A vigorous, strong feeling. Historical human life suddenly takes on meaning and significance. Optimism. 40
Nonetheless, on the political side, Eliade was old enough and experienced enough in the thirties to know what he was doing, or should have been. Perhaps he was
"catastrophically naive," but that also is a failing which needs to be addressed. There is no need to doubt the sincerity of his scattered denunciations of fascist or Nazi ideology and practice, both prewar and postwar, including of atrocities against Jews, or to cavil at his also scattered, respectful treatment of Jewish scholars, such as Gershom Scholem, and of religious Judaism. 41
But what has bothered many critics was Eliade's subsequent inability to renounce or even discuss seriously the Legion aspect of his own life, beyond the still apologetic and naivesounding references cited above in the posthumous volume two of his autobiography. He would say little more than he did, for example, in response to denunciations by an Italian scholar in 1950 of his "alleged 'fascist' activity before the war." Eliade thought the allegations ultimately emanated from the thencommunist Romanian embassy in Rome; his only comment was the remark that they were "a timely reminder that my imprudent acts and errors committed in youth constituted a series of malentendus [misunderstandings, mistakes] that would follow me all my life." 42
Yet it is statements like this that have only caused doubts to fester. Ion Culianu, a brilliant young historian of religion, a protégé of Eliade and his literary executor, put his finger on the problem in a review of Eliade's autobiography when he said of 1936 to 1938: "Why insist at such length on a relatively short episode in a long life?
Because the rest of that life is relatively well known and transparent, whereas it is precisely this episode that the second volume of the autobiography reveals in a detached tone." 43
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Culianu was himself murdered at the University of Chicago on May 21, 1991, perhaps at the hands of Guardist elements still lingering in the murky world of Romanian politics. As a Romanian, though born and raised in the communist era, he must have had some insights into Eliade's mentality and the political culture of their homeland less accessible to outsiders than to a native. After reading "the whole coveted file concerning Eliade's political sympathies in 1938–1940," he wrote Mac Ricketts, "my position is still the same. Mr. Eliade has never been an antiSemite, a member of the Iron Guard, or a proNazi. But I understand anyway that he was closer to the IG
[Iron Guard] than I liked to think." He also raised the problem, important to our own discussion of three mythologists, of reading the words and thoughts of one era through the lens of another, after horrible events that were once still in the future had become terrors of history. 44 How much can we excuse a mythologist or historian of religion for, like most humans, not possessing absolute precognition, while still blaming them for not reading aright the signs of the times? How could sentiments that in the end led to unspeakable horrors have been at one time fairly "normal," though not blameless?
Culianu quoted Seymour Cain, "a penetrating reader of the Autobiography":
Eliade never directly forswears his ideological association with the Legionary movement, and sees its decline and fall as a Romanian tragedy, the inevitable result of its political naiveté, rather than a good thing. He is more like the fellowtravelers of Soviet communism who gave up their association but never repudiated the ideology to which they had given their youthful devotion. 45
One can only regret that the mature Eliade never found the time or the courage to address open and fully those errors of his youth, subjecting them to the acute analysis of spiritual consciousness of which he was capable in examining the initiatory ordeals of others. It seems more than likely that he was one of those intellectuals so innocent and naive, and so entranced by the pull of a spiritual drama that raised one above the pale cast of thought, that he as youthful "mythologist" saw the myths he wanted to see enacted by the Legion, and blinded himself to its ugly side. Throughout the twentieth century the likes of the young Eliade have embraced fascism and Marxism, feeling only the same righteousness and joy. Quite nonviolent by nature himself,
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fundamentally more aesthetic than political (or, for that matter, than scholarly in the most rigorous sense of the term), he exalted the Legion's own martyrs but, incredibly given its martial tone and its propaganda, was surprised by its kills.
Had he talked about all this as the light of common day overtook his fantasies after 1945, he would have raised his own stature in the end, and we would have known more about the midtwentieth century, that era of unprecedented opulence and terror, of myth and science, through which he made his pilgrimage. Culianu, after mentioning Eliade's reference in the autobiography to his taking a "dangerous turn," at that point in his life, adds, "How much we wish he had said: a wrong one!" 46
But he did not.
The apocalyptic year 1945 was a time of radical disjuncture in Eliade's pilgrimage, a season of moving from one life to another. The late thirties and early forties had been a time of death in his personal world, as they had been for so many millions in the world at large. Codreanu was executed in 1938, Nae Ionescu died prematurely of a heart attack in 1940, Sebastian was hit by a truck and killed in 1945, Eliade's first wife Nina died of cancer in 1944.
After 1945 death changed to new life. He met his second wife, Christinel, in Paris where they were both postwar exiles from Romania. For Eliade was in exile in a strange new postwar world, a world shaped by atomic bombs, the revelations of Auschwitz, communist triumph in eastern Europe, elsewhere the victory of British and U.S. values. In such a world the less said about the past the better, of course. But it must quite honestly have also seemed to Eliade that 1945 afforded an opportunity such as is rarely given a human being to reconstruct himself thoroughly and begin anew, despite the possibility that a few ghostly "malentendus" would still waft out of the nowremote past. During the final months of the war, still in Lisbon, he sensed a profound change overtaking him. He suffered severe insomnia: But I did not resort to sleeping pills. Instead, I reread and meditated on the Gospels, trying to discover the direction to take to get out of the labyrinth. It had seemed to me for a long time that I had been wandering in a labyrinth, and as time passed I became more and more convinced that it was yet another initiatory ordeal, as many crises in the past several years had been. All the despair, depression, and suffering had a meaning: I must understand them as so many "initiatory tortures" preparing me for the symbolic death and spiritual resurrection toward which I was
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heading. I knew that I could not remain indefinitely in my present state: I was no longer the man I had been in the first year of the war, but still I had not attained another mode of being. I was in an obscure phase, a transition period . . . [even as] the whole world was in the process of being transformed. 47
Many lives are divided into definite parts, but in not all of them is there such a clear wall as in the case of Mircea Eliade, exiling one at a definite point from one set of days that are no more, and from a place to which one can never return physically. Inevitably there will be a sense of loss and gain, of regret and of opportunity. But also one will be achingly aware there is something in one's past which no one who had not lived in that nowforbidden space and time could ever truly understand.