecturing at the University of Chicago, he accepted a professorship in its Divinity School; in 1962, he became one of its Distinguished Service Professors. His position at Chicago, where he remained for the rest of his life, enabled him to serve as mentor to a full generation of talented younger scholars who were inspired by his example, even when, as was common, they proceeded to disagree with his views. He chose to measure his own impact by citing a simple statistic. When he came to Chicago, there were three significant professorships in the history of religions in the United States; twenty years later, there were thirty, half of which were occupied by his students. On the intellectual journey from Romania to India to Chicago, Eliade traced a career —and life—that saw many opposites converge: East and West, tradition and modernity, mysticism and rationality, contemplation and criticism. He continued his research and writing in retirement until his death of a stroke on April 22, 1986.

Before considering Eliade’s theory in its particulars, we ought to notice the foundation on which it stands. Two ideas especially serve as its axioms, or cornerstones; they are fundamental to everything else. The first, which has come into view already, is his strong stand on reductionism. Eliade believes adamantly in the independence, or “autonomy,” of religion, which for him cannot be explained as the mere by-product of some other reality. “A religious phenomenon,” he insists,

-196-

will only be recognized as such if it is grasped at its own level, that is to say,

In the language of the natural sciences, we might rephrase this to say that religion is not to be construed as a “dependent variable,” the thing that always changes in any test or experiment. If anything, it must be taken as the constant or the independent variable; other aspects of life—social, psychological, economic—must be understood to depend upon it. As an element in human behavior, religion functions as a cause rather than an effect.

The second axiom applies to method. If religion is, in fact, something independent, something that cannot be explained purely through psychology or sociology, how, then, should we explain it? Eliade answers that we must combine two separate angles of vision. Because students of religion mostly study the past, their subject in one sense is simply history. Accordingly, like other historians, they gather and order evidence, make generalizations, criticize them, and try to find causes or consequences. In this respect, their discipline certainly is the history of religions. At the same time, the study of religion cannot be just historical either. We understand religion only when we also apply what Eliade calls “phenomenology” (from the Greek phenomenon, “an appearance”): the comparative study of things in the form, or appearance, they present to us. Any science is partly phenomenology. We know the color red in the spectrum because its appearance differs from that of blue or violet. By the same measure, one way we know a religious form—a belief or a ritual—is by comparing it with others. Eliade thus emphatically endorses the famous words of the philosopher Goethe on language, which Max Müller had already adopted for the study of religion: “He who knows one knows none.” Without comparison there can be no real science.

It is true that historians are suspicious of comparisons, especially when they are used to find similarities. The skeptical mind of the scholar is always inclined to think that no two things are ever quite the same; every time, every place is different from the next. Eliade disagrees. He thinks that certain general forms, certain broad patterns of phenomena in religion, can be taken outside of their original time and place to be compared with others. Times and places may differ, he would say, but concepts are often the same. The mathematician Euclid was an ancient Greek, a man of his time; yet we can study his geometry as if he had taught it just yesterday. The man may be historical, but his theorems are timeless. The same would seem to apply to the concepts of religion. The worship of Zeus is in one sense tied to a single time and place

in history; it is a belief and practice belonging to ancient Greek religion. But if we notice that in the Greek stories of the gods Zeus has a wife, that he lives on Mt. Olympus, and that he is more powerful than other divine beings, it is not hard to see in him certain typical features of the “sky god” as he appears in many different times and places around the world. Zeus may belong only to the Greeks, but the phenomenon of the sky god does not. And because such gods appear in many cultures, we can learn a great deal by tracing their patterns—by noticing those features they share with one another and those they do not.With these axioms in hand, we can now turn to the main elements of Eliade’s program, although here, as we found with Marx and Freud, we will need help from more than one of his books. Eliade tends in all of his writings to explore the same major ideas and patterns, but in no one of them does he offer a sort of single, grand exhibit of his theory, as Frazer or Durkheim does. In addition, as a writer of fiction, he often seems to prefer the ways of the novelist even in his scholarly works; he gives long, winding commentaries rather than precise arguments. That being so, we can do best with his theory by keeping to a few central themes and examining each through the one book that explains it best. We shall explore in sequence each of the following:

-198-

For readers with a good memory, the first impression made by these words is likely to be one of déjà vu. Eliade here seems to be repeating the very thing we heard from Durkheim concerning the sacred and the profane. Nor should that come as a surprise. Eliade was educated in the French intellectual tradition, where, largely because of Durkheim, this way of defining religion came to be widely accepted. A closer look, however, will show that in fact there is a difference. As we saw before, when Durkheim speaks of the sacred and profane, he is always thinking of society and its needs. The sacred for him is the social—that which matters to the clan; the profane is the opposite—that which matters only to the individual. For Durkheim, sacred symbols and rituals seem to speak of the supernatural, but all of that is just the surface appearance of things. The purpose of symbols is simply to make people aware of their social duties by symbolizing the clan as their totem god. When, by contrast, Eliade speaks of the sacred, this clan worship clearly is not what he has in mind. In his view, the concern of religion is with the supernatural, plain and simple; it centers on the sacred in and of itself, not on the sacred merely as a way of depicting the social. Though he uses Durkheim’s language and agrees that the term covers more than just personal gods, Eliade’s view of religion is closer to that of Tylor and Frazer, who conceive of it first and foremost as belief in a realm of supernatural beings.

Instead of Durkheim, Eliade asks us to think of another scholar as his guide: the German theologian and historian of religion Rudolf Otto. In 1916 Otto published on this very subject a famous book entitled The Idea of the Holy (in German, Das Heilige), where he too uses the concept of the sacred but not as applying to society or social needs. He writes instead about a distinct and dramatic kind of individual human experience. At one time or another in their lives, he writes, most people encounter something truly extraordinary and overwhelming. They feel gripped by a reality that is “wholly other” than themselves—something mysterious, awesome, powerful, and beautiful. That is an experience of “the holy,” an encounter with the sacred. Using Latin terms,

-199-

Eliade’s concept of the sacred bears a strong resemblance to Otto’s. In an encounter with the sacred, he says, people feel in touch with something otherworldly in character; they feel they have brushed against a reality unlike all others they know, a dimension of existence that is alarmingly powerful, strangely different, surpassingly real and enduring.

For primitives as for the man of all pre-modern societies, the sacred is equiv-
alent to a power, and in the last analysis, to reality. The sacred is saturated
with being. Sacred power means reality and at the same time enduringness and
efficacity…. Thus it is easy to understand that religious man deeply desires to
be, to participate in reality, to be saturated with power.⁷

Readers of a Judeo-Christian or a Muslim background naturally suppose that Eliade is referring here to an encounter with God, but his idea of the sacred is much wider than that. It could mean the realm of many gods, of the ancestors or immortals, or of what some Hindus call “Brahman,” the Supreme Spirit beyond all personality. However the sacred is conceived, the role of religion is to promote contact with it, to bring a person “out of his worldly Universe or historical situation, and project him into a Universe different in quality, an entirely different world, transcendent and holy.”⁸ Further, the sense of the sacred is not an occasional thing, found only among certain people or at certain times. In the secular societies of modern Western civilization, people display it in surprising, unconscious ways, such as through dreams, nostalgias, and works of the imagination. Yet however disguised, suppressed, or obscured, the intuition of the sacred remains a permanent feature of human thought and activity. No human being is without it. When eyes are open to notice it, it can be seen anywhere.

Among archaic peoples, Eliade continues, this idea of the sacred is more than just common; it is regarded as absolutely crucial to their existence, shaping virtually every aspect of their lives. They refer to it even when they think of something so basic as the time of day or the place where they live.

-200-

In The Sacred and the Profane, Eliade draws upon numerous examples from a wide range of cultures to show just how seriously such traditional peoples take the business of following the patterns set by the gods. The authority of the sacred controls all. When they set up their villages, for example, archaic clans do not choose just any convenient place to build. A village must be founded at a place where there has been a “hierophany” (from the Greek hieros and phainein: “sacred appearance”). Once it has been confirmed that this particular place has, in fact, been visited by the sacred, perhaps in the form of a god or ancestor, the location receives a ritual blessing that establishes it as the center point of a “world” (in Greek a cosmos: “place of order”). Around this center, the community can then be built in such a way as to show it has a definite divinely ordered structure; it is a sacred system. Because this constructed society extends outward from a ceremonial center point, it stands clearly separate from the disorder of the desert, forest, or open plain that normally surrounds it. Instead of a chaos, the village, built according to the blueprint given by the gods, is a cosmos; in a world of danger and disorder, it is a scene of security and design.

In many cultures, this sacred center is marked with a pole, pillar, or some other vertical object that plunges into the ground and rises up to the sky to join the three great regions of the universe: heaven, earth, and the underworld. That is because this point, which may also be marked by a tree or even a

-201-

In medieval Christianity and early Islam, in ancient Babylon and modern Java, among the Indians of the American Northwest and the villages of Vedic India—almost everywhere we want to look—we find this recurring pattern, says Eliade. Life orients itself around a sacred center, a vertical “symbol of ascent” that links heaven to earth, the sacred to the profane. Around such sacred poles or atop sacred mountains, great temples have always been built. And from them also the surrounding world is divided into its different sectors, usually the four directions of the compass. Just as the universe itself starts from a center and spreads out to four horizons, so, in Bali and parts of Asia, villages must be built at a crossroads, so that they can reflect the four main sectors of the world. In some tribal cultures, the ceremonial house in the village center is supported by four columns, which represent the four main directions, while the roof of the house symbolizes the vault of heaven, and an opening squarely in the center allows prayers to rise along the vertical sacred pole directly to the gods.

In all of these shapes and ceremonies, which naturally vary in minor ways from one culture to the next, the role of divine patterns, or models, is plainly evident. Eliade explains that the archaic village, temple, or even house must be an imago mundi, a mirror image of the entire world as it was first fashioned by divine action. When such places are built, the process of construction is just as important as the structures themselves. Things must not only be a reflection of the sacred; they must come into being in a sacred manner as well. And that is, again, because human structures and activities must trace out the very process by which the gods brought the world itself into existence. Archaic peoples thus place great significance on “cosmogonic” myths—their stories of how the world first came into being, whether by divine command or by some struggle in which the gods overcome chaos and defeat an evil

-202-

In Eliade’s view, this intense effort to imitate the gods is part of an even deeper desire that archaic peoples have. They wish not only to mirror the realm of the sacred but somehow actually to be in it, to live among the gods. A full discussion of this issue must be deferred till we come to The Myth of the Eternal Return; for the moment we can simply note Eliade’s comment that all archaic peoples have a sense of a “fall,” of a great tragic loss in human history. By this he does not mean just the fall of humanity into sin as told in the biblical story of Adam and Eve, who disobeyed the command of God and were punished accordingly. Archaic people know a fall in the sense of a profound separation. They hold that from the first moment human beings become aware of their situation in the world, they are seized by a feeling of absence, a sense of great distance from the place where they ought to be and truly want to be—the realm of the sacred. Their most characteristic attitude, in Eliade’s words, is a deep “nostalgia for Paradise,” a longing to be brought close to the gods, a desire to return to the realm of the supernatural.