After several years of study at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago, I made a commitment to the field known as History of Religions, specializing in the religions of Japan. I began the study of Sanskrit, the ancient language of India, and Japanese. In high school I had taken four years of Latin; in college, three years of German. In graduate school, facing doctoral exams, I realized that tackling two difficult languages and Ph.D. exams was too demanding, so I concentrated my time and energy on Japanese. I took courses in Japanese religion, and for a year was an assistant to a Japanese scholar of Buddhist studies.
The question that puzzled me as an undergraduate, how to understand the incredible diversity of religious traditions, still intrigued me. What could all the so-called “world religions” of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism (to mention just a few) have in common? And what about the distinctive traditions of Native Americans and other tribal peoples? My hope was that the University of Chicago would help me resolve these questions.
At that time the Divinity School was abuzz because they had just hired Mircea Eliade, considered the world’s leading authority on religious studies. In addition to the many volumes he had written, he had offered a general interpretation of the nature of religion. He saw all religion as the quest to experience the sacred. For him, all life is divided into two modes of being in the world, the sacred mode and the profane mode. The profane is just things and actions that are empty, not referring to anything beyond them. By contrast, the sacred mode is what bring us into contact with what is holy and transcendent. Humans orient their lives around sacred time, in festivals and rituals, and around sacred space, such as altars and shrines.
Sacred time and sacred space enable humans to create an ordered symbolic world, which affords them a sense of reality. Living entirely in profane time and profane space, leaves a person without a centered life and ordered world—a situation Eliade called chaos.
He saw religion as the attempt to orient oneself in a meaningful world, overcoming the threat of disorder and meaninglessness (chaos), and discovering a pattern of symbolic and ritual order (cosmos). This general overview could be used to approach any specific tradition.
Intrigued with this exciting possibility of unlocking the puzzle of the larger picture of religious life, I wanted to read Eliade’s works, but none had appeared in English. He wrote in Romanian and French; his most recent book at that time had been translated into German as Das Heilige und das Profane (The Sacred and the Profane). Relying on my college German, I made my way through that book, which became a pivotal resource for my graduate program.
Eliade explained that all peoples, from prehistoric and tribal cultures to the major “world religions,” divide human experience of reality into sacred and profane space and time. We live most of our careers in ordinary space and time, but need the power of the sacred to have a sense of meaning, order, and a higher reality. By periodically returning to the sacred time of festivals, people can participate symbolically in the sacred, and re-actualize the events of mythical time.
A few brief paragraphs cannot do justice to the power of Eliade’s interpretation of religious life. His book, The Sacred and Profane: The Nature of Religion, now available in English, is a good introduction to his full interpretation.
In seminars with Eliade, we grad students frequently asked him for his method that enabled him to decipher so many difficult subjects—from yoga to shamanism. He never answered that question directly, either in class or in his many books. When we students pressed him, he would tell a story of how a certain tribe performed annual rituals that enabled them to participate in sacred time, and return to the mythical epoch when these rituals were created.
Eliade also had written novels, and encouraged his students to “be creative.” I had been told to read his novels, none of which existed in English translation. I read in French translation what is considered his major novel, Foret interdit (now available in English as The Forbidden Forest). Although it did not reveal any specific method for studying religion, the structure of the novel did afford helpful insights for approaching all aspects of life. Rather than presenting a straightforward narrative, the novel provided episode after episode, each one a kind of enigma or mystery.
This taught me that Eliade did not have a mechanical tool, or foolproof can opener to decipher a ritual or symbol or festival. My own assessment is that Eliade is a kind of religious detective or forensics scholar, asking what are the objects, actions, forms, and other key elements in the tradition we are studying? How do these components define sacred time and space, and how do they help the participants gain a sense of communion with transcendent power, enabling them to realize a sense of cosmos?
This rationale is what helped me continue my doctoral program. To test this working hypothesis, I returned to my interest in Native American culture and religion, selecting the Zuni tribe as a test case for me to try out Eliade’s approach. Using the translated records of Zuni myths, together with descriptions of their major rituals and symbols, I wrote, under Eliade’s supervision, a master’s thesis, “Worldview of the Zuni Indians.” Here, “worldview” is about the same as what Eliade called cosmos.
Having successfully applied Eliade’s approach to a Native American culture and religion, I proposed to use the same strategy for a doctoral dissertation on religion in Japan. Before we move on to the distant topic of Japan, it is good to reflect on the history of Eliade’s contributions. As a grad student in the late 1950s and early 1960s, like many others who studied and wrote about religion, I was bowled over by the innovative and creative insights of Eliade. In the intervening half century, some scholars have made critiques of Eliade’s theories, saying there is no such thing as “the sacred,” and claiming that Eliade emphasized the common features of all religious life at the expense of minimizing the distinctive elements. I leave it to readers to digest Eliade’s works, and make their own judgments.
For my career, his works enabled me to gain an overview of the religious life of humanity, and also to do work in my own field of specialization. I owe a great debt to Eliade, and dedicated to him my book, Religions of Japan: Many Traditions within One Sacred Way (later included in my Religious Traditions of the World.)
Many years ago, this professor and novelist urged his students to be creative. Although I cannot claim to be on the same level as my mentor, I have followed his advice in writing The Twin Destiny series of novels.
I hope that the episodes in these novels provide dramatic clues to discover your own destiny and orient your life, as you seek to avoid chaos and find an ordered world—a cosmos.
H. Byron Earhart 