Religion on Trial

...A religious vision, polemically advocated with prophetic fervor as a source of salvation is a different beast, even when heuristically caged, from a scientific paradigm...

...There was a comforting theological flavor to his writings, missing in the anthropologists—and also in Commonweal: 376 the sociologists until Peter Berger came along...

...But while admitting that, Dudley is not willing to surrender the scientific claims and explanatory power of Eliade's theories...

...In the book under review Dudley sets himself up as mediator...

...verifiable or falsifiable, because his intuitive method is not that of the empiricists...

...What science calls for today is bold, imaginative theories, having the heuristic power to generate new "facts" unnoticed before and new explanations for old previously unexplained facts...

...His famous range of empirical data is gained, so it is said, by "scrabbling through indices" for usable references...

...Some critical reviews were followed by an all-out attack by Edmund Leach, reinforced by Anthony Wallace...

...They are not empirically...

...His book's association with the death-of-God theme deprived it of independent attention, so that its portrait of Eliade as a religious thinker with a prophetic vision was not taken up...

...He earns his right to the role by giving an excellent account of Eliade's vision of homo religiosus . He admits its normative character as an ontology and soteriology...

...The illusion that Eliade read his conclusions off the data was shattered by the anthropologists...

...Because they drew their identity as a species distinct from theologians from the wishful conviction that theirs was a detached, scientific study of religion, not muddied by any particular religious commitment...

...A powerful challenge, but seemingly without effect...

...So, while they might reject Eliade's misleading presentation of his own work and method and clean up some secondary inaccuracies, religionists should not dismiss it, but instead revise it underand exploit its great heuristic value...

...Charles Davis IN 1963 THOMAS ALTIZER in Mircea Eliade and the Dialectic of the Sacred tried to convince us of the theological importance of Eliade...

...Commonweal: 378...

...How far was the liking for Eliade—probably the most frequently listed author for courses in religion—and the uncritical reception of his theories due to the theological background of so many of the faculty in departments of religion...

...It is worth noting that Edmund Leach, the outstanding advocate in English of Levi-Strauss and French synchronic analysis, cannot abide Eliade one little bit...

...Students took what Eliade was saying about the "archaic ontology" as an objective interpretation of traditional religion...

...Why did religionists not hear the thundering of this prophet in their midst...

...The case has its points, but I remain unconvinced...

...In departments of religion Eliade's work stayed innocuously classified under the science of religion, with his selfpresentation as an interpreter simply describing the data still taken at its face value...

...Religionists have remained more polite, but some, like Baird and Penner, have now examined Eliade's methodology and found it wanting...

...The books were too useful to be overlooked by ex-theologians finding their sea-legs in comparative religion...

...At the same time, the strength of their newly formed identity blocked off the perception that one was dealing here with a system as a priori as any overt theology, with a guiding religious vision more powerful than most theologians could muster...

...Referring to present new thinking about scientific method—Kuhn, Lakatos et alii —Dudley suggests that historians of religion are out of date in insisting on the old-fashioned datahypothesisverification model for scientific research...

...Eliade's books were crammed with "facts," conveniently arranged under helpful generalizations about the sacred and its various manifestations...

...They failed to perceive his polemical advocacy of it as opposed to modern consciousness, his preaching of it as a source of rebirth for the otherwise doomed West...

...A general report is given by John Saliba in 'Homo Religiosus' in Mircea Eliade: An Anthropological Evaluation...

...He does not distinguish primary and secondary sources, nor does he evaluate them, often making use of discredited sources...

...As a more precise suggestion, Dudley argues that Eliade's theoretical work is best presented as belonging to the French tradition of deductive systemic thought or synchronic analysis, as represented by Levi-Strauss, Dumézil, Foucault among others...

...The charge is not only that Eliade works from a priori assumptions, but also that his use of evidence is slip20 June 1980: 377 shod and prejudiced...

...Eliade's theories are not based on inductive reasoning from the data...

...Strange to think that at the very time when in departments of theology bibli-cists and theologians were stressing sacred history and seeing Judaism and Christianity as uniquely historical religions, students in departments of religion were being made to read in Eliade that religion was the way one escaped the "terror of history," that the denial of history was the very meaning of religious symbols, myths and rites, that the attempt to find salvation through history was utterly mistaken, that even Judaism and Christianity in their true essence were anti-historical...