Mircea Eliade As the “Anti-Historian” of Religions

This article picks up the criticism that rapidly developed and soon became entrenched that Eliade was in fact an “Anti-Historian.” Perhaps Dudley goes too far in insisting that Eliadean History of Religions can only be true to itself “by relinquishing ... empirical verification” and must “surrender the pretence that phenomenological description and the raw data of history are compatible”? If the Eliadean “transconscious” is determined by the encounter with the actual, empirical world, then any specific representations of reality must refer to the empirical and can only be checked against human experience. Dudley provided a great service in recognizing Eliade’s affinity with continental thinkers such as Foucault; however, he may have been misled by a lack of awareness of Eliade’s roots in Romanian trăirism and his concomitant emphasis on empirical experience (on trăirism see “The Life and Work of Mircea Eliade” in this volume, 5–6). Dudley’s article illustrates clearly the fact that a review of Eliade serves in many ways as a review of the main issues facing the History of Religions in the second half of the 20th century. This article appeared in th Journal of the American Academy of Religion 44/2 (1976): 345-59. All rights reserved. Copyright © 1976. Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press.