Abstract
In her work on the history of linguistics, Julia Kristeva makes an interesting assertion: if the Renaissance replaced the cult of an almighty God with a new cult of man, a new revolution in our era is replacing the Renaissance cult of man with that of language.1 From her perspective, into the complex and imprecise sphere of human activities, a science is introduced because language lends itself to scientific analysis. An important form of language that suggests the possibility of scientific analysis for Eliade is myth, a phenomenon that attracted the attention of many thinkers prior to Eliade’s important contributions to the subject.
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Notes
Julia Kristeva, Language — The Unknown: An Initiation into Linguistics, trans. Anne M. Menke (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989).
Voltaire, The Complete Works of Voltaire, 59, Second Edition, ed. J. H. Brumfitt (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969), p. 105.
David Hume, The Natural History of Religion, in The Philosophical Works, Vol. IV (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1854), p. 428.
Giambattista Vico, The New Science, 3rd edn, trans. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (New York: Cornell University Press, 1968), pp. 81, 221.
Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, 2 vols, trans. Ralph Mannheim (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953–7), I:3.
Friedrich Schlegel, Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms, trans. Ernst Behler and Roman Struc (University Park and London: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1968), p. 82.
Friedrich W. J. von Schelling, Einleitung Philosophie der Mythologie in Werke, 6 vols, ed. Manfred Schroten (München: E. H. Beck Berlagsbuchhandlung, 1943–56), VI: 396.
David Friedrich Strauss, A New Life of Jesus, trans. Marian Evans (London: Williams & Norgate, 1865), p. 206.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Wm A. Haussmann, in The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, 18 vols, ed. Oscar Levy (New York: Russell & Russell, Inc., 1964), I: 174.
Max Müller, Comparative Mythology (London: G. Routledge, 1909; reprint Arno Press, 1977), p. 178.
Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion, trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1961), p. 30.
C. G. Jung and C. Kerényi, Essays on a Science of Mythology, trans. R. F. C. Hull, Bollingen Series XXII (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), p. 72.
Clyde Kluckhohn, ‘Myths and Rituals: A General Theory’, in Reader in Comparative Religion: An Anthropological Approach, eds William A. Lessa and Evon Z. Vogt (New York: Harper & Row, 1972): 93–105. This essay appeared earlier in the Harvard Theological Review, Vol. XXXV (January 1942): 45–79.
Bronislaw Malinowski, Magic, Science and Religion and Other Essays (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Anchor Books, 1954), p. 101.
Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf (New York: Basic Books, 1963), p. 229.
Julia Kristeva, ‘From Symbol to Sign’, trans. Seán Hand in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), p. 65.
Jacques Derrida, The Postcard: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 9.
Eric Gould, Mythical Intentions in Modern Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), pp. 42–3.
Mircea Eliade, ‘The Prestige of the Cosmogonic Myth’, The Divinity School News, Vol. XXVI, no. 1 (February 1959): 3. There are scholars who do not share Eliade’s opinion regarding the primary significance of the creation myth. To cite just one contrary opinion from Jewish religious history, Howard Eilberg-Schwartz writes, ‘Eliade overstates the importance of cosmogony by seeking to understand all rituals and religious conceptions as a rearticulation of a creation myth.’ (p. 358) Eilberg-Schwartz shows that the purity/impurity dichotomy in the Jewish Mishnah’s theory finds no parallel and hence no justification in the priestly cosmogony, although the Mishnah equates the human capacity to classify with the divine work of creation. This means that human activity and thought can serve as a criterion for classifying things into different categories and possesses the power to change basic properties of objects (p. 372), in ‘Creation and Classification in Judaism: From Priestly to Rabbinic Conceptions’, History of Religions, Vol. 26, no. 4 (May 1987). In contrast to Eilberg-Schwartz’s criticism of Eliade, Lawrence E. Sullivan argues, ‘Here Eliade claims neither that all cultures possess cosmogonic myths, nor that cosmogonies are given first place of priority in those cultures which possess them.’ Review of A History of Religious Ideas, Vol. 2: From Gautama Buddha to the Triumph of Christianity, by Mircea Eliade, in Religious Studies Review, Vol. 9, no. 1 (January 1983): 16.
For an informative discussion, see Matei Calinescu, ‘“The Function of the Unreal”: Reflections on Mircea Eliade’s Short Fiction’, in Imagination and Meaning: The Scholarly and Literary Worlds of Mircea Eliade, ed. Norman J. Girardot and Mac Linscott Ricketts (New York: Seabury Press, 1982), pp. 138–61.
Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, trans. Emerson Buchanan (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), p. 237.
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© 1992 Carl Olson
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Olson, C. (1992). Sacred Language and Soteriology. In: The Theology and Philosophy of Eliade. Library of Philosophy and Religion. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230378926_6
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