Theology: Scientist of Symbols

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Far from being exercises in antiquarianism, Eliade's analyses of myths and symbolism have a decidedly contemporary relevance. In an age of dialogue between East and West, he points out, a knowledge of the still living Oriental religions is essential to anyone who hopes to understand the mind of India or China. Eliade also believes that an awareness of mythology and legend is vital to understanding the history of nonreligious modern man. Only within the last few centuries has man emerged from a cosmos controlled by God and godlets into a desacralized universe. And even while consciously rejecting mythology, man is still subject to it: modern psychology has amply proved that the subconscious mind of man is an uncharted inner universe of symbols.

Marxism & Myth. Modern nonreligious man, says Eliade, "regards himself solely as the subject and agent of history, and he refuses all appeal to transcendence." But this stance too is myth, since man today is surrounded by camouflaged spiritual symbols and corrupt rituals that faintly echo the sacred visions of his religious ancestors. Getting drunk on New Year's Eve, for example, is a secular vestige of a rite found in many ancient religions, in which an orgiastic pre-New Year festival re-enacted the chaos that existed before the divine creation of an ordered cosmos. Eliade argues that mythology is apparent even in sophisticated modern ideologies. Marxism's dictatorship of the proletariat is a secular parody of the widespread religious concept, the salvation of society by "the redeeming role of the Just." And the Communist dream of a "withering away of the state," after which each man shall give according to his abilities and receive according to his needs, echoes the ancient religious vision of an earthly paradise.

Eliade recognizes that modern man cannot return to the days in which God was seen in the moon and the stars, and concedes that the desacralization of the universe was necessary before its scientific conquest. But time and again Eliade warns that man must eventually discover new living symbols of the sacred, since "it is only in being open to the transcendent that he is fully human." Thus, for Eliade, modern man is following in the footsteps of the paradigmatic legendary Faust: he may have successfully stripped the world of its soul only to have lost his own.