Russian History 40 (2013) 264280

brill.com/ruhi

Mircea Eliades Understanding of

Religion and Eastern Christian Thought
Bryan Rennie
Westminster College
brennie@westminster.edu

Abstract
This article introduces Mircea Eliade. His biography and his understanding of religion are
outlined and the possibly formative influence of Eastern Orthodoxy is considered, as are
recent publications on the issue. His early essays present Orthodoxy as a mystical religion in
which, without some experience of the sacred, profane existence is seen as meaningless and
he later identified this same basic schema in all religion. Orthodox theologians Vladimir
Lossky and Dumitru Stniloae are inspected for similarities to Eliade. Ten consonances
between Eliades thought and Orthodox theology are considered. However, dissonances are
also noted, and for every potential Orthodox source of Eliades theories there is another
equally credible source, causing a controversy over the formative influences of his Romanian
youth as opposed to his later Indian experience. It is suggested that Eliade gained insight
from Orthodoxy, but that this was brought to consciousness by his sojourn in India. Theology
in the form of categorical propositions is present in the Eastern Church but exists alongside
other equally important expressions in the visual, dramatic, and narrative arts. The Eastern
Church as a multi-media performative theater prepared Eliade to apprehend religion as
inducing perceptions of the really realcreative poesis exercising a practical influence on
its audiences cognitions. Orthodoxy is a tradition in which categorical propositions had
never come to dominate the expression of the sacred, and Eliade wrote from a vantage point
on the border, not only between East and West, but also between the scholar and the artist.
Keywords
Mircea Eliade; Eastern Orthodoxy; Vladimir Lossky; Dumitru Stniloae; Nae Ionescu; the
Legion of the Archangel Michael; the sacred

Although he is not particularly well known beyond the discipline of the

history of religions, when Mircea Eliade died in 1986 he had written over
20 major monographs on religion and hundreds of scholarly articles.
He was the general editor of the first edition of the 16volume Macmillan
Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2013

DOI 10.1163/18763316-04002007

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Encyclopedia of Religion, the founding editor of the still significant

University of Chicago journals History of Religions and The Journal of
Religion. He had trained a generation of Ph.D.s in the history of religions at
Chicago and was a major influence on the discipline in the U.S. While he
was still living, a chair in the history of religions was endowed in his name
at the University of Chicago and is now occupied by the Indologist Wendy
Doniger. After his death he became the object of a great deal of criticism
and contentionincluding accusations of antiSemitism and fascist
involvementand repeated calls have been issued to move beyond the
Eliadean era.1 Importantly for the purposes of the Association for the
Study of Eastern Christianity, Eliade was a Romanian of Eastern Orthodox
upbringing. I will here consider Eliades theoretical understanding of religion and the possibly formative influence that his Eastern Christian culture
may have had on that understanding. I will do so by examining the work of
two established Orthodox theologians, Vladimir Lossky and Dumitru
Stniloae, for any similarities to Eliades thought, and by considering the
conclusions of two other authors who have already written on the topic,
A. F. C. Webster and Ansgar Paus. If the influence of Eastern Christian
thought is to be demonstrable in an area outside the immediate sphere of
the Eastern Church, the work of a scholar such as Eliade would appear to be
an obvious place to look.
Eliade was born in Bucharest in 1907. He developed an early interest in
world literature and was led from there to philology, philosophy, and comparative religion. Around 1924-25 he learned Italian and English in order to
read Raffaele Pettazzoni (1883-1959) and James George Frazer (1854-1941).
In 1925 Eliade enrolled in the department of philosophy at the University
of Bucharest and came under the influence of Nae Ionescu (1890-1940),
an assistant professor of logic and metaphysics and an active journalist.
The shadow that fell on the older scholar because of his involvement with
the extreme right in inter-war Romania later darkened Eliades reputation.
Eliades masters thesis examined Italian Renaissance philosophers from
Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499) to Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), and Renaissance
humanism was one of his major influences when he turned to India to
universalize the provincial philosophy he had inherited from his
European education. He was granted an allowance by the Maharaja of
1)See, for example, the contributions from Roger Corless and Russell McCutcheon in Bryan
Rennie, ed., Changing Religious Worlds: The Meaning and End of Mircea Eliade (Albany, NY:
State University of New York Press, 2001), 3-9 and 11-23.

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Kassimbazar to study in India for four years. In 1928 he sailed for Calcutta to
study Sanskrit and philosophy under Surendranath Dasgupta (1885-1952), a
Cambridgeeducated Bengali, professor at the University of Calcutta, and
author of a five-volume History of Indian Philosophy.
Eliade returned to Bucharest in December, 1931 and successfully submitted his analysis of yoga as his doctoral thesis in the philosophy department
in 1933. This eventually became Yoga, Immortality and Freedom.2 From 1933
to 1939 he was active with the Criterion group, a collection of scholars
and intellectuals in Bucharest who gave public seminars on wide-ranging
topics. They were strongly influenced by the philosophy of trirism; the
search for the authentic in and through lived experience. In 1933 Eliade
also published his second novel Maitreyi, which was to secure his reputation in Romania as a major novelist.3
After the Second World War, during which Eliade served with the
Romanian Legation in England and Portugal, he was unable to return to
communist Romania because of his earlier connection with the political
right. In 1945 he moved to Paris where Georges Dumzil (1898-1986), an
important scholar of comparative mythology, secured a part-time post for
him at the cole pratique des hautes tudes at the Sorbonne, teaching
comparative religion. The German Joachim Wach (1898-1955), then chair of
the History of Religions at the University of Chicago, was prompted by his
students, with whom Eliades work was very popular, to invite Eliade to give
the Haskell Lectures in 1956. After Wachs unexpected death, Eliade
assumed the chair in Chicago in 1958 and stayed there until his own death,
publishing extensively and continuing to write fiction in Romanian. Mircea
Eliade was not a guru, however, despite the fondness that publishers and
admirers have for the 1930 image of him clad in a dhoti. He was no sage but
rather a very successful scholar.
Eliades presence in the English-speaking academy has diminished since
his death in 1986. Use of his work in graduate courses has declined and
there has been no repetition of the conferences on his thought such
as those held in the 1970s and 1980s, although there were several
conferencesnotably in Bucharest and in Chicagoin his centennial
2)Mircea Eliade, Yoga, Immortality, and Freedom (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958).
3)Mircea Eliade, Maitreyi (Bucharest: Editura Cultura Nationala, 1933); translated from the
Romanian by Alain Guillermou as La Nuit Bengali (Lausanne: Gallimard, 1950); translated
from the French by Catherine Spencer as Bengal Nights (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1994).

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year, 2007. It is still not widely known by the Englishspeaking public that
Eliade was a prolific and successful writer of fiction. Only an irregular sampling of that fiction is available in English, although that is beginning to
change to some degree now that movies have been made of his novel
Maitreyi (La Nuit Bengali, Nicolas Klotz, 1988) and his short story, Tineree
fr Tineree, filmed by Francis Ford Coppola (Youth without Youth, 2007).
I have described Eliades academic analysis of religion at some length
elsewhere.4 He distinguishes between religious and non-religious humanity on the basis of the perception of time (apparently derived from Henri
Bergsons Time and Free Will).5 Eliade contends that the perception of time
as a homogenous, linear, and unrepeatable medium is a peculiarity of
modern and non-religious humanity. Archaic or religious humanity (homo
religiosus), by comparison, perceives time as heterogeneous; that is, as
divided between mundane time, which is linear and unrepeatable, and
sacred time, which is reactualizable by virtue of its eternal presence. By
means of myths and rituals which give access to this sacred time religious
humanity protects itself against the terror of history, a potential existential anxiety and helplessness before the absolute and irresistible factuality
of historical time. Eliade undermines this distinction, however, by insisting
that non-religious humanity in any pure sense is a very rare phenomenon
if it exists at all. Myth and illud tempus (the eternally present sacred time)
are still to be apprehended, albeit concealed, in the world of modern
humanity, and the attempt to restrict all real time to linear historical time
he sees as finally self-contradictory.
Eliades concept of the sacred has been the subject of considerable
contention. He identifies the sacred with the real but also clearly states that
the sacred is a structure of human consciousness. This implies the subjectivity of both the sacred and of reality. Yet the sacred is identified as the
source of significance, meaning, power and being, and manifestations of
the sacred in lived experience are what he calls hierophanies, cratophanies,
or ontophanies accordingly. Eliade states that believers must be prepared
by their experience, including their traditional religious background, before
they can apprehend the revelation of the sacred. To others a sacred tree,
4)Bryan Rennie, Reconstructing Eliade: Making Sense of Religion (Albany, NY: State
University of New York Press, 1996) and Bryan Rennie, ed., Mircea Eliade: A Critical Reader
(London: Equinox Publishing, 2006).
5)Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness
(New York: Macmillan, 1910).

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for example, remains simply a tree. Humanity seeks to live in as close proximity to the sacred as possible. However, it is an indispensable element of
Eliades analysis that while any phenomenal entity could be apprehended
as a hierophany or revelation of the sacred, all beings reveal, but at the same
time conceal, the nature of the sacred. The fact is that the sacred can only be
experienced in mundane, material instantiations, which camouflages it
even as it is revealed, and this gives rise to the insight that the sacred exists
beyond all polarities and is often expressed in the form of a coincientia
oppositorum. Religion is seen as a unifying human universal involving these
experiences.
Beyond the scholarly debate over the academic value of this analysis,
a wealth of biographical material has become available, the implications
of which have also been argued. Romanian and other archives have
been investigated in detail, and several biographies have appeared (mainly
French), raising new questions. In the late 1980s the works of Ivan Strenski,
Adriana Berger, and Leon Volovici raised one specific question: had
Eliade been a supporter of the Legion of the Archangel Michael, a militant
Romanian Orthodox nationalist organization also known as the Iron
Guard?6 This organization was violently anti-Semitic. Had Eliade been, and
did he remain, anti-Semitic himself?
I cannot digress into a detailed consideration of this questionsuffice it
to say that even given newly available information there remains significant doubt that Eliade ever was virulently anti-Semitic, although between
January 1937 and February 1938 he did write more than a dozen articles in
support of the Legion. Eliade thought creators of culture to be a countrys
most potent forcethe most effective nationalists, thanks to whom a
nation conquers eternity7 and he saw the Legions religious appeal as a
means of popularizing, by appealing to deep traditional roots, the type of
cultural creativity that he had previously attributed to the intellectual and
writer. While some have suspected Eliade of joining a Legionary nest, no
definitive proof has ever emerged. His writings express no obvious antiSemitism. He was appointed to the Press Services section of the Romanian

6)Ivan Strenski, Mircea Eliade in Four Theories of Myth in Twentieth Century History
(London: Macmillan, 1989); Adriana Berger, Fascism and Religion in Romania, The Annals
of Scholarship 6, no. 4 (1989): 455-465; Leon Volovici, Nationalist Ideology and Antisemitism:
The Case of Romanian Intellectuals in the 30s (New York: Pergamon, 1991).
7)Mircea Eliade, Romnia n eternitate in Profetism romnesc 2 (Bucharest: Editura Roza
Vnturilor,1990), originally published in Vremea VIII no. 409 (1935): 6.

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Cultural Legation to London in April 1940 by the same royalist dictatorship

that had ordered the execution of the Legions captain along with some
250 Legionaries the previous year. When England broke diplomatic relations with Romania, Eliade was posted to neutral Portugal. During his tenure in the Office of Press and Propaganda there Eliade produced neither
anti-Semitic nor pro-Nazi writings.
Scholars are divided over the formative influences on Eliade. Some
emphasize the transformative effect of Eliades visit to India between 1928
and 1932. Others have emphasized the earlier influences of Eastern
Christianity. An inspection of Eliades early writings seems to support the
latter claim. In 1927, he wrote his Spiritual Itinerary, and here he says:
A whole series of spiritual experiences is required for one to attain that
spiritual state which is Orthodoxy. The consciousness finds its natural
equilibrium in Orthodoxy.8 From such beginnings it seems unlikely that
the claims of Orthodox influence on Eliades thought could fail to be substantiated. Probably the most obvious channel by which such influence
could have exerted itself was via the aforementioned Nae Ionescu. Eliades
biographer, Mac Linscott Ricketts speaks of the major role the elder man
was to play in the life of the younger and points out that No other person
is mentioned so many times in the pages of Eliades Autobiography as
Ionescu.9 Ionescu was a devout Romanian Orthodox layman, who knew
the works of both Greek and Latin Church Fathers well: according to a
Romanian monk, [t]he writings of Nae Ionescu show an organic understanding of the right belief. He understands it from the inside out.10
Reading Eliades early articles, Ricketts came to the conclusion that for
[Eliade], ChristianityOrthodoxyis a mystical religion, affording man
direct contact with the deity.11 Eliades early essays present an essentially
Orthodox view, with salvation as the divinization or deification of
humanity. To become a god has been humanitys objective, Eliade says,
ever since we transcended the animal state of having only physiological
drives. Without some experience of spiritual realms, existence is meaningless, since, everyday consciousness is a bundle of sensations, sentiments,
8)Mircea Eliade, Itinerariu spiritual in Profetism romnesc 1 (Bucharest: Editura Roza
Vnturilor, 1990); originally published in twelve installments in Cuvntul between August
and September of 1927. See Ricketts, Romanian Roots, chapter 7.
9)Mac Linscott Ricketts, Mircea Eliade: the Romanian Roots, 2 vols. (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1988), 123.
10)Quoted in Ricketts, Romanian Roots, 100.
11)Ricketts, Romanian Roots, 184.

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and ideas which have no meaning in themselves. Eliade portrays the theosis
of the Eastern Church as both thirst and practical program for the
attainment of immortality and freedom from material determinism.
It transcends the humiliating psycho-physical causality of existence.12 He
later identified the same schema in Hindu yoga and even in all religion.
At least ten such parallels or homologies can be identified between
Eliades thought and Orthodox theology: (1) the accepted irrationalism of
ritual and Eliades emphasis upon the transrational; (2) the emphasis
of both on lived experience as the source of religious belief; (3) the critique
of desacralization or secularism; (4) the hierophany or experiential
instantiation of the sacredespecially in the icon; (5) the coincidence of
opposites as an accurate expression of that sacred; (6) the related simultaneous revelation and camouflage of the sacred; (7) Orthodox synthesis
and Eliades eclectic understanding; (8) the universal humanism of the
experience of the sacred; (9) the transcendence of the incarnate human
condition as the goal of religious effort; and (10) the poesis of the Eastern
Church, the creative artistry by which a parable or icon conveys its point
more forcefully than any verbal description, resonates strongly with Eliades
own creative hermeneutics.
Early claims regarding Eliades debt to Eastern Orthodox theology were
made by the Chicago theologian, T. J. J. Altizer in 1963. Altizer believed that
we must take account of Eliades roots in Eastern Christendom one can
sense in Eliade the Eastern Christians hostility to the rational spirit of
Western theology.13 There is a clear homology between the irrationalism of
ritual experience and Eliades emphasis upon the transrational and transhistorical. Dumitru Stniloae explains that the mystical union with God is
not irrational, but suprarational,14 but he further specifies that a rationalist philosophy weakens, for example, the mystery of the Trinity.15 Eliade
insists that one must not think that theoretical coherence is necessarily
the result of systematic reflection; it already asserts itself at the level of the
image and the symbol, it is an integral part of mythic thought.16 Stniloae
12)Quoted in Ricketts, Romanian Roots, 268.
13)T. J. J. Altizer, Mircea Eliade and the Dialectics of the Sacred (Philadelphia: Westminster
Press, 1963), 37.
14)Dumitru Stniloae, Orthodox Spirituality: A Practical Guide for the Faithful and a Definitive
Manual for the Scholar, trans. Archimandrite Jerome (Newville) and Otilia Kloos, foreword
by Alexander Golubov (South Canaan, PA: St. Tikhons Seminary Press, 2002), 28.
15)Stniloae, Orthodox Spirituality, 46.
16)Mircea Eliade, The Two and the One (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), 89, n. 1.

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further explains that Orthodox teaching doesnt rationalize the mystery

of God in Trinity. It bases itself on the experience of God.17 This is an
old, established doctrine, which Stniloae recognizes in, for example,
St. Ephraim the Syrian. And Vladimir Lossky has observed that the Orthodox
tradition is essentially, and not merely tangentially, mystical. It does not
make any sharp distinctions between mysticism and theology, or between
personal experience of the divine mysteries and the dogma affirmed by the
Church.18 Stniloae bears this out precisely: Orthodox doctrine generally
holds that in the Church the spiritual is conferred through what is sensory
and tactile.19 This is certainly one of the similarities between Orthodox
theology and Eliades thought: they both emphasize the experiential nature
of the human encounter with the sacred.
The 1986 paper by the American Orthodox theologian Father A. F. C.
Webster sought a phenomenological description of religion that might at
once reflect and inform the Orthodox mystical tradition,20 and he sought
it in Eliades works. Although Webster saw the work of the German theologian Rudolf Otto as amenable to the theological aspects of Orthodox mysticism, the phenomenological dualism of Mircea Eliade proves useful to a
fuller understanding of the liturgical qualities of Orthodox mysticism.21
Webster comments that Orthodox theologians and historians of religion
have not had much contact with one another. Rarely is the Orthodox tradition cited by historians of religion. Similarly, few Orthodox theologians
have utilized the most respected historians of religion.22 Webster attempted
to bridge this gap using Eliades thought.
Particularly striking is the parallel between the Orthodox and Eliadean perspectives on
the procedures by which the religious person sets apart certain places, times, etc. from
the mundane world in order to re-sacralize the world first by finding or re-rooting
oneself in what he or she intuitively apprehends as the true ultimate reality and, second, by reinterpreting, re-imagining, and reconstituting the world around him or her
from this restored vantage point. So striking, in fact, are the parallels between
17)Stniloae, Orthodox Spirituality, 48.
18)Vladimir Lossky, Orthodox Theology: An Introduction (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimirs
Seminary Press, 2001), 628.
19)Stniloae, Orthodox Spirituality, 17.
20)A.F.C. Webster, Orthodox Mystical Tradition and the Comparative Study of Religion: An
Experimental Synthesis, Journal of Ecumenical Studies 23 (1986): 621. This article is reproduced in part in Rennie, Mircea Eliade, 404-10.
21)Webster, Orthodox Mystical Tradition, 621.
22)Webster, Orthodox Mystical Tradition, 622.

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Orthodox liturgical (and theological) mysticism and Eliades depiction of the archaic
religious person that one may wonder whether Eliade truly captured in words the
structures of archaic and developed religion or allowed his own Romanian Orthodox
upbringing to inform his perceptions to an extent far greater than he would have
admitted!23

Webster considers various arguments to validate this point and reveals

further similarities. For example, Eliades critique of desacralization is
structurally homologous to the Orthodox critique of secularism. Also,
Eliades concept of hierophany as the act of manifestation of the sacred,
which is broad enough to encompass elementary forms of the manifestation of the sacred as well as the supreme hierophany (which, for a Christian,
is the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ)24 allows a hierarchy of types that
displays a strong affinity to the epiphanic theme in Orthodox dogmatic and
liturgical theology.
The German Catholic theologian and philosopher Ansgar Paus reinforces Websters comments on hierophanies, specifically arguing that
Eliade is influenced by Eastern Orthodox theology of icons. Paus argues,
one can demonstrate that the key to understanding the whole of Eliades
religious, historical material lies in theology, or, to put it more precisely,
in Byzantine icontheology.25
The Orthodox icon bears the character of a theophany and finds in that its justification.
It leads the beholder through itself and, by its presence, to community or union
(communio) with transcendent reality, and thus away from empirically experienced
space-time (theognosy). Icons share the structure of a sacrament, Their function
lies in the anamnesis of the divine.26

Paus further observes:

Through precise observation of the manifold iconic materials and through personal
religious acquaintance with holy icons, Eliade discovered his universally valid historically neutral principle of interpretation. Without doubt Eliades understanding of
symbols is the enduring manifestation of an attitude to the image, having its rationale
in the Byzantine world of the Eastern Orthodox Church.27
23)Webster, Orthodox Mystical Tradition, 638-39.
24)Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion (London: Sheed and Ward 1958), 11.
25)Ansgar Paus, The Secret Nostalgia of Mircea Eliade for Paradise: Observations on
Method in the Study of Religion, Religion 19 (1989): 140-41. This article is reproduced in
Rennie, A Critical Reader, 392-403.
26)Paus, Secret Nostalgia, 144.
27)Paus, Secret Nostalgia, 145.

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Vladimir Lossky further reinforces the homology between Eliades hierophany and Orthodox theology: Since the Word has incarnated Himself, the
word can be thought and taughtand in the same way the Word can be
painted.28 The similarity with Eliades notion of hierophanythat the
sacred must first be manifest in some concrete, physical form accessible to
human experience (which simultaneously camouflages it in profane form),
before it can be thought, taught, apprehended, and appreciated is evident.
Lossky also uses the language of coincidentia-oppositorum to express
himself: The living God must be evoked beyond the opposition of being
and non-being, beyond all concepts.29 Furthermore, knowledge of divine
nature is achieved and canceled out simultaneously in the impersonality of
unknowing.30 The language is inescapably reminiscent of Eliades understanding of the coincidentia-oppositorum, even more so of his perennial
theme of simultaneous revelation and camouflage.
In Eliades eclectically focused gift for synthesis Paus again sees the
pronounced influence of the Eastern Church. Regarding eclecticism,
Stniloae argues that Patristic tradition informs us that the Fathers did not
hesitate to appropriate terminology from the pagan world and to imbue
it with Orthodox meaning,31 and Eliade follows that pattern.
A further homology appears in the form of human universalism. Lossky
is in the tradition of the Cappadocian fathers, Dionysius the Areopagite,
and Meister Eckhart, a tradition which speaks to the human condition
here and now, shared universally. Only one nature exists, common to all
men, although it appears to us fragmented by sin, parceled out among
many persons men possess a single common nature.32 There is a resonance here with Eliades insistence on the ubiquity of religion and his
desire to de-provincialize the West by drawing from Eastern (specifically
Hindu) philosophy, as we have seen.
There is further apparent similarity between Eliades understanding of
freedom as the goal of all religious effort and the Orthodox concept of freedom. For the Fathers personhood is freedom in relation to nature: it
eludes all conditioning Personal uniqueness is what remains when one
takes away all cosmic context, says Lossky. And again: human personal
28)Lossky, Orthodox Theology, 13.
29)Lossky, Orthodox Theology, 23.
30)Lossky, Orthodox Theology, 28.
31)Stniloae, Orthodox Spirituality, 2 n. 2.
32)Lossky, Orthodox Theology, 125.

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dignity consists in being able to liberate himself from his nature.33 That
God has become man that man might become God is attributed to
Irenaeus, but is also in Athanasius, and is common among later Orthodox
theologians. We must become partakers of the divine nature, says
Lossky.34 Freedom, for Eliade also, was this kind of freedom from causal
determination by participation in the sacred. Eliades immortality and
freedom from Yoga, Immortality, and Freedom closely assimilates to this
deification.
Finally, the poesis or narrative logic of the Eastern Church is powerful:
a logic proper to the story told with no particular compulsion or power
beyond that narrative. This seems to be the kind of logic that Eliade apprehended in all systems of symbols and myths.35 The self-authenticating
logic of all myths stands only within its own theological circle despite its
rhetorical appeal. For example, Lossky states that the Trinity is the initial
mystery, the Holy of Holies of the divine reality, the very life of the hidden
God. Only poetry can evoke it, precisely because it celebrates and does not
pretend to explain.36 Similarly, Eliade styled his whole approach creative
hermeneutics,37 a poetic hermeneutics, an interpretation necessitating
literary or narrative creativity. But it is an entechnos poesis, a skilled creativity, no less truth-full for its poetic component. This understanding of the
non-scientific, creative, poetic utterance informs all of Eliades work.
As well as these homologies, however, there are equally apparent dissonances. For example, God is determined by nothing and that is precisely
why He is personal, says Lossky. The universal Christian emphasis on
the personal nature of God is something entirely foreign to Eliade, who
explicitly states his own inability to believe in such a God.38 Eliade may
be influenced by the Orthodox Church but he does not stand inside its
theological circle. Even Altizer recognized that in Mircea Eliade, Christian
33)Lossky, Orthodox Theology, 72.
34)Lossky, Orthodox Theology, 92, quoting II Peter 1:4.
35)Eliade, The Two and the One, 1, n. 1, above n. 16.
36)Lossky, Orthodox Theology, 46.
37)Mircea Eliade, The Quest: History and Meaning in Religion (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1969), 4.
38)Eliade himself apparently felt this inability to believe, describing himself as a Christian
who could not believe in God (in Ricketts, Romanian Roots, 123). He also thought the modern Western intellectual to have killed a God in whom he could not believe (Occultism,
Witchcraft, and Cultural Fashions: Essays in Comparative Religions (Chicago: Chicago
University Press, 1976), 5.

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theology is confronted by a great religious scholar and thinker whose vision

of the sacred is incompatible with the established forms and traditions of
Christianity.39 Despite Ionescus apparent influence over Eliade, Eliade
disagreed with his Professor in many ways. The 1934 autobiographical novel
by Eliades Jewish friend, Mihail Sebastian, De dou mii de ani (For Two
Thousand Years) bore a preface by Ionescu, which was openly anti-Semitic,
in theological rather than racial terms, but Sebastian retained it out of
loyalty. Eliade responded in print, attempting to mediate between the two
men and to reject Ionescus anti-Semitism, again on theological grounds.
Ionescu may make an important appearance in Eliades novel, Gaudeamus,
but in that novel Eliade emphasizes his autobiographical protagonists
rational inability to believe in God. Somewhat later, Eliade names theology
as one of many monomanias, that is, a single perspective which explains
everything from its particular point of view among which he groups a
materialistic interpretation of history, Freudianism, biology, theology,
magic, individualism, etc. and he wonders if the majority of moderns are
monomaniacs.40
In the work of both Webster and Paus, one encounters problems and
reservations concerning the Eastern Christian influence over Eliade.
Webster recognizes that Eliades thought does not directly reflect Orthodox
tradition. For example, Webster, typical of Orthodox theologians, considers
that within the Orthodox tradition alone may the person seeking after the
ultimate meaning of life realize his or her goal,41 whereas it is fundamental
to Eliades thought that communion with the sacred occurs in all traditions.
Also Webster speaks of the Protestant Rudolf Ottos emphasis on the experiential dimension of religion in terms of the nonrational or suprarational,
so there is no need to trace these elements of Eliades thought to Orthodoxy.
Not only that, but for Otto any description of the numinous experience
of the numen itselfpartakes ipso facto of a process of reification that
would tend to obfuscate the reality in question.42 So Eliades signature
understanding of the camouflage or concealment of the sacred in the profane need not necessarily be traced to Eastern Orthodox Theology either.
39)Altizer, Eliade, 15, emphasis added.
40)Mircea Eliade, quoted in Ricketts, Romanian Roots, 610, 1332, n. 14, originally from
Simple Presupuneri, Cuvntul, 11 Feb 1933, reprinted in Oceanografie (Bucharest: Editura
Humanitas, 1991), 221.
41)Webster, Orthodox Mystical Tradition, 624.
42)Webster, Orthodox Mystical Tradition, 627.

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Webster concluded with the observation that One need only allow for
the primarily historical instead of mythical basis of Orthodox liturgical
mysticism before adopting Eliades approach to religion in its entirety!43
and this is a very significant distinction from Eliade, who polemicized
vigorously against such historicism throughout his work. According to
Webster,
Eliade seems to have employed a metaphysical agnosticism in his writings, but the
logical structure of the sacred as he elucidated it leaves room for someone with more
metaphysical certitude to objectify the real as the numen or God and he showed
less concern for the nature of that sacred reality than for the attitudes and the behavior
of the people who believe in it.44

This focus by Eliade on the behavior of the people who believe in the sacred,
rather than on the sacred per se, is apparent to Webster, who has studied
Eliade carefully from the point of view of someone who is committed to a
theological stance. Furthermore, the very source used by Paus in affirming
Eliades dependence on Byzantine icon theory, that is, Eliades passage on
the veneration of the lingam by tribal peasant women, affirms Eliades
respect for the potential of the Hindu tradition. Ricketts comments that,
while in India, Eliade, seeing how the lingam could evoke religious sentiments on the part of women and girls in India, was able to understand
the veneration of icons in Orthodox churchessomething he had regarded
previously as idolatry.45 The point here is that, despite his earlier emphatic
support of the Eastern Church Eliade had not sympathized until now with
one of its most cherished traditionsthe veneration of icons. It seems to
be Eliades understanding of Hindu veneration that enabled his understanding of his own Orthodox tradition. This seems at least to moderate
Pauss strong position on the influence of Orthodox icontheology. There
may be a christological foundation in the Incarnation, but the Hindu notion
of avatars and murtis and even the Islamic attitude to the Quran as Allah
inliberate or manifest in book form, argues for a more widespread operation of this phenomenon. Thus, when Paus concludes that Eliade suggested
that the Byzantine doctrine of icons, in its fusion with the outlook on life of
the Romanian husbandman, reflected the state of consciousness of archaic

43)Webster, Orthodox Mystical Tradition, 642.

44)Webster, Orthodox Mystical Tradition, 636-37.
45)Ricketts, Romanian Roots, 362.

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man, he (Paus) both goes beyond the textual sources (Eliade nowhere
actually says this) and ignores alternative, non-Christian sources, which
Eliade specifically considers. Paus cannot establish that this theology is
purely and simply Byzantine. Thus he goes too far in claiming that Eliades
creative hermeneutics is developed under the control of a special theological a priori.46
It seems to be the case that for every potential Eastern Orthodox source
of Eliades theories there is another equally credible source. For example,
Eliades emphasis on experience as the source of salvific understanding
could come from the mystical theology of the Eastern Church, but it is also
found in the work of the Protestant Italian historian of religions, Vittorio
Macchioro (b. 1880), whom Eliade admired, read, and met in 1927. Perhaps
the one defining feature of Orthodox theology is the deference to and
respect for the specific tradition that bridges the gulf of human ignorance
and this seems to be the one feature that Eliade decisively rejected as the
modern artist rejected prior tradition in favor of a personal quest that
builds rationally upon individual experience.
A resolution to the controversy between those who believe Eliades
Romanian youth to be the formative influence on his thought and those
who find his Indian experience to be more formative might be suggested.
Eliade gained preconscious insight under the influence of Byzantine
Orthodoxy, but this was brought to consciousness and corroborated by his
Indian experiences, leading to his belief in a universal human structure.
Eliade was certainly influenced by the Eastern Church, but he rejected the
Churchs exclusive claim to truth, and he attempted to construct a universally applicable taxonomy with reference to other cultural traditions. But
besides this attempt to construct an intellectually justifiable and workable
taxonomy and morphology of religious data, Eliade employed a creative
hermeneutic that constitutes a pragmatic narratology.47 The narrative
nature of human representations and explanations of reality, and therefore
of the sacred as Eliade conceived it, is an observation that is becoming
increasingly widespread. To cite Jeppe Sinding Jensens conclusion as a single, recent, and philosophically informed example:

46)Paus, Secret Nostalgia, 145, emphasis added.

47)Bryan Rennie, Il ny a pas un Solution de la Continuit: Eliade, Historiography, and
Pragmatic Narratology in the Study of Religion. ARC: The Journal of the Faculty of Religious
Studies, McGill University, 30 (2002): 115-137.

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The role of narrativity in our scientific understanding of the world is yet another
underrated issue an explanation of religion or religious matters may also consist in
making plain or clear and showing the meaning of, or how it all makes sense. Thus
the narrative aspects of explanation become much more noticeable: explanations are
stories.48

I have argued at some length elsewhere that Eliade anticipated this narrative turn.49 For example, he believed that a literary work is an instrument
of knowledge. The imaginary universes created in novels, stories, and tales
reveal certain values and meanings unique to the human condition which,
without them, would remain unknown, or, at the very least, imperfectly
understood.50 Eliade made a distinction between his diurnal or scientific work, and his fictional literature as his nocturnal or artistic work
(the German wissenschaftliche would be less misleading than the English
scientific here). However, he also insisted that There is no real resolution
to the continuity between my academic and my literary work, between the
diurnal and the nocturnal reign of the spirit.51 For Eliade there was no
resolution of the continuity between analysis and fiction. He was a writer
of bothand they may not be so far removed one from the other as we
have previously liked to think. That is not to say that Eliades analyses have
no wissenschaftliche value, but that they remain Geisteswissenchaftlich
part of the humanities. Although the influence of Orthodox Christianity
may not have exerted dominance over Eliade in the sense of imposing
dogmatic assumptions about the specific nature of the real/sacred, it
certainly seems to have been his experience of that Church as a multimedia performative theater of the narrative, graphic, and dramatic instantiation of its sacred forms that alerted and sensitized the young Eliade to
the potential of religion as a performance that can pragmatically affect its
audience so as to induce the apprehension of the really real.52 As well as

48)Jeppe Sinding Jensen, The Study of Religion in a New Key (Aarhus: University of Aarhus,
2003), 232.
49)Rennie, Pragmatic Narratology.
50)Mircea Eliade, Journal III: 1970 1978 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 283.
51)Il nexiste pas de vritable solution de continuit entre mes ouvrages scientifiques et
mon uvre littraire, entre le rgle diurne de lesprit et son rgle nocturne. Mademoiselle
Christina (Paris: LHerne, 1978), 7.
52)See Bryan Rennie, Mircea Eliade: The Perception of the Sacred in the Profane, Intention,
Reduction, and Cognitive Theory, Temenos: Nordic Journal of Comparative Religion 43 no. 1
(2007): 73-98.

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the systematic arrangement of data into utilizable taxonomies, creative

poesis is always also underway in the History of Religions, exercising a practical influence on its audience. It may have been Eliades skill in poetically
influencing his audience which both ensured his popularity as an author in
his own day and which left him open to criticism from more prosaic or
(naturs) wissenschaftliche scholars. He certainly developed that skill in
the Orthodox environment of his youth and, although we may not be able
to establish indubitable lines of specific influence in the narration of the
relevant data, we can nonetheless tell a story that clarifies our world.
The primary emphasis of the PostReformation Western Church is on
theology composed of categorical propositions. Words have dominated
contemporary theology, according to the American Catholic theologian
Thomas OMeara,53 and Stniloae goes even further in saying that
Protestant theologians consider the word as the only means of divine
revelation.54 So great had that dominance become that when, in the late
eighteenth century, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe came to analyze
Leonardos Last Supper, he saw it entirely as the illustration of an auditory
event, the visible sequel to a vocal stimulus, a graphic depiction subordinate to the word.55 Yet, while the propositional language of traditional
theology is a great imaginative achievement, it does not represent the
whole of human experience, according to John Dixon, an emeritus professor of religion and art. OMeara points out that nonverbal creative art
suggests a mode of subjectivity that not only rejects the technocracy of
words but which unleashes, bestows, and discloses the more of Presence
and can give us an aesthetic intuition of ineffable presence the aesthetic
illustrates human theological interpretation of divine revelation [and]
can describe religion, revelation, faith, and thinking-about-faith with a
strength and clarity equal to the categorical style.56 This is no secret to the
Eastern Church, as is witnessed by Constantine Cavarnoss claim that the
icon presents simultaneously and concisely many thingsa place, persons
and objectsthat would take an appreciable period of time to describe in

53)Thomas OMeara, The Aesthetic Dimension in Theology in Art, Creativity and the
Sacred, ed. Diane Apostolos-Cappadona (New York: Continuum, 2001), 206.
54)Stniloae, Orthodox Sprituality, 34.
55)Leo Steinberg, The Seven Functions of the Hands of Christ: Aspects of Leonardos Last
Supper, in Art, Creativity and the Sacred, ed. Diane Apostolos-Cappadona (New York:
Continuum, 2001), 55.
56)OMeara, The Aeasthetic Dimension, 205.

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words.57 Dixon says, systematic thought can occur in languages other than
the verbal,58 which precisely reiterates Eliades insistence that theoretical
coherence asserts itself in the image and the symbol and the myth.59 While
theology in the form of categorical propositions is decisively present in the
Eastern Church, it cohabits that Church alongside other equally important
expressions of theology in the visual, dramatic, and narrative arts. Exposure
to this multi-media environment may well have prepared Eliade to develop
his general understanding of religion as a human universala connection
and not a division between people. Eliades insistence on maintaining
his own artistic output in the form of fiction supports this observation.
His lived experience was of a tradition in which formal categorical verbal
propositions had never come to dominate as the only worthwhile expression of the human experience of the Sacred, and he wrote from his vantage
point on the border, not only between East and West, but also between the
scholar and the artist.

57)Constantine Cavarnos, Orthodox Iconography: Four Essays (Belmont, MA: Institute for
Modern Greek and Byzantine Studies, 1977): 30-35; available from http://www.orthodoxinfo
.com/general/icon_function.aspx.
58)John W. Dixon, Jr., Painting as Theological Thought: The Issues in Tuscan Theology, in
Art, Creativity and the Sacred, ed. Diane Apostolos-Cappadona (New York: Continuum,
2001), 277.
59)Eliade, The Two and the One, 89, n. 1, above n. 16.