Eliade, Mircea (1907–1986)

Mircea Eliade was one of the founders of the modern academic field of history of religions and was a pillar of the University of Chicago's school of comparative religious studies from 1958 to 1986. Eliade was a prodigious Romanian novelist who survived World War II as an exiled fascist cultural attaché before becoming the most influential founder of religious studies in the United States.

As an attempt to bridge East and West and archaic and modern, Eliade's scholarship encourages cultural dialogue and a respect for the power of symbols and history. His critics allege that generalizations about ethnic and religious communities for the sake of comparison minimize the important roles that conflicts and politics play in religion. His support for fascism in Europe before World War II combined with his writings about the revolutionary power of nostalgia seem to endorse violence despite his nonpolitical humanistic stance.

As a high school student in Bucharest, Eliade published a hundred articles and taught himself multiple languages in his parents' attic. He trained [Page 338]him self to sleep 5 hours a night and wrote fiction for relaxation, eventually becoming one of Romania's most famous novelists. While studying the influence of Neoplatonism on Italian Renaissance philosophy in Rome after college, Eliade wrote to the Maharaja of Kassimbazar, who sponsored 3 years of study in the home of the famous Hindu philosopher Surendranath Dasgupta in Calcutta. According to his autobiography, Eliade desired “to become truly ‘Indian'” before he was expelled from the house for seducing his mentor's daughter Maitreyi.

While “in the field,” Eliade combined his textual study of Sanskrit, scripture, and philosophy with yoga techniques in a Himalayan ashram near Rishikesh, where he “awoke at daybreak and bathed in the Ganges, just a few meters from my kutiar.” At age 25, back in Romania, he served a brief mandatory stint in an artillery unit despite his poor eyesight. Later, Eliade participated in Christian nationalist political efforts, where he opposed both the proletariat and the aristocracy; instead, he considered it best to have a fascist dictator lead the modernization of the nation since democracy required too much patience. First imprisoned by King Carol II for 4 months, he was then “exiled” as cultural attaché to London in time to survive the Blitz. After his wife died of cancer in Lisbon in 1944 and the war ended, Eliade was reborn a nonpolitical, humanistic educator through what he called a “spiritual resurrection.”

An intellectual trying to bridge East and West, primitive and modern, Eliade was well positioned to heal Westerners distressed by the Holocaust and the H-bomb's devaluation of human life, using romanticism and reason. With a variety of languages and 3 years of Hindu practice to his credit, along with the discipline to synthesize large amounts of scholarship, Eliade tried to resacralize the West using Eastern and archaic wisdom. As he told his interviewer, recruited by Georges Dumézil to teach at the Sorbonne, Eliade had his greatest impact following Joachim Wach at the University of Chicago, where he was to train half of America's distinguished chairs of religious studies between 1958 and 1986.

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