As my parents had for diner this Romanian friend...ten years ago, I did learn how to pronounce the name of this other Romanian, historian of religion, fiction writer, philosopher, and professor at the University of Chicago. The influence of Nae Ionescu (b.1890), then an assistant professor of logic and metaphysics and an active journalist, was keenly felt by the young Eliade and the shadow which fell on the older scholar because of his involvement with the extreme right in inter-war Romania has darkened Eliade's reputation.
Eliade's Master's thesis examined Italian Renaissance Philosophers from Marcilio Ficino to Giordano Bruno, and Renaissance.
Humanism was one of his major influences when he turned to India in order to "universalize" the "provincial" philosophy he had inherited from his European education. Finding that the Maharaja of Kassimbazar sponsored European scholars to study in India Eliade applied and was granted an allowance for four years. In 1928 he sailed for Calcutta to study Sanskrit and philosophy under Surendranath Dasgupta (1885-1952), a Cambridge educated Bengali, professor at the University of Calcutta, and author of a 5 volume, History of Indian Philosophy (Motilal Banarsidass 1922-55).
He returned to Bucharest in 1932 and successfully submitted his analysis of Yoga as his doctoral thesis at the Philosophy department in 1933. Published in French as Yoga: Essai sur les origines de la mystique Indienne this was extensively revised and republished as Yoga, Immortality, and Freedom.
Eliade contends that the perception of time as an homogenous, linear, and unrepeatable medium is a peculiarity of modern and non-religious humanity. Archaic or religious humanity (homo religiosus), in comparison, perceives time as heterogenous; that is, as divided between profane time (linear), and sacred time (cyclical and reactualizable). Eliade undermines this concept, insisting that non-religious humanity in any pure sense is a very rare phenomenon.
"The sacred" has also been the subject of considerable contention. Some have seen Eliade's "sacred" as simply corresponding to a conventional concept of deity, or to Rudolf Otto's ganz andere (the "wholly other"), whereas others have seen a closer resemblance to Emile Durkheim's socially influenced sacred. Eliade himself repeatedly identifies the sacred as the real, yet he states clearly that "the sacred is a structure of human consciousness" (1969 i; 1978, xiii). This would argue more for the latter interpretation: a social construction of both the sacred and of reality. Yet the sacred is identified as the source of significance, meaning, power and being, and its manifestations as hierophanies, cratophanies, or ontophanies accordingly (appearances of the holy, of power, or of being).
This is a necessarily brief and incomplete list of Eliade's work. For a fuller bibliography, see Bryan Rennie, Reconstructing Eliade. See the following link for a partial listing of Eliade's fictional works.
Eliade, M. (1954) Cosmos and History:The Myth of the Eternal Return, trans. W. Trask, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Probably Eliade's most crucial and approachable short work. Contains his analysis of time as heterogenous for the religious and homogenous for the non-religious and his conception of the 'terror of history' and the ability to 'reactualize' religious time.)
----- (1958a) Yoga, Immortality and Freedom, trans. W. Trask. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. (First published in French as Yoga: Essai sur l'origine de la mystique Indienne in 1933, this informative and scholarly work analyses yoga as a concrete search for freedom from human limitations)
----- (1958b) Rites and Symbols of Initiation (Birth and Rebirth), trans. W. Trask, London: Harvill Press. (The publication of Eliade's 1956 Haskell Lectures at the University of Chicago, 'Patterns of Initiation'. His analysis of initiatory themes implies their ubiquity and structure as a symbolic death and rebirth.)
----- (1958c) Patterns in Comparative Religion, trans. R. Sheed, London: Sheed and Ward. (An attempt to delineate the morphology of the sacred. Frequently criticized for its cross-cultural, and ahistorical approach, Patterns organizes religious phenomena by structural similarities regardless of time or place of origin. A valuable source of data despite this.)
----- (1959) The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. W. Trask, London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. (Picking up where Rudolf Otto's The Idea of the Holy (Das Heilige) left off, the sacred is explicated through its relation to its binary counterpart, the profane. The complex dialectic of the sacred and the profane is outlined.)
----- (1960) Myths, Dreams and Mysteries: the Encounter between Contemporary Faiths and Archaic Realities, trans. P. Mairet, London: Harvill Press. (Eliade's understanding of myth in the modern world, the mythic prestige of origins, and his analysis of the symbolism of ascension, flight, the labyrinth, and swallowing by a monster, among others.)
----- (1961) Images and Symbols: Studies in Religious Symbolism, trans. P. Mairet, London: Harvill Press. (More on symbolism, particularly the symbolism of the center, knots, shells, and pearls. Symbolism and history and some remarks on method.)
----- (1963) Myth and Reality, trans. W. Trask, New York: Harper and Row. (The structure of myths. More on the prestige of origins and on the survival of myths and mythic themes in modern thought.)
----- (1964) Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, trans. W. Trask, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. (Long a standard work in the study of Shamanism, a detailed and valuable source of information on the phenomenon.)
----- (1965) The Two and the One, trans. J.M. Cohen, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. (An important work for the analysis of the coincidentia oppositorum, the coincidence of opposites, or binary oppositions in the history of religious ideas. Androgyny is explored as are cosmogony and eschatology, the birth and death of the cosmos or worldview.)
----- (1969) The Quest: History and Meaning in Religion, London: University of Chicago Press. (An attempt at a more methodological work. The Quest pulls together articles previously published on Eliade's methodological and theoretical presuppositions, including his 'new humanism', his response to the quest for the 'origins' of religion.)
----- (1978) A History of Religious Ideas, vol. I, From the Stone Age to the Eleusinian Mysteries, trans. W. Trask, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. (Originally projected as a complete history of religion in one volume. This was an attempt to give Eliade's understanding of the entire history of religion from a unified perspective. A useful reference work, potentially readable in its entirety. Many of Eliade's categories survive in this mature work: the terror of history, the coincidentia oppositorum, the symbolism of the center, the hieros gamos or symbolic heavenly marriage.)
----- (1982) A History of Religious Ideas, vol. II, From Gautama Buddha to the Triumph of Christianity, trans. W. Trask, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
----- (1985) The History of Religious Ideas, vol. III, From Muhammad to the Age of the Reforms, trans. A. Hiltebeitel and D. Apostolos-Cappadona, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
----- (1987) Encyclopedia of Religion (editor-in-chief), New York: Macmillan. (Seventeen volumes of articles on every aspect of religion by leading scholars in the field. Currently the standard reference encyclopedia on religion.)
Information from Westminster Education
Thanks Brennie,
brennie@westminster.edu
Eliade's Master's thesis examined Italian Renaissance Philosophers from Marcilio Ficino to Giordano Bruno, and Renaissance.
Humanism was one of his major influences when he turned to India in order to "universalize" the "provincial" philosophy he had inherited from his European education. Finding that the Maharaja of Kassimbazar sponsored European scholars to study in India Eliade applied and was granted an allowance for four years. In 1928 he sailed for Calcutta to study Sanskrit and philosophy under Surendranath Dasgupta (1885-1952), a Cambridge educated Bengali, professor at the University of Calcutta, and author of a 5 volume, History of Indian Philosophy (Motilal Banarsidass 1922-55).
He returned to Bucharest in 1932 and successfully submitted his analysis of Yoga as his doctoral thesis at the Philosophy department in 1933. Published in French as Yoga: Essai sur les origines de la mystique Indienne this was extensively revised and republished as Yoga, Immortality, and Freedom.
Eliade contends that the perception of time as an homogenous, linear, and unrepeatable medium is a peculiarity of modern and non-religious humanity. Archaic or religious humanity (homo religiosus), in comparison, perceives time as heterogenous; that is, as divided between profane time (linear), and sacred time (cyclical and reactualizable). Eliade undermines this concept, insisting that non-religious humanity in any pure sense is a very rare phenomenon.
"The sacred" has also been the subject of considerable contention. Some have seen Eliade's "sacred" as simply corresponding to a conventional concept of deity, or to Rudolf Otto's ganz andere (the "wholly other"), whereas others have seen a closer resemblance to Emile Durkheim's socially influenced sacred. Eliade himself repeatedly identifies the sacred as the real, yet he states clearly that "the sacred is a structure of human consciousness" (1969 i; 1978, xiii). This would argue more for the latter interpretation: a social construction of both the sacred and of reality. Yet the sacred is identified as the source of significance, meaning, power and being, and its manifestations as hierophanies, cratophanies, or ontophanies accordingly (appearances of the holy, of power, or of being).
This is a necessarily brief and incomplete list of Eliade's work. For a fuller bibliography, see Bryan Rennie, Reconstructing Eliade. See the following link for a partial listing of Eliade's fictional works.
Eliade, M. (1954) Cosmos and History:The Myth of the Eternal Return, trans. W. Trask, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Probably Eliade's most crucial and approachable short work. Contains his analysis of time as heterogenous for the religious and homogenous for the non-religious and his conception of the 'terror of history' and the ability to 'reactualize' religious time.)
----- (1958a) Yoga, Immortality and Freedom, trans. W. Trask. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. (First published in French as Yoga: Essai sur l'origine de la mystique Indienne in 1933, this informative and scholarly work analyses yoga as a concrete search for freedom from human limitations)
----- (1958b) Rites and Symbols of Initiation (Birth and Rebirth), trans. W. Trask, London: Harvill Press. (The publication of Eliade's 1956 Haskell Lectures at the University of Chicago, 'Patterns of Initiation'. His analysis of initiatory themes implies their ubiquity and structure as a symbolic death and rebirth.)
----- (1958c) Patterns in Comparative Religion, trans. R. Sheed, London: Sheed and Ward. (An attempt to delineate the morphology of the sacred. Frequently criticized for its cross-cultural, and ahistorical approach, Patterns organizes religious phenomena by structural similarities regardless of time or place of origin. A valuable source of data despite this.)
----- (1959) The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. W. Trask, London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. (Picking up where Rudolf Otto's The Idea of the Holy (Das Heilige) left off, the sacred is explicated through its relation to its binary counterpart, the profane. The complex dialectic of the sacred and the profane is outlined.)
----- (1960) Myths, Dreams and Mysteries: the Encounter between Contemporary Faiths and Archaic Realities, trans. P. Mairet, London: Harvill Press. (Eliade's understanding of myth in the modern world, the mythic prestige of origins, and his analysis of the symbolism of ascension, flight, the labyrinth, and swallowing by a monster, among others.)
----- (1961) Images and Symbols: Studies in Religious Symbolism, trans. P. Mairet, London: Harvill Press. (More on symbolism, particularly the symbolism of the center, knots, shells, and pearls. Symbolism and history and some remarks on method.)
----- (1963) Myth and Reality, trans. W. Trask, New York: Harper and Row. (The structure of myths. More on the prestige of origins and on the survival of myths and mythic themes in modern thought.)
----- (1964) Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, trans. W. Trask, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. (Long a standard work in the study of Shamanism, a detailed and valuable source of information on the phenomenon.)
----- (1965) The Two and the One, trans. J.M. Cohen, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. (An important work for the analysis of the coincidentia oppositorum, the coincidence of opposites, or binary oppositions in the history of religious ideas. Androgyny is explored as are cosmogony and eschatology, the birth and death of the cosmos or worldview.)
----- (1969) The Quest: History and Meaning in Religion, London: University of Chicago Press. (An attempt at a more methodological work. The Quest pulls together articles previously published on Eliade's methodological and theoretical presuppositions, including his 'new humanism', his response to the quest for the 'origins' of religion.)
----- (1978) A History of Religious Ideas, vol. I, From the Stone Age to the Eleusinian Mysteries, trans. W. Trask, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. (Originally projected as a complete history of religion in one volume. This was an attempt to give Eliade's understanding of the entire history of religion from a unified perspective. A useful reference work, potentially readable in its entirety. Many of Eliade's categories survive in this mature work: the terror of history, the coincidentia oppositorum, the symbolism of the center, the hieros gamos or symbolic heavenly marriage.)
----- (1982) A History of Religious Ideas, vol. II, From Gautama Buddha to the Triumph of Christianity, trans. W. Trask, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
----- (1985) The History of Religious Ideas, vol. III, From Muhammad to the Age of the Reforms, trans. A. Hiltebeitel and D. Apostolos-Cappadona, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
----- (1987) Encyclopedia of Religion (editor-in-chief), New York: Macmillan. (Seventeen volumes of articles on every aspect of religion by leading scholars in the field. Currently the standard reference encyclopedia on religion.)
Information from Westminster Education
Thanks Brennie,
brennie@westminster.edu
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