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Mircea Eliade's Vision for a New Humanism This Page Intentionally Left Blank Mircea Eliade's Vision for a New Humanism Mircea Eliade's Vision for a New Humanism This page intentionally left blank Mircea Eliade's Vision for a New Humanism DAVID CAVE New York Oxford OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 1993 Oxford University Press Oxford New York Toronto Delhi Bombay Calcutta Madras Karachi Kuala Lumpur Singapore Hong Kong Tokyo Nairobi Dar es Salaam Cape Town Melbourne Auckland Madrid and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan Copyright © 1993 by David Cave Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 200 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Cave, David. Mircea Eliade's vision for a new humanism / David Cave. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-19-507434-3 1. Eliade, Mircea, 1907- 2. Humanism—20th century, 3. Religion. 4. Man. I. Title. BL43.E4C38 1993 291'.092-—dc20 91-39810 135798642 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper To Peggy, faithful companion, wonderful friend, and loving wife This page intentionally left blank PREFACE I first became acquainted with Eliade through his autobiography. What amazed me was how driven he was in his need to create, which for him meant to write from the enormous range of his readings and his multiform experi- ences. Eliade wrote broadly. He had an obsessive need to create an oeuvre. From the journalistic and apologetic to the literary and the scholarly, Eliade wrote in all genres for all audiences. Yet behind this body of work an interpretive schema and visionary impulse cohered, stabilized, and directed his life. Eliade interpreted his life, as he would all human life, as being mythological in structure. Humans undergo repeated initiations in the pursuit of meaning. This mythological thrust to human life interested me. But what interested me more was the nature of the vision and impulse that inspired and drove him as a humanist. This study is a prolegomenon to the visionary impulse behind Eliade's prolix life. It also looks at how Eliade foresaw this impulse for culture at large, the audience to whom Eliade ultimately directed his writings. In helping me refine and sober my initial readings of Eliade and initiate me into the complexities and controversies surrounding him, I am grateful to a number of people. Now at Baylor University, John Jonsson encouraged me to consider researching the thought of Eliade. Glen Stassen and E. Glenn Hin- son, at Southern Seminary, commented on the initial drafts of each chapter and on the final manuscript. At the University of Chicago, Jerald Brauer, Joseph Kitagawa, Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty, and Paul Wheatley provided helpful perspectives on the life and thought of Eliade. The late Ioan Culianu confirmed my research direction at a time when I needed it, read the entire manuscript, and encouraged its publication. I am grateful for what he did and am grieved that such an eminent scholar and warm human being should have been so tragically taken from us. Special thanks goes to Lawrence Sullivan at Harvard University. From when he first instructed me when I was a visiting student at the University of Chicago to when he read the entire text, Sullivan's comments were indispens- able for giving me and others confidence in the manuscript. viii Preface At Indiana University, Matei Calinescu taught me how to appreciate and read Eliade's fantastic literature. He also alerted me to upcoming and existing studies on Eliade. Mac Linscott Ricketts, at Louisburg College, carefully read and edited the entire manuscript. He offered helpful suggestions and criticisms. When I wrote to him for information on Eliade's Romanian years, he promptly re- sponded with valuable material. To Ed Linenthal at the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh, I owe a word of thanks. He urged me to follow through with my revisions and affirmed my labors when I was feeling guilty for giving too much attention to the book at the expense of other obligations. Also at Oshkosh, I am grateful to Betty Dickinson for helping me in the mechanics of computer operation and in the use of new software. Indeed, the entire Religious Studies department at Oshkosh was a timely support group during the year I taught there and went through the lonely ordeal of the work of writing and revising. Lastly, but always firstly and faithfully, I am grateful to my wife, Peggy. She has put up with many sacrifices, always, though, with devoted patience and understanding. And to Jonathan, our two-year-old, I am also grateful. His presence reminds me of what is finally most important. Fort Mitchell, Ky. D.C. April 1992 CONTENTS 1 Introduction, 3 Biography of Eliade, 6 Nature of This Book, 12 2 The New Humanism as a Hermeneutics of a "Participatory Morphology" and as a Spiritual Vision, 14 A Hermeneutics of a "Participatory Morphology," 14 The New Humanism as a Spiritual Vision, 25 3 The Nature of the Human Condition: Humans as Symbolic, 32 The Character of Symbolic Existence, 33 The New Humanism as Dialectical and Incarnational, 35 As a Cosmic Spirituality, 41 The New Humanism and the Relation to the Whole, 54 4 The Nature of the Human Condition: The Human as Mythic and as Homo Religiosus, 65 Humans as Mythic, 66 Humans Make and Live in Myth, 67 The New Humanism as Transhistorical, 72 The New Humanism Patterned After Exemplary Models, 81 The New Humanism Patterned After Communitarian Models, 90 The Human Being as Homo Religiosus, 92 5 The Goals of the New Humanism, 103 Humans as Authentic, 104 Humans as Free, 119 Humans as Cultural, 127 Humans at the Center, 140 x Contents 6 The Challenges of the New Humanism, 169 Humans as Creative, 170 Humans and Initiation, 178 The New Humanism: A Science, 185 7 Conclusion, 192 Summary of Intent, 192 Appraisal of Findings, 194 BIBLIOGRAPHY, 197 INDEX, 211 Mircea Eliade's Vision for a New Humanism This page intentionally left blank 1 Introduction Despite the great number of works on the late historian of religion and write! Mircea Eliade, there is the need for another book. For no book that I have seer has adequately dealt with the visionary impulse behind the totality of Eliade's prolific and manifold life work, as both a scholar and writer. This visionary impulse I identify as his hope for a new humanism. Certainly many studies devoted to Eliade have scrutinized his theoretical assumptions, have dug for his elusive methodology, have highlighted his contributions to the already large corpus on myth and religious symbolism, explored the existential impli- cations to his sacred/profane cosmology, and—perhaps most consistently— have responded to his interpretation of history. And to Eliade the writer of novels, short stories, and plays, the above themes and intentions have been equally applied as well. Literary critics have analyzed Eliade's style, content, plot and character development, use of genre and paralleled these to other writers. In short, Eliade has been approached from many directions. Left to themselves, these studies hardly offer a cohesive picture of Eliade Moreover, some of the criticisms brought against him are misaligned because they fail to take Eliade for what he was trying to do. So if we are to find any cohesion to this diversity and realign many of the criticisms, it is essential to position Eliade around that which motivated his life work: a hope for a new humanity. I do not claim this is his only impulse. But I do believe it is the most encompassing and persistent. Not only is a book necessary to reposition Eliade, but there is also room for demonstrating the relevance of his thought and methodological orientation to issues circulating today in and outside the academy of religion. Certainly pluralism in all its varieties—religious, cultural and ethnic, socio-political, linguistic, disciplinary, methodological—with relativism and fragmentation as its side effects, is a stimulating, creative, yet often divisive problem in the academy and in popular culture. Canon formation, the reading and use of other 3 4 Mircea Eliade's Vision for a New Humanism peoples' texts and myths—be it from feminists, deconstructionists, funda- mentalists—the soundness of one methodology or assumption over another, conversations (or lack of) between disparate fields, moral and cultural relativ- ism, these and other dynamics interpenetrate the problematics of pluralism. To the creative yet problematic opportunities of pluralism, Eliade has something to say. To another contemporary issue, Eliade's interpretation of symbols as tied to cosmic structures and rhythms is appropriate to current and ongoing ecological concerns. Less concerned with the physical threat to human surival, Eliade's understanding of symbols addresses the importance of ecology as a paradigm within which humans define themselves as human beings and orient their existential sense of place. For, at least for the present, there is only one habitable world, and all humans live on it, regardless of whether they con- sciously see it as having meaning for them or not. Ecology or landscape affects our hermeneutics. There is the need, then, to take seriously a "hermeneutics of landscape."1 Yet this "hermeneutics of landscape" is today less defined by the natural world as by the modern city and the electronic world of communications and its array of artifical images. However beneficial and destructive the modern city and electronic communications are, it cannot be denied that humans rely less on the natural landscape to interpret their place in the world and center themselves accordingly.
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