"Legionarism has reintroduced to Romania the joy and the pedagogy of the honest, open struggle. . . . It has created the awareness of an historic mission, the feeling that we were born in order to carry out a unique revolution in the history of the nation . . . new, Legionary aristocracy. . . . " 25 In "Why I Believe in the Triumph of the Legionary Movement," Eliade is made to say that its affirmation was because "I believe in the destiny of our nation, I believe in the Christian revolution of the new man, I believe in freedom, personality, and love." (This article appeared in the Guardist paper Buna vestire over Eliade's name, although according to Mac Ricketts, Eliade, in 1981, denied writing it. Ricketts states, however,
Page 88
that in any case it was based on paraphrases of articles Eliade had written, and probably contained nothing with which he would not have agreed at that time.) 26
What appealed to him most about that militant movement was its "spirituality," the dedication of its young cadres who went into the villages to help peasants, and the movement's own ostensible dedication to social rebirth and the creation of the "new man"—a goal which seems very clearly to exemplify what Eric Voegelin meant by political gnosticism.
Though perhaps with distaste, Eliade seemed willing to accept the Legion's violence and antiSemitism as a price that had to be paid for national resurrection. While he clearly seemed to view the Legion as something comparable to Gandhi's spiritual, nonviolent movement for the liberation of India, it must be noted that even many years later he accepted violence as also acceptable in India's case. In his 1978 interview with the French journalist ClaudeHenri Rocquet, he said that it was in India that he became "politically aware," in seeing the repression of Indians by their British rulers.
I said to myself: "How right the Indians are!" It was their country; all they were asking for was a kind of autonomy, and their demonstrations were completely peaceful. They weren't attacking anyone, just demanding their rights. And the police repression was pointlessly violent. So it was in Calcutta that I became aware of political injustice and at the same time realized the spiritual possibilities of Gandhi's political activity: the spiritual discipline that made it possible to stand up to blows without hitting back. It was like Christ; it was Tolstoi's dream.
[Rocquet said] So you were won over, heart and soul, to the cause of nonviolence. . . .
[Eliade] And of violence too! For example, one day I heard an extremist talking, and I had to admit he was right. I understood perfectly well that there had to be some violent protesters too. 27
In reference to Gandhi's handling of the volatile Indian situation, Eliade once remarked that "in a political movement, the only leaders with a chance of success are those who know how to satisfy (or to Chloroform) the extremists." 28
At the same time, it must be noted that Eliade's public Legionism extended only for little more than the year 1937—a year of phenomenal growth for the movement—
though the question of his sympathies during years of service to rightist Romanian governments allied
Page 89
with Hitler until 1944 cannot be overlooked. But he claimed never to have joined the Legion, and actually wrote very few pieces explicitly praising it. However, his sometime friend, the Jewish writer Mihail Sebastian, whom as we have seen he befriended in the affair of the preface, penned in his journals at the time that in private Eliade was capable of expressing euphoric enthusiasm for the Legion, even its violent acts, and also for its antiSemitic outbursts. Needless to say, Sebastian was deeply distressed, commenting, "He's not joking, nor is he demented. He's only naive. But there is such a thing as catastrophic naiveté!" 29 Sebastian also had much to say about the "Guardist conversion" among young intellectuals spearheaded by Nae Ionescu and the newspaper, Cuvantul, which Ionescu edited, a swelling tide that reached its climax in 1937 and 1938, the years of Eliade's adherence. 30
Though nothing can excuse Eliade's enthusiasms today, two factors may at least help us to understand: first, the abysmal corruption and incompetence of the nominally democratic monarchy that ruled Romania in those days; and second, the natural attraction of the Legion's romantic, spiritual, and mythic rhetoric for one of Eliade's susceptibilities. The way in which all fascist movements appealed to deep instinctual yearnings for communal solidarity, spiritual rebirth, and enacting deeds of mythic dimension—feelings not far removed from the religious—is not to be underestimated.
During most of the thirties, the king had tacitly encouraged the Legion and its nationalism. But in 1938 Carol II, alarmed at the Legion's rapid growth and electoral triumphs, established a royal dictatorship and turned against the Legion, seeing it as a rival source of power. Codreanu was arrested in April and finally executed
"while trying to escape" on November 30, 1938. Eliade, along with his beloved teacher Nae Ionescu and many others of supposed Legion sympathies, was imprisoned; Eliade for refusing to sign a document dissociating himself from the Legion. He said, first, that he had never joined so could not leave it; and, second, that he did associate himself with many of its aims. Eliade never criticized Codreanu, the movement's founder and leader. In memoirs written shortly before his own death, he wrote:
I don't know how Corneliu Codreanu will be judged by history. . . . For him, the Legionary movement did not constitute a political phenomenon but was, in its essence, ethical and religious. He repeated time and again that he was not interested in the acquisition of power but in the creation
Page 90
of a "new man." . . . [He] believed in the necessity of sacrifice; he considered that every new persecution could only purify and strengthen the Legionary movement, and he believed, furthermore, in his own destiny and in the protection of the Archangel Michael. . . . A good part of the Legionary activity consisted in worship services, offices for the dead, strict fasts, and prayers. 31
Eliade, who emphasized in his own autobiography the extensiveness and seriousness of religious life among the incarcerated legionnaires, was released after four months and, in 1940, enabled by wellplaced patrons to depart his increasingly desperate country to become its cultural attaché in London, where he endured the Blitz, and then, just before Britain declared war on Romania in 1941, in neutral Lisbon, Portugal, until 1945.
During the latter years Eliade (who had never completely endorsed the Mussolini or Hitler regimes) found time to compose a book in praise of Portugal's "benevolent"
dictator António Salazar, a fellow professor raised to a position of power, whose administration he recommended as an example to his countrymen. (The book, he earnestly says in the introduction, was written to answer a question: "Is a [national] spiritual revolution possible?" The answer, he now found, is Yes! Salazar has
"achieved a miracle"; "a totalitarian and Christian state, built not on abstractions, but on the living realities of the nation and its tradition.)" 32
At the same time, we must note that, according to his memoirs, Eliade was aware of Legion atrocities, though apparently only those occurring after the 1938 death of Codreanu. While the Legion had always been antiSemitic and protofascist in character, the 1938 persecution and the replacement of Codreanu by the extremist Horia Sima as leader still further darkened the character of the Iron Guard, as it was increasingly called. Then, as loyalties shifted and events moved with bewildering speed, in 1940 the legion came to power in alliance with the king and the proNazi military dictator Ion Antonescu to create a "National Legionnaire State." Eliade was clearly shocked by a series of assassinations of prominent political enemies enacted soon after by the Legionnaire State on November 30, 1940. 33 Then, in January 1941, according to his autobiography, he further "learned of the excesses and crimes of the Legionnaires (examples were cited of pogroms: in particular, one at Iasi)." 34 At the same time, Antonescu turned