eliade

Mircea Eliade ( 1907-1986)

B. 9 March 1907 in Bucharest (Romania), d. April 1986 in Chicago.

At 14 he published his first article How I discovered the philosopher's stone.

1928-1932: prepared in India his dissertation which became : Yoga, Immortality And Freedom.

1945: wrote in Romanian his Prolegomena to the History of Religions, published 1949 in French under the title: Traité d'Histoire des Religions.

1957: Professor of the History of Religions, University of Chicago.

He attended regularly the Eranos seminars (founded by C.G. Jung) in Ascona, Switzerland (see Eranos-Jahrbuch).

Eliade has first studied the non-western cultures and their otherness.

He insists on what he calls the "irreductibility" of the religious phenomenon (i.e that the religious phenomenon cannot be reduced to any other else), and on the "irrecognoscibility' of the holy (i.e that the holy cannot be recognized as such at first sight). Every manifestation or self-disclosure of the holy is the manifestation of something totally different, of a reality which is not belonging to this world, in objects which are belonging to the secular world. So the man in whom the holy manifests itself - shaman, priest - remains a man like other men. But in the eyes of the religious man (homo religiosus), this immediate reality of the being or the object in which the holy is revealing itself is transmuted at the contact of the supernatural reality. " The great mystery resides in the fact that the holy manifests itself and that it has manifested itself, because, in becoming manifest, the holy limits itself and historicizes itself by itself "

In every theophany, M. Eliade is distinguishing three elements:

1) the natural object which continues to be situated in its normal context

2) the invisible reality or the All Other which forms the revealed content

3) the mediator which is the natural object invested by a new dimension: holiness.

For M. Eliade, the historian of religions' approach is threefold:

1) First, he is a historian, because every religious phenomenon is, in the first place, an event of human history. For its understanding, it ought to be replaced in its hisorical context.

2) Next, he is a phenomenologist. The historian of religions investigates hierophanies (i.e manifestations of the holy), whose structure are identical on the scale of mankind

3) The third stage is the hermeneutical approach. It consists in deciphering the message contained in the religious facts, so as to render them accessible to contemporary men.

For M . Eliade, there is a deep cultural unity of mankind, because of the universal character of its symbolics.

Other great historian of religions:

Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834)

Friedrich Max Müller (1823-1900)

Edward Burnett Tylor (1832-1917)

William Robertson Smith (1846-1894)

James Georges Frazer (1854-1941)

Sigmund Freund (1856-1939)

Emile Durkheim (1858-1917)

Max Weber (1864-1920)

Aby M. Warburg (1866-1929)

Nathan Söderblom (1866-1931)