Love and anarchy in Romania : A critical review of Mircea Eliade's Autobiography, volume one, 1907–1937

Eliade is a problem: to at least half of today's historians of religion he embodies the discipline; to the other half he is anathema. I do not intend to review this debate here, nor to rehearse the themes of Eliade's massive oeuvre. I will, however, point over my shoulder to the mixed legacy of theoretical debts and doubts Eliade's work has inspired and try to bring them into relationship with the life story Eliade tells in the Autobiography. This review then attempts to show how Eliade's ‘life’ and ‘letters’ cohere and thus how in illuminating one we shed light on the other.     

The diplomatic career of Mircea Eliade: A response to Adriana Berger

Adriana Berger has attacked Mircea Eliade's connection with the Romanian right-wing movement, the Iron Guard, or Legion of the Archangel Michael. Her article ‘Fascism and religion in Romania’, makes much of certain British Foreign Office documents which I have inspected in detail. Not only do these documents fail to corroborate Berger's conclusions but they cast real doubt on Berger's critical detachment. Her claim that Eliade was detained in England because of his political activities on behalf of the Iron Guard, and also of Nazi Germany, is without foundation. Other insinuations which she has made about Eliade's political motivations are subject to alternative interpretations. Eliade undoubtedly was vehemently nationalist in his youth and gave some support to the Legion of the Archangel Michael. However, we must constantly guard against permitting our pre-existent judgements of nationalism and fascism to dictate our reading of historical event. Even if justified, prejudice is still prejudice and is not acceptable scholarship.     

Recent Defenders of Eliade: A Critical Evaluation

Several defenders of Mircea Eliade have written books maintaining that Eliade's personal life and literary and scholarly contributions are all of one piece; that one cannot understand his scholarship without understanding his personal life, fears, ambitions, religious and other commitments. Reviewed and critically evaluated are Mac Linscott Ricketts's interpretation that the essence of Eliade's scholarship can be seen in his early Romanian experiences and writings; Carl Olson's interpretation that Eliade's scholarship is essentially theological and philosophical; and David Cave's interpretation that Eliade's scholarship is essentially based on his spiritual vision of a new humanism. Interpretations of Eliade's historical consciousness and his Christianity are criticized. Next, using these three defenders and several critics, the recent controversy about Eliade's politics and the political nature of his scholarship is considered. Finally, questions are raised as to whether Eliade's defenders have blurred or collapsed certain legitimate scholarly distinctions, thus rendering his scholarship even more vulnerable to attack.     

Illud tempus in Greek myth and ritual

This article offers a re-examination of Eliade's classic theory of rituals as repetitions of archetypal events that once upon a time took place in illo tempore. I confront the theory with ancient Greek myths and rituals, showing that it does fit them to some extent, although it needs to be modified and further elaborated. The Greeks were acutely aware of the ambivalence of mythical time, and their rituals were not just meant to evoke it but to keep it off as well. In myth things typically go wrong, and the task of ritual is to correct them, repeating the archetypal mistake in a non-literal way that makes it possible to relate to the mythical while leaving it safely detached behind the boundaries of the civilized world. The Greek vision of primordial time does not necessarily contradict the myth-and-ritual pattern proposed by Eliade, but it is interesting in that it emphasizes certain features of primordiality downplayed by him, thus inviting us to reconsider the meaning of the whole conception. This is what I attempt in the second part of my paper, in which I set the problem of ritual repetition in a different methodological perspective, interpreting it in accordance with contemporary, structuralist approaches to the study of Greek religion.     

Eliade on diplomatic service in London

It was in England that Mircea Eliade started writing the volume which would be published nearly a decade later as Traité d'histoire des religions (Patterns in Comparative Religion), as attested by the book's Avant-propos de l'auteur, dated ‘Oxford 1940/Paris 1948.’ Eliade also states in his autobiography (1988, p. 84) that ‘I read, took notes, and elaborated a plan of a vast synthesis of the morphology and history of religions, a synthesis I had glimpsed instantaneously in an air raid shelter during an alarm.’ In order to recreate the historical and political environment in which Eliade conceived and began to write his fundamental theoretical book, I have sketched the history of Great Britain's early involvement in World War II, the dramatic political events in Romania during Eliade's diplomatic service in London, and the British government's intrigues that held him a virtual ‘captive’ from September 1940 to February 19411     

Blessed are the uncertain,for they will experience excess

In this paper I look at the possibility that uncertainty may not merely be a stage in the research process, but an outcome in itself. Exploring how university education and scholarship collided with my own personal experiences and identity I discuss how a combination of poststructural theory and my encounters with peace, conflict and religion enabled me to value uncertainty, and I make the case that uncertainty can open up the future to the gift of chance. By intertwining discussions of both lived experience and academic work, the organisation of the paper reflects how the two became inextricably linked, continuously folding into each other, so that my sense of self influenced my research, and conversely, my research influenced my sense of self. The outcome is a discussion of how I incorporated uncertainty into my research and personal life, which I explore using the example of religion, and how I lost and gained my faith, rejecting my previous Christianity while reconstructing a kind of faith found in uncertainty, a sense of place and ethical space to come.     

The Strange New World in the Church:

Hauerwas's refusal to translate the argument displayed in With the Grain of the Universe (his recent Gifford Lectures) into language that “anyone” can understand is itself part of the argument. Consequently, readers will not understand what Hauerwas is up to until they have attained fluency in the peculiar language that has epitomized three decades of Hauerwas's scholarship. Such fluency is not easily gained. Nevertheless, in this review essay, I situate Hauerwas's baffling language against the backdrop of his corpus to show at least this much: With the Grain of the Universe transforms natural theology into “witness.” In the end, my essay may demonstrate what many have feared, that Hauerwas is, in fact, a Christian apologist—though of a very ancient sort.     

THE LEGACY OF GORDON KAUFMAN: THEOLOGICAL METHOD AND ITS PRAGMATIC NORMS

I argue that the most significant contribution and legacy of Gordon Kaufman's work rests in his theological method. I limit my discussion to his methodological starting point, his concept of human nature, as he develops it in his book, In Face of Mystery. I show the relevance of this starting point for cultural and theological criticism by arguing two points: first, that this starting point embraces religious and cultural pluralism at its center, providing a framework for intercultural and interreligious discussion and cooperation, and second, that Kaufman's interpretation of religion that emerges out of this starting point embodies pragmatic criteria for evaluating and reconstructing alternative cultural and religious worldviews, so that they may function more adequately within the changing contexts of life.     

‘The Trojan horse of philosophia perennis’: Mircea Eliade's quest of spiritual transformation

This essay highlights one of Mircea Eliade's most important legacies to Religious Studies. The Romanian scholar never reduced the spiritual history of humankind to a mere socio-cultural construction. He defended his stance against the naturalist scholars and resisted the stream of ‘scientific atheism’ that is now towering above Religious Studies departments. The article also underlines Eliade's early intellectual influences and his idea of ‘creative hermeneutics’. I hope that this essay will contribute to a better understanding of Eliade's philosophical presuppositions.     

BARTH AFTER KANT?

Barth consistently comments on Kant's importance for his early thought in his autobiographical sketches, letters, and even more explicitly in his 1930 lectures on Kant in his Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century. Interestingly, however, little attention has been paid to these latter lectures on Protestant history in the secondary literature. In part, this oversight has been due to the manner in which Barth's theology has been thought to overcome Kant's influence much earlier on in his intellectual development. Hence, although commentators such as Merold Westphal, Simon Fisher and Bruce McCormack have developed keen interest in Kant's influence upon Barth's early work, even engaging Barth's Neo‐Kantian context in great detail, my contention is that Barth's later interpretation of Kant is crucial to his intellectual development, and gives further insight into Barth's legacy for contemporary theology today. My aim in what follows is to refigure the relationship between Barth's early appropriation and critique of Kant, and the more onto‐theological issues at stake in his later Protestant history lectures. In so doing, we can begin to discern in Barth, not an abandonment or disregard for the metaphysical questions of being, but rather, the call to face them all the more rigorously.     

Recent defenders of Eliade: A critical evaluation

Several defenders of Mircea Eliade have written books maintaining that Eliade's personal life and literary and scholarly contributions are all of one piece; that one cannot understand his scholarship without understanding his personal life, fears, ambitions, religious and other commitments. Reviewed and critically evaluated are Mac Linscott Ricketts's interpretation that the essence of Eliade's scholarship can be seen in his early Romanian experiences and writings; Carl Olson's interpretation that EEade's scholarship is essentially theological and philosophical; and David Cave's interpretation that Eliade's scholarship is essentially based on his spiritual vision of a new humanism. Interpretations of Eliade's historical consciousness and his Christianity are criticized. Next, using these three defenders and several critics, the recent controversy about Eliade's politics and the political nature of his scholarship is considered. Finally, questions are raised as to whether Eliade's defenders have blurred or collapsed certain legitimate scholarly distinctions, thus rendering his scholarship even more vulnerable to attack.     

In Search of a More Reliable Truth: Mourning and Donald Capps’s Psychological Portrait of Jesus

This article is an abridged version of a chapter in my dissertation. In my dissertation, I examine the relationship between personal experience and public theory within certain strands of contemporary psychology of religion and pastoral theology. My guiding theory is Peter Homans’s “mourning religion” thesis. In this chapter, I examine the life and work of Donald Capps, who is the most prolific contemporary writer in the fields of psychology of religion and pastoral theology. I argue that Capps addressed various personal losses in a deeply personal way during his fifties, and I believe that the key moment for Capps in overcoming his melancholia occurred after his application of his melancholia theory to Jesus, because there Capps was able to integrate and to sustain in a satisfying way his various selves and, therefore, open himself up to mourn in a non-defensive way—the way of humor.     

Jakob Wilhelm Hauer's New Religion and National Socialism

Jakob Wilhelm Hauer (1881–1962) was a missionary to India and later both a professor of religious studies at Tübingen and a founder of a new religion, called the German Faith Movement (Deutsche Glaubensbewegung, DGB). According to Hauer, his movement was the essence of National Socialism. Because some contemporary scholars try to distance Hauer's scholarship and the DGB from National Socialism, this paper reviews existing literature about the Hauer phenomenon. It does so in light of the authors' research in the Federal Archives of Koblenz and Berlin and the German Literature Archive in Marbach. Hauer's personal development and determination to further Nazism are traced. Together, the literature review and Hauer's view of religion show that his religious thought and his Nazi politics are inseparable.     

The Essentiality of “Culture” in the Study of Religion and Politics

This article reviews various theoretical approaches political scientists employ in the analysis of religion and politics and posits culture as a conceptual bridge between competing approaches. After coming to the study of religion slowly in comparison with other social science disciplines, political science finally has a theoretically diverse and thriving religion and politics subfield. However, political scientists’ contributions to the social scientific study of religion are hampered by a lack of agreement about whether endogenous or exogenous theoretical approaches ought to dominate our scholarship. I assert that the concept of culture—and more specifically, subculture—might help create more connections across theoretical research traditions. I emphasize how the concept of religion‐based subculture is inherent in psychological, social psychological, social movement, and contextual approaches to religion and politics scholarship, and I explore these theoretical connections using the example of religion‐based “us versus them” discourses in contemporary American politics.     

Burhoe's Second-Hand Influence

Many of us not part of the "old Burhoe gang" are nonetheless deeply influenced by the ideas of Ralph Wendell Burhoe, albeit in indirect ways. This remembrance summarizes six such ways: Three are "procedural" influences, namely (1) that dialogue is most valuable, especially in the science/religion interface, when carried on among those who may not agree; (2) that scholarship is necessary to refine and improve preliminary opinions; and (3) that organizations are crucial to accomplishing the first two tasks. The three "substantive" influences are (4) Burhoe's focus on human values; (5) his work in defining God; and (6) his contribution to defining what it means to be human. As is well known, his emphasis in all three substantive cases was on the power and nuances of biological and social evolution, especially on the dynamics of natural selection.     

The Study of Religions in the Third Reich: A Report on Work in Progress

Translator's Note. Possible connections between the study of religions and European fascism, if not indeed Nazism, have sparked considerable discussion and debate in the English-speaking world. Consider the celebrated cases of Mircea Eliade and Georges Dumézil.By contrast, the work of German scholars of religion during the NS period has been relatively little studied. Still, there have been exceptions. Burkhard Gladigow of Tübingen has published ‘Naturwissenschaftliche Modellvorstellungen in der Religionswissenschaft in der Zeit zwischen den Weltkriegen’.¹Recently, the study of religions during the Third Reich has become the subject of an ongoing seminar at Philipps-Universität Marburg. To date, one student has declared his intentions to write a thesis on the topic. Rainer Flasche, who convenes the seminar, has also worked on the topic extensively. The following essay is a preliminary indication of his results.Flasche, born in Hannover in 1942, studied theology, philosophy, German, and the history of religions in Marburg. He has taught history of religions there since 1971, making his habilitation in 1975. His best known work isDie Religionswissenschaft Joachim Wachs(Berlin: de Gruyter, 1978).Readers may wish especially to note what emerges as the central principle of Nazi religio-historical hermeneutics: that only those who belong to a race (gender? class?) can understand it. Thus, only Germans can understand Germanic religion. The essay may also shed some light on the study of religions in Germany after the war. A reviewer of a recent book by Isaiah Berlin has noted how Berlin's lasting confidence in the liberal tradition perhaps derives from the usefulness of that tradition in Eastern Europe, where Berlin spent his formative years. In post-war Germany, the study of religions has emphasized a positivism that remains close to the sources and shuns explicit theorizing, an emphasis in which Flasche clearly concurs. The usefulness of this strategy should not be overlooked. It allowed German scholars of the NS period, but also later under communist rule in the Democratic Republic and to some extent within the confines of state-run theology programs in the Federal Republic, to work independently of and even oppose a sanctioned ideology. The strategy was not to champion competing theories but to oppose ideological claims with ‘facts’. This stance contrasts sharply with the theoretical richness that characterized German thought about religions before 1933, but—once burned, twice cautious.A note on terminology. The development of the nation-state took markedly different courses in the German and English speaking worlds. As a result, the wordVolkand the adjectivevölkischhave no entirely satisfactory English equivalents. The connotations of ‘nation’ are too limited, because the GermanVolkwas an ideal that transcended not only the principalities that dominated German political life from 1648 to 1866 but also the remnants of German glory that remained after World War I and even the extensive empire administered by Prussia from 1866 to 1918. Therefore, I have translatedVolkas ‘people’. But English ‘popular’ has quite a different sense fromVölkisch, so forvölkischI have used the adjective ‘national’ instead. Readers should keep in mind the direct verbal link between the two in the original.     

TECHNO‐SECULARISM AND “REVEALED RELIGION”: SOME PROBLEMS WITH CAIAZZA'S ANALYSIS

Abstract. Instead of focusing my remarks on John Caiazza's interesting and important thesis about the way in which modern technology is drastically secularizing our culture today, I examine the frame within which he sets out his thesis, a frame I regard as seriously flawed. Caiazza's argument is concerned with the broad range of religion/science/technology issues in today's world, but the only religion that he seems to take seriously is what he calls “revealed religion” (Christianity). His consideration of religion is thus narrow and cramped, and this makes it difficult to assess properly the significance of what he calls techno‐secularism. I suggest that employing a broader conception of religion would enable us to see more clearly what is really at stake in the rise of techno‐secularism. Instead of defining the issues in the polarizing terms of revealed religion versus secularity, I argue for a more integrative approach in which concepts are developed that can bring together and hold together major religious insights and themes with modern scientific thinking. If, for example, we give up the anthropomorphism of the traditional idea of God as creator and think of God as simply creativity, it becomes possible to integrate theological insights with current scientific thinking and to formulate the issues posed by the rise of techno‐secularism in a more illuminating way. This in turn should facilitate effective address of those issues.     

The economics of spiritual luxury: The glittering lobby and the parliament of religions

Richard H. Roberts's article on the theoretical setting of the 1993 World's Parliament of Religions is an example of the contradictions that result when scholars of religion presume that religion is autonomous or sui generis. By conceiving of religious experiences as independent variables that have socio‐political and economic implications, but not causes, such scholarship romanticises and thereby depoliticises historical, human interactions and institutions. Despite his efforts to portray globalised religion as an active, oppositional force, contradictions in Roberts's essay suggest that global religion is itself a commodified construct dependent on the process of mythifxcation to gloss over concrete differences in class, race and gender.     

Millenarism in Greco-Roman Palestine

The purpose of this article is to shed light on an ambiguity in Émile Durkheim's theory of social effervescence. Durkheim's failure to distinguish two kinds of effervescence at the heart of the religious rite has left a dangerous legacy in the study of religion. If his work is read, however, in light of René Girard's theory of the violent origins of religion, his analysis of la société can retain the distinction between the effervescence of the crowd in scapegoating and the effervescence of protecting the victims of scapegoating. This thesis is tested by briefly comparing some contemporary essays on Durkheim.