In this essay, which we publish in full on the occasion of the 71st anniversary of Ioan Petru Culianu's birth (January 5, 1950), the Romanian scholar analyzes the life and works of his teacher Mircea Eliade, taking into account both the biographical and the literary aspects. , as well as obviously his role as a "mystagogue" and initiator as regards the hermeneutic question of the Sacred and of the history of religions.
di Ioan Petru Culianu
Born on March 9, 1907 in the family of a career officer, Mircea Eliade manifested a very precocious aptitude for encyclopedic studies. After making his debut with some articles on entomology in a popular science magazine, he soon celebrated the publication of his XNUMXth article. His adolescence is marked by two complementary inclinations: crises of melancholy despair and heroic revolts against them and against the limitations of the human condition in general. He got used to sleeping only five hours a night and also to swallowing repellent substances to control his will. In addition to this, after Honorรฉ de Balzac, his first literary passion, he meets Giovanni Papini and recognizes himself in his "finished man" who comes to the point of losing his own identity. Already at this time he was passionate about the history of science - especially alchemy -, orientalism and the history of religions.
Beginning his university studies of philosophy in 1925, he was fascinated by his professor Nae Ionescu (1890-1940), a young scholar of Mephistophelian appearance and intelligence who was to become one of the leading voices of the Romanian traditionalist movement shortly thereafter. At that time, Nae Ionescu divided her time between lessons in metaphysics and logic and the newspaper "Cuvantul"(The word), with a national-peasant political tendency. In a political landscape dominated by the liberal party, the national peasants placed themselves on the right of the government and based their plans for economic and social reforms on the idea of โโthe welfare of the majority class, which was that of the peasantry. Without taking a direct interest in politics, Mircea Eliade, who soon became the editor of "Cuvรขntul", was a born democrat. A visit to Italy, during which he had a meeting with his idol Giovanni Papini but also with the intellectuals Ernesto Buonaiuti and Virgilio Macchioro, offered him the opportunity to condemn Mussolini's regime in an article. Virgilio Macchioro, to whom we owe this information, was almost thrown out, from which the naive young Mircea Eliade decided never to deal directly with politics again.
It was in Italy that he learned of the existence of Surendranath Dasgupta, the great historian of Indian culture, and of the liberality of the Maharaja of Kassimbazar. He wrote to the latter to ask for one scholarship in India, in order to study the practices of yoga. The request was accepted and in 1929, at the age of 22, Mircea Eliade found herself in Calcutta where she initially lived in a boarding house for English, to later move to her guru Dasgupta. However, an unfortunate love took him away from his house and he retired to theHimalayan hermitage of Shri Shivananda. A new love, as well as the need to perform military service in Romania, forced him to leave the hermitage and return to Bucharest, where his first novel appeared: Isabel opens up to the devil (Isabella and the Devil's Waters, 1930). For Eliade it is celebrity, accompanied by a long series of disappointments.
He passed his doctorate in philosophy with the first version of his book, published simultaneously by P. Geuthner and the Romanian Royal Foundation in 1936, which constitutes the only great work available at the time by summary on yoga, he sees the career of novelist and university teacher opening up at the same time, becoming assistant assistant to Nae Ionescu in the Faculty of Arts. In 1933 the success - of prestige and of public - of the autobiographical novel arrives Maytreyi, translated into French in 1950 with the title La Nuit Bengali. Since then the volumes of essays, memoirs, novels and scientific writings have followed one another: twenty-two, from 1932 to 1943. Many of which consisted of collections of articles, which, by 1943, were now more than a thousand ... and Eliade was just reached maturity!
Supported both by the national-peasant party that came to power and by the king who had sent him back to Romania, Professor Nae Ionescu slowly approached the extremist organization "The Iron Guard", of Cornelius Zelea-Codreanu (1899-1938). For this reason the newspaper "Cuvรขntul" had to suspend its publications in 1933. The ideologist of an orthodox revolution that was to restore the values โโof autochthonous spiritualism, Nae Ionescu, a good connoisseur of Jewish culture, gradually took up vaguely anti-Semitic positions. This was reproached by his pupil Mircea Eliade during a famous controversy in 1934. In fact, Eliade still took a democratic position, refusing to fall into the excesses of his friends on the right or on the communist left. He kept open the dialogue with one and the other through participation in a cycle of conferences called Criterion, whose aim was to represent all points of view in a balanced way in an authentically pluralist debate.
Unfortunately, from 1934, points of view stiffened and Eliade saw himself isolated in a no man's land by his friends on the left as well as by those on the far right, systematically reproaching one with his "spiritualism", others with his position on the matter. of the "Jewish question". Nonetheless, Eliade will end up being unjustly considered right-wing because of the increasingly marked politics of his teacher Nae Ionescu. This is how, in the course of the great purges ordered by King Charles II, after the arrest of Nae Ionescu, he too came interned in a concentration camp. Freed, he remained from then on a prisoner of the same misunderstanding on which his arrest had depended. Shortly after, on the Ides of March 1940, Nae Ionescu fell, probably the victim of one of the foreign secret services who had realized the enormous economic and strategic importance of Romania at the outbreak of the war. On 10 April 1940 Mircea Eliade was appointed cultural advisor to the Romanian Embassy in London by the government of the pro-English liberal G. Tataresco, whose minister of cultural affairs was the liberal historian CC Giuresco. When England broke off diplomatic relations with Romania on 10 February 1941, Eliade was transferred to Lisbon, where he remained for the duration of the war.
The Portuguese experience it is fundamental to the political position taken by Eliade in this tragic era. A convinced democrat, he is forced to accept the reality of the dictatorship, as Romania has passed from the royal dictatorship of 1938-1940 to the military dictatorship of 1941-1944. In Portugal Eliade is confronted with a dictatorship that was prosperous at that time and, by the admission of his own opponents, very "democratic", of which, outside the fray, he can admire both the moderate position in foreign policy and above all the rejection of anti-Semitism in all its forms. In the face of the Romanian military dictatorship, which increasingly falls prey to the threats and promises of Hitler, the Portuguese leader Salazar he takes the liberty of criticizing Hitler in public, stating that the military occupation of Europe by the Nazi army constitutes the greatest misfortune of Western civilization. Eliade described his Portuguese experience in a book, which appeared in Romania in 1942, with the aim of persuading his country's dictator to take a more flexible attitude towards German demands. Salazar himself, whom Eliade met in August 1942, considered the war in Russia madness and declared that if he had been Antonesco he would have taken care to keep the army at home. Mircea Eliade returned to Bucharest to try to convey this important advice to the Romanian leader, but only reached his antechamber. This is his last visit to the land of Romania.
The end of the war surprises him in Paris, with the initiatory difficulties of exile, which he faces alone, as his first wife died during the war. The great success of his first scientific works is unable to secure him a place at the CNRS as he is suspected - unfounded but fueled by the Romanian embassy - of having been a member of the Iron Guard. On January 9, 1950, Eliade marries Christinel Cottesco who will be the inseparable companion of his life and work for the next thirty-five years. Befriended Carl Gustav Jung, participates in conferences "Weres"In Ascona and obtained a modest scholarship from the Bollingen foundation in New York, which allowed him to support himself until 1955 when, invited to Chicago to hold the famous Haskell Lectures, he will fill the vacant chair of the great sociology and phenomenology of religions Joachim Wach. Settled in the United States, Mircea Eliade met with ever greater notoriety, fully deserved by virtue of the originality, unparalleled erudition and depth of the more than thirty volumes that appeared after the war and translated into 18 languages. Proposed ten times with no results for the Nobel Prize for Literature, Mircea Eliade has on the other hand obtained the highest academic and honorary distinctions in France, in the United States and in other countries of Europe and America.
The vast and profound work of the historian of religions arises from an implicit dispute over the sense of the existence of man in the world. Eliade's aim is to trace the contours of a philosophical anthropology starting from the description of the fundamental structures of religion. There are three fundamental characters that run through Eliade's scientific career: 1) the specialist, author of the monographs on yoga (1936, 1954), shamanism (1951) and Australian religions (1973); 2) the phenomenologist-comparatist, author of Treatise on the history of religions (1949), by Aspects of the myth (1963) and the imposing History of religious beliefs and ideas (three volumes, 1976-1983); 3) finally the philosopher-hermeneut, author of remarkable essays, in Romanian and in French, some of which are included in the volumes Myths, dreams, mysteries (1957) The nostalgia of the origins (1971), etc.
Overcoming the limits of the human condition
The study of the religious documents of humanity reveals to Eliade the existence of an identity or a continuity of structure which manifests itself in the many analogies at the level of religious techniques properly so called. Thus, without commenting on the filiations derived from these two distinct religious phenomena, Eliade underlines, for example, the great similarities between yoga and shamanism in terms of their existential purposes and the practical realization of the adepts. For the shaman the important thing is ecstasy. Everything he does, down to the smallest details of his costume, for example, is directed to this end. Ecstasy is thus almost the fulfillment of a theatrical performance, to the point that the limits between the two are often imperceptible. But shamanic ideology states that the practitioner can transcend the limits of the human condition, and the technique sometimes confronts the researcher with paradoxical phenomena.
As for yoga, while based on the same archaic beliefs as shamanism, it represents a technique in which the cosmos is rather internalized by the practitioner, taken into his subtle body. For Eliade the shaman's ecstasy is opposed to the yogi's 'entasis'. Faithful to this research program of religious techniques for overcoming the human condition, Eliade also set himself to analyze that phenomenon of social and mystical relevance which is initiation (Mystical births, 1959, then Initiations, rites, secret societies, 1976). The religious techniques by which man affirms his spiritual autonomy depend on the same program of investigation research on alchemy, already sketched in two small volumes in Romanian (1935 and 1937) but made famous by the text Metal arts and alchemy (1956). Shamanism, yoga, initiations, alchemy constitute the four major subjects to which Eliade has consecrated some works of obligatory reference.
Based on a vast experience of authentic religious documents, the phenomenologist's work represents a continuation and at the same time an overcoming of monographic subjects towards the realization of great syntheses. The phenomenological perspective is intended to discover the structures and types within religions around the world, to grasp what is common between them, in short to establish the essence of religion.. The phenomenology of religions as an autonomous discipline appeared in Holland during the second half of the XNUMXth century, defended and illustrated by professors PD Chantepie de la Saussaye (in Amsterdam) and CP Tiele (in Leiden). After the publication of Edmund Husserl's work, the phenomenology of religions was inspired by the latter to defend its particular procedure, the intention of which was to grasp the essence of the phenomenon in question. Its character as a scientific discipline, which proceeded inductively, was gradually accentuated by the numerous German, Dutch and Swedish phenomenologists at the beginning of the century. Among them the greatest - and the main inspirer of Eliade - was the professor of Groningen Gerardus Van der Leeuw (1890-1950), author of an imposing Religious phenomenology (1933) as well as many other fundamental essays on the structures of religion and primitive mentality.
There was somehow a tradition, within the treatises of phenomenology, of sketching pictures of recurring religious categories with which to represent them in an invariable way, since religious experiences, from the simplest of humanity drew on the center within of which human life takes place: the sky, the earth, the water, the vegetation, the rock. Among the 82 categories of Van der Leeuw, the latter had only a marginal role and, more importantly, they were still spoken of in the manner of the evolutionists, after having dealt with the subject of animism. Finally, their order was equally dictated by the evolutionist idea, implicit or explicit, that the same religions had known a development from the simple and the inferior towards the complex and the superior. The problem of God in monotheism could therefore only be dealt with at the end of the lists of categories.
The sacred changes our perception of space-time
In his Treatise on the history of religions, Eliade overturns the tradition of phenomenology in two senses. In the first place because religious phenomenology does not go beyond the experience linked to the natural datum, to time and to space. Secondly, because we speak of the monotheistic God at the beginning and not at the end of the work. The innovation introduced by Eliade within phenomenology is therefore of a very high order. Eliade determines the categories by virtue of which religious experience modifies the perception of space and time (subject on which his writings had repeatedly focused) already starting from The myth of integration (original edition 1942) and Commentaries on the legend of the master mason Manolo (1943). In his work of phenomenology Eliade introduces the fundamental concept of hierophany, which represents the revelation of the sacred within the natural and artificial objects that surround man. The first elements that reveal themselves as sacred are the sky, the earth, the water, the trees, the stones. But all these hierophanies express a particular modality of the sacred: thus the sky, for example, symbolizes transcendence, the earth rather symbolizes motherhood and fecundity, etc. In a vast synthesis Mircea Eliade meticulously outlines the human experience of the sacred, an experience that is, for us, both strange and fascinating at the same time.
The territory, for the archaic man, is always oriented: it is a sacred space around a center of the world, which is both absolute from the ontological point of view and relative from the pragmatic point of view (in Buddhism for example each stupa or Buddha tomb is a center of the world and, at the same time, the only tomb of the only Buddha ). Sacred time is a time made cyclical by the periodic and stable commemoration of events that took place at the origin. Sacred space and time owe their special character to myth. Myth is always a story concerning the origins of the world in the most general sense. This story also concerns the territory - of which it establishes the sacred character due to the relationship it establishes with the deeds of primordial mythical beings - and time - whose cycles are equally based on the periodic ceremonies and rituals established aborigine by the characters of the myth. For the archaic man the world is only a pretext, a support whose reality is not posed in the first instance by the sensible experience but by the experience of the original traces of mythical beings, in short by the experience of hierophanies.
The conception of the modern world, completely profane, not oriented in relation to any trans-historical value, has been prefigured by Judaism and Christianity which pass on a notion of linear time, in which history takes the place of the events of myth. It can be said, in some way, that in the Abrahamic religions history itself is mythologized: Easter is no longer, as among the Canaanite peoples, a simple spring festival but the commemoration of the exit of the Jewish people from Egypt: the passion of Christ does not take place in illo tempore, at the origin of time or in the time of the dream, as among the Australian populations, but it took place at a specific historical moment, under the procurator Pontius Pilate, etc.
Conceived in this way, the sacred-profane dichotomy plays a leading role in Mircea Eliade's philosophical anthropology. Exhibited in numerous essays, from The myth of the eternal return (1949) to The nostalgia of the origins (1971), Eliade's philosophical anthropology has none of the systematic doctrine. It is based on some phenomenological premises as well as on Carl Gustav Jung's theories of psychoanalysis. Modern man lives disoriented. Eliade makes his own, from Jung's thought, the idea of โโarchaic survivals in the unconscious of modern man. Modern man carries within himself the paradox of an existence at two different and parallel levels, incompatible with each other for self-awareness: on the one hand the historical level, organized according to a scheme of adaptation to an alienating situation, and from the the other is the mythical level, that is, its deep psychic structure, organized according to a symbolic scheme. The historical man continues to live unconsciously according to the same categories as the pre-modern man: his unconscious life is in fact still structured according to an initiation scheme implicit in his contact with history. This situation can be defined, according to the formula of the psychoanalyst Erich Neumann, as a "Ritual of fate"; modern man undergoes the initiatory test of history, he is unconsciously initiated into existence responsible for the very fact of his historicity. On the other hand, this is how Eliade recovers existence in the world of modern man: still assigning him a mythical model.
The problematic of the ritual of destiny returns very often in Eliade's literary creation. This, alongside some realist novels, most of which still unpublished in France [and also in Italy ndt] and an experimental novel (Light that goes out, 1934), includes several novels and fantastic tales, almost all of which are now available in translation. At first, the fantastic tales respond to a belief expressed in the excellent essay Folklore as a means of knowledge (1937): since all paranormal phenomena are real, the extraordinary fantastic actions that Eliade exhibits in his novels - displacement of characters in space and time, faculty of magical action, "out of the body", even vampirism (Miss Cristina, 1936,) - โโare themselves real. Later Eliade elaborates one theory of the "unknowable miracle", which reaches a kind of "synchronicity" in the Jungian sense of the word. Indeed, it is known that Jung denied the causal relationship between the elements of a forecast (for example, the chart of the sky in astrology) and its realization. However, he admitted the existence of what he called "synchronicity".
In the second phase of Eliade's fantastic literature, the tale of extraordinary supernatural deeds remains almost unchanged, with the absolute primacy of time displacement ("sliding" of layers of time over each other, temporal discontinuity, etc.). It's the characters that completely change, and the attitude towards what happens to them. IS the "idiot" of expressionist aesthetics (The man who passed through the walls by Marcel Aymรฉ, The man with the rose by Romanian playwright George Ciprian, etc.) who now makes an appearance in Eliade's prose, especially in short stories such as The Bohรฉmiennes (1959) 14.000 head of cattle (1959) The old man and the officer (1968), etc. In the great novel, partly autobiographical, The Forbidden Forest the role of the "idiot" is attributed to the anti-hero par excellence Stรฉphane Viziru, whose fundamental problem is the irruption of the supernatural into the real, the premonition and its interpretation. Stรฉphane is a modern man, an ordinary man whose historical existence is disturbed by a series of "synchronicities". The wide open space of the night of the unconscious that was ajar for him feels compassion for him and in the end absorbs him completely.
The third period of Eliade's fantastic literature responds to an intention to recover all those who suffer, from consciences adrift, and is clearly distinguished in relation to the first two. This last metamorphosis of the narrator Mircea Eliade manifests itself starting from the story Uniforms of a general (1974) which inaugurates a whole cycle, which we call the โcycle of entertainment and cryptographyโ. It contains all the latest stories of Eliade: Bhuchenwald's secret agent, The three Graces, The pilgrim, The life of a centenary, Nineteen roses e Dayan. The transition from the "cycle of the idiot" to "Show cycle" happens with the story At the court of Dionysus, published for the first time in the โJournal of Romanian Writersโ (Munich, 1968, pp. 24-66). In the first cycle, that of Nights in Serampore, Dr. Honigberher's secret, The snake, which could be called "Indian cycle", the specialist of the sacred excels. In the second, the idiot, the poor in spirit takes the place of the specialist. But in both cases it is an irruption of the fantastic into everyday life.
Reminiscences of the idiot - whose positive character must be emphasized theidiot triumphans it had in Nicolรฒ Cusano and, later, in the whole Christian tradition - they remain in the third cycle, as well as other Eliadian themes. But, in general, this โcycle of entertainment and cryptographyโ confronts us with new characters and problems. The fantastic no longer bursts into everyday life, but is put into relationship with modern science and cryptography: hence the decisive role attributed to the policeman, to the cryptographer who creates a myth by proposing the existence of an enigma. The deciphering procedures play a leading role in the show organized by young people in search of absolute freedom and occupy a central place in many writings of this cycle. It is no longer a question, now, of a miracle:
"We are condemned to absolute freedom," says a character in the ending of Nineteen Roses. And the attempt to decipher coded messages that appear meaningless, tending to confuse the police, gives a petty result: โThere have well been poor in spirit in this world down to us. But the most famous of them remains Parsifal. In fact he was the only one who asked: Where is the cup of the Holy Grail? [โฆ] What meanness! - he continued in a weary, distant tone - what meanness, this Grail we have been commanded to seek. To seek and rediscover! [...] "(The pilgrim, in โEthosโ 3, pp. 35-36).
Deciphering, essential to the narrative in this "cycle of entertainment and cryptography", leads to "nothing". Nonetheless, the meaning of existence in the world, of this existence here, based on "nothingness", is condemned to absolute freedom, and it can only be through an operation of deciphering.
Eliade, mystagogue of modern times
It is possible to attribute to Eliade the name of mystagogue. Among the ancient Greeks the mystagogue he was the priest who presided over initiation into the mysteries and therefore, by extension, a teacher, a guide. This is one of the meanings of the word. However, there is another which, without being pejorative, indicates an artificial process: the mystagogue is someone who invents mysteries and attracts others to follow him on his way. Both meanings suit Eliade: he is the teacher, the initiator of the mysteries he himself invented.
It is useless to insist on the status and importance of hermeneutics in Eliade's scientific work, illustrated by Adrian Marino in his book published in France in 1981. In Eliade's memoirs and diaries, hermeneutics acquires an existential status, which is emphasized more times. It is through the hermeneutic activity that Eliade faces and understands some episodes of his own existence, as well as of modern culture: for example, yoga and tantrism help him to re-evaluate certain anarchic experiences of his adolescence, in which he reduced his hours of sleep and strengthened his will by swallowing repugnant substances; love reveals to him the mystery of totality. Thus, elsewhere, he points to parallels between the theories of modern physics and mystical experiences.
In Eliade's literature, hermeneutics retains a character of essentiality and is elevated to a fundamental technique of survival and liberation. The search for meaning is a man's own activity, and he can only survive to the extent that he has one: reaching liberation means having found meaning. Now, hermeneutics is precisely the operation that gives meaning. Each one must seek his own Grail on his own. The search for the Grail is an essentially hermeneutic activity. The "first" Eliade, the theorist of the miracle and its irruption into the world, believed the same hermeneutics to have a transcendent meaning. The "second" Eliade, that of the "petty Grail [...] sought and found" believes that the meaning is posed by hermeneutics. Thus the mystagogue, who acted as the initiator of objective mysteries and transcendent the operator, realizes that he is nothing but an inventor of mysteries who makes use of the means of hermeneutics. In Eliade's literature, along its three stages or cycles, the skein of transcendence unravels so that at the end, in the third cycle, man finds himself separated from nothingness ("absolute freedom") except by the thin wall of 'hermeneutics.
At this point the whole message of Eliade could be summed up in these words: to survive one must practice hermeneutics. As for the modalities of hermeneutics, the one that best suits man is cryptography. Mysteries must always be deciphered, in fact decryption is not made to dispel doubt: on the contrary, it creates it, it is the productive mechanism of the mystery. What this mechanism is exercised on does not really matter: at least one can use mold stains on a wall (Buchenwanld's secret agent) - thesis with which Eliade reaches the other great modern mystagogue, Jorge Luis Borges. But this operation is effective provided that the mystery is not revealed, or rather, that it is not possible to decrypt the encrypted message. In this case the sense you get is always ridiculous due to its insignificance, it is nothing but a "miserable Grail". The Grail can only truly be a producer of meaning, moral elevation and balance during its research: when it is found - that is to say: when the hermeneutic faculty is no longer exercised - it produces death. Indeed the Grail is nothing and its search is not what brings us closer to it but what separates us from it. Of course, there will be some faithful of Eliade who will protest: do we have to search for so long to understand that between nothing and the Grail there is no difference? But, like Eliade himself, everyone will understand it only at the opportune moment, so that this revelation will be no less extraordinary than any other. And at the same time less terrible.
The function of the mystagogue is to instruct and accompany. There can be no mystagogue without faithful. Mircea Eliade did not institute real mysteries. With his books he addresses the whole world: all his readers are faithful to him. And to those who approach him, Eliade responds with an intense and equal radiance of love. Which is the imperative of the "saint": to give everyone, without discrimination, all their love. A belated commitment, which begins with an exercise that many of his novels testify to: loving two women at a time with the same impartial and indivisible love. Just as the reduction in the hours of sleep can only take place one minute a night, so the universal irradiation of love can only be obtained by starting with the least complicated case: trying to love two different beings with all one's love, in order to arrive more late to the whole of humanity. This is Dr. Payot's method as applied to holiness. Eliade has come so far on this path that the words of the 49th chapter of the Tao-te-king:
โThe wise man is heartless; his heart is his people's heart. I am good with the good and equally with the evil, in fact it is virtue itself that is good. I am sincere with those who are sincere and equally with the traitor, in fact it is virtue in itself that is sincere. The existence of the sage in the world is not peaceful: his heart radiates on all mortals; his people bind themselves to him and the wise treat him as if all were his sons. "
But Eliade's mystagogue activity can be even better clarified than with a parable belonging to the wisdom of the East. The "Lotus Sutra", Saddharma-pundarika Buddhist, states that the probability that man will be able to attain liberation in the course of this existence is no greater than that of a barking turtle coming to the surface of the water at the precise moment when a pierced log passes over his good eye, in so as to be able to climb, passing through the hole, over the trunk. The turtle is dark-eyed: its possibility of orientation is limited. The likelihood of the log being punctured is minimal. The trunk navigates randomly, covering all the waters of the world: the probability that it passes right over the turtle is very low. There is little hope of obtaining liberation. But, rightly, the function of the mystagogue is to throw pieces of wood with holes in the water intended for the warhead turtles.
This is the role that Mircea Eliade has given himself. His literature, especially his stories, consists of these "pieces of wood" whose function is to attract the warped turtles to a truly unusual exercise, an exercise that was also represented in one of the sculptor's masterpieces Costantin Brancusi: The flying turtle.
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