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Professor of the History of Religions at the University of Chicago, has pointed out, extreme particularism ends up with absurdities every bit as awkward as those of the universalist extreme.
Taken to its own ultimate absurdity, the sensible observation that myths have a culturespecific message that cannot be detached from that setting would imply that myths can have no meaning except for the individual who creates or tells them. "For where extreme universalism means that the other is exactly like you, extreme nominalism [particularism] means the other may not be human at all." Moreover, we may find that members of the "context" group may themselves approach the story differently. Achilpas and Algonquins are not entirely alike, but neither is any one Alchipa or Algonquin exactly like everyone else of the same tribe. One might indeed be more similar to a person of another culture than not, and just as some nonEnglish understand Shakespeare better than do not a few Englishmen, so some Alchipa or Algonquin myths may be as well or better understood and appreciated by twentiethcentury persons of European decent as by some of their own tribe; to deny this possibility would also be to demean the humanity of their creators.
Rather, every telling is different, and a telling from one country is as likely to share something with a telling from another as with a telling from elsewhere in the same country. The focus upon individual insight leads us to a kind of second naivete: it leads us to posit a "sameness" based not on any quasiJungian universalism but on a kind of pointillism, formed from the individual points of individual authors whose insights transcend their particular moment and speak to us across time and space. . . . By searching for our individual artists not merely in the bastions of the western canon but in the neglected byways of oral traditions and rejected heresies . . . one is arguing not for a narrow range of cultural excellence but, on the contrary, for a wider construction of crosscultural inspiration. 75
Eliade had in fact said the same thing earlier:
The principal objection made against me: I "idealize" the primitives, I exaggerate the importance of their myths, instead of "demystifying" them and emphasizing their dependence on historical events (colonialism, acculturation, paganChristian syncretism, etc.) But . . . it is precisely because it has been emphasized too much and because what seems to me essential is thus neglected: the hermeneutic of religious creations. . . . A
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Bantu or Indonesian critic will only be able to wonder: How were the Westerners able to write thousands of volumes on the "beauty" and the "eternal values" of The Divine Comedy, the work of a political exile, and see in our mythologies and our messianic symbols only a protest of oppressed peoples? Indeed, why am I suspected of ''idealism" each time I try to analyze these primitive and archaic creations with the same care and the same sympathy that we bring to commenting on Dante or Meister Eckhart? 76
The Politics of Paradise
The political philosophy of Eliade's mature—post1945—work is only implicit. That in itself is significant, for it tells us there is a clear break from the mercurial young man with opinions on everything, including rulers at home and abroad, from India to Italy. The silence says as loudly as could any words that not only does he himself no longer have interest in the political world, but he also rejects commitment to particular political causes and ideologies as the way to construct the new humanism.
That is evident, first in the explicit deconstruction of political mythologies such as those of Marxism and Nazism we have examined. Those postwar Eliadean reductions of oncepotent ideologies to ageold but never realized eschatological motifs would clearly reveal their futility to all but hopeless true believers. Those passages put Eliade back to where he was before 1936, before the Codreanu or Salazar years, when he denounced the barbarians of Berlin and Moscow more or less evenhandedly.
There is this difference, though: now nothing appears about contemporary political parties or movements, unless it be by implication the present rulers of Romania;
there is only harking back to the passions of the thirties. If those fascistera ideologies are mentioned, it is to place them, as he does the Marxism then gripping his homeland, in the timeless mythological matrix to which he clearly thinks all such schemes belong, and from which they should never have escaped. In this respect they are all of the nature of illud tempus, bespeaking though with forked tongue the paradise for which we humans are all nostalgic. But even primal peoples are estranged from paradise; it can never be more than a dream and a set of symbols here in profane time. As the gnostics well knew, creation and the fall are one. Totalistic ideologies are politics of nostalgia for paradise, and therein lies their appeal
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and their deceptiveness. But how much else in this postEden world is nostalgia for paradise as well!
Therefore even totalistic ideologies also are parts of the radical pluralism of the world as it is today. Radical pluralism militates against absolutizing any one myth. The danger of absolutizing Eliade had no doubt learned from his thirties and forties experience, though again he chose to say so only indirectly. Yet any multiplicity of myths and venues of the sacred clearly must hold, for one who is aware of it, the political consequence of mandating either freedom of choice or arbitrary totalitarian imposition of a single ideological myth. Since 1945, Eliade certainly never proposed the latter, and lived and talked in a way wholly consistent with abiding in a world of mythological freedom. That would be a world in which the sacred is real but under all sorts of camouflages; the state presumably ought to let a great array of them flourish, so that they may be freely and individually discerned by those able to see their hierophanies. As an exile, Eliade knew the soulsaving value of choiceless seeing, observing, and understanding in a world of which one was not, and could never be, completely a part.
In Ordeal by Labyrinth Eliade emphasized that, although he was deeply concerned about the tragic state of Romania in 1945 and after, he did not believe that overt political activity was what was of most importance. "Of course, one can always sign a manifesto, protest in the press. That is rarely what is really needed." Instead, he and a circle of Romanian intellectual exiles formed a circle to "maintain the culture of a free Romania and, above all, to publish texts that had become unpublishable in Romania itself." The essential liberating work, in other words, was not political but intellectual and cultural. It is the intellectual, we are told, who is regarded as ''enemy number one" by tyrants, and "making culture" is the "only efficacious form of politics open to exiles." There is nothing is this dialogue about Eliade's prewar life; whether the premise about culture over politics is universally true or not, the discussion gives a significant clue to the postwar identity he assigned himself. 77
There is something more here than the Burkean affirmation of existing tradition as necessary and good for the wellbeing of society that we marked in discussing Jung.
Here is a more radical thrust. Despite Altizer's claim that the historian of religion was too backwardlooking, in reading Eliade we sense that new tradition can always be revealed by new hierophanies, that the sacred can be found