In the same way, to draw the conclusion from Eliade's repeated contention that religion is sui generis, of its own type of being and irreducible to anything else, that this aspect of human life has, in his eyes, special ontological status would be unwarranted. He may have thought so; but sui generis of itself need only mean that religion as some point needs to be interpreted out of its own categories, which
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Eliade believed he had isolated in such referents as sacred space and sacred time. Religion requires selfinterpretation no more or less than, say, political science, economics, sociology; or psychology. Only a crude ideologue would say there is nothing at all in the political world that cannot be explained solely in terms of money;
or on the other side that the vagaries of finance are subject only to political or spiritual considerations. Eliade was concerned that the study of religion likewise not be merely subordinated to politics, economics, sociology, or psychology. But religion is no more sui generis that politics, economics, sociology, or psychology—each major sphere of human life has its own irreducible core of necessary interpretive categories and "laws," as well as vast areas that are best understood in dialogue with the other human disciplines. The same is true of art, and he was ever more of an artist, or at least an aesthetician of religion, than a scholar. Eliade wrote: Works of art, like "religious data," have a mode of being that is peculiar to themselves; they exist on their own plane of reference, in their particular universe. . . . A work of art reveals its meaning only insofar as it is regarded as an autonomous creation; that is, insofar as we accept its mode of being— that of an artistic creation—and do not reduce it to one of its constituent elements (in the case of a poem, sound, vocabulary, linguistic structure, etc.) or to one of its subsequent uses (a poem which carries a political message or which can serve as a document for sociology, ethnography, etc.) 73
Note that Eliade's idea of religion as sui generis, irreducible to any other interpretation, could as well be applied to nationalism and political commitment generally. If strong feeling associated with and focused on a particular clear and distinct symbol or idea is sufficiently intense, the sui generis argument seems to be saying, then that symbol and its associated circles of feelings and believers is a unique, selfvalidating entity, not to be explained in terms of academic categories that are less intense, more generic and abstract. An example can, to be sure, be judged a good or bad case of nationalism on moral grounds; after 1945 Eliade was apparently prepared to make a moral judgment about the quasireligious nationalism of the storm troopers. Perhaps if pressed he would make similar judgments about religions as good or bad, though he was usually unwilling to do so.
However, this is not the last word on Eliade. There is also the way in which his recognition of the intrinsic, sui generis similarity of com
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mitment and experience in the many mansions of religion, and perhaps of quasireligious movements as well, opens up a world of benign pluralism. This is itself a good, for the comparative method enables one to experience vicariously the passions of other faiths as well as one's own, so leading to that enrichment of total human experience that is the fertile ground of the new humanism.
As we have already noted, critics of Eliade raise charges of "essentialism"—currently a very bad word in some academic circles, as is its opposite, "reductionism," in the Eliadean camp—based on a particular reading of Eliade's concept of religion as sui generis. They also point to the Romanian's political past and its supposed connection with his history of religion project, implying that the fascist essentialism of race or nation is of a piece with Eliade's universal essence of religion. Needless to say, those for whom religion is a priori understood to be a quest for an ahistorical essence (of humanity? of the universe?), which will never be found because it is not there, will probably never be pleased with Eliade. The temptation to throw in Eliade's political past as an additional proof is then hard to resist, though to me the connection seems rather tortured, in the end amounting to little more than an ad hominem argument which attempts to tar Eliade's entire work with the illrepute all decent people feel for storm troopers and the Iron Guard. In fact, it would seem that Eliade's religious universalism, right or wrong, ''essentialist" or not, is ontologically and morally very different indeed from the racism or nationalism in which the fascist found his essences. It may be added that some of these same scholars who criticize Eliade on political grounds cite marxist and marxisttinged sources without imputing to them all the sins of Stalinism and the gulags.
For persons like myself, instinctively religious but caught up in modernity's pluralism of space and time, Eliade's work performed an interesting function. It enabled one to use the sense of reality felt in one religious context to intuit the same in another, while undercutting clashes of theology through paying attention instead to the props by which religion forms its various realities, making them nonhomogeneous with the stream of profane life. For me, if not for everyone, Eliade's talk of "the sacred" in various times and places, even sometimes under deep camouflage, was neither mere reification of abstract categories nor covert theology. Perhaps it was a combination of Schleiermacher's religion as feeling with the social constructs of Durkheim's social
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effervescence. It was quieter and subtler than Otto's Das Heilege, yet more objective than Jung's archetypes. Words about it were a kind of language a little different from anything philosophy or theology could speak of coherently. Those who could not get it might be, as Max Weber said of himself, "religiously unmusical."
The appeal as well as the weakness of Eliadeanism lay in such a combination of vagueness and an evocative romantic style. The style depended on calling forth a mighty army of images from the distant and the past, freighted with the frisson of significance those "musical" to this approach are likely to give that which comes across great gulfs of space and time. The romantic ear considers such feelings cognitive and exemplary.
Thus the importance one felt in Eliade's books depended more than anything else on the stylistic and imagistic calling forth of a romantic sense of wonder associated with archaic religion. Yet it may well be that only with the aid of that sense could modems intuit at all the subjective meaning of religions past, or compare them meaningfully with religion or quasi religion present. For while the romantic feeling may not be exactly the same as the archaic religious feeling, it is at least a feeling about transcendent realities, and perhaps as close as most of us will get to the subjective experience of religions of other times and places. It can evoke, as Eliade once remarked, "the Platonic structure of Australian spirituality," in which, as for the Greek, "to know means to remember." 74 Those to whom such feelings are inaccessible, or unimportant, can only be regarded as "unmusical" in this particular respect, perhaps the better to analyze the mathematics of the notes.
Equally important is the issue of universalism versus the particular. In the late twentieth century the sort of discovery of universal themes so characteristic of Jung, Eliade, and Campbell, as of Frazer earlier, has been much denigrated. In the wake of "postcolonial" backlash against the intellectual "imperialism" and "Orientalism" of practitioners of the universalist art, any idea that the mythic themes of a given cultural context could be taken out of that setting to display universal, archetypal meanings was considered not only inevitably to distort the myth, but to be demeaning of the particular culture. It implied that the known meaning of the myth in the culture had to be subordinated to a more universal "real'' meaning assigned by an outsider. Yet, as Wendy Doniger, Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service