Myth and Religion in Mircea Eliade

Douglas Allen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 1998
• ISBN:
  9781136769443
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Italian History
• Index: History

This multidisciplinary study is the first book devoted entirely to the critical interpretation of the writings of Mircea Eliade on myth. One of the most popular and influential historians and theorists of myth, Eliade argued that all myth is religious. Douglas Allen critically interprets Eliade's theories of religion, myth, and symbolism and analys

CHAPTER 1

Eliade's Antireductionism

One cannot read Mircea Eliade's writings on myth, in particular, and religion, in general, without soon encountering his concern, often bordering on an obsession, with the evils of modern forms of “reductionism.” It is such reductionism, as evidenced in modern scholarly approaches and in much of contemporary life, that prevents us from appreciating, or even recognizing, the nature, function, significance, and meaning of myth and religion. Eliade sees much of his task, as defined by the proper and urgently needed “creative hermeneutics” of the history of religions, as reclaiming the mythic and renewing modern scholarship and contemporary life by an “antireductionist” orientation toward the “irreducibility of the sacred,” including the irreducibly sacred world of myth.

Already introduced is Eliade's frequent use of the term “antireductionism.” Defenders of the methodological assumption of the irreducibility of the religious, as well as critics such as Robert Segal, often use the term “nonreductionism” and present the basic distinction as reductionism versus nonreductionism. As used within the history of religions and religious studies, “nonreductionism” refers to approaches that analyze religious data only in religious terms; “reductionism” refers to the analysis of religious data in secular terms. Eliade, in this regard, claims to adopt a nonreductionist method and interpretation of religious myth.

The stronger, more assertive sense of “antireductionism” gets better at Eliade's position: his vigorous critique and condemnation of dominant, inadequate, and oppressive reductionist accounts; his claim not only for a more adequate interpretation of the irreducibly mythic but also for the irreplaceable significance of his threatened, autonomous discipline of history of religions; and even his vision of the mythic spiritual renewal of modern, desacralized, impoverished, reductionist, Western culture.

With regard to Eliade's general approach to reductionism and myth, we may distinguish two related claims: the irreducibility of the religious, or of the “sacred,” and the irreducibility of the mythic. First, for Eliade myth is religious myth; therefore, the most common way to violate the irreducibly mythic dimension of the data is to reduce its irreducibly religious structure and function to some nonreligious plane of reference and explanation. This focus on the irreducibility of the religious will be the main concern of chapters 1 and 2. Chapter 3 will examine Eliade's claims about the universal structure of the dialectic of the sacred that defines the irreducibly religious nature of his mythic data.¹ Second, there are claims about the irreducibility of the mythic that go beyond claims about its irreducibly religious nature. All mythic data are religious, but not all religious data are mythic. In chapter 7 it will be seen that there are unique, irreducibly mythic structures, functions, and modes of being in the world that distinguish myth not only from nonreligious but also from other religious phenomena.

Eliade's frequent concern with “reductionism” raises many complex issues. Reductionism has been and continues to be a central methodological and theoretical focus in many scholarly disciplines. It will be important to situate Eliade's antireductionist analysis within some of these larger theoretical debates on reductionism. First, we shall uncover some of the motives and concerns that contributed to Eliade's primary focus on the evils of reductionism and his insistence on an irreducibly religious approach to myth. Emphasized in chapter 1 will be Eliade's formulation of the irreducibility of the sacred. Chapter 2 will then consider some of the criticisms of Eliade's antireductionism that have arisen within the field of history of religions, or Religionswissenschaft, and social scientific approaches to religion.

THE NEED FOR A NEW PROCEDURE

In his so-called antireductionist approach to myth and other religious phenomena, Mircea Eliade has been criticized and praised as a “romantic” scholar who privileges the mythic world of the “primitive” and the “archaic.”² As we shall see, he is very critical of major characteristics of the Western Enlightenment that have defined much of “modernity.” Therefore, it is not surprising that scholars such as Ivan Strenski should characterize Eliade's approach to myth as extolling an irrationalist traditionalism and a “Volkish,” neo-romantic primitivism, one largely devoid of any modern, rigorous, scholarly methodology.³

Nevertheless, Eliade, while appreciating and even defending much of the traditional mythic world view, intends his antireductionist approach to myth to be more advanced than that of earlier scholarly interpretations with which his is often compared. He claims to be avoiding methodological pitfalls of past theories and to be offering new, more adequate interpretations of the meaning of myth, as well as a creative future-oriented response for dealing with personal and even global crises confronting humanity. In his approach to myth, Eliade recognizes profound differences in the modern hermeneutical situation from that of earlier interpreters. In studying myth as part of the scholarly discipline of Religionswissenschaft, he distinguishes what he is doing from the earlier, highly subjective and normative theories of Tylor, Frazer, and other scholars, as well as from the normative approaches defining such disciplines as theology and the philosophy of religion.⁴

As a scholarly historian of religions, Eliade repeatedly claims to use an “empirical” approach to myth and other religious phenomena. The “historian of religions uses an empirical method of approach. He is concerned with religio-historical facts which he seeks to understand and to make intelligible to others.'⁵ The modern scholar begins by collecting mythic and other religious documents, empirical facts that need to be interpreted.⁶ She or he studies myths as factual, empirical phenomena. In siding with R. J. Zwi Werblowsky and others signing the so-called Marburg platform at the Tenth International Congress for the History of Religions in 1960, Eliade agreed that “the common ground on which students of religion qua students of religion meet is the realization that the awareness of the numinous or the experience of transcendence (where these happen to exist in religion) are—whatever else they may be—undoubtedly empirical facts of human experience and history, to be studied like all human facts, by the appropriate methods. Thus also the value systems of the various religions, forming an essential part of the factual, empirical phenomenon, are legitimate objects of our studies.'⁷

A profound difference in the modern hermeneutical situation is seen in the attempt by most contemporary scholars to differentiate their approaches from earlier interpretations that ignored the irreducibly historical nature of the mythic data. “Almost without noticing it, the historian of religions found himself in a cultural milieu quite different from that of Max Müller and Tylor, or even that of Frazer and Marrett [sic]. It was a new environment nourished by Nietzsche and Marx, Dilthey, Croce, and Ortega; an environment in which the fashionable cliché was not Nature but History.”⁸ Modern scholars realize that in studying myth they work exclusively with historical documents. As Eliade affirms in many places, his point of departure is historical data that express mythic and other religious experiences of humankind. Through his phenomenological approach, he attempts to decipher the empirical, historical, mythic data; to describe the phenomena that constitute the mythic world of homo religiosus; and to interpret their religious meaning.

Although Eliade upholds the empirical and historical nature of his approach to myth and occasionally goes out of his way to distinguish what he is doing from the theological, metaphysical, subjective, nonempirical, nonhistorical, and “unscientific” nature of earlier approaches, many critics claim that his own approach is nonempirical and nonhistorical, even antihistorical.⁹ Indeed, some critics compare his approach with that of various uncritical, nineteenth-century generalists whom he claims to reject. They claim that “Eliade, like Frazer, lumps religious beliefs and practices together in a comparative way which ignores the differences and the cultural and historical situations” and that “every methodological error of which Sir James Frazer and his contemporaries have ever been accused is here exhibited in its purest form.”¹⁰

Eliade not only wants to distinguish his approach to myth not only from that of earlier nonempirical and nonhistorical theorists but also from that of twentieth-century, “scientific” empiricists, historicists, and other specialists. He keeps insisting that we need a new theoretical approach, a new hermeneutics more adequate to interpret the meaning of myth and other religious phenomena:

The correct analyses of myths and of mythical thought, of symbols and primordial images, especially the religious creations that emerge from Oriental and “primitive” cultures, are, in my opinion, the only way to open the Western mind and to introduce a new, planetary humanism. These spiritual documents—myths, symbols, divine figures, contemplative techniques, and so on—had previously been studied, if at all, with the detachment and indifference with which nineteenth-century naturalists studied insects. But it has now begun to be realized that these documents express existential situations, and that consequently they form part of the history of the human spirit. Thus, the proper procedure for grasping their meaning is not the naturalist's “objectivity,” but the intelligent sympathy of the hermeneut. It was the procedure itself that had to be changed. For even the strangest or the most aberrant form of behavior must be regarded as a human phenomenon; it cannot be interpreted as a zoological phenomenon or an instance of teratology. This conviction guided my research on the meaning and function of myths, the structure of religious symbols, and in general, of the dialectics of the sacred and the profane.¹¹

This important formulation is typical of claims found throughout Eliade's writings. Usually when he makes these points about the need for a new hermeneutical procedure, qualitatively different from earlier approaches insisting on scholarly “detachment” and “nonhuman” models of “objectivity,” he presents them as part of a critique of “reductionism” and as promoting “the irreducibility of the sacred.”

In an essay on how to understand polarities, oppositions, and antagonisms in archaic and traditional societies, Eliade tells us that we need a hermeneutical effort, not another secular demystification: “Our documents—be they myths or theologies, systems of space divisions or rituals enacted by two antagonistic groups, divine dualities or religious dualism, etc.—constitute, each according to its specific mode of being, so many creations of the human mind.” “We do not have the right to reduce them to something other than what they are, namely spiritual creations. Consequently, it is their meaning and significance that must be grasped.”¹² In short, Eliade frequently attacks earlier and many contemporary interpreters as reductionists, who ignore the irreducibly sacred dimension of their mythic data.

In this introductory section, it has simply been asserted that Mircea Eliade claims to be using an empirical approach to myth, to recognize the historical nature of the mythic data, and to collect mythic religious documents expressing phenomena that need to be described and interpreted. But how does he know which documents to collect, which phenomena to describe and interpret? To answer these and similar questions, we need to introduce several methodological principles in terms of which Eliade can distinguish religious phenomena. The most important principles allowing Eliade to distinguish religious phenomena are the irreducibility of the religious and the dialectic of the sacred and the profane. This chapter considers his criticism of reductionistic approaches to myth and other religious phenomena and his methodological alternative in terms of the irreducibility of the sacred. Chapter 3 will focus on a formulation of Eliade's universal structural criteria for distinguishing religious from nonreligious phenomena.

THE IRREDUCIBILITY OF THE SACRED

This presentation of Eliade's position has referred to his critique of “reductionism” and his insistence on “the irreducibility of the sacred.” Such language reflects Eliade's own formulations. At times, other expressions such as Eliade's “methodological assumption of the irreducibility of the sacred” and his “so-called antireductionist principle” will be used, since my position is that all approaches, including Eliade's, are in certain broad respects necessarily reductionistic.¹³ But not all reductionistic approaches...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series Editor's Foreword
• Preface
• 1 Eliade's Antireductionism
• 2 Reductionistic Critics and Eliade
• 3 The Dialectic of the Sacred
• 4 Nature, Cosmos, and Religious Bias
• 5 Symbolic Language and Structure
• 6 Characteristics and Functions of Symbolism
• 7 The Structure of Myth
• 8 Eliade's Antihistorical Attitudes
• 9 The Primacy of Nonhistorical Structures
• 10 Camouflage of Sacred in Modern Profane
• 11 Cultural and Spiritual Renewal
• Bibliography
• Index