Romanian historian of religion, philosopher and novelist
Mircea Eliade
Mircea Eliade (Bucharest, 1907 – Chicago, 1986) was one of the most influential interpreters of religious experience in the twentieth century. His view that the sacred breaks into the world and splits experience into sacred and profane space and time reshaped the study of religion. His fiction, which is fantastic and autobiographical, draws on the same themes, while his political record, including his support for the Iron Guard, remains a subject of debate.
Mircea Eliade was born in Bucharest, where he studied philosophy before travelling to Italy and then to India. There he worked with the scholar Surendranath Dasgupta and learned Sanskrit, Pali and Bengali. He spoke five languages fluently and could read three more, among them Hebrew and Persian. After teaching in Bucharest and serving as a cultural attaché in London and Lisbon, he settled in Paris, and in 1957 he was appointed professor of the history of religions at the University of Chicago, where he taught until his death in 1986.
The central idea of his work is the sacred. Eliade used the term hierophany for the manifestation of the sacred in an ordinary object or event, and he argued that religious experience divides reality into sacred and profane space and time. A place marked by a hierophany acquires structure and orientation, whereas profane space can only be divided geometrically and offers no pattern for behaviour. He cited the story in Exodus in which Moses removes his sandals before the burning bush (Exodus 3:5). Eliade distinguished the hierophany from the older and narrower idea of a theophany, the appearance of a particular god.
Another pillar of his thought is sacred time. In traditional societies, Eliade argued, myth recounts primordial time, the moment when the sacred first appeared and gave shape to the world and to human society. In this sense, every myth is a story of creation. Many cultures believe that the value of a thing lies in its origin, so that only the first appearance of the sacred is fully meaningful. This, Eliade suggested, explains the nostalgia for origins found in many religions, the longing to return to a primordial paradise.
His most influential theory is that of the eternal return. According to it, rituals do not merely imitate sacred events; they take part in them and restore the mythic time of the beginnings, at least in the minds of believers. Eliade developed this in The Myth of the Eternal Return (1949), and in his Treatise on the History of Religions he looked for connections between very different traditions. Wendy Doniger, who was his colleague in Chicago, observed that Eliade argued for universals more boldly than narrower patterns would have allowed. Georges Dumézil praised the Treatise for its ability to synthesise diverse mythologies.
To describe his method, Eliade used the figure of homo religiosus, an ideal person for whom the world is full of sacred meaning. Robert Ellwood, who studied under him, notes that Eliade described how this ideal figure would see the world, not how every real practitioner thinks. Ellwood adds that Eliade sometimes overlooked that distinction and applied the model to traditional societies as a whole.
In his literary work Eliade favoured fantastic and autobiographical fiction. His best-known titles include Maitreyi, Noaptea de Sânziene (The Forbidden Forest), Isabel and the Devil's Waters and Romanul adolescentului miop (Novel of the Nearsighted Adolescent), as well as the novellas Domnișoara Christina (Miss Christina) and Tinerețe fără tinerețe (Youth Without Youth). Many of these pages blend personal experience with material drawn from India, Romanian folklore and religious life, which explains their place within his wider output.
Eliade's public life is also part of his story. In the late 1930s he publicly backed the Iron Guard, a fascist and antisemitic movement, and his links to the far right were criticised after the Second World War, including by himself. In the 1980s he was again criticised for the antisemitism of his youth, visible in some of his novels and diaries, although several Jewish friends and students in Chicago defended him. Unlike some of his contemporaries, such as Emil Cioran and Eugène Ionesco, he never publicly repudiated that prejudice. The episode shows how origin myths and national identity can be turned towards exclusion, a question distinct from his scholarly contribution, which continues to be studied and debated.