Escape Into the Sacred

...Though it shows evidence of having been hastily written, Myth and Reality is a useful summary of Eliade's own ideas drawn from his previous work...

...The extent of his knowledge and the acuteness of his analysis of myth have enormously enlarged our understanding of it as a historical phenomenon...

...For all their superior sophistication and learning, modern theologians have never succeeded in advancing beyond the arguments first propounded by the early Church Fathers...

...The nature of the crisis may be briefly described in this way: If the Near Eastern world at the time of Christ was rife with an immense variety of savior gods, if Christ himself was a historical figure thinking and acting within a well-defined tradition of Hebrew Messianic prophecy, if his message was actually a mere variation on the paradigm of myth as it manifested itself in a thousand different ways before and during his lifetime, and if the concept of rebirth is Pauline, rather a descendant of Eastern and Greek speculation than an original, divinely-inspired Christian idea, what then happens to the claim for the uniqueness of Christ and of Christianity...

...Because, as he says, "myths describe the various and sometimes dramatic breakthroughs of the sacred into the World," the return to myth would re-achieve the same breakthrough for the modern world of the sacred whose absence has been the cause of so much of its woe...

...As a system of belief, one can only do with Eliade's thought what one does with any system of belief: take it or leave it...

...Yet the dilemma has persisted, for if, on the one hand, the word of God was revealed only in Christ's time, then history before Christ has to be thought of as mere preparatio evangelii, hardly an acceptable idea in this age of historical and international understanding...

...The first four uses of the term suggest that myth is a stage in the intellectual development of man, from superstition (i.e., incorrect belief), through religion (i.e., incomplete belief) to science (i.e., correct belief...

...One who thinks of myth in terms of the last three uses will view it as a fixed psychological manifestation obscured and hampered by the accretion of reason and science...

...On the other hand, history after this has to be thought of as a continual falling off from the high point of Christ, again hardly an acceptable idea in this age of progress (even leaving out the argument over the effects of Christianity on the manners and morals of men since its introduction...

...At the least, it might be argued that its surreptitious attraction to the heady mysteries of myth is a kind of compensation for its Sunday-like approval of the straight-laced realities of science...

...The only way out of the dilemma has been for the theologian to take the existential leap into, as in the case of Kierkegaard, the paradox of the absurd, into the death of God of Nietzche, the Dasein of Heidegger, the metahistory of Berdyaev, the "fall" of Tillich, and the myth of the eternal return of Eliade...

...If the myths of Dionysius and Apollo are no longer told, the attitudes of mind they represent are still very much alive and still indissolubly linked to each other in an eternal reciprocity of love and hate...

...Because he has successfully made this escape, the man of the traditional civilizations, as Eliade calls him—that is, primitive man, the practitioner of Yoga, the Christian, all those who have performed the rites of regressus ad uterum—has the right to reproach modern man for his obstinacy in living in time, in the detritus of his own history, and therefore unfree, uncreative, and ultimately unborn...

...But as a study of myth, it can be praised for its scholarship and criticized for putting that scholarship to a propaganda purpose precisely because that purpose is not openly acknowledged...

...He has, however, used his learning to give substance to a view of myth which has had the effect of diminishing it into a mere synomyn for his particular form and way of religious belief...

...Of all the scholars in the field of myth, perhaps none has done more to clarify and, at the same time, to confuse the subject than has Mircea Eliade...

...What is wrong is to adopt the timid and misleading pretense that objective history is being presented when in fact something much more exciting is being attempted— that is, an effort to change men's minds...

...It is, in other words, an ever-repeated natural process by which man regularly frees himself from his own history and escapes into the eternal world of the sacred...

...To summarize this idea in Eliade's own words: "We might say that by 'living' the myths one merges from profane, chronological time and enters a time that is of a different quality, a 'sacred' time at once primordial and indefinitely recoverable...

...These are: 1) myth as primitive belief, 2) myth as concealed history, 3) myth as religious allegory, 4) myth as intellectual allegory, 5) myth as wish-fulfillment, 6) myth as collective thought, and 7) myth as a form of faith...

...And though Eliade has done this in the name of objective scholarship, even his most sympathetic exponent, Thomas J. J. Altizer, in his recent able and persuasive study, Mircea Eliade and the Dialectic of the Sacred, speaks of him as "prophet, seer, and shaman"— hardly the roles in which one expects to find chairmen of departments of religion in Midwestern universities whose "dearest hope [is] that Christianity will undergo a new and radical rebirth...

...Modern theology has never gotten over the shock of the historical approach to religion, and though the anthropological and historical study of myth was not in direct and daily contact with the forces which produced the figure of the historical Christ, it contributed its share to the process which created that crisis in theology which continues to shake religious thought today...

...Indeed, one may well wonder if the reiteration of its faithfulness to the wife does not in fact conceal considerably more ardor for the mistress...

...The heart of his thesis is the notion that the mythic system of primitive peoples enabled them to achieve a satisfactory rapport between themselves, nature and God, and that a return to this mode of belief, through a mythically purged Christianity, will free modern man from the chains of history and rational thought...

...I am far from being read in all the voluminous literature on myth being produced today—it ranges over pre-history, anthropology, archaeology, classical studies, the history of religion and art, psychology, sociology, theology, literary criticism, as well as virtually every form and genre of creative activity —but I have been able to note at least seven different uses of the word...

...or it was the first true expression of the word of God, hitherto fallen on deaf ears, and is therefore unique as the original word of God...

...Therefore, he will lament its decline and will, through the advocacy of one form of faith or another from religion to literary criticism, endeavor to restore it to its primitive vitality...

...It is one thing to study myth and to show how it has been used in religion and art, but it is quite another to transform it into a philosophia perennis of which Christianity is the only valid manifestation...

...I should have thought that in today's circumstances the study of myth and the role of Christianity have enough burdens of their own without being saddled with each other's problems...

...Reviewed by HERBERT WEISINGER Comparative Literature Program, Michigan State University One would think that an age which prides itself on its dedication to science would have nothing but scorn for myth...

...These took one of two forms: Either Christianity was the culmination and fulfillment of a venerable tradition which had its origins in the very beginnings of time and is therefore unique as the clearest word of God, hitherto obscured by superstition and false religion...

...The last three uses assume that myth is a permanent part of the essential constitution of man, built into his basic genetic structure and manifesting itself in different ways under the pressures of varying needs and circumstances...

...One who thinks of myth in terms of the first four uses sees it as essentially an historical phenomenon with both a past and a goal...

...But such is the paradoxical character of the 20thcentury mind that the fervor of its passion for myth is no less than the firmness of its espousal of science...

...Eliade directs the full power of his scholarship to showing that the idea of renewal is central not only to primitive myth, the religions of the East and to early Christianity, but to its modern manifestations in Marx, Freud and art on the sophisticated level as well as in the cargo cults and the mass media on the popular level...

...Nor is it desirable that this should be done, for no work of scholarship can attain to greatness if it is not so utterly committed to a point of view which, however much later scholarship may demonstrate to be based on faulty evidence, is so passionately argued that it moves men and gains their assent...

...If to keep up with the scholarship on myth is almost impossible, to keep the many and contradictory uses of the word clear and distinct from each other is, in practice, altogether impossible...

...He will, in one form or another, urge the emancipation of the mind from the trammels of myth, thought of as a vestige of superstition, in the direction of rational thought and scientific method...