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against the Legion and the Legionnaire State, though not the outrages, came to an end. In fact, these horrors and later Romanian antiSemitic atrocities were exceeded only by the Nazi holocaust in numbers and brutality, leaving scores of desecrated synagogues and thousands of mutilated corpses. 35 It is not evident that Eliade saw any relationship between these "excesses" and the central ideology of the spiritual nationalism, with its antiSemitism, that he had once admired, perhaps to the point of rapture.
In 1978, Eliade was to write to Ioan Culianu, a fellow Romanian and protégé who had questioned him about his involvement: I don't think it is possible to write an objective history of the Legionary Movement nor a portrait of C.Z.C. [Codreanu]. The documents at hand are insufficient; moreover, an objective attitude can be fatal for the author. . . . After Büchenwald and Auschwitz even honest people cannot afford being "objective." 36
What he seems to be saying, in effect, is that what the Legion meant forty years before to a young, starryeyed, and instinctively spiritual person like himself, capable of being fired up by mythological archetypes and with no awareness of the evil that was to be unleashed, is a reality locked in a past that, after the gates of time have been slammed shut on it, can never be recovered, much less communicated to one who was not there, without hopeless misunderstanding. Undoubtedly in his youthful idealism he had sided with the Legion because he saw them as persecuted righteous mystics and idealists. Responding to their highflown Christian and spiritual rhetoric, he doubtless believed the Legionnaires were at heart peaceful friends of the peasantry, though prepared to struggle and die for their cause. But who could say or hear such things now without a cynical snicker? Better simply to say nothing.
What is to be made of a case like this? After the war, Eliade definitely condemned the evils of the Nazi regime, usually in parallelism with those of the Marxist states, just as he had in the early thirties. In Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries, talking about the mythological character of Marxist communism, he says that it is clear that the author of the Communist Manifesto takes up and carries on one of the great eschatological myths of the Middle Eastern and
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Mediterranean world, namely: the redemptive part to be played by the Just (the "elect," the "anointed," the "innocent," the "missioners," in our own days by the proletariat), whose sufferings are invoked to change the ontological status of the world. In fact, Marx's classless society, and the consequent disappearance of all historical tensions, find their most exact precedent in the myth of the Golden Age which, according to a number of traditions, lies at the beginning and the end of History. Marx has enriched this venerable myth with a truly messianic JudaeoChristian ideology; on the one hand, by the prophetic and soteriological function he ascribes to the proletariat; and, on he other, by the final struggle between Good and Evil, which may well be compared with the apocalyptic conflict between Christ and the Antichrist, ending in the decisive victory of the former.
He here implicitly recognizes communism as Jungian inflation or as gnostic in Voegelin's sense. (In a journal entry for November 3, 1960, Eliade reports that Eric Voegelin visited him, and he was "surprised by the affinity of our positions," and concerning his perception of modern gnosticism, Eliade said the political thinker "can't get over the fact that no one has ever seen these things up to now") 37 Regarding the other totalitarian ideology, Eliade in the same passage is in fact less generous: In comparison with the grandeur and the vigorous optimism of the communist myth, the mythology propagated by the national socialists seems peculiarly inept; and this not only because of the limitations of the racial myth (how could one imagine that the rest of Europe would voluntarily accept submission to the masterrace?), but above all because of the fundamental pessimism of the Germanic mythology . . . for the eschaton prophesied and expected by the ancient Germans was the ragnorök—that is, a catastrophic end of the world. 38
However, apart from the few allusions in the memoirs like those cited above, both the mythology and the atrocities of the Legion are passed over in silence, almost as though he expected few of his worldwide readers to know or care anything about the darkstained history of one small country.
Defenders of Eliade like Bryan Rennie point out that Eliade's relatively few published statements on behalf of the Legion in his one year of public association were, given the context of time and place, quite moderate. He did not, Rennie states, single out Jews apart from other minorities for condemnation, much less utter words that could
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have incited the antiSemitic terrorism that came after Codreanu's death and the brief tenure of the Legionnaire state. In the most notorious case, an article castigating Jews for their "intransigence," Eliade actually placed the real blame on "Christian history" and its tragic influence on Jews under its shadow.
In Reconstructing Eliade Rennie analyzes the allegations of four of the major critics of Eliade's political activities in the thirties—Ivan Strenski, Adriana Berger, Leon Volovici, and Daniel Dubuisson—and makes substantial, often convincing countercriticisms. He leaves us, as does Ricketts, with a picture of a young man who was not personally antiSemitic or fascist, though nationalistic and strongly under the illusion that the Legion was a spiritual and nonviolent activity something like Gandhi's movement for the independence of India. Rennie concludes his chapter on Eliade's political involvement with these words: "[I]t has to be said that there is to date no evidence of actual membership, of active services rendered, or of any real involvement with any fascist or totalitarian movements or ideals. Nor is there any evidence of continued support for nationalist separatist ideals after their inherently violent nature was revealed, nor of the imprint of such ideals in Eliade's scholarship." Scholars who have made such allegations, he contends, "have pursued their own agendas with little regard for the integrity of their textual sources." 39
Certainly other Romanian intellectuals of the thirties, as Volovici amply illustrates, were far more blatantly fascist and antiSemitic than Eliade. One need mention only Eliade's "Mephistopheles," as he has been called, Nae Ionescu, or the insufferable Emil Cioran, who acquired a measure of postwar fame as an existentialist philosopher in Paris. Perhaps Eliade was also the victim of too much fame too soon, a brilliant but still immature figure who may have felt compelled by his position as
"leader of the young" to take public stands he might privately have preferred to avoid. Many of us, including myself, would not care twenty or thirty years later to be held accountable for everything we said or believed about religion or politics at age thirtyone. It is also fair to point out that the Legion experience of the thirties was only part of what shaped the mature Eliade who emerged after the war, as if from a difficult and prolonged nearsighted adolescence: there was also India, the classical literature of several languages, existentialist philosophy, the ideas of the renaissance. In a striking journal entry for January 3, 1961, Eliade wrote:
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Today, coming home from the university, in the vicinity of the Oriental Institute, I suddenly experienced my life's duration. Impossible to find just the right word. I suddenly felt, not older, but extraordinarily rich and full; expanded—bringing together in me, concomitantly, both the Indian, Portuguese, and Parisian "time" and the memories of my Bucharest childhood and youth. As if I had acquired a new dimension of depth. I was "larger," "rounder." An immense inner domain—where, not so long ago, I was penetrating only fragmentarily by trying to relive suchandsuch an event—was revealed in its totality: I'm able to see it from end to end and, at the same time, in all its depth.