Mircea Eliade

Mircea Eliade was born in Bucharest in 1907 and died in Chicago on 22 April 1986. He took a master's degree in 1928 and a doctorate in 1933, spent two years in India working with the Indologist Surendranath Dasgupta, and left Romania in 1941 for a press post in Lisbon, where he stayed through the war. After the war he taught at the Sorbonne in Paris from 1946 to 1949, first came to the United States in 1956, and in 1957 was appointed at the University of Chicago, joining both the Divinity School and the Committee on Social Thought — a dual post he held until his death. The papers from that career, catalogued at Chicago, record Joseph Campbell among his correspondents.

Eliade's scholarly contribution is a vocabulary. He taught readers to analyse religion through the category of the hierophany — the manifestation of the sacred in an object, place or moment — and through illud tempus, the time of myth that lies outside ordinary history, in which practitioners place themselves when they re-enact a foundation story. The Sacred and the Profane (1959) carried these distinctions to a general readership, and they became standard equipment in the academic study of religion. They are, however, his analytical choices — designed to make religions comparable to one another — not neutral universals that describe every tradition on its own terms. A category that sorts the material that well is a tool, and a tool built by someone, in a particular century, for particular arguments.

Behind the academic career stands a political record that Eliade never answered. In January 1937 and into February 1938 he published articles supporting the Romanian fascist movement, the Legion of the Archangel Michael; the historian Mac Linscott Ricketts identified eight to ten such articles, while a Romanian collection lists fourteen, some of which Eliade denied writing — the count itself is disputed. Suspected of Legionary sympathy, he spent four months, from July to November 1938, in an internment camp, and after his release he stopped publishing in the Legion's favour. In a 2018 Los Angeles Review of Books exchange on exactly this question, his defender Bryan Rennie writes that Eliade "never did repudiate his support of the right", while arguing the record shows nationalism rather than antisemitism; his critic Philip Ó Ceallaigh argues the opposite. Earlier scholars went further — Daniel Dubuisson in 1993 and Steven Wasserstrom in 1999 argued his history of religion was compromised by his politics — a reading Rennie disputes. The exchange closes without agreement, and Eliade himself, in thirty years at Chicago, said nothing about his fascist past.

What remains useful is the discipline of keeping both ledgers open. Eliade's categories can be taken seriously as instruments for reading without becoming laws of religion, and his biography can be recorded as documented history without being converted into either a verdict or a footnote. The test he failed to apply to himself is the one to apply to him — and to any framework: no category earns universal status by being widely taught, and no uncomfortable record stops existing because the scholar moved to another country.