Mat Messerschmidt
Mircea Eliade, the Sacred and Postmodernism
I first opened The Sacred and the Profane by Mircea Eliade on a sunny Sunday afternoon during a summer in Berlin in my late 20s. I was hung over, recovering from a long Saturday night in the world’s most hedonistic city. Geography was part of what had drawn me to Eliade: he was, like me, someone who had made a home in both Bucharest, Romania, and in Chicago, in the U.S. – at the University of Chicago, no less, where I was currently a graduate student, attending classes every day in the building in which Eliade had taught. But now, ten years later, Eliade is most associated in my mind, for ironic reasons, with Berlin: within no more than 20 pages, I was aware of the irony of reading, in that wonderful modern Gomorrah, a book that claimed to reveal the timeless structures of sacrality from which the good, the true, and the beautiful eternally emanate. I love Berlin deeply, but I do not think God lives there.
But the sacred certainly lives in the pages of The Sacred and the Profane. It is hard to think of a book that more thoroughly deserves to be described as beautiful. With reference to colorful rites, architectural building patterns, and myths spanning the globe, Eliade, the scholar of comparative religions, shows us the sometimes incredible patterns of similarity across cultures in how the sacred is structured spatially and temporally. Over and over again, human beings organize themselves spatially around a sacred spot believed to be the point at which the world was created, a point to which they must always return, and they order their sense of time around the cyclical return, via religious ceremony, to the sacred time before time, the time in which the world was created. The cycles of seasonal labor, menstruation, and birth and death all reflect the inevitable cyclical return of sacred time. The closer one is, in space or time, to the sacred, the closer one is to what truly is, because “being and the sacred are one.”[1] The yearning for the sacred is thus an “ontological nostalgia,” or nostalgia for being, for the real, that permeates and anchors life and human civilization.[2] In Eliade’s thought, the Platonic unity of the good, the true, and the beautiful becomes a sociological necessity, with the sacred as the point of origin of all three.
As a graduate student in the humanities who had recently been reading books mostly from what could be called the postmodern era, this was thrilling. Eliade was standing up for the beautiful, without the omnipresent late-twentieth-century – and scholarly! – distrust that rests assured that the beautiful is always an insidious mask that refracts and thus hides repressed ugly desires, or the material interests of the ruling class, or, at best, mere culturally and historically contingent perspective that ought to be put in its place as such. Against all this late modern enervation and failure of conviction, here was Eliade, whom I could imagine walking streets that I had walked on two different continents, celebrating the origins of beauty and writing them into the fabric of all human culture. He rejuvenated my sense of purpose as a young scholar, reminding me that scholarship could be used to happily illuminate good and beautiful things.
This initial take on Eliade, though, was an under nuanced and somewhat naïve one. In fact, the thinker who was fighting so hard for goodness, truth, and beauty could be said, paradoxically, to extend into every human epoch the fundamentally modern event that Nietzsche calls “nihilism” or “the death of God” – when goodness, truth, and beauty dissipate or lose their power. We might say that he does this not exactly accidentally, but as the result of the fact that he honestly follows the thread of his own thought even when it leads into unpleasant places. We have nostalgia for being, nostalgia for the sacred, because the sacred moment, the moment of creation, is never the moment in which we are living now, but is always a moment we are merely remembering. This means that the source of goodness, truth, and beauty is impossibly remote. This thought becomes literalized, in Eliade’s survey of world religions, with the recurrence of the deus otiosus, the supreme creator deity who in many religions is believed to always already have left us and the world at some point long ago. To be human, then, is to live after the death of God, among the Tschi in West Africa or among the Athenians in ancient Greece as much as in modern Berlin.[3] Eliade tells us in his memoirs that “myth and religions, in all their variety, are the results of the vacuum left by the retreat of God … ‘true’ religion begins only after God has withdrawn from the world.”[4] It may be astonishing, given what we might call the generally sunny vibe of The Sacred and the Profane, that the first American book on Eliade was written by death-of-God theologian Thomas Altizer, who believed that faith – in any common sense of the word – was no longer possible in the twentieth century. Altizer’s moment of fame came in the 1966 Time magazine cover that asked, “Is God dead?” As he intuited, there is no reason to think that the man Eliade lived among the living gods, in any deep and authentic sense of true religiosity – there is no reason to believe that God was not dead for Eliade himself. The Sacred and the Profane closes on a dark picture of a modern Western world from which the gods have flown, and there is no reason to believe that Eliade is not a part of that world – no reason to believe that he himself believed, and quite a bit of reason to believe that he did not. Having posited the sacred as the source of all goodness, truth, and beauty, Eliade tells us, almost as a brief afterthought, that that source is irremediably beyond our reach – today, certainly, and perhaps from the beginnings of human civilization.
Is Eliade, then, ultimately more postmodern, more nihilistic than he at first appears? This would be an overly simple conclusion. Nietzsche, who popularized the phrase “the death of God” and sought to wage battle against modern nihilism, believed that victory in such a battle would be a superhuman accomplishment. It would, his character Zarathustra tells us, require the sacrifice of many human beings, and would mean doing battle in a metaphorical desert with a metaphorical dragon, representing the old, moribund values that have been in place for millennia.[5] What this means is that the birthing of new values, the trailblazing of a new path to the sacred, is a tremendously difficult task. It seems to me that this is a critical difference between Nietzsche as a diagnostician of the crisis of nihilism and many of the intellectuals who today call themselves critics of postmodernism. Those critics are right, I think, to associate the postmodern with a lack of intellectual courage, conviction, and orientation, but they often speak as if finding our way out of the condition they criticize is as easy as deciding to reject it, as easy as simply saying that it is bad – and in this, I think they are deluded. As Nietzsche says explicitly, and as the unfolding of Eliade’s thought shows, finding new pathways to the sacred, new conceptions of the good, new values – all of this is very hard. It is not that his thought collapses into the modern listlessness of the world described at the end of The Sacred and the Profane, but his passion, which sets him apart from that world, nevertheless partakes in its rootlessness. His thinking appears as a striving in the abyss, rather than the construction of a new edifice of sacrality, even if his pulse is more vital than that of the world around him.
Perhaps Eliade finds himself unable to build new pathways to the sacred because he rejects all new things, imagining human life to be fundamentally and inevitably backwards looking. Human life is “nostalgia,” for him, nostalgia for the real and for the sacred, nostalgia for the moment of creation that has already taken place, and for the god who has already performed the miraculous deed of creation. It is hard to imagine him plotting a course forwards, through the ascendant postmodern malaise he condemns, because he can think only of retreating from it, back to an earlier time. Sometimes this inclination toward historical retreat feels fantasy-driven: Eliade, for instance, at times evinces a strong nostalgia for the old religiosity of the Romanian countryside – yet at no time did he ever belong to that Romanian countryside, as an educated, refined resident of Bucharest, the capital city. In this way, he differs from Nietzsche, who was always reactionary or right-wingbut never simply conservative, and who constantly spoke of the construction of a new world to replace the modern, nihilistic one he saw around him, with new gods to replace the expired ones.
Another way in which Eliade was unlike Nietzsche is that he was a college professor (Nietzsche’s professorial career was cut short by scandal and health concerns). This implied, apart from the grand Nietzschean project of the creation of a new world and new gods, an apparently more modest task: the creation of course syllabi. Eliade’s colleague at Chicago, Allan Bloom, although tonally and dispositionally vastly different from Eliade, described in his 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind a campus environment whose cultural rudderlessness could be said to resonate with Eliade’s general cultural description, in The Sacred and the Profane, of the profane modern era as a whole. Bloom is right, I think, when he describes how postmodern attitudes toward knowledge lead naturally to a collapse in student motivation: once access to the source of the good, the true, and the beautiful is said to be impossible, it becomes far less clear how exactly a university education is supposed to enrich the student. It becomes harder to love books when access to such a source is something those books claim not to offer, or even something whose impossibility they seek to show.
I can imagine Eliade’s students would have found his courses exhilarating in the context of the intellectual atmosphere described by Bloom – much as I found his book exhilarating in Berlin. While the sacred and the good were being relativized out of existence everywhere else, Eliade was showing how they resided very tangibly in the concrete religious practices of historical peoples. In an academic milieu in which everyone else was presenting themselves as subversive for undermining the Good, Eliade, for his defense of it, must have seemed, well, genuinely subversive.
But to the degree that Bloom’s book identifies any positive remedies to the malady of the present, those remedies come entirely from the past – and the same can be said of Eliade’s general outlook. One might wonder whether his young students might not ultimately have felt the same despondency we detect in the final pages of The Sacred and the Profane, when he describes the profane modern world: with their lives ahead of them, they would have learned that the sacred, the source of goodness, had already been forever lost to the past.
Throughout his life, Eliade moved geographically further and further from the sort of rapidly disappearing religious lifestyle that his thought longs for, the sort of lifestyle that could retain some contact with the sacred. Never having been a product of the rural Romania he romanticized, he began in Bucharest, then moved to the more secular Paris, before finally ending up in Chicago, in big-city America, which he must have experienced as being near the outer limit of modernity, secularism, and profanity. Eliade gave plenty to the places in which he lived, but what did he take from them, what did he learn from them? As he envisions possible futures, is there room in his thought for urbane Parisian sophistication, or for American cultural dynamism? Is there room for a sacrality that does not look statically backwards – one which, like Nietzsche’s discipleship to the ancient Greek god Dionysus, celebrates destruction and creation as divine?
Whatever else he was, Eliade was courageous. He swam ardently against a postmodern current that, to him, threatened to wipe out everything that mattered. If his success was partial, this may tell us that the current was even stronger than he realized.
[1] Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane. Trans. Willard R. Trask. Harcourt 1987, 210.
[2] Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane 106.
[3] Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane 124-125.
[4] Mircea Eliade, No Souvenirs Journal, 1957-1969. Translated by Fred H. Johnson, Jr. Harper & Row 1977, 74.
[5] See the first two sections of Thus Spoke Zarathustra: Friedrich Nietzsche, Also Sprach Zarathustra. In Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Bänden. Volume 4. 11th edition. Ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. Munich: de Gruyter 2007, 11-31.
INDICAȚII DE CITARE
Mat Messerschmidt ,,Mircea Eliade, the Sacred, and Postmodernism’’ în Anthropos. Revista de filosofie, arte și umanioare nr. 11 / 2025
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ANTHROPOS. REVISTA DE FILOSOFIE, ARTE ȘI UMANIOARE 