The Transcendental Structure of the Archaic Universe. Mircea Eliade’s The Sacred and the Profane Valentin Cioveie ANNALS of the University of Bucharest Philosophy Series Vol. LXIV, no. 1, 2015 pp. 83 – 112. VARIA THE TRANSCENDENTAL STRUCTURE OF THE ARCHAIC UNIVERSE. MIRCEA ELIADE’S THE SACRED AND THE PROFANE VALENTIN CIOVEIE Abstract The argument of the present paper shows that Mircea Eliade’s book The Sacred and the Profane is not conceived just as a simple introduction into the history of religions. This book dares to formulate an ontology and an anthropology which are more originary (in the phenomenological sense) and complete than those of Plato at the beginning of European philosophy and those of Heidegger’s Being and Time at the other end of philosophy’s history. Although not explicitly expressed, The Sacred and the Profane together with other similar works by Eliade aims to expose the profoundest – according to Eliade himself – ontology and anthropology ever thematised. In this article I try to systematize Eliade’s ontological and anthropological discourse and to show its transcendental dimension. Keywords: sacre, profane, ontology, anthropology, Eliade, Heidegger. I. Introduction The work that will be analyzed in what follows was written in 1956 and was published in 1957 under the title Das Heilige und das Profane (The Sacred and the Profane) in Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, Reinbeck bei Hamburg. It is explicitly conceived by the author as a general introduction to the phenomenological and historical study of religious acts and it “describes the modalities of the sacred and the situation of the human being in a world charged with religious values” (Eliade 1957, 18). More precisely, it is a presentation of the experiences, 84 VALENTIN CIOVEIE beliefs and behaviour of homo religiosus, above all of those of the human being from traditional and oriental societies. Eliade includes here archaic societies among traditional societies, although the distinction between archaic and traditional repeatedly appears in the work.1 The book will reveal “the logic and greatness of their conceptions upon the world”, “that is of their religious behaviour, symbolism and systems”, will highlight “the specific categories of a religious existence that is archaic and traditional” (18). In order to be clearer through contrast to people living today, but also for the general message of the book destined to them, Eliade will present the religious human being “as compared to the human being lacking in religious sentiment, of the human being living ... in a desacralised world” or, to put it differently: “Our primary concern is to present the specific dimensions of religious experience, to bring out the differences between it and profane experience of the world.” (17) Although Eliade does not deal with the process of degeneration of the religious phenomenon2, he contrasts the result of this degeneration brought about by secularization, which is the behaviour of the modern individual, impoverished and lacking in coherence, with the experience and behaviour of the homo religiosus as an archaic, traditional and oriental human being. II. The Nature of the Sacred The sacred as primary indefinable category is borrowed by Mircea Eliade from Roger Callois (who is only mentioned in the Forward to Traité d’histoire des religions), and both relate, of course, to Rudolf Otto’s work, Das Heilige (1917). If Callois is no longer mentioned in The Sacred and the Profane, Otto’s concept is briefly sketched in order to underline the differences from Eliade’s approach. Otto analyses the fundamental dispositions generated inside an individual by numinous experience, 1 For example, in the Forward (to the French edition) etc. 2 Nor does he deal with the significant theme of the resacralisation of the profane, which represents a theme that is currently under discussion; however, he points out three possible directions of development for this process (Forward to the French edition). THE TRANSCENDENTAL STRUCTURE OF THE ARCHAIC UNIVERSE. 85 MIRCEA ELIADE’S THE SACRED AND THE PROFANE translated through the terms tremendum, majestas, and fascinans. Eliade believes (taken the subtitle of Otto into account) that this is the analysis of the irrational side generated by the relationship with the sacred, while he will present the phenomenon in its entire complexity, beyond the dichotomy between the rational and the irrational. The terms most often used are experience (without making any distinction between the rational and the irrational side) and behaviour. According to the authors mentioned above, the sacred cannot be defined, it represents the ultimate reality that is inexpressible par excellence: it can only be said that “it is the opposite of the profane” (10). What could be characterized positively are only its manifestations in the world and in time for the consciousness of human being, manifestations which belong to the most different categories. In this context, Eliade makes a statement which clearly reveals the fact that, for him, sacred reality is monolithic and indistinct (unitary), in total opposition to the heterogeneity of hierophanies and also that he supports a relativistic point of view in the history of religion: From the most elementary hierophany – e.g., manifestation of the sacred in some ordinary object, a stone or a tree – to the supreme hierophany (which, for a Christian, is the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ) there is no solution of continuity. (That means: they do not evolve one from another – V.C.). In each case we are confronted by the same mysterious act – the manifestation of something of a wholly different order, a reality that does not belong to our world, in objects that are an integral part of our natural “profane” world. (11) The same reality, that of the sacred, through the same mysterious act, gives birth both to the hierophanies from the sacred stones, as well as to the most complex and non-dual hierophany in the history of religions, Jesus Christ. Even if you are not Christian (and thus scandalized by this levelling inside the realm of the Unseen), as a historian of religions you cannot help being surprised by this extreme simplification. And the conclusion that one must reach is that a simple and monolithic reality, even if it is being (Being) itself, as Eliade would state, cannot directly bring about the quasi-infinite variety of hierophanies, cratophanies, teophanies and revelations of the sacred, 86 VALENTIN CIOVEIE without the mediation of some other sacral levels.3 For this reason, a variety inside the sacred per se needs to be conceived, probably ordered in a hierarchy of stages that accounts for the variety perceived throughout history. And this is an aspect that Eliade does not achieve in any of his works, unless we accept a realist position with regard to the categories present in the Treatise, obtained through phenomenological reduction. In this case however, the use of the concept of the sacred as being beyond these categories would go in the direction of an absolute transcendent, apophatic reality and would overlap what the Abrahamic traditions consider to be God in His hidden nature or the ultimate reality in Hinduism etc. We cannot however find any statements in Eliade’s work to support this point of view, with the exception perhaps of the impossibility of defining the sacred and of making the latter synonymous with being (which however is distinct and ontologically subordinated to God in the Christian tradition: the truly ultimate Reality goes beyond being, according to Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite, for example). The sacred is equated by Eliade also with reality itself, with the saturation by being and with power. The opposition sacred – profane can be translated through the opposition real – unreal. As this is a reality filled with power, the sacred acts efficiently in the world and it is perennial. As the reader can see from our considerations and from many other claims in the huge work of Eliade, it is very hard to find just one sense of the word. I propose instead to accept different meanings which are mutually complementary. These meanings can be divided into two main categories that I will call ‘ontic claims’ and ‘epistemic claims’. I use the term ontic as being different from ontological, the last one implying a structure, the first one just a claim regarding the reality of the sacred outside the human consciousness. In my opinion, we cannot treat the work of Eliade without taking into account a certain evolution through time. Regarding the concrete problem which is of interest here, the nature of the sacred, it would be inappropriate to think that the Traité (and the Prolegomena) shared 3 Eliade uses numerous terms from the same semantic area to refer to the phenomenon of the manifestation of the sacred: hierophany, epiphany, ontophany, kratophany, teophany,the revelation or irruption of the sacred, the appearance of a sign. THE TRANSCENDENTAL STRUCTURE OF THE ARCHAIC UNIVERSE. 87 MIRCEA ELIADE’S THE SACRED AND THE PROFANE exactly the same conception with The Sacred and the Profane. I find it significant that in the first book (appeared in 1949, but written between 1940 and 1948) just the name of R. Callois is mentioned, but not that of R. Otto, while in the second book we find the ideas of Otto presented, but Callois is not even mentioned. Here we have to remind the reader that Callois came from the sociological school of Durkheim and that supported Eliade explicitly against Durkheim’s views an anti-reductionist stance and an anti-evolutionist view in the history of religious traditions. But there are many claims of Callois himself that Eliade accepted in their entire formulation, maybe with another justification. The sources of the epistemic theses regarding the nature of the sacred represent, on one hand, the fact that the sacred manifests itself for the human consciousness, according to the structures of this consciousness. We have no direct, unmediated experience of the sacred as noumenal realm, as we already know from Kant. On the other hand, not just the individual structure of consciousness contributes to what we experience as the sacred, but also the human community as a sociological reality. The first source of the ontic thesis regarding the nature of the sacred is Otto’s idea, borrowed from Kant, that in order to have an experience of the world as something sacred, there must be a noumenal reality out there, the sacred is not just a modality of our consciousness. The second source is the idea of a real power out there, mentioned by Dumézil in his Preface to the Traité: mana as a mystical force without form but being capable of taking any form. As Bryan Rennie in his book Reconstructing Eliade: Making Sense of Religion (1996) proposes, there is a conjunction in Eliade between what I call the epistemic and ontic theses. But Rennie accentuates so much the epistemic thesis that the reader has the impression of excluding the other. In an article not yet published, supporting the attribution theory regarding the sacred in Eliade against a sui generis discourse, he is explicitly making this step. 88 VALENTIN CIOVEIE I want to mention five senses4 in which the word ‘sacred’ is used in Eliade without supporting each of them with texts, because my aim in this paper is the transcendental doctrine of Eliade. However, for any transcendental doctrine there must be a real counterpart outside the consciousness. 1. The sacred as a reality absolute transcendent to the cosmos (and being), irreducible and apophatic: the noumen. About the sacred in this sense we can only say that is opposed to the profane. It does not mean an entity and it does not imply a specific ontology, but it is independent ontic of all other realities. It appears in different traditions as the Supreme Being who becomes deus otiosus. 2. Closely connected with the first sense is the second one: the sacred as a force (energy) without form, but capable of taking any form. 3. As being itself, manifested through the cosmically hierophanies, but irreducible to the mundane aspects of these. It is specific to cosmic religiosity which is opposed to what I called the apophatic sense of the sacred and its experience. 4. The sacred as archetypes (which have three different meanings according to I.P. Culianu). 5. The sacred as adjective referring to the modality of human experience, to the relation of consciousness with the real, but not to the real itself. It is the thesis of this paper that the human modality of experiencing the sacred in the first senses has a transcendental structure. The manifestation of the sacred is a paradoxical process: something of a completely other nature manifests itself in an object or in a being in the world over here, in the profane world: 4 Julien Ries distinguishes in the second chapter of his excellent book Il sacro nella storia religiosa dell'umanita (1995), when he analyses the conception of Otto, between what I consider the first sense from the transcendental sense and from the sacred as value. The three meanings appear again in his book in the chapter dedicated to Eliade. THE TRANSCENDENTAL STRUCTURE OF THE ARCHAIC UNIVERSE. 89 MIRCEA ELIADE’S THE SACRED AND THE PROFANE By manifesting the sacred, any object becomes something else, yet it continues to remain itself, for it continues to participate in its surrounding cosmic milieu. (12) It is the first process of the duality sacred-profane (to which we shall return) and it consists exactly in this paradoxical merging of a reality beyond with natural realities from here. But the most important intrication is with the human consciousness. III. Underlining the Importance of Eliade’s Work The first thesis of the anthropology of a religious individual is the following: The individual of the archaic societies tends to live as much as possible in the sacred or in close proximity to consecrated objects. The desire of the religious individual to live in the sacred is in fact the same as his desire to situate himself in objective reality, not to let him be paralysed by the endless relativity of purely subjective experiences, to live in a real and efficient world – and not in an illusion. (12) We speak here of an ontic yearning. In order to develop this anthropology and the ontology implicitly related to it, Eliade will analyze in antithesis the two manners of being in the world, from the point of view of space and living, of the experience of time, of the relation with nature and tools, of the perception of human life itself constituted from its concrete acts. The ontology is absorbed in the transcendental anthropology exactly in the manner in which this is done in Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit: world is a moment of the transcendental structure of Dasein ‘being-in- the-world’ and no more than this. I think that this transcendental discourse is late and not to be found in Traité. The method used is that of comparison between the most different ‘primitive’ cultures, removed from each other both in time and space, followed by traditional cultures (India plays a central role here), then the Judeo-Christian tradition and, at last, modernity. The purpose is to highlight the common transcendental traits of religious experience as 90 VALENTIN CIOVEIE opposed to profane experience, ignoring the differences between historical and cultural contexts. We speak here of the approach that is typical to the philosophical tradition of categorial thinking, as it was shown above. Eliade is of course aware of the importance of historical, social, psychological etc. determinations of the experience of the sacred, as becomes obvious both from his explicit statements present in different works, as well as in the mode of analysis present in the three volumes of the History, as in numerous other works. There are however in his writings two processes of abstracting the general from the concrete: a) on the one hand, it means reducing historical, social, psychological etc. determinations, in order to arrive at what is irreducible in the experience of the sacred; b) on the other hand, it means searching for the common traits of the experience of the sacred in very different cultures. Although ‘reductionist’ in this double (phenomenological) sense, his position is militantly anti-reductionist in a completely other sense. He argues explicitly against reducing religious experience to one of its historical, social etc. contexts, hence Mircea Eliade affirms the irreducibility of the experience of the sacred and of its reality (see ‚Foreword to Treatise upon the History of Religions etc.) As we speak here of a work that has the character of an introduction into the study of religious phenomena, I will present its contents using Eliade’s own terms. There might be a category of readers who are somewhat troubled by the ‘thesist’ manner of presenting the paper. I tried through this analytical approach to highlight as best as I could the central statements and the structure of archaic ontology and anthropology, so that they can be distinguished from the many examples in the work and from other statements with an explanatory role, and in this manner the groundwork will be laid for eventual further research for this other type of Existential Analytics (that is, the comparison with Plato’s ontology and with the work Being and Time by Heidegger, as will be shown later on). What is essential to note in Eliade’s thematisation is the shift that is produced by the understanding of the archaic mind in the conceptualization of the classical binome logos – mythos: for Eliade the whole realm of myth is related to logos too, that is to reason; however, we speak here of a logic of the symbols present in the pre-theoretical THE TRANSCENDENTAL STRUCTURE OF THE ARCHAIC UNIVERSE. 91 MIRCEA ELIADE’S THE SACRED AND THE PROFANE mode in the behaviour of the traditional and archaic individual, and opposed to the logic of the concepts (Aristotelian etc.). Eliade’s purpose in this paper is purely philosophical; this is only visible at first glance for the reader who notices that the central terms of the first chapter are space, world, inhabiting, being, two modes of being in the world. These are Heideggerian terms, and the influence of Heidegger’s ‘Existential Analytics’ on Eliade is also attested by Culianu.5 The thesis of the present article is that Mircea Eliade tries through this work to present another, more original, Existential Analytics, starting from the experience and behaviour of the religious individual in opposition to the profane individual. We deal therefore with a transcendental phenomenological discourse. This is not the place to analyse the relationship between these two proposals for transcendental anthropology (Heidegger and Eliade). We do however have to emphasize the superficial impression that the religious individual could be identified with Heidegger’s authentic Dasein, although an analogy between the two concepts is possible. From a certain perspective we can even speak of an opposition between Dasein and homo religiosus.6 We would venture the thesis according to which Eliade’s analysis from this work is transcendental in the strictest sense of the word, meaning that we deal here with structures of the individual that make possible a type of experience and a certain behaviour. We do not speak here only of structures of consciousness, as in the case of the transcendental tradition from Kant to Husserl. Eliade speaks of experience at the level of the whole human being and, referring to R. Otto, he includes the irrational level in his analysis.7 Therefore, the sense 5 Eliade’s critics pass very quickly over this influence. See an extended discussion in the Annex. 6 An argument certainly not lacking in significance can be taken up from Eliade’s literary works (enough has been written about the unity of the academic and literary works for us not to insist upon the matter here). In The Forbidden Forest Ștefan Viziru opposes a saint’s vision upon time with the heideggerian one defended by Biriș. Culianu (previous note) speaks about Eliade’s interest for the ontic, as opposed to the heideggerian interest for the ontologic. 7 If there several transcendental discourses upon the level of conscious experience do exist, there are very few attempts to offer a transcendental analysis of the unconscious. We are personally only aware of Vasile Dem. Zamfirescu’s (1998) excellent analysis. The transcendental analysis of the total human being is Mircea