The Sacred and the Profane. The essence of religious man...
Written: Oct 17 '04
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Pros: Clear structure; insightful examples; involving analysis; an excellent introduction to Eliade's work.
Cons: None.
The Bottom Line: This is a must-read book for anyone even remotely interested in the religious experience.
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| platonism's Full Review: Mircea Eliade - The Sacred and the Profane: The Na... |
Strictly speaking, there is no 'best choice' as to which book offers the most satisfying introduction to Mircea Eliade's work as an historian of religions (he has also written a lot of fiction, and several autobiographies/journals). From Patterns in Comparative Religion in 1949 to his later books more than thirty years later, his body of work is remarkably cohesive: every successive book refines and expands a select set of themes.
Many readers got their first taste of Eliade with The Sacred and the Profane (1956). It is easy to understand why: at 180 pages, it is a shorter read than Eliade's other books; more importantly, it tackles the most crucial of all Eliadian notions – hierophanies, myths and symbols, cults/rites/initiations, the religious underpinnings of many secular movements/activities, etc. This influential book is thus as good an introduction to Eliade as any.
The essence of religious man: from Otto to Eliade
The Sacred and the Profane was expressively written as an introduction to the history of religions. Still, the book is anything but a dry manual. The aim of Eliade is not to introduce the reader to a particular field, that of religious studies. While Eliade accepts the tag 'historian of religions', he is not writing an history of religions in the strict sense of the word: in fact, historical and cultural conditioning play a very small role in The Sacred and the Profane. Instead of analyzing religious forms chronologically or nationally, he contends that the essence of homo religiosus (religious man) somehow transcends history; in other words, to be religious is to showcase several recurrent traits, no matter what era or culture this or that individual religious man takes part in. Homo religiosus encompasses a wide variety of beliefs and practices, but his mode of being is consistent. To study homo religiosus is not to fancy an external, impersonal perspective on dated myths and rites, but it enables one to delineate a way of life.
To understand Eliade's approach, one must point out the 20th century emergence of the phenomenology of religions. The first crucial work in that regard is undoubtedly Rudolf Otto's The Idea of the Holy (1917), which I have already reviewed. In that book, Otto studies what he deems the experience of the numinous – the primordial religious feeling or emotion. This emotion is that of mystery, awe, fear, fascination (Otto uses such terms as mysterium tremendum, fascinans, majestas); the numinous cannot be described, but only lived and felt. Subsequent explanations of this primordial experience – myths, theological and philosophical doctrines, a belief in daemons and angels, etc. – are conceptual elaborations of an irrational feeling. And it is this irrational aspect of religion that preoccupies Otto in his book.
At the beginning of The Sacred and the Profane, Eliade assesses Otto's pioneering book. Much like Otto, Eliade is more interested in the primordial, pre-conceptual experience than in its later rationalizations. But as his book's title implies, his perspective is less that of the rational/irrational relationship than that of the sacred/profane dialectic, which had been introduced forty years earlier by French sociologist Emile Durkheim. After all, Eliade wants to understand the life experience of homo religiosus. This life experience encounters hierophanies – that is, when the sacred (hieros in Greek) reveals itself (phainein). The sacred can only be sacred if it is surrounded by the profane. The sacred is reality in its purest sense – only the sacred truly is for homo religiosus.
The many guises of the sacred
Throughout The Sacred and the Profane, Eliade proceeds to consider some of the main guises of the sacred. He fittingly begins by exploring the notion of sacred space. Homo religiosus experiences space as non-homogenous: that is, some of it is sacred and exists in the strongest sense of the word, while some of it is without form. Much like a church's threshold is set between the sacred (inside) and the profane (outside), the very home of homo religiosus exhibits this dichotomy. Eliade goes on to show how cosmogony (the creation/generation of the world) is repeated, re-enacted in (for example) an extension of territory or the thrashing of a new soil: Chaos is transformed into Cosmos (cosmos in Greek not only means 'world', but also 'order'). Temples and cathedrals are themselves images/copies of transcendent models, and they sustain the cosmos' sacredness.
The two types of space find their equivalent in the two types of time. For homo religiosus, profane moments of no religious significance are interrupted by celebrations or rites which regenerate sacred time. While profane time cannot be reversed, sacred time is recreated with each celebration; profane time is thus abolished, transcended. Myths have recorded what has happened as the world came to be, and act as a guide for homo religiosus: myths are not only learned, but lived; homo religiosus accomplishes himself only insofar as he lives up to his transhuman model. The religious man must re-enact his mythical past because the true sin would be to forget one's archaic origins. The myth of the eternal return, to which Eliade has devoted a book, emphasizes this notion of time that strays away from continuous, irreversible profane time.
Sacred space ensures that Nature is not exclusively 'natural', that it is filled with religious symbols. Contemplation of the sky is itself a religious experience, since it registers as transcendent, wholly other; this is closely related to the notion of remote gods, i.e. gods who, after the creation of the cosmos, withdrew to the heavens and let their more dynamic mediators complete cosmogony (this pattern can be seen in countless myths, including Plato's cosmogonic myth in the Timaeus and in Hermetism). Natural symbolism also concerns water, earth, trees, stones, the moon and the sun, all of which can be hierophanies and reveal the sacred.
The rebirth of modern man
Eliade uses the word 'primitive' a few times in The Sacred and the Profane, but never in a pejorative sense. It is quite the opposite: he tries to show how the so-called primitive man lived a total life. Eliade has written in other books that homo religiosus is the total man: that is, he is someone whose every word and gesture carries the utmost signification, whereas modern man, living in a desacralized cosmos, usually acts with purely utilitarian goals.
It is always clear that Eliade sides with archaic man, and not with modern man. In his Journal, Eliade has often mentioned that time was a burden for him, and that he has strived to transcend it for as long as he could remember. This does not lead to a reactionary break with modernity: in the last ten pages of The Sacred and the Profane, Eliade emphasizes the religious underpinnings of distinctively modern movements/activities, from Marxism to popular literature, film and psychoanalysis. Eliade contends that a thorough understanding of homo religiosus and what remains of that figure in the secular world could lead to a rebirth of modern man. As he suggests in the book's final chapter, the human life itself, with its daily trials, dreams, pains and joys, brims with religious symbols. To flesh out these implicit motifs is to connect with universal symbols – to leave one's individual, isolated vantage point and embrace a more universal point of view. In that vein, you might want to read an Eliade-influenced piece I have written about video games: Philosophico-religious musings about video games.
Towards a new humanism
In The Sacred and the Profane as in all of his other books, Eliade dares to be a humanist and rejects both nihilistic pessimism and outrageous positivism. He suggests that the historian of religions should go beyond merely historical research, and practice creative hermeneutics: in other words, the fruits of his work can have a cultural function for modern man, and are not remote, detached pursuits. For him, there is no such thing as a completely detached inquiry in religious studies: the documents must of course be used seriously and critically and the historian of religions should stay informed of discoveries outside of his own discipline, but a religious experience can only be understood if one sympathizes with it, considers it in its own terms and does not try to reduce it to purely psychological or sociological causes. Such an inquiry has the potential to forever alter the life of the researcher because he/she chooses to open him/herself to other traditions and beliefs. It is a testament to Eliade's greatness that The Sacred and the Profane can have the exact same effect on the reader.
Recommended:
Yes
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platonism
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