Between Religion and Literature: Mircea Eliade ... - Lafayette College

Eliade and Frye
constantly hearkened back to a venerable tradition of universal, systematic,
and synthetic thinkers-most notably, Sir James Frazer and C. G.
Jung,35 as well as, in Eliade's case, Goethe,36 and, in Frye's case,
Spengler.37 Thus both men hold their disciplines responsible, first of all,
for collecting and synthesizing widely diverse materials expressive of the
sacred and the imaginative. In conceiving of the history of religions as a
"total" discipline, Eliade esteems it as "a Noah's Ark" stocked with "camouflaged"
forms of the world's traditional religious values and models.38
Similarly, Frye recommends that criticism approach literature as "the
encyclopaedia of visions of human life and destiny."" 39 And if, for Eliade,
historians of religions define themselves by their ability to synthesize reli-
gious data into a "general perspective,""40 precisely such a general, syn-
thetic perspective is implied in Frye's maxims for critically educated
readers: "All themes and characters and stories that you encounter in lit-
erature belong to one big interlocking family," so the value of literary
studies derives from "the total body of our reading, the castle of words
we've built, and keep adding new wings to all the time."4'
a more centripetal movement of scholarship, trying to avoid specialization in order to articulate a
number of central problems of critical theory" (Spiritus Mundi, p. 23).
35 Mircea Eliade revered Frazer's The Golden Bough, despite "all its shortcomings," as a seminal
classic in religious studies (Quest [n. 14 above], p. 14) and recognized it as a "cultural fashion" in
itself ("Cultural Fashions and the History of Religions," in The History of Religions: Essays on the
Problem of Understanding, ed. Joseph M. Kitagawa [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967],
pp. 25-26). On Eliade's relation to Jung, see Mac Linscott Ricketts, "The Nature and Extent of
Eliade's 'Jungianism,"' Union Seminary Quarterly Review 25 (1970) : 234. Frye's Culture and Literature
(Denham, ed., n. 2 above) includes under the rubric "Grammars of the Imagination" his own
review essays on Frazer ("Symbolism of the Unconscious," pp. 84-94) and Jung ("Forming
Fours," pp. 117-29), along with his review of Eliade. Together with Jung's work on libido symbolism,
Frye regards The Golden Bough primarily as a study in literary criticism (see Northrop
Frye, "The Archetypes of Literature," in his Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology [San
Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1963], p. 17, Anatomy [n. 16 above], p. 109, and "Literature
and Myth," in Relations of Literary Study: Essays on Interdisciplinary Contributions, ed. James Thorpe
[New York: Modern Language Association, 1967], p. 30). Frye, like Eliade, resists the frequent
confusion of his own use of the term "archetype" with Jung's, but he acknowledges the resemblance
of his own view of literature in the Anatomy toJung's mandala vision (Spiritus Mundi [n. 15
above], p. 117).
36 Mircea Eliade regards Goethe, Voltaire, Da Vinci, and Giovanni Papini as representatives of
the "universal spirit" (Autobiography, Volume I: 1907-1937, Journey East, Journey West, trans. Mac
Linscott Ricketts [San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1981 ], p. 70), with which he himself identifies:
"As always, I see Goethe's destiny as my own" (Journal II, p. 72).
37 Frye ranks Spengler, with Frazer, as one of his long-time "culture-heroes" (Spiritus Mundi, p.
111). See also "Spengler Revisited," ibid., pp. 179-98.
38 Eliade, Labyrinth (n. 14 above), p. 149; Journal II, pp. 162-63.
39 Frye, Critical Path (n. 18 above), p. 128.
40 Mircea Eliade, "Methodological Remarks on the Study of Religious Symbolism," in The History
of Religions: Essays in Methodology, ed. Mircea Eliade and Joseph M. Kitagawa (Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1959), p. 91.
'41 Northrop Frye, The Educated Imagination (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964),
pp. 48, 95.
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