Mircea
Eliade
(1907-1986)
Throughout much of the mid- to late-twentieth century there was no more influential scholar of religion than Mircea Eliade, the Romanian expatriate. After attaining some fame in Romania as a novelist after World War I, Eliade spent the World War II years abroad, and wrote books in the late 1940s and early 1950s for which he would later become famous throughout the world--volumes on comparative religion, shamanism, and yoga. In the late 1950s he held a brief visiting appointment at the University of Chicago's Divinity School and, following the unexpected death of the program's then Chair--the German sociologist of religion, Joachim Wach--Eliade stayed on and, along with the scholar of Japanese religions, Joseph Kitagawa, played a central role in leading Chicago's program to a place it continues to hold as one of the field's most important graduate programs. Eliade was classically trained as a comparativist and is today best known for his efforts to establish what at Chicago is called "history of religions" as an autonomous, academic discipline, distinct from anthropological, psychological, or sociological studies of religion. His largely successful approach to accomplishing this, adopted by others both before and after him, was to argue for the sui generis nature of religion, thereby requiring distinct methods for its study and distinct institutional locations for carrying out this research. Because of the unique character of religious phenomena (each being the site where "the Sacred" manifests itself), along with his views that religion was at its essence concerned with establishing meaning in otherwise potentially meaningless human lives and societies, Eliade was also known for his advocacy of what he termed a total hermeneutics (that is, a complete interpretive science), what he also called the New Humanism; the historian of religions, by studying symbolic expressions of what he held to be deeply meaningful existential situations common to all peoples, was able to re-experience in their own lives--and thereby become the interpreters of and guardians for--the meaning that these symbols, narratives, and practices once had for archaic peoples long ago. Apart from a tremendously impressive amount of writing and editing (including his role, toward the end of his life, as the editor-in-chief of what has become the field's primary reference work, The Encyclopedia of Religion [1987]), Eliade is also known today for the manner in which, after his death in 1986, his life (some of its details were made public through his four published volumes of journals and his two volume autobiography) and his extensive body of work have generated a substantial body of critical secondary literature, concerned with re-examining his arguments in favor of religion's irreducible character as well the way in which--like many European intellectuals who matured between the two World Wars--his personal politics may have impacted his scholarship.
Major Works
Patterns in Comparative Religion (1949)
Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return (1949)
Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (1951)
Yoga: Immortality and Freedom (1952)
The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion (1957)
Myth and Reality (1963)
From Primitives to Zen: A Sourcebook in Comparative Religion (1967)
The Quest: History and Meaning in Religion (1969)
The History of Religious Ideas (1976, 1978, 1983; 3 vols.)
The Encyclopedia of Religion (1987; editor-in-chief)
Quotation
"[A] religious phenomenon will only be recognized as such if it is
grasped at its own level, that is to say, if it is studied as something
religious. To try to grasp the essence of such a phenomenon by mean of
physiology, psychology, sociology, economics, linguistics, art or any
other study is false; it misses the one unique and irreducible element
in it--the element of the sacred.... Because religion is human it must
for that very reason be something social, something linguistic, something
economic--you cannot think of man apart from language and society. But
it would be hopeless to try and explain religion in terms of any one of
those basic functions which are really no more than another way of saying
that man is. It would be as futile as thinking you could explain [the
novel] Madame Bovary by a list of social, economic, and political
facts; however true, they do not affect it as a work of literature."
- from Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion (1949)
Select Web Resources on Eliade
Mircea
Eliade: Biography
Technical
Terms Used in the Works of Mircea Eliade
Mircea
Eliade and Joseph Kitagawa (eds.), The History of Religions: Essays
in Methodology (1959)
"Myths
and Mythologies," chapter 7 from Bryan Rennie's Reconstructing
Eliade (1996)
Secondary Literature on Eliade and Religion
Guilford Dudley, Religion on Trial: Mircea Eliade and His Critics.
Temple University Press, 1977.
Eric J. Sharpe, Comparative Religion: A History, pp. 213-217. Open
Court, 1986.
Ivan Strenski, Four Theories of Myth in Twentieth-Century History.
Chapters 4 and 5. University of Iowa Press, 1987.
Mac Linscott Ricketts, Mircea Eliade: The Romanian Roots, 1907-1945.
East European Monographs, 1988 (2 vols.)
David Cave, Mircea Eliade's Vision for a New Humanism. Oxford University
Press, 1995.
Walter Capps, Religious Studies: The Making of a Discipline, 139-145.
Fortress Press, 1995.
Bryan S. Rennie, Reconstructing Eliade: Making Sense of Religion.
State University of New York Press, 1996.
Daniel L. Pals, Seven Theories of Religion. Chapter 5. Oxford University
Press, 1996.
Russell T. McCutcheon, Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse on Sui
Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia. Chapters 2 and 3.
Oxford University Press, 1997.
Douglas Allen, Myth and Religion in Mircea Eliade. Garland Publishing,
1998.
Robert S. Ellwood, The Politics of Myth. Chapter 3. State University
of New York Press, 1999.
Steve Wasserstrom, Religion after Religion: Gershom Scholem, Mircea
Eliade, and Henry Corbin at Eranos. Princeton University Press, 1999.
Bryan S. Rennie (ed.), Changing Religious Worlds: The Meaning and End
of Mircea Eliade. State University of New York Press, 2001.
Bryan S. Rennie (ed.), Mircea Eliade: A Critical Reader. Equinox
and Routledge, 2005.
Bryan S. Rennie, "Eliade, Mircea," The Encyclopedia of Religion,
2nd edition. vol. 4, pp. 2753-2763. Macmillan Reference USA, 2005.