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Eliade's Progressional View of Hierophanies1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Stephen J. Reno
Stephen J. Reno
Affiliation:
Lecturer in Phenomenology and History of Religion, University of Leicester
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Extract

The purpose of this essay is to present a brief description and evaluation of Mircea Eliade's interpretation of religious symbols with an eye to certain methodological difficulties. Professor Eliade characterises the procedure of the historian of religions as being uniquely preoccupied with religious symbols, that is, with those symbols which are involved in both the experience of homo religiosus and in his conception of the cosmos. As an historian of religions Eliade's own approach has consistently been to study religious symbols from a position that is not reductionist. Although admitting the influence of cultural and environmental factors upon the formulation of religious symbols, he has been primarily concerned to discern the typical structures or types of religious experience and expression by a consideration of religious phenomena. In his own words, he has attempted to study ‘the conceptions of being and reality that can be read from the behaviour of man of the premodern societies’.

Type
Articles
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 8 , Issue 2 , June 1972 , pp. 153 - 160
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1972

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References

page 153 note 2 Eliade, Mircea, ‘Methodological Remarks on the Study of Religious Symbolism’, in The History of Religions: Essays in Methology, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1959, p. 88.Google Scholar

page 153 note 3 Eliade, Mircea, Cosmos and History, The Myth of the Eternal Return, New York, Harper and Row, Harper Torchbook edition, 1959, p. 3.Google Scholar

page 154 note 1 For example, Eliade observes, ‘If one goes to the trouble of penetrating the authentic meaning of an archaic myth or symbol, one cannot but observe that this meaning shows a recognition of a certain situation in the cosmos and that, consequently, it implies a metaphysical position.’ Cosmos and History, p. 3. See also, Eliade, Mircea, Images and Symbols, Studies in Religious Symbolism, New York, Sheed and Ward, 1961, p. 12.Google Scholar

page 154 note 2 Eliade, Mircea, Sacred and Profane: The Nature of Religion, New York, Harper and Row, Harper Torchbook edition, 1961, p. 11.Google Scholar

page 154 note 3 Eliade, Mircea, Patterns in Comparative Religion, Cleveland, World Publishing Company, 1963, p. 10.Google Scholar Originally appeared as Traite d'histoire des religions, Paris, Payot, 1964. Hereafter this work will be referred to as Patterns.

page 154 note 4 Eliade, Mircea, Sacred and Profane, p. 21.Google Scholar For additional remarks concerning the hierophany, see op. cit. pp. 12, 14, 26, 28, 36, 63–4, 117, 115–58; also Patterns, pp. 23–33, 446–8.

page 154 note 5 Eliade, , Patterns, pp. 23–4.Google Scholar

page 154 note 6 Ibid., p. 13.

page 155 note 1 Eliade, , Patterns, p. 13.Google Scholar

page 155 note 2 Eliade, , Patterns, p. 26.Google Scholar See also, Myths, Dreams and Mysteries, New York, Harper and Row, Harper Torchbook edition, 1961, pp. 12–13.Google Scholar

page 155 note 3 Eliade, , Patterns, p. 25.Google Scholar

page 155 note 4 Ibid. It is interesting to note that in his treatment of the dialectic of mythical consciousness, Ernst Cassirer considers the phenomenon of ‘revaluation’ from the perspective of a ‘higher’ religious awareness. He observes, ‘In the moment when the religious function, having discovered the world of pure inwardness, withdraws from the world of outward, natural existence, this existence loses its soul, as it were, and is degraded to the level of a dead “thing”.… The sensuous image and the whole sensuous phenomenal world must be divested of their symbolic meaning, for this alone makes possible the new deepening of pure religious subjectivity which can no longer be expressed in any material image.’ The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Vol. II, ‘Mythical Thought’, part iv, ‘The Dialectic of Mythical Consciousness’, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1966, p. 241.

page 155 note 5 The use of the term ‘idolatry’ is unfortunate because it carries along certain somewhat pejorative resonances. As Eliade uses it, however, it is almost a technical term. He uses it to describe that ‘attitude which consists in preserving, in some sense, and constantly revaluing the ancient hierophanies’. Patterns, p. 26. Also, ‘…that generous view which sees idols, fetishes and physical signs all as a series of paradoxical embodiments of some divinity.’ op, cit. p. 27.

page 155 note 6 Eliade, , Patterns, p. 26.Google Scholar

page 156 note 1 Eliade, , Patterns, p. 25.Google Scholar

page 156 note 2 Eliade, , Patterns, pp. 3–4 for the full illustration.Google Scholar

page 156 note 3 Eliade, , Patterns, p. 26.Google Scholar

page 156 note 4 Eliade, , Patterns, pp. 13, 26.Google Scholar

page 156 note 5 Eliade, , Patterns, p. 29.Google Scholar In this same place he observes, ‘This coming-together of sacred and profane really produces a kind of breakthrough of the various levels of existence. It is implied in every hierophany whatever, for every hierophany shows, makes manifest, the coexistence of contradictory essences: sacred and profane, spirit and matter, eternal and non-eternal, and so on.’

page 157 note 1 Eliade, , Myths, Dreams and Mysteries, p. 125.Google Scholar

page 157 note 2 Eliade, , Patterns, pp. 29–30.Google Scholar

page 157 note 3 Ibid.

page 157 note 4 Eliade, , Patterns, p. 30, footnote.Google Scholar In another place he writes, ‘One may say that the history of religions—from the most elementary to the most developed—is constituted by a number of important hierophanies, manifestations of sacred realities. Beginning from the most elementary hierophany—for example, the manifestation of the sacred in any object whatever, say a stone or tree—and ending in the supreme hierophany, the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ, there is no real break in the continuity.’ Myths, Dreams and Mysteries, p. 124. For additional expressions of this ‘progressional’ view, see op. cit., p. 125; also The Sacred and the Profane, p. 11; and Patterns, pp. 23, 26, 30, 448, 463.

page 158 note 1 Ibid., p. 29.

page 159 note 1 Eliade, , Myths, Dreams and Mysteries, pp. 125–6.Google Scholar

page 160 note 1 Eliade, , Images and Symbols, pp. 169–70.Google Scholar

page 160 note 2 Altizer, Thomas J. J., Mircea Eliade and the Dialectic of the Sacred, Philadelphia, The Westminster Press, 1963, p. 83.Google Scholar

page 160 note 3 It may be argued that I have based my comments solely upon the one passage in Patterns, (p. 29), and that this may not be so important a point for Eliade. But I point out that my remarks are based not on this citation alone, but rather upon that progressional approach itself which is in-sufficient evidence in Eliade's writings to indicate that it is an important dimension of his work.