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: Contemporary Approaches of Mircea Eliade,

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1. Mircea Eliade (1907-1986)

Mircea Eliade was born in Bucharest, Romania. 1 Mircea Eliade was a historian of
religions, humanist, orientalist, philosopher, and a creative writer. 2 Mircea Eliade claimed
that religion has to be understood at its own level on the grounds that this is to go against the
spirit of the scientific enquiry into religion and in effect to exclude explanation in favour of
implicitly theological assertion.3 Also, Mircea Eliade says of the significance of religious
symbols: “we do not have the right to conclude that the message of the symbols is confined to
the meanings of which a certain number of individuals are fully conscious, even when we
learn from a rigorous investigation of these individuals what they think of such and such a
symbol belonging to their own tradition. Depth psychology has taught us that the symbols
delivers its message and fulfils its function even when its meaning escapes awareness.”
Mircea Eliade’s equation of his interpretation of religion with the believer’s point of view
thus remains arbitrary.4

1.1. Mircea Eliade’s Phenomenology

In Mircea Eliade's conception, religion “does not necessarily imply belief in God,
gods, or ghosts, but refers to the experience of the sacred.” The sacred and profane are “two
modes of being in the world, two existential situations assumed by man in the course of
history.” What is most characteristic of religion is its being occupied with the sacred, which it
distinguishes from the profane. The sacred may be described as that which is experienced as
“power” (Van Der Leeuw), as “wholly other” (Otto), as “ultimate reality” (Wach). In other
religious contexts it is described by such terms as “absolute reality,” “being,” “eternity,”
“divine,” “source of life and fecundity and others.”5
For Mircea Eliade, the historian of religions must also be concerned with the structure
of religious phenomena because such structures are non-temporal. In this sense, the historian
of religions must go beyond the ordinary historian. Rather than simply reconstructing an
1
Carl Olson, Theory and Method in the Study of Religion: A Selection of Critical Readings (Belmont:
Wadsworth, Cengage Learning, 2003), 158, hereafter Olson, Theory and Method in the Study of Religion.
2
Samuel Longkumer, A Reader in Primal Religious Traditions and Their Selected Movement in India
(Kolkata: Authors, 2012), 21.
3
Gavin Flood, Beyond Phenomenology: Rethinking the Study of Religion (London: Cassell, 1999), 88.
4
Robert A. Seagal, “In Defence of Reductionism,” The Insider/Outsider Problem in the Study of
Religion, edited by Russell T. McCutcheon (London: Cassell, 1999), 141.
5
Allen, “Mircea Eliade's Phenomenological Analysis of Religious Experience.”
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event, historian of religions must discern the history of a particular manifestation reveals.
Before historians of religions can isolate and comprehend the structure of a religious form,
they must examine all the historical examples possible. This suggests that the history of
religions is by nature an encyclopaedic approach to its subject. Thus, Mircea Eliade
understands the science of religion in a very broad sense of the term because it embraces
phenomenology and philosophy of religion without neglecting the historically concrete.6

1.2. Mircea Eliade’s Comparative Approach

Mircea Eliade was a phenomenologist more concerned with historical development of
religions. Mircea Eliade’s comparative method is that of phenomenological typology. His
concentration was on the ‘archaic expressions of religious experience.’ Thomas L. Benson
says that, “he saw these expressions as archetypal responses to the presence of the sacred in
this worldly objects and in events that is cyclic rather that sequential,” Mircea Eliade’s ideas
can be understood from his classic work The Sacred and the Profane. Here he discussed that
“man becomes aware of the sacred because it manifests itself, shows itself, as something
wholly different from the profane.” With regard to the origin and development of religion he
said, “The history of religions- from the most primitive to the most highly developed- is
constituted by a great number of hierophanies, by manifestations of sacred realities.” For him
the sacred and the profane are two modes of being in the world, rather ‘two existential
situations assumed by man in the course of his history.7
Firstly, he argued for “the irreducibility of the sacred.” He believed that religious
phenomena must be understood as uniquely and irreducibly religious. Mircea Eliade
frequently criticized those who attempted to reduce religion to psychological, social,
economic, historical, or other nonreligious phenomena. According to him, they failed to do
justice to the unique, irreducible essence of religious experience: the sacred.8
Secondly, the religions can be distinguished from the secular because it expresses a
universal, essential structure that Mircea Eliade called the “dialectic of the sacred and the
profane,” or the “dialectic of hierophanies” (manifestations of the sacred in the world). This
dialectic involves the experience of the transcendent in which the sacred (infinite, eternal,
non historical) paradoxically manifests itself through ordinarily profane (finite, temporal,

6
Olson, Theory and Method in the Study of Religion, 158-159.
7
S. Robertson, Approaching Religion in a Pluralistic context (Bangalore: BTESSC, 2011), 41.
8
Douglas Allen, “Mircea Eliade,” in https://www.britannica.com/biography/Mircea-Eliade, 19 Feb
2020.
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historical) phenomena. Mircea Eliade’s approach is also grounded in his claim that there are
essential, universal, coherent, symbolic systems that provide the framework for interpreting
religious meaning. Religious language is symbolic, always pointing beyond itself to
transcendent sacred meanings. Mircea Eliade understood human beings as religious beings
(homo religious) and as symbolic beings (homo symbolicus). Human beings necessarily use
language to express themselves, and it is the capacity to express things with symbolic
language that allows humans to experience deeper meanings and to unify experiences in
terms of coherent, symbolic, structural worlds of meaning. As symbolic, religious beings,
humans were also viewed by Mircea Eliade as “mythic beings.” Myths are symbolic, sacred
narratives of what took place in primordial, mythic time. They provide exemplary sacred
stories that allow religious people to make sense of and deal with their existential crises, such
as experiences of our historical and temporal limitations, of senseless suffering and arbitrary
and tragic death, and of alienation and the lack of deep meaning in our lives.9
Finally, it should be noted that Mircea Eliade was not a detached scholar. He was
deeply concerned about what he perceived as the arrogance and provincialism of modern
Western culture. Declaring that there was an urgent need for a “cultural renewal” and a “new
humanism,” he held that individuals should reconceived themselves as global or planetary
beings. He called for a “creative hermeneutics” that would decipher the sacred hidden in the
modern profane and establishes a dialogue with the symbols, myths, and religious phenomena
of non-Western cultures.10

9
Douglas Allen, “Mircea Eliade,” in https://www.britannica.com/biography/Mircea-Eliade,

10
Douglas Allen, “Mircea Eliade,” in https://www.britannica.com/biography/Mircea-Eliade,