Mircea Eliade and the Sacred Tradition (A Personal Account)

Author(s): William W. Quinn, Jr.

Reviewed work(s):
Source: Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions, Vol. 3, No. 1
(October 1999), pp. 147-153
Published by: University of California Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/nr.1999.3.1.147 .
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Quinn: Eliade and the Sacred Tradition

Mircea Eliade and the Sacred Tradition

(A Personal Account)
__________________________________
William W. Quinn, Jr.

t is doubtless safe to assume that many, if not most, readers of this

journal know who Mircea Eliade was and what the sacred Tradition
is. However, for those who do not, a brief introductory statement
will be useful before proceeding to the heart of the matter. Mircea Eliade
(1907-1986) was a Romanian scholar and savant who as a young man
earned his Ph.D. from the University of Bucharest and spent the last
several decades of his life as a professor at the Divinity School of the
University of Chicago. In addition to producing a tremendous corpus
of published material, he was instrumental in the development of the
discipline of the history of religions, an inclusive and nondogmatic
approach to the study of religion. But Eliade was much more than an
academic: he was also an author, linguist, poet, philosopher, and
esotericist.
As to the sacred Tradition, for those familiar with the works of
Ananda Coomaraswamy, Ren Gunon, Frithjof Schuon, and the writers
associated with them, no explanation is necessary. For those unfamiliar
with the term, briefly stated, it is the belief in the existence of an esoteric,
primordial Tradition based upon a set of a priori and immutable first
principles, metaphysical in nature, true now as always, which in all places
and in all times have had expositors. In many cases, but not in all, these
expositors are believed to have been the revealers of new religions.
Alternatively, they have used existing religious symbols and metaphors
as heuristic devices to elucidate these first principles which inhere in
all the worlds religions and premodern philosophies. Of particular
interest within the present context, these first principles can be
identified as the bases, in one form or another, of many of the new
religious movements that have appeared since the mid 1960s.
The issue to be discussed here is the understanding Mircea Eliade
had of the Tradition as found in the sacred texts of the worlds religions
and as elucidated by Coomaraswamy, Gunon, and their associates. What
follows is a personal account based upon a very close association I had
with Eliade during the four-year period in which I was his student at the

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University of Chicago. This account is first-hand and heretofore has never
been disclosed in print for reasons which I will more fully explain.
The story begins in the early winter of 1977 upon my being accepted
in the Master of Arts in Religious Studies program at the Divinity School
of the University of Chicago. I began as a part-time student with a fulltime job, commuting to the universitys downtown campus in Hyde Park
from the Chicago suburb of Wheaton, the bucolic site of the national
headquarters of the Theosophical Society in America. By the fall of
1977, I had left my employment as both managing editor of The American
Theosophist magazine and associate editor of the Theosophical
Publishing House, in which capacities I had served for five years. I moved
to Hyde Park to become a full-time student and there rented a rather
weathered studio apartment in which I lived for over four years.
Initially, my relationship with Eliade was thoroughly bound up with
my relationship to the Divinity School. By June of 1978, when I was
awarded the Master of Arts in Religious Studies from the Divinity School,
Eliade had become something like a mentor to me in the philosophy
of the sacred Tradition. As to my relationship with the Divinity School,
things were much different. Since I had first met Eliade in the autumn
quarter of 1977, when I enrolled in Classics in the History of Religions
which he taught with Frank Reynolds, he had directed me to the study
of the works of Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, whose philosophia perennis
was the subject of my masters thesis.1 Coomaraswamy and the sacred
Tradition, together with esotericism generally, were the subject areas I
subsequently sought to pursue as a candidate for the Ph.D. in the Divinity
School.
But that was not to be. Apparently (and ironically) the philosophia
perennis was not considered sufficiently religious or sacredor whatever
the criteria werefor consideration as a subject of doctoral-level
scholarly inquiry at the Divinity School. And this, quite frankly, irritated
Eliade, who had sponsored my proposal and had met with me and then
dean of the Divinity School Joseph Kitagawa to discuss the idea. Rejected
by the Divinity School, Eliade almost single-handedly arranged that my
proposal be considered by the Committee on the History of Culture in
the Division of Humanities. It was accepted there, and I had the
exceptional good fortune to work under the tutelage of Karl Wientraub,
Chair of that Committee, with my three Ph.D. program, and later
dissertation, advisorsEliade, Martin Marty, and Wendy Doniger. In
1981, many courses, exams, languages, and one dissertation later, I was
awarded the Ph.D. from the Committee on the History of Culture,
Division of Humanities, University of Chicago. The title of my
dissertation was The Only Tradition: Philosophia Perennis and Culture
in the Writings of Ananda K. Coomaraswamy and Ren Gunon.2
The title of the dissertation fairly reflects its content. But it was more
than an indispensable requirement for the Ph.D. It also reflects my
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own views on the subject, consistent with a concept found in St. Augustine
and cited more than once by Coomaraswamy, the first half of which is
crede ut intelligas (believe in order to understand). A fortiori, the
dissertation further reflects to a considerable extent Eliades views on
the philosophia perennis. I am perfectly aware, given the focus of recent
and multiple scholarly studies on the oeuvre of Eliade,3 that the
preceding statement is likely to generate some controversy, the more
so in light of the recent release of The Only Tradition, my revised and
updated dissertation in book form published by SUNY Press in its
Western Esoteric Traditions series. Creating controversy is not my
intention in making the statement, however. Rather, my intention here
is to recount a personal experience that I deemed was best left untold
until now. To continue, then, the story of my association with Eliade is
as follows.
In the autumn of 1977, upon enrolling in the Classics in the History
of Religions course, a small seminar group of around twenty graduate
students, I went to see Eliade by appointment in his third-floor office at
the Lombard-Meadville Unitarian Seminary. We were to discuss paper
topics and seminar presentations. For me, that first meeting was perhaps
the most memorable. There was an instantaneous and mutual
understanding of the qualitative type that needs no further explication
to the intuitive. He asked about my background and my interests in the
field of religious studies and listened politely and attentively as I told
him of my theosophical perspectives and experience. It was during this
first meeting that, in retrospect, I can say without exaggeration he
changed the course of my life. In what I now perceive to be instruction,
as against suggestion, he directed me to the works of Ananda
Coomaraswamy and, with somewhat more caution, Ren Gunon. He
further instructed me to minimize my use of the principal figures and
literature of modern theosophy during my tenure as a student.
Throughout the following years, I assiduously heeded this advice, which
proved to be very sound. The effect of this advice was more like a
sublimation than a repudiation of my views, and my ultimate success at
the university as an intellectual cenobite and solitary advocate of the
philosophia perennis was the proof of its wisdom.
During the course of the next four years, Eliade and I had many
long and equally memorable discussions in his office at the seminary,
virtually all of which involved the sacred Tradition and related areas.
These discussions occurred within the context of the six regular courses
and two individual reading courses I formally took with him as a
matriculating student. In addition, we had other discussions, as needed,
pertaining to issues that involved my masters thesis and doctoral
dissertation, both of which he supervised. He spent his winters in
Chicago, teaching at the university, and his summers in Paris, teaching
inter alia at LEcole des Haute Etudes. This schedule conveniently
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provided me with the time during the summer months to digest the
insights gained during our winter discussions. I do not know if Eliade
had any students in France who, like me, concentrated almost exclusively
on the esoteric approach to religion and the philosophia perennis. But,
notwithstanding the later arrival of Ioan Couliano at the Divinity School,
I believe I was the only student at Chicago who could be so categorized,
at least during the later years of Eliades life. It is possibly for this reason,
together with the fact that none of this has ever before been disclosed,
that one sees so little in recent works about Eliade that examines the
centrality of the philosophia perennis in his major works, lying there just
under the surface, and described by him in terms such as archaic
ontology.
Eliades familiarity with the sacred Tradition was both professional
and scholarly, on the one hand, and personalfor lack of a better
termon the other hand. It became clear during our discussions that
this familiarity developed early in his life. Based on his own writings,
this familiarity accelerated during the time he spent as a graduate
student in India during the 1920s studying Sanskrit and practicing the
disciplines of yoga. In this latter effort he was supervised by
Surendranath Dasgupta, whom he referred to as his master (matre)
and guru.4 Upon his return to Romania from India in 1931, Eliade
was for a time attracted to the views and program of the Legion of St.
Michael, a nationalistic reform organization which espoused elements
of certain esoteric principles, but he never became a member.5
Eliades initial venture into the scholarly discourse of the philosophia
perennis arguably began in the years immediately preceding the genesis
of Zalmoxis, his Romanian journal on the history of religions begun in
1939. It was around this time that he encountered the works of Ananda
Coomaraswamy and began a correspondence with him. His principal
statement about the significance of Coomaraswamy and the superlative
quality of the latters work appeared in an article titled simply Ananda
Coomaraswamy, first written for Revista fundatiilor regale and later
reprinted in Insula lui Euthananius (Bucharest, 1943). He stated there
that Coomaraswamys value was in demonstrating the coincidence of
doctrines, not only in the case of Shankara and Eckardt, but also of all
the bearers of the word of Eastern and Western metaphysical
traditions. In the following paragraph, he continues,
Few are the modern writers who have cited with so much erudition and
sympathy the texts of St. Thomas, St. Bonaventure, Meister Eckardtor Vedic
texts and Buddhist scripturesas Ananda Coomaraswamy. The knowledge of
the Christian Middle Ages is, in the case of this Indian scholar, more accurate
and more deep than that of many European savants.6

Elsewhere in the article he refers to Coomaraswamy as one of the

greatest savants of our time, an exceptional thinker, and describes
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his works as reflecting an intense erudition and deep understanding.

The article is as instructive of his own views as it is about those of
Coomaraswamy; Professor Eliade, in lamenting that the academic study
of Eastern traditions had fallen to philologists and specialized scholars,
states, However, due to the structure of their mentality and to the
positivistic, anti-metaphysical bias of the nineteenth century, they
ignored precisely that which was most valuable in the cultures they were
investigating: the metaphysical tradition (emphasis added).7
Eliade and Coomaraswamy maintained a correspondence until 1947,
the year of Coomaraswamys death. In the summer of that year, Eliade
was seeking a teaching position in the United States and solicited
Coomaraswamys help. In Volume 2 of his Autobiography, Eliade makes
reference to a letter Coomaraswamy wrote to him in August, informing
him of a position teaching French in a new college soon to be
established. Eliade, reminiscing further, declares, I had dreamed of a
trip to the United States especially to meet Ananda Coomaraswamy, to
talk with him at length about his latest exegeses based on the philosophia
perennis.8 In what is likely the actual response to Coomaraswamy, Eliade
replied in a letter to him dated August 26, 1947. There Eliade stated
no doubt with reference to the essay Symplegades, Coomaraswamys
latest such exegesisthat You have admirably and greatly enhanced
[in Symplegades] the multivalence of the myth, and its ultimate
analysisbreaking out of the human condition by means of passing
through all polarities in the instantaneousness of the nuncis worthy
of a master.9 This compliment is consistent, first, with the way in which
Eliade begins the letter by addressing Coomaraswamy as Cher Matre,
clearly in the same sense as he referred to Dasgupta as a master and
guru. Second, it is consistent with the way in which he closes the letter
by conveying his feelings of admiration and gratitude for
Coomaraswamy.
One will find references to esotericism and the sacred Tradition
scattered throughout Eliades huge corpus of published works, whether
in formal journals10 or pedagogic disquisitions. This includes a paper
titled The Occult and the Modern World published in 1974 in which
he outlines the beginnings of the periods new religious movements.
But perhaps the least ambiguous, if not most explicit, formal statement
made by Eliade on the sacred Tradition was in a 1979 review article on
Princeton University Presss three-volume set by and about
Coomaraswamy. Released by the press in 1977 as part of the Bollingen
Series, this set contains a biography of Coomaraswamy by Roger Lipsey
and two volumes of collected articles and essays by Coomaraswamy on
Metaphysics and Traditional Art and Symbolism. Eliades review
article, Some Notes on Theosophia Perennis: Ananda K. Coomaraswamy
and Henry Corbin, contains both an encomium of Coomaraswamy
and more of his own views on the sacred Tradition. Just as he had more
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than forty years earlier, Eliade describes Coomaraswamy in this article
in these terms: There is no doubt that Ananda Coomaraswamy was
one of the most learned and creative scholars of the century.11
As to his own views on the sacred Tradition and its significance,
these are also expressly set forth in this review article. The goal of the
university, wrote Eliade, is the restoration and the revivification of
the study of traditional sciences [i.e., theosophia perennis] in the West.
Moreover, indicating the role that might be played by the history of
religions in the realization of this goal, he wrote that What interests
the historian of religion the most is the resurgence of a certain esoteric
tradition among a number of European scholars and thinkers who
represent many illustrious universities.12 As I was there at the time and
similarly interested in the scholarly pursuit of the Tradition, I was
privileged to have been able to discuss with Eliade the ideas and subject
matter that went into this review article. For this reason, I can affirm
and confirmthe primacy of the sacred Tradition in Eliades perspective
on religions. He believed that the Tradition constitutes what is religious
about religions, and he himself described it in this review article as
the philosophia perennis, the primordial and universal tradition present
in every authentic nonacculturated [non-despiritualized] civilization.13
This review article, his piece on Coomaraswamy, and certain
segments of Occultism, Witchcraft and Cultural Fashion are as close to an
explicit profession of the sacred Tradition as Eliade ever made. Though
we never discussed this rather sensitive topic, I have drawn conclusions
concerning his reluctance to be more explicit in his writings about the
sacred Tradition. My opinion is that to remain in the fray, so to speak,
Eliade had to constrain or at least minimize explicit exposition of these
views. This was necessary in order not to be categorically labeled an
esotericist or some similar description and consequently drowned out
by the consensus omnium of academia and others in the field of the history
of religions who failed or refused to acknowledge the probity of the
philosophia perennis and the validity of intellection as a mode of
apperception.
For precisely the same reasons, I never considered memorializing
or publishing either my account of this relationship or my opinion prior
to his death. So, to finish my opinion now, in terms as succinct as I can,
I believe Eliade wisely decided not to risk his considerable stature in
the area of religious studies by becoming an overt spokesman for the
sacred Tradition, but rather to remain in the fray and seek to convince
others of its truth not by leading but by pointing the way. In this
occupation, he was, in my view, entirely successful.

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ENDNOTES

William W. Quinn, Ananda K. Coomaraswamy on the Philosophia Perennis, Re-Vision

2, no. 2 (1979): 18-27.
2
The dissertation has been revised, substantially updated, and recently published as
The Only Tradition (Albany: SUNY Press, 1997).
3
The principal ones are David Cave, Mircea Eliades Vision for a New Humanism (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1993), and Bryan S. Rennie, Reconstructing Eliade: Making
Sense of Religion (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996). See also Harry Oldmeadow, Mircea Eliade
and Carl Jung: Priests Without Surplices? Studies in Western Traditions, Occasional
Papers, no. 1 (Bendigo, Australia: LaTrobe University, 1995). One must necessarily
include here the work in progress by Mac Linscott Ricketts, which is a biography of
Eliade for the years 1945-1986 and a sequel to his two-volume Mircea Eliade: The Romanian
Roots, 1907-1945 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988).
4
Mircea Eliade, Yoga: Immortality and Freedom (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1969). See page xxii: As to Surendranath Dasgupta . . . for three years he was our
professor of Sanskrit, our master, and our guru.
5
The Legion of St. Michael, its relationship to the militant Iron Guard, and the whole
pre-World War II political milieu of Romania is thoroughly treated by Mac Linscott
Ricketts in Romanian Roots, cited above in note 3. Those with an irrepressible proclivity
to see fascist conspiracies everywhere have occasionally sought to lump Eliade into this
worldview. This is poor history and worse analysis. Eliades attraction to the Legion was
marginal and was only pursued to the extent that the Legion, in its formative stages,
reflected certain esoteric principles which might have been beneficial to establishment
of a different polity in Romania at the time.
6
Mircea Eliade, Ananda Coomaraswamy, Revista fundatiilor regale 4 (1937): 183-89,
unpublished translation courtesy of Mac Linscott Ricketts. See also Insula lui Euthananius
(Bucharest: 1943).
7
Ibid.
8
Mircea Eliade, Autobiography, Volume II: Exile Odyssey, 1937-1960, trans. Mac Linscott
Ricketts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 118.
9
Mircea Eliade, letter to Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, dated 26 August 1947, Special
Collections, Princeton University Library. Translated from the French by William W.
Quinn.
10
In his best-known journal, No Souvenirs (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), Eliade made
a rather controversial (to Traditionalists) remark about the views of Ren Gunon, whom
he regarded as a pessimist owing to Gunons belief in not a virtual but an actual
destruction of the world at the end of the present cycle. It was principally this aspect of
Gunons views that Eliade did not share. Eliade in fact respected Gunons metaphysical
acuity, stating elsewhere that Gunons doctrine is considerably more rigorous and
more cogent than that of the occultists and hermeticists of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries (Occultism, Witchcraft, and Cultural Fashions [Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1976], 127).
11
Mircea Eliade, Some Notes on Theosophia Perennis: Ananda K. Coomaraswamy and
Henry Corbin, History of Religions 19, no. 2 (1979): 167-76, 171.
12
Ibid.
13

Ibid., 176.

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