From Reality to Subject: A Sympathetic, Yet Critical Reading of Eliade

Authors

• TEUVO LAITILA University of Joensuu

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.33356/temenos.4626

Abstract

Mircea Eliade is, or at least has been, the most heavily crticised scholar of religions. A number of critics have been discontented with his 'uncritical' way of using data to illustrate or assert his insights. It has been said that Eliade's presuppositions about the nature of reality and religion are not scientific but metaphysical or theological. Eliade's sympathisers, on the other hand, have tried to show that he does after all have a method, and that a careful reading demonstrates that either his presuppositions are no more unscientific that those of anyone else or they can be rethought in a scientifically acceptable way. My starting point is both sympathetic and critical. My question is, what is Eliade actually attempting to understand when he states that he wants to understand religion at its own level? He himself states that he wants to unmask the 'revelations' of the sacred, or - as he also says - the transcendent, and their significance for modern man, who has lost his comprehension of both the sacred and its meaning. This he can do, he argues, by recapturing the way in which 'primitive' and 'archaic' cultures and ancient and modern traditions outside mainstream religions have used symbols to establish a patterned, harmonised view of the world, or - as Eliade prefers to say - reality. Both Eliade's critics and his sympathisers presumably agree that Eliade's presuppositions include statements about the 'essence' of religion, about the nature of reality, and about the ways religion operates, or should operate, in human life, or mode-of-being-in-the-world; they also agree that one of Eliade's main concern in religious studies is with symbols. In my article, I deal with these four points (essence, reality, mode-of-being and symbols), proposing a reading of Eliade which emphasises the scholar's encounter with the subject and not the 'essence' of the matter under study. In my conclusion I suggest that studying the ways in which humans use symbols, which they connect with the 'real' to construct a 'mode-of-being' - or, as William Paden put it, a 'world' - is one way of going 'beyond' Eliade.