Western Michigan University ScholarWorks at WMU Master's Theses Graduate College 8-1969 History and Archetypes a Critique of Mircea Eliade's Philosophy of History as Applied to a Study of Spatial Orientation in Dante Marilyn J. Hughes Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/masters_theses Part of the Medieval Studies Commons Recommended Citation Hughes, Marilyn J., "History and Archetypes a Critique of Mircea Eliade's Philosophy of History as Applied to a Study of Spatial Orientation in Dante" (1969). Master's Theses. 3043. https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/masters_theses/3043 This Masters Thesis-Open Access is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate College at ScholarWorks at WMU. It has been accepted for inclusion in Master's Theses by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks at WMU. For more information, please contact [email protected]. HISTORY AND ARCHETYPES A CRITIQUE OF MIRCEA ELIADE'S PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY AS APPLIED TO A STUDY OF SPATIAL ORIENTATION IN DANTE by Marilyn J. Hughes A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of the School of Graduate Studies in partial fulfillment of the Degree of Master of Arts Western Michigan University Kalamazoo, Michigan August, 1969 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. MASTER’S THESIS M-2004 HUGHES, Marilyn Joan HISTORY AND ARCHETYPES: A CRITIQUE OF MIRCEA ELIADE'S PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY AS APPLIED TO A STUDY OF SPATIAL ORIENTATION IN DANTE. Western Michigan University, M.A., 1969 History, medieval University Microfilms, Inc., Ann Arbor, Michigan Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. TABLE OF CONTENTS Page INTRODUCTION ................................ 1 Chapter I. THE VIEW OF SPACE OF TRADITIONAL SOCIETY ..................................... 14 The Feeling of Being Lost in the Vast Chaos of Indeterminate Space ............. 15 How Traditional Man Discovers Sacred S p a c e ..................................... 27 The Center of the World Conception In Traditional Society ................. 35 II. JERUSALEM AS CENTER OF THE WORLD FOR DANTE ....................................... 45 Jerusalem as Sanctified by Hierophanies and Signs ................. 45 Jerusalem as Axis Mundi and Meeting Place of Earth, Heaven, and Hell .... 54 Jerusalem as Cosmic Mountain and the Story of the F l o o d .............. 65 Jerusalem as Site of the Cosmogony and Navel of the W o r l d ..............72 A Special Problem: Dante's Non-spatial God Spatially Located "Out There" . 98 Dante1s God is an immaterial God beyond time and s p a c e ............99 Does Dante1s cosmology in any wav contradict his immaterial God? .... 105 Is Dante's cosmology, then, just an accomodation to our sense faculties? . ......................... 108 ii Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Chapter Page What is a contradiction for us was not a contradiction for Dante .... 120 Within the Cosmos— Church, Commune, House— Did Dante Orient Himself in Relation to Jerusalem?............. 125 Did Jerusalem Maintain Its Sacredness for Dante Nearly Thirteen Centuries after the Resurrection?............... 136 C o n c l u s i o n .............................. 147 III. ROME AS CENTER OF THE WORLD FOR DANTE . 159 Dante Considered Rome Sacred: The Textual Evidence ..................... 159 How Rome Had Been Sanctified According to D a n t e ................... 169 Rome: Sacred Place, Sacred People, Sacred Empire, Sacred Church, or H e a v e n ? ............................ 195 The Role of Italy in Dante's View of Space .......................... 215 Comments on Methodology................. 229 IV. MIRCEA ELIADE'S ANALYSIS OF THE TRADITIONAL AND MODERN VIEWS OF SPACE: PROFITS AND DRAWBACKS OF ITS APPLICATION TO MEDIEVAL THOUGHT .......... 232 A General Methodological Critique of Mircea Eliade ..................... 232 Comparison of cultures at similar levels of development with regard to their historical aspects .......... 232 Comparison of cultures at similar levels of development with regard to their non-historical. archetypal aspects ................. 236 ill Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Chapter Page The traditional-modern continuum and Eliade's philosophy of h i s t o r y .............................. 244 Universals common to all men— traditional survivals in the modern unconscious ................. 254 Profits and Drawbacks of Applying Mircea Eliade1s Method to Dante's View of Space ......................... 273 Towards a Rapprochement................. 286 BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................... 295 iv Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. INTRODUCTION Whether he is willing to admit it or not, a scholar always starts a rese; rch project with certain theoretical choices and biases, with preconceived notions about what the research will discover, and with a Weltanschauung that con­ ditions his perception of the data. As some would have it, the researcher's theoretical "prejudices" cause him to pigeonhole the data, to force the facts to fit the theories; indeed, some researchers do just that— one anthropologist of note has so far refused to publish the data from his field research because it conflicted with what his theoretical assumptions told him he should find, the anthropologist con­ cluding that he must have done something wrong in the way he collected the data rather than assuming that the theory needed to be thrown out. Examples of such obstinate clinging to theories no matter what lends justification to those who argue that one ought to proceed to the data with a theoreti­ cal tabula rasa, but, it is only a partial justification. There is no such thing as scientific objectivity in the utopian sense of the term. It is part of the human condi­ tion that any methodology adopted by a scholar is limited in the questions it can answer, and that the truths it establishes are only tentative formulations. Truth is a process, a gradual growth of man's consciousness and differentiation, 1 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 2 conceptualization, and organization of reality; truth is therefore always relative and cannot be retained unless it 1 grows. In addition to his general frame of reference or Weltanschauung and his unconscious theoretical assumptions, a scholar must have made certain conscious theoretical choices at the beginning or early stages of his research; otherwise his research has no direction. One must have theories, albeit theories he is willing to relinquish or revise in favor of superior formulations, or else he has no questions to ask of the data. And if he has no questions to ask, then he does not know what to look for, the enterprise thus becoming a chaotic one. Although there is the danger that he will dis­ tort the data by seeing what he expects to find, if he tries to see everything the quality of his perception becomes so diluted that there is a sense in which he sees nothing at all. Most researchers have some personal stake in the re­ sults of the research; that is, they are motivated to study what they study because they hope the answer they find will reinforce their own philosophy of life, back up the findings of their previous professional publications, or in some other way reward them for their efforts. If the motivation is strong enough it can be a distorting factor. However, in ^1 am here following Leslie Dewart, The Future of Belief; Theism in a World Come of Age (New York: Herder and Herder, 1966), 90-96. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 3 an article on the psychology of creativity, Rollo May sug­ gests that it is precisely when the creative person is most emotionally involved with his project that his intellectual 2 faculties are most alert and his observations most objective. These general statements will establish a frame of reference for understanding the methodology of Mircea Eliade and my critique of it, a critique evolving during the course of this thesis and explicitly formulated in the conclusion. Eliade's and my research take place in different mental en­ vironments. My Weltanschauung is an "historicist" view and his is a "religious” view (his terms), and these a priori differences create widely disparate results. Eliade clearly 3 sees fallacies m the histories position, and without 4 attempting to directly refute histoncism, he attempts m his works to outline the historical phenomena which (properly interpreted) constitute a superior alternative to historicism. M. Eliade has dedicated his life to demonstrating the im­ poverished experience of the "secular" or "profane" man as 2 Rollo May, "The Nature of Creativity," in Creativity and Its Cultivation, ed. H. H. Anderson (New York: Harper & Row, 1959), 64-65. "*See especially Eliade's analysis of "The Difficulties of Historicism," in Mircea Eliade, Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return, trans. Willard Trask (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1959), 147-54. See also the concluding chapter to this thesis. 4 . Mircea Eliade, Images and Symbols: Studies in Religious Symbolism, trans. Philip Mairet (New York: Sheed & Ward, n. d. /orig. 19617), 32. __ Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction