The Americanism of Eliade's last years, unlike the earlier Romanianism, was not chauvinist and presumably included room for all the country's many minorities, including exiles like himself. On the other hand, he called for no national resurrection or creation of a "new man"; it is as though this was somehow already accomplished or unnecessary, as though paradise was already in place and eschatology realized as much as it could be in the grimy world of current American democracy. He was disappointingly indifferent to the civil rights movement in full spate during his first American decade.
His journals reveal that while he was intrigued by the "hippies" and the sixties counterculture with its frenetic rediscoveries of the sacred past and present, he was less favorably impressed by the "new left" of the same decade, though he was still willing to experiment mentally with even the most extreme political openness. In his journal entry for December 3, 1968, he muses on the way one window of the university bookstore was filled with books against the war in Vietnam and American crimes there, while another window boasts the trans
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lated works of Mao Tsetung. Earlier in his journals he had set down accounts, brought to him by escapees from the homeland he clearly believed reliable, of unspeakable tortures to which priests and others had been subjected in Romania by its current Marxist regime; in the absence of any corresponding university bookstore exhibit on those horrors he undoubtedly considered the young American aficionados of Mao and the Vietcong hopelessly naive and biased. He commented:
"Naturally, all this seems difficult to believe in Europe. But I wonder what sign is to be seen in this excess of tolerance: strength, selfconfidence, and confidence in American destiny, or indifference, fatigue, the first symptoms of decadence? To what limits can tolerance be stretched, politically speaking?" 95
He looked at the campus upheavals of the late sixties, such as those at Chicago and Columbia in 1968, with European eyes, as the work of welltrained agitators and propagandists like the fascists of thirty years before. All that lay between the two: "several million dead." 96 More important than such "ravaging in the name of democracy" was the existing democratic space for pluralism and, if one wish, for a nonpolitical life, or rather one in which the political goal of tolerant pluralism can be advanced by the camouflaged means of scholarship.
One cannot make a strong case for it, because he did not, but I would suggest that while he may not have known much about Thomas Jefferson beyond what he read in Lewis's American Adam, perhaps in the end Eliade would have enjoyed a conversation on political matters (as well as the many other matters on which both polymaths were eminently well informed) with the sage of Monticello as much as with anyone else who comes to mind. Both did not hide their disdain for manipulative and dimwitted kings under whose rule they suffered, both had deeply conservative instincts on such things as affection for traditional rural life and its virtues, both loved a world where travel and intellectual discovery were possible. At the same time, both believed religious and political institutions could and should be renewed, that it was possible to return, in some essential way, to the point of creation and start a novus ordo seclorum. Like Eliade, Jefferson was fascinated by the ideal of a pristine paradise, when humans lived together in simplicity and harmony before the coming of feudal oppression, which could be the model of a new age. Both were intrigued with the idea, at least, of total liberation from history and the past, and an entirely new human beginning. The new beginning required, above
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all, careful attention to methodology, and at the same time a paradisal vision of the future as well as of the past.
In passing, the thought occurs to one that Eliade and Jefferson had more than a little in common in character and destiny as well. Both have known periods of adulation in popular and scholarly esteem; both have come down a bit as both have been accused of more show than depth in their encyclopedic learning, of less than originality in their core ideas, and of serious inconsistency in their social and political attitudes. But there is more: both were also incredibly complex and elusive personalities who, whenever it seems one has pinned them down, display another side that undercuts a premature assumption. Jefferson had a remarkable ability to avoid seeing unpleasant realities, as for example his artful disguising the nature of his slave quarters, manifesting what Joseph Ellis has called "the deep deviousness only possible in the dedicated idealist" 97—a characterization that could well cover significant aspects of Eliade's life, particularly the relationship with the Legion of the Archangel. Yet in the case of both men it would be quite unfair to let a life of rich, varied, and shifting interests and experiences be swallowed up by any one of them, including the political.
Eliade was not at heart a scholar, much less a politician or social scientist, but a litterateur, a writer and literary critic—though it may be a critic of myths rather than current bestsellers. His oeuvre must finally be received and assessed in that light. So he was at the beginning, and so at the end. If he was not always accurate or consistent in terms of social scientific canons, neither are not a few other writers of works nonetheless admired for elegant style and evocative quality. He claims that Freud once "had the courage to admit: 'I am not really a man of science. . . . I am by temperament nothing but a conquistador . . . with the curiosity, the boldness, and the tenacity that belong to that type of person.'" 98 Mircea Eliade likewise could not be contained in a single discipline, but used lamps stored in one corner of the academy to cast light around several rooms and out into the street. The scholar endeavors to distance himself and his passions from the material; Eliade, the man of letters, was concerned like any literary writer to invoke moods and feelings by transmitting his own experience and that of his generation through his shamans and cosmogonic myths. More than anything else he yearned to create mirrors of words that would reflect back and forth between the aeons, and give humanity an
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accurate portrait of itself comprised of them all. He would really rather have been known as a great novelist than historian of religion.
Finally, returning to politics, let us make Eliade a little more radical, as would Altizer. What kind of politics would come out of the radical conflation of sacred and profane? And is this what Eliade really wanted, or did he allow a role for tension between the two in safeguarding freedom on all inner and outer levels? One senses a move toward the Jeffersonian values of his adoptive society, the United States, as he saw around him a land thankfully pluralistic and pragmatic, though one which also had a disconcerting way of identifying itself with the primal or the eschatological paradise, and thus outside the terrors of history. The latter was a view which, though innocent by European standards of identifying the homeland with paradise, nonetheless could have policy and cultural significance. The American way of combining the illusion and reality of innocence in the midst of a sinful world was described in a forceful and disturbing book by Eliade's contemporary Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History (1952). However, Eliade himself was careful not to identify America with paradise, though he appreciated the value of the vision of a new Eden if it was properly optional.