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The Row Boat"Had we but world enough, and time..." *
Eliade Over Cocktails4/21/2007 00:12:27Some thoughts about Mircea Eliade, the Romanian scholar who is more than anybody responsible for the academic study of religion in North America. So I'm at this conference in Sacramento and at the pleasant little cocktail hour I meet this woman from Romania at UC Davis and use it as an opportunity to interrogate her about Mircea Eliade. At first she didn't know who Murchaya Eleeahduh was but when she realized that I was talking about Mircea Eliade she knew exactly who I was talking about. She was aware of him mainly through his novels (as well as his history of religions, which her parents had but was repressed under the communist government). In the course of talking with her two angles on his life and work struck me as important, pertaining particularly to thinking about the relation between biography and work. The first thing she thought of was the story Bryan Rennie mentions (in Micrea Eliade: A Critical Reader) where Eliade has an affair with his Indian teacher's daughter. He writes a novel about the whole thing, then the daughter writes one in reply! What my interlocutor emphasized, though, was the way that Eliade writes about her. His erotic fascination with her was founded in her total sense of dependence on the transcendent sacred. Hearing this struck me suddenly with the tremendous erotics in Eliade's account of the sacred and, in particular, his account of the "archaic." It might be interested (if it hasn't been done) to do a paper connecting the way he talks about his woman from his youth and his theoretical construct of the sacred. The second was the politics. I asked my friend whether Eliade was someone everyone in Romania read, say, in high school. She stopped me and said, well, she grew up half under the communist regime, where anything related to religion was banned. When she said this it struck me how profoundly opposed Eliade's homo religiosus is to the political ideology that overcame his country. For Marx, religion is an illusion, a false consciousness, and a blight on human nature. For Eliade, in total contrast, religion is the essence of human nature, which was once understood to be the only possible access to the really real. It is the modern "man" claiming to have surpassed religion who lives in a false consciousness. We should not underestimate the psychological significance of one's work being banned in one's own country. Since he sat in a chair at Chicago we assume his audience must have been the Western European and American colonial project of religious studies, but it is worthwhile not to ignore the silent audience of my friend's family, who kept copies of Eliade's books in their house even though they were forbidden. (And then of course there are the weird theologico-psychoanalytic worlds of the Bollingen and Erasnos Foundations that funded his publications.) I submit these remarks to elaborate on my growing sense that Eliade the scholar should not be separated from Eliade the artist, the maker. For those of us in religious studies, when we see something to be "constructive" and blatantly ideological rather than purely academic we assume it is "theology." But I think to simply call him theological is an oversimplification of a larger erotic-artistic-political set of crypto-messages at work. |
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