Sermons From A Man On A Ladder

One of the earliest and the bitterest of the increasingly hostile criticisms of Eliade, Edmund Leach’s review of Eliade’s The Two and the One , also takes into account many other of Eliade’s works so it cannot be accused of the partial reading that often hampers critics. There do, nonetheless, seem to be some fundamental misconceptions in Leach’s critique. For example, his insistence” (pace Eliade) that there is no radical discontinuity between &s;archaic’ philosophy and that of modern man” comes despite the fact that Eliade insists precisely on the continuity of “archaic” and “modern” thought. In “Hierophany” (above, 89) Eliade states that “[r]ich and diverse as it is, the religious history of human life evidences no essential discontinuity.” In Myth and Reality (above, 205), he says, “there was no break in the continuity between the archaic world and the modern world.” Still, the most interesting feature of Leach’s critique might be its representation of another apparent discontinuity—between the academic analysis of religion with its insistent lack of sympathy towards the perceived credulousness of a more sympathetic and therefore more apparently “theological” analysis. Leach’s article appeared in the New York Review of Books , vol. VII (Oct. 20, 1966): 28–31. All rights reserved. Copyright © by the New York Review of Books. Reprinted by permission of the New York Review of Books.