Semitism of his homeland, he prided himself on his friendship with a Jewish novelist like Mihail Sebastian, and took a relatively moderate public position on the "Jewish question." His journalistic assaults on Jewish influence in Romanian life, distasteful as they are, seem to single out Jews for resentment little more than Hungarians, Bulgarians, and other of the many peoples now resident within the ''Greater Romania" created by World War I. In the eyes of partisans of Romanianism, those minorities appeared prepared to usurp the prerogatives of the ethnic majority.
There were several intellectual influences on the young Eliade. Ivan Strenski, in his valuable discussion in the section on Eliade in Four Theories of Myth, has emphasized the role of his friend Lucien Blaga, a Romanian mythologist and folklorist who "saw his own herme
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neutic work as a hybrid form of depth psychology and ontology." 15 Eliade also carried his understanding of religious psychology, especially of the sacred and its primordial symbols, virtually—but I believe not entirely—to metaphysical lengths.
But no one was more influential for the young Eliade than the charismatic, fascistleaning philosopher Nae Ionescu (1890–1940). Ionescu inculcated mysticism, political activism, and a sort of preexistentialist questioning, risktaking irrationalism. Eliade entered the academic world as assistant to this holder of a chair of philosophy at Bucharest. Ionescu wrote little; Eliade himself edited his one collection of essays in 1936. But Ionescu's charm and Socratic method of teaching led many of his acolytes to follow him into dangerous political realms. At one time he was a sympathetic student of Jewish thought and mysticism. But as the influence he had once had at the court of King Carol II waned, by 1933 he was a supporter of the Legion. Eliade was his admirer and protégé; undoubtedly much of the responsibility for Eliade's own rightist involvement must be laid at Ionescu's feet. Nonetheless, in a significant 1934 event, Eliade rebuked Ionescu over an appalling preface the latter had written to a novel by their Jewish friend Mihail Sebastian: Ionescu, by then an Eastern Orthodox rather than cabalistic mystic, had said, amid much else, that the Jew suffers "because he ought to suffer," having refused to recognize Jesus Christ as the Messiah. This controversy led to an exchange in the press over whether Jews can be saved; against more rigid theologians as well as Ionescu, Eliade argued that they indeed can. 16
Jews were certainly suffering to the northwest in newly Nazi Germany. In early 1934 Eliade could write: "How can we imitate Hitlerism which persecutes Christianity or Communism which burns cathedrals? The Communist arsonists of churches are hooligans—and so are the Fascist persecutors of the Jews. Both of them trample down humaneness and personal faith—which are the freedoms of every individual." 17 For that matter, he went on to anticipate another evil consequent upon the victory of totalitarianism either of the right or of the left: the division of the people into two groups, one "good" and one ''bad"—based on race in the case of Nazism, on social class under communism. Only those of the "right" category would be permitted to live in "freedom." But this, Eliade perceived, was nothing more than a reversion to primitive tribalism, wherein only those who knew the correct totem were free to "eat and couple at will." 18 Talk of political revolution—so much a part
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of thirties life on both the right and the left, did not impress him, and he doubted if others were impressed either: "I don't believe there's a conscious young person in this country who hasn't been soured by so much Karl Marx, so much Mussolini, so much Communism, Corporatism, and who knows what else?" The true revolution, he insisted, would have to be inward, a revolution of "soul," on the level of the "permanent revolution" brought by the Son of Man, who taught "revolution against the old economy'' to bring in a "new economy of charity, hope, and love." 19 He believed that such a revolution was possible, even on the political plane. In India, he had been much impressed with Mohandas K. Gandhi and his nonviolent, spiritualitybased movement for Indian independence and renewal. In December 1935 he told a Romanian radio audience:
Gandhi's nationalist movement is not a political movement but primarily a mysticism, that is, a spiritual revolution addressed to the soul, aiming at the purification of man, the reformation of social values, and ultimately the salvation of the soul. Paradoxical as it may seem, the only spiritual revolution in the Christian spirit which exists in the world today—is Gandhi's nonviolent movement. 20
In the same spirit, in those years the "Romanianism" he fervently promoted was described as a "higher," nonpolitical nationalism, embracing enthusiasm for all that was sublime in the Romanian heritage. Indeed, Eliade went on with some justice to contrast the renaissance then underway in Romanian art and letters with the sorry state of the nation's political life. "Romanianism," he contended, "is realized fully on the artistic plane, but is trivialized on the political plane." 21
But the consequent though highly unfortunate result of awareness of this gross dichotomy was Eliade's growing disillusionment with democracy: not only with what passed for democracy in his homeland, but with the idea generally. As his thought developed in this ominous direction, political and "mystical" dimensions of revolution became more and more mixed, and while Eliade always professed to esteem nonviolent, truly "spiritual" methods of combat and renewal both individually and nationally, it became increasingly easy for him to overlook lapses on this point by those he believed genuinely dedicated to the right goals. In 1936 he wrote admiringly of Mussolini for the first time, while noting that "democracy has not made modern
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Romania a powerful state." He contrasted democracy's process of "slow, larval evolution," which had only brought poor Romania to the point of being a laughingstock, with a "violent, riskfilled revolution" that would restore a people's pride and faith. 22
It was then but a small step further for him openly to extend his favor toward the Legion, the only visible prospective agent of such a revolution in Romania. He seems to have been directly inspired by the death in battle of two Romanian legionnaires who volunteered to fight in the Spanish civil war on Franco's anticommunist side, and whom he, like many of his countrymen, regarded as Christian martyrs. (One of the two martyrs, Ion Mota, had been a fervent Jewbasher and Romanian translator of that notorious antiSemitic forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.)
In his memoirs Eliade dilates almost ironically on the Legion's "cult of death" in those same years, 1937 to 1938. 23 But, though he does not mention it, he must have been aware that a cult of violence in the Legion paralleled its cult of death. Indeed, Codreanu's exaltation of both was extreme even by fascist standards. Not only was violent struggle on behalf of the country lauded, not only was "martyrdom" for its sake the worthiest and most holy of all deaths, but to forfeit one's eternal salvation for the sake of Romania, by committing on its behalf acts that were necessary but so terrible they would cast the doer of them into hell, was to display a nobility beyond praise. By espousing such bizarre sentiments the Legion revealed, however perversely, its "Christian'' foundation, in contrast to the paganism of most other fascisms. 24
Eliade said nothing about this, but he did catch the spirit of the Legion's goal of "national resurrection." In 1939 he wrote of the "new aristocracy" of the Legion: