Philosopher’s View on Religion

Mircea Eliade

PHI 100
PREPARED BY: RONNEL JOHN M. ROMAGOS

Foundation University
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Mircea Eliade
1907-1986
Mircea Eliade
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PHI 100 - Religions, Religious Experiences and Spirituality

 While Otto called the reality behind all religious experience the holy, Mircea
Eliade (1907–86) preferred to call it “the sacred.” He also extended on Otto’s
thought by looking not only at the response of individual persons to the sacred but
to the way that an inbreaking of the sacred into the human world had social and
cultural effects as well, from the selection of sites for the founding of cities or the
erection of ridgepoles in homes, to the arising of Jungian-like archetypes in
human storytelling and communications.
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PHI 100 - Religions, Religious Experiences and Spirituality

 For Eliade, the sacred was a formative power in human communal life, and he
devoted his energies to exploring the recurring patterns in its appearance. This led
him to bring back into play the wide-ranging comparative methods of Frazer, for
which he has received some of the same criticisms, but he has easily been the
most influential Western scholar of religion in the 20th century.
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PHI 100 - Religions, Religious Experiences and Spirituality

 I. Mircea Eliade built on Otto’s idea of the holy as a real phenomenon that breaks into
the world.
 A. He used the term “the sacred” instead of “the holy.”
 B. Like Otto, he concentrated on how people experienced the sacred instead of how they
conceptualized it.
 C. He believed that all humans responded to the sacred, even those who did not encounter it
firsthand.
 1. People use symbols to represent various aspects of the sacred.
 2. People establish towns, build sanctuaries, and organize space and time with reference to the
sacred.
 3. Modern, secularized humanity, while rejecting the sacred, still feels a nostalgia for the experience
of “archaic peoples.”
 4. People who retain the experience of the sacred and continue to respond to it are homo religiosus
(religious humans).
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PHI 100 - Religions, Religious Experiences and Spirituality

 II. Mircea Eliade’s idea of sacred space.
 A. Though scientifically, we conceptualize space as continuous and uniform, religious
people experience space as divided into profane space and sacred space.
 1. Profane space is the ordinary space in which we live and go about our daily activities free
of all reference to larger reality.
 2. Sacred space is the space where the sacred breaks into our ordinary reality and manifests
itself (a hierophany).
 3. Sacred space is experienced differently. When one enters a sacred space, he or she acts in
accordance with the environment (e.g., a church).
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PHI 100 - Religions, Religious Experiences and Spirituality

 B. Hierophanies create points of reference that help people orient themselves in an
otherwise trackless world. They help create a cosmos out of chaos.
 1. Axis mundi, or “world-axis,” is the location where the sacred breaks into ordinary reality.
 2. Cities might be founded on hierophanies (e.g., the vision of the eagle and snake that
established the site of Mexico City).
 3. A church, temple, or shrine may provide a center for organized, habitable space.
 4. The entire world can be centered on a central, sacred point (e.g., Jerusalem or Mecca).
 C. Outside of the sacrally organized space lies the danger of chaos.
 1. Chaos can be seen as a wilderness and a strange land.
 2. Such places, being outside the sacralized and organized world, are considered dangerous.
 3. Such places are also charged with transformative power through the ability to unmake and
remake an individual. Many initiation rites take place there (e.g., Jesus’ 40 days in the desert).
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PHI 100 - Religions, Religious Experiences and Spirituality

 D. People need such a point of orientation to know where they are in the world.
 1. Settled peoples erect a central structure (such as a cathedral with a steeple) where the sacred
breaks in and which serves as a central point of reference.
 2. Wandering people carry with them a token (such as a sacred pole) so that they will always be
at the center regardless of where they are.
 3. Eliade illustrates this need through the example of an Australian nomadic tribe that lay down
and died when their sacred pole was broken.
 E. The idea of sacred space is best illustrated by a map found in a 13 th-century monastic
Psalter which shows a sacred conception of the world.
 1. Jerusalem lies at the center, representing the spot where God was manifested in Jesus.
 2. As one moves away from the center, one sees more signs of chaos and disintegration
represented by deformed people around the periphery.
 3. Outside this globe lie representations of chaos (e.g., dragons).
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PHI 100 - Religions, Religious Experiences and Spirituality

 III. Mircea Eliade’s idea of sacred time.
 A. Just as space holds an unequal density of profanity and sacrality, so too does
time.
 1. Profane time is ordinary, unexceptional time.
 2. Sacred time is either the illud tempus (the “once upon a time”) when sacred events
happened or ritual time that recaptures and makes that sacred time present once again.
 B. The illud tempus is the time of creation and the time when all was new and fresh
in the world.
 1. This time is not historical but mythical.
 2. This time is often recurrent, based on the phases of the moon and the cycles of the
seasons.
 3. This time is recaptured by religious rituals which retell the myths again.
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PHI 100 - Religions, Religious Experiences and Spirituality

 IV. Mircea Eliade’s idea of symbol.
 A. The sacred as such is never on display; it is a Kantian Ding an sich.
1. It can only be inferred by observing how people experience it.
2. The typical way of laying out what people think about the sacred is by deploying symbols to
encode it.
 3. Symbols characterize particular aspects of the sacred, and they form structures by relating to one
another so as to provide insight into the structure of the sacred.
 B. Eliade explored symbols and catalogued them, showing how certain ones recur in many places
and times.
 1. The sun represents the universal.
 2. The moon symbolizes death and rebirth.
 3. Water typically symbolizes chaos and formlessness.
 4. Sky-father and earth-mother symbols recur frequently. The growth of plants is seen as their union
in sexual intercourse.
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PHI 100 - Religions, Religious Experiences and Spirituality

 V. Mircea Eliade’s idea of ritual and myth.
 A. Rituals serve to place human life into the context of the sacred through
reenactment and symbolism.
 B. Rituals take place in sacred time.
 1. Their liturgies reiterate what the divine powers did in the distant illud tempus.
 2. Myths, then, are vitally important to rituals, as they tell the stories of the actions of
the divinities at the time of creation.
 3. Myths give people an understanding of the progress of their own lives and activities
by relating them to divine models.
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PHI 100 - Religions, Religious Experiences and Spirituality

VI. Mircea Eliade never proposed an ultimate definition of religion.
 A. He assumed that people could tell the sacred from the profane intuitively.
 B. His method was historical and comparative. The object was to describe homo
religiosus, the universal religious person.
 C. He sidestepped the official theologies of religious bodies by focusing on the
experience of the sacred rather than conceptualizations about it.