Killing Time

On October 29, 1945, Jean-Paul Sartre delivered his lecture “Existentialism Is a Humanism,” a declaration of independence for the postwar era. Its organizers at the Club Maintenant in Paris were unprepared for the size and enthusiasm of the crowd, which mobbed the ticket office and injured several attendees. The lecture confirmed Sartre’s celebrity. Though he had witnessed Hitler’s seizure of power while studying in Nazi Berlin, and despite the nightmares of collaboration, genocide, and atomic weapons that ensued, Sartre maintained a confidence in the power of human choice. His expansive vision of freedom offered exoneration from the past. He announced that there was no God, no human nature, no purpose inherent in history. Other living things have a predetermined nature—but not human beings. Human beings are freedom. No matter our biology, history, or personal circumstances, Sartre insisted, we always possess the freedom to be whomever we choose to be: “Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself.” Or as his three-word mantra would have it: “Existence precedes essence.”

Sartre’s goal was to author the first truly godless philosophy, and he defined existentialism as “an attempt to draw the full conclusions from a consistently atheistic position.” He insisted that atheism did not license hedonism or invite resignation. Just the opposite: Existentialism demanded courageous self-assertion in a disenchanted world, providing the only way for a devastated continent to begin again after the horrors of the war. Human beings were alone in the universe, projecting their values onto an empty sky. Yet this radical freedom, Sartre maintained, meant that every person is individually accountable for the course of his life. No excuses, total responsibility. Sartre’s lecture told the story of a young man who had come to him for advice in 1940. The man’s brother had died fighting the Germans, and he had been deserted by his father. Should he join the Free French forces assembling in England? Or should he take care of his ailing mother, who lacked other means of support? Sartre argued that the young man could not reason through this decision or rely on any moral authority to guide him. He had to make an existential choice—a choice that would define him. The same held for Western civilization. Its future was ours to choose.

For one person in the audience that evening, Sartre’s scenario was no hypothetical. Six years earlier in his native Romania, Mircea Eliade had joined a dissident movement, narrowly escaped death, and left behind a mother he would never see again. He had spent the war in exile in Portugal and London and had only recently moved to Paris, where he mixed with fashionable company, compelled to publish at a desperate pace to alleviate his poverty.

Like Sartre, Eliade was grappling with the ­anxieties of modern freedom and dark fears about the direction of human history. And like Sartre, Eliade took for granted the continuing decomposition of Europe’s Christian culture. But otherwise, the interpretation of modern life that he would develop over the next four decades could not have been more different. Eliade became one of the most influential twentieth-century scholars of religion, a founder of the school of thought known as the history of religions. His books, which gained a wide readership in postwar America, record his quest to escape what he regarded as the nihilism of a culture that could no longer distinguish the sacred from the profane. He described his search in the liberal rhetoric of promoting intercultural dialogue, expanding human consciousness, and overcoming Western ethnocentrism. But rather than celebrate our metaphysical loneliness as a liberation, Eliade sought to repopulate the modern imagination with the commanding power of the sacred. He asked questions that would have bewildered Sartre. Is paganism possible for us still? Can we re-enter the lost world of primitive religion and summon its meaning-making powers? Eliade’s quest led him to a theological ­precipice—from which he glimpsed, across an archaic religious frontier, a future in which we would dare to say “yes.”

Eliade left France in 1956 for the ­United States, where he would spend the rest of his professional life. The books he published during his decade in Paris had drawn the attention of faculty at the University of Chicago Divinity School, whose Baptist founder, John D. Rockefeller, had promoted the academic study of religion and endowed some of the first chairs of comparative religion. Eliade’s inaugural lectures at Chicago described his new home as a place where Christianity was withering but his own life was being reborn. His visa had been made possible by the intervention of the State Department, which declared his work essential for national security, and he always expressed gratitude for the freedoms and security of American life. But his journals also reveal how stultifying he often found his new milieu. Sounding sometimes like an existentialist himself, he worried that mass society was draining Americans of deep human qualities. Spiritually shallow, culturally conformist, and suffocated by traffic, entertainment, and advertising, postwar America, with its brimming confidence in human power and historical progress, offered little protection from the spiritual terrors Eliade most feared.

Eliade made his name in America with a book that appeared in English shortly before he settled in Hyde Park. The Myth of Eternal Return sold more than a hundred thousand copies, an astonishing number given its erudite focus. On its face, the book is an introduction to “archaic ontology” and describes the shared metaphysical assumptions of primitive religions. Eliade had been ­captivated by archaic cultures as a young boy, and he had written his dissertation on occult influences on Renaissance philosophy. The Myth of Eternal ­Return displayed an extraordinary command of the religious myths and practices of societies ranging from Babylonia to Oceania and from the paleolithic era to late antiquity. Though Eliade was personally ambivalent towards Christian theology, the book was praised by Catholic philosophers Etienne Gilson and Jacques Maritain, and it is easy to see why. Eliade defended the idea that religious beliefs and practices were a source of genuine knowledge, essential to understanding the nature of the world and of human life. And he warned that a further erosion of spiritual values would leave the West unable to understand other cultures and the roots of its own identity.

Though The Myth of Eternal Return largely avoided philosophy, its arguments were in fact a highly creative intervention in debates about existentialism, whose postwar popularity was booming. In America, existentialism was often associated with a mood of rebellion and alienation, and its influence was felt most in movies, literature, and the social sciences. But in France and Germany, where it was born in the early 1930s, existentialism was a philosophy that set aside abstract debates and went straight to the most fraught experiences of daily life, which turn on the struggle to find meaning in secular, scientistic, and technocratic modernity. 

Eliade saw the same motifs at work in primitive religion. The tribes of the Andaman Islands or ­Tierra del Fuego might not have examined the nature of anxiety, and the Aborigines and the Sioux might not have wrestled with the dialectics of being and nothingness. But their myths and rituals showed that they were no less preoccupied with “limit situations” than Europe’s leading existentialist thinkers were. In Eliade’s writings, primitive man became an existentialist avant la lettre. Rather than elaborating speculative theoretical arguments, he was engaged with the everyday experiences of facing mortality and overcoming despair. And primitive man, argued Eliade, unlike modern man, possessed the means to address these profound threats in ritual and myth.

Eliade’s claims helped to launch the field of religious studies, over which he exercised a global influence through his books and two generations of doctoral students. With Eliade’s assistance, the field experienced a postwar boom, as American universities, concerned that ascendant scientific and technical fields were soulless, were eager to find a place for “religion” in the humanities curriculum. Eliade offered a sophisticated rationale for its ambitions, which became pressing after the Supreme Court’s 1963 decision rejecting “­sectarian” instruction in public education. His approach ­treated religious studies as a master science that could integrate other humanistic fields by studying the religious patterns of cultural meaning-making. Although he was discreet in his explicit claims, his work implied that primitive and non-Christian religions featured metaphysical ideas that were more powerful and immediate than those found in the greatest works of Western philosophy. His claims were well suited to a climate in which theology’s status was waning and American demographics were ­changing. Nonetheless, his ambition is evident. Religions that had been dismissed as demonic, superstitious, or childish nonsense—first by the biblical critique of paganism, then by the Enlightenment attack on myth, and later by scholars such as James Frazer—were, he insisted, a source of the highest human wisdom.

To recover this forgotten wisdom, ­Eliade contrasted “modern man” with “homo ­religiosus,” an ideal type that represented the man of traditional societies. The difference between the types lies not in their different beliefs about the divine, but in their starkly different attitudes toward time. Eliade’s portrait of modern man was a philosophical composite, equal parts existentialist, Marxist, and positivist. He argued that to be a modern human being was essentially to valorize history, that is, to confer value on temporal events in themselves. As Eliade saw it, virtually all modern Western people assumed that history was linear and irreversible. Time moves in one direction, from the past to the future, and events can never be repeated. This conception of time gave the West a distinctive dynamism, since it endowed individual events with unique significance. But Eliade argued that it had also left many modern people exposed to the “terror of history,” by which he meant the unsettling awareness, so bleakly described by some existentialists, that the tragedies of history can shake our belief in its progress. “How can man tolerate the catastrophes and horrors of history,” Eliade asked, “if beyond them he can glimpse no sign, no transhistorical meaning?”

Homo religiosus assumed a fundamentally different stance toward time. Rather than embrace it, he sought to abolish it. What Eliade called “archaic ontology” is a vision of the world that enabled cultures to survive their exposure to time by willfully defying its reality. Perhaps the most original aspect of Eliade’s scholarship was his phenomenology of the religious experience of primitive peoples. From fragments of myth, bone, artefact, and human testimony, he peered into the life of homo religiosus and his heroic revolt against history. Homo ­religiosus refused to submit to fate. He clung defiantly to his dreams of freedom and was unbowed before the prospect of death. Eliade imagined homo ­religiosus as engaged in a prodigious act of time-defying world-building. Inspired by an “obsession with the real” and a “thirst for being,” the man of primitive society transformed the threatening chaos of nature into an ordered cosmos of meaning. Existentialist philosophers had written about the importance of “resoluteness” and “engagement” when confronting the world. “I carry the weight of the world by myself alone,” Sartre announced in Being and Nothingness. Eliade directly challenged the existentialists’ vision of modern man as bearing the exhilarating responsibility of a godless existence. The responsibility of archaic man was cosmically greater, Eliade countered, and his way of life was entirely religious. Homo religiosus renewed the cosmos, sustaining it against the threat of chaos.

Eliade explained in his landmark 1957 book The Sacred and the Profane that the archaic world, indeed most of the world before Western modernity, cannot be fully understood except as a religious response to the pressures of history. Human beings live under the sign of time: We are born, we grow, we decay, and we die. As Eliade put it in his autobiography, we live with the unsettling awareness that “there are things which once were but are no longer.” Provoked by his own experiences of war and dislocation, Eliade asked how we can preserve our humanity in a fleeting world visited by frequent destruction and inevitable death. He conceded that modern people are right to fear their vulnerability to revolutionary ideologies and promethean science. But he also believed that they are profoundly mistaken about the nature of power, despite being consumed with its pursuit. The highest human power is not found in technological prowess, the scientific method, or material wealth. It is rooted in religious capacities that modern people have forgotten. Eliade undertook to show that, although the homo religiosus of pre-modern and archaic society was technologically simple, he was metaphysically powerful—far more so than contemporary Westerners, who have been spiritually weakened by their own creations. Like his modern counterpart, homo religiosus lived in “terror” of being “overwhelmed by the meaninglessness of existence.” Yet his response was not to master the world through ingenuity. It was to endow his life with sacrality.

For homo religiosus, real human power did not depend on controlling nature. It depended on annulling history. “Killing time” was therefore his highest imperative. He killed time, Eliade claimed, through the enactment of rituals and the recitation of myths that enable him to enter a momentary state of timelessness. In ritual, he becomes present at creation, the origin of time. In myth, he learns of the truths whose eternity time cannot touch. ­Eliade’s basic claim, which he elaborated in every book and found confirmed in nearly every ­archaic culture, was remarkably simple. Human beings must eat, sleep, mate, hunt, work, play, fight, and die. ­Rituals transform these human necessities into sacred ceremonies. From Siberia to Australia, Eliade found rituals that sacramentally transfigured the daily requirements of life, saving them from dissolution by the unceasing flow of time. Eliade was adamant that these rituals—which give sacred, ­unchanging form to life’s core activities—were in no way a sabbath from the “real world.” Rather, they served as portals into the only “real world,” a passage out of the false world of impermanence and change and into a higher, unchanging, and superhuman order. Eliade did not claim that primitive man lived in a permanent state of ritual ecstasy or that he was blissfully unaware of mundane life. He merely credited primitive societies for discovering a powerful form of “therapy,” on which their cultures were founded, and which relieved their spiritual terrors and turned bodily sufferings into initiations.

Though Eliade saw himself as an academic historian, his insights into the nature of time and power reflected his unusual spiritual journey. Raised in a Romanian Orthodox family, Eliade acquired a passion for religious ideas—alchemy was an early fascination—but no strong religious identity. His close friend, the essayist and philosopher Emil Cioran, said that Eliade hovered on the “periphery” of religious belief, “placing books above the gods.” Eliade vigorously defended the unique nature of religious experience against the reductionist tendencies of academic study. But his journals also reveal an abiding wariness of biblical monotheism and a distaste for the Christian theologians whom he studied but did not admire. (He dismissed speculative arguments about God as “naive and childish.”) More impressive to Eliade, and more responsive to his personal anxieties, was what he discovered in India, where he had spent three years as a student learning Sanskrit, studying tantric yoga, and living in an ashram (an experience later fictionalized in a novel, Bengal Nights, that became a movie starring Hugh Grant). His discovery of the “beauty and nobility of paganism” would change him forever, and he credited Indian philosophy with helping him to see through the veil of time.

But how can time be abolished, and not merely resisted? We must make an “eternal return” to our cosmic origins, Eliade argued, becoming “contemporary” with the sacred events that preceded our fall into history. Eliade likely knew more about comparative mythology than any scholar who ever lived, and what he found in myth was the power to reverse time. In his 1963 book Myth and Reality, he argued that myths answer fundamental metaphysical questions about form and causality. They narrate how things came into existence, the primordial events whereby life came to be what it presently is. As accounts of a culture’s creation, myths reveal the archetypes that explain the origins of natural objects, cultural traditions, and social roles. A world shaped by myth is therefore one in which “essence precedes existence,” exactly the reverse of Sartre’s famous phrase. To live mythically is to saturate all things with higher meaning. “To the primitive, nature is never purely ‘natural,’” Eliade explained. Things are “real” only insofar as they are an epiphany of their sacred forms and exemplars. It is by living out these myths—by imitating the gestures of gods, heroes, and ancestors in everyday life—that homo religiosus accomplishes what the Western view of time presumes is impossible. The man of ritual and myth steps out of secular time and returns to the Great Time of origins. “One is no longer living in chronological time but in the primordial time.”

Eliade realized that he could never adopt primitive and Eastern religions as his own. But in studying them with great sympathy, he gained insight into the peculiar nature of Western culture, whose influence, he concluded, he could not fully escape. Whether he was describing Eskimo shamans or Bantu hymns, Eliade always returned to the same diagnosis: Modern Western culture represents a fateful inversion of the traditional world of archaic and primitive cultures. He meant that our culture, unlike that of our early ancestors, is not founded on abolishing the profane and annihilating time. Instead, it is ­founded on dismantling the sacred, and thus abandoning us to the ravages of accelerating time. Eliade was often criticized for simplifying primitive life, and for ignoring what the Catholic anthropologist Mary Douglas called “secular savages.” But if he simplified, he argued, he did so to help people see modernity as a radical transvaluation of the way human beings have, since the dawn of ­recorded time, understood and coped with reality. Eliade described this modern deviation, this renunciation of the hardest-won wisdom, by means of stark contrasts, and often in apocalyptic terms. Rather than imitate archetypes, he observed, we value individual creativity. Rather than aspire to reverse time, we quicken it. Rather than elevate the real to the holy, we demean it to the profane. “Modern nonreligious man assumes a new existential situation,” Eliade dramatically ­concluded. “He will become himself only when he is totally demysticized. He will not be truly free until he has killed the last god.”

During the last two decades of his life, while laboring on his multivolume History of Religious Ideas, Eliade wondered whether Western culture could fulfill Sartre’s vision and become completely secularized. He offered two very different answers, both negative. The first denied that contemporary culture was in fact ­disenchanted. Not unlike Mary Douglas, he explained that the sacred was merely “camouflaged,” hidden in the forms and figures that continued to shape our imaginations and express our highest yearnings. To perceive the sacred, he wrote, “we have to attempt a demystification in reverse; that is to say, we have to ‘demystify’ the apparently profane worlds . . . in order to disclose their sacred elements.” In modern movies, fiction, painting, theater, and holidays, Eliade found experiences of the sacred that interrupt everyday life and turn us to the contemplation of “laicized” archetypes in secularized myths. Eliade also saw Americans undertaking spiritual quests in novel forms. In the popularity of detective novels and psychoanalysis he saw the yearning to undergo spiritual initiation and uncover lost knowledge. And in the United States he saw an entire nation inspired by the oldest mythic theme, that of Eternal Return. For what were our love of the frontier, our cult of youth, and our promise of new beginnings, he asked, other than modern expressions of man’s primitive hope for a rebirth that annihilates the accumulated weight of time?

But Eliade also offered a second and darker prognosis for a culture that, in defiance of human needs, had sought to deconstruct the sacred. In the 1960s and 1970s, as enrollments in religious studies departments swelled, Eliade was celebrated as a ­guru of the religious counterculture and its rebellion against Christian prohibitions in its search for the ecstasy of “living in the moment.” His admirers revered him as a seer who could guide their spiritual adventures, reopening communication with the gods, like the necromancers he wrote about. Eliade sensed an “occult explosion” in the making, a quickening of the gods and goddesses of old. He wrote about the surge of popular interest in witchcraft, astrology, magic, psychedelics, and the paranormal, seeing it as a sign of discontent with the secular confinements of modernity. 

By his reckoning, the occult revival represented something more than religious voyeurism. It marked the limits of Western rationalism and the return of spiritual experiences that had been long dormant. “In America,” Eliade wrote, “we have seen the rediscovery of religious experience that had been supposed totally outdated.” He drew particular attention to movements that sought to redefine norms for sex and gender. He identified them not as movements of modern political dissent, but as expressions of archaic religious yearnings. The desire to overturn conventional morality, and to return to a primordial state of “chaos and formlessness,” might look like an attempt to desecrate the holy. In reality, Eliade explained, it was an attempt to restore a religious connection to the primal forces of life, an effort to resacralize creativity and fecundity. “One might say we are witnessing the triumph of divinities similar to Baal and Astarte,” he wrote, “but which are desacralized.”

In an extraordinary 1978 interview, Eliade spoke freely about the spiritual temptations he had overcome. Eliade had dedicated his career to building religious studies as an academic field in which the sacred could be encountered with intellectual rigor and cultural sensitivity. But for those unprepared by study, he warned, exposure to the occult’s celebration of life’s creative vitalities and destructive powers would pose grave dangers. Eliade revealed his own fears in learning to appreciate the beauty and nobility of religious practices that initially seemed to him demonic, including human sacrifice and cannibalism. His inner sympathy for the metaphysical power of the primitive brought terror.  “How many times have I just escaped losing myself,” he recalled, “losing my way in that labyrinth where I was in danger of being killed, sterilized, emasculated.” Eliade insisted on the importance of maintaining humane values, yet he insisted that we must risk abandonment to the surging power of untamed reality: “Confrontation with the void, with the demonic, the inhuman, the temptation to regress into the animal world—all those extreme and dramatic experiences are the source of man’s greatest spiritual creations.”

As Eliade saw it, Sartre and his descendants were wrong about the itinerary of Western culture. The waning of biblical religion would not culminate in our radical freedom to make ourselves, unencumbered by the spiritual heritage of the past. It would usher in the exact opposite: a reawakened paganism and our involuntary obedience to its perennial archetypes.

Modern man, radically secularized, believes or styles himself an atheist, areligious, or, at least, indifferent. But he is wrong. He has not yet succeeded in abolishing the homo religiosus that is in him: he has only done away with (if he ever was) the christianus. That means that he is left with being ‘pagan’ without knowing it.

Eliade saw paganism as an affirmation of life, a sacralizing of our responsibility to perpetuate order and meaning in the face of chaos and destruction. It reveres the human capacity to defy the depredations of time and to take worldly responsibility for perpetuating what we value most. Eliade had sensed paganism’s power of meaning-making already in interwar Romania, where a religious quest that had begun in a university library soon led him into real-life peril. Worried that Romanian culture was being contaminated by Western modernity, Eliade called for a national revolution moved by “a pagan thirst for new life.” In 1972 an Israeli researcher revealed that Eliade had authored more than a dozen essays in support of the Iron Guard, an anti-Semitic and fascist social movement, before fleeing Romania in 1939. Eliade rebuffed the accusations through private letters and conversations, denying that he had ever promoted antisemitic or fascist views, and declaring the most incriminating passages to be fabrications. Casting himself as a victim, he dismissed the campaign as an attempt to derail his chances of winning the Nobel. His reputation as a generous genius and apolitical man of letters—he once claimed not to have read a newspaper in twenty-five years—has been under revision ever since.

Was young Eliade a fascist and anti-Semite? This question is misguided, or perhaps it is more accurate to say that such concerns are too limited, too myopic, given Eliade’s grand metaphysical vision. The young ­Eliade was no different from the mature Eliade. He recorded his deepest ideas in his books, where he urged readers to see past biblical proscriptions and find enlightenment in the archaic religions that were, he believed, humanity’s most ancient and universal heritage. He yearned to midwife a restoration of primitive religious sensibilities, which he thought were the only hope for a spiritual rebirth that could save a world degraded by secularism and wounded by Christian hubris.

Eliade’s books point to a conclusion that their enigmatic author left undrawn, hinting only at their “secret” or “hidden” meaning. But that meaning is not difficult to decipher. Eliade believed that he was living through the twilight of Christianity and Judaism, which he called “fossils.” Though he wrote little about theology, he clearly regarded biblical religion as spiritually impoverished—not because modern thought had refuted it, but because its own teachings had promoted disenchantment. It had distinguished God from the created world, shattered the primitive unity of community and cult, and placed our primal passions under a transcendent moral law. More important still, it had transformed our experience of time, rendering impossible its ritual abrogation. For Jews and Christians alike, Eliade noted, God’s actions in salvation history are fundamentally unmythical. Unlike archaic myths, Scripture describes God’s personal entry into chronological time. It depicts a sacred history that points to redemption in a messianic future, not to an endlessly repeated eternal return to our ancestral past. According to Eliade, a religion that aims to redeem time, rather than to cleanse us of its taint, sows the seed of secularism. Christianity and Judaism prevent human beings from recovering their primordial origins, burden them with individual responsibility, and leave them exposed to the terrors of history. The archaic mythos, so essential for our access to metaphysical power, had been fatally distorted by the Christian logos. The upshot has been the empty cosmos that Sartre embraced: “Ours is a time in which all the traditional theological categories have become meaningless.”

But did the greatest historian of religion of our time understand the faith in which he was baptized? Eliade’s assumption was that history stands in opposition to eternity, and that to endure suffering and death, we must annul or reverse time by embracing the never-changing world of archetypes and myth.But for Christians, all time is God’s time—not in the sense that God’s eternity is the time-less negation of time, but in the sense that God is a power that governs history while being fully present within it. Creation therefore is history, since it anticipates the covenant that completes it. Though Christian worship remembers a sacred time, it is not merely the commemoration what has already happened. It is also an anticipation of what is to come. Eliade thought that the essence of religious ritual was to live in the past. But for Christians, it is to prefigure, in word and deed, the future.

Eliade explored the biggest questions, and he did so in an age in which few scholars dared. Though he never wrote his long-promised personal book on God, he considered with seriousness whether we could bear the chaos and terror of living without a relation to the sacred. He reminded a profane culture of the importance of experiences that break the frame of everyday life, taking us out of the waking world and its bondage to time and space, and leading us into the dream world. He reminded us, too, that the fundamental religious impulse is not to argue about the divine but to worship it. For many today, life has never seemed so fleeting. Nothing promises duration, every certainty is devoured by time, and every passage of escape seems blocked. The existentialist’s braggadocio no longer impresses us. The flatness of life in a consumer society seems inescapable. Is it then a surprise that we hear echoes of Eliade in the increasingly not-so-fringe figures of our media? We hear him in the call to celebrate the primal and vitalistic forces on which life depends. We hear him in those who say that our culture remains haunted by the symbols of our archaic ancestors. And we hear him in those who seek wisdom in the forgotten cultures and myths of human prehistory. Like Eliade, these voices urge us to imagine acts of time-defying world-building and meaning-­making. The Christian response to those who seek a dark enlightenment is not to spurn the religious quest that Eliade wished to revive. It is to offer a correction that inverts it. Homo religiosus believed that he sustained the world by feeding the gods. Homo christianus knows that God sustains humanity by feeding us.

Ulf Andersen via Getty Images.