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Title: The Sacred and Profane: The Nature of Religion by Mircea Eliade, Willard Trask ISBN: 0-15-679201-X Publisher: Harvest Books Pub. Date: October, 1968 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.77 (13 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: What Is the Sacred?
Comment: This is a fundamental text for religious scholarship and for living an examined life.
Eliade wastes no time trying to explain or define the experience of the sacred in terms of other disciplines (for instance, the sacred as psychological experience (Campbell) or the sacred as sociological phenomenon (Burkert)). Instead, he examines the sacred as sacred.
Eliade shows how sacred space and sacred time are supremely REAL space and time, permanent and eternal in opposition to the fluid space and time of the profane world. Homo religiosus re-enacts the primordial deeds of the gods in his rites and, indeed (unlike modern man), in all his acts, because only those primordial acts are truly real. Likewise, irruptions of sacred phenomena into profane space create sacred space, space which is created, which is eternal, which is real.
Read this book before undertaking any serious study of comparative religion. Read this book along with other classics about thought. Read this book and consider your own experience of the sacred. But whatever you do, read this book.
Rating: 5
Summary: Characterizing the Numinous
Comment: That the phenomenon of religious experience brooks no debate whatsoever. Eliade examines characteristics of this phenomenology, contrasting what humankind has experienced for tens of thousands of years with modern, stripped-down, rationalized religion. If nothing else, this book demonstrates what "modern" religions lack. The price they have paid in order to become modern deprives them of the underlying phenomena which have always empowered spiritual experience as a meaningful force in the past.
The chief point of the book is "to show in what ways religious man attempts to remain as long as possible in a sacred universe, and hence what his total experience of life proves to be in comparison with the experience of the man without religious feeling, of the man who lives, or wishes to live, in a desacralized world."
Eliade begins with hierophany, the event of the sacred manifesting itself to us, the experience of a different order of reality entering human experience. He presents the idea of sacred space, describing how the only "real" space is sacred, surrounded by a formless expanse. Sacred space becomes the point of reference for all other spaces. He finds that people inhabit a midland, between the outer chaos and the inner sacred, which is renewed by sacred ritual and practice. By consecrating a place in the profane world, cosmogony is recapitulated and the sacred made accessible. This becomes the center of the primitive world. Ritual takes place in this sacred space, and becomes a way of participating in the sacred cosmos while reinvigorating the profane world.
Next, Eliade considers sacred time and mythology. While "profane time" is linear, sacred time returns to the beginning, when things were more "real" than they are now. Again, ritual plays an important part. Time is regenerated by being created anew as rituals tie participants back to the sacred origins of the cosmos. Thus, the cycle of the year becomes a paradigm for community renewal and for replentishing the world from the sacred genesis.
He goes on to examine how a number of the elements of nature typically play into sacred experience. He considers water, the sacred tree, the home and the body. He notes that "No modern man, however irreligious, is entirely insensible to the charms of nature." Cosmic symbolism adds a new value to an object or action without removing the inherent values. Religious man finds within himself the same sanctity which he finds in the cosmos. "Openness to the world enables religious man to know himself in knowing the world--and this knowledge is precious to him because it is religious, because it pertains to being."
He concludes the book by considering the contrast between homo religiosus and profane man. Non-religious man finds that all things have been desacralized. This can be liberating, in that oppressive meanings have been removed--but also impoverishing as all actions and items have been deprived of spiritual significance. He speaks to the great loss of Christianity:
"The religious sense of the urban population is gravely impoverished. The cosmic liturgy, the mystery of nature's participation in the Christological drama, have become inaccessible to Christians living in a modern city. Their religious experience is no longer open to the cosmos. In the last analysis, it is a strictly private experience; salvation is a problem that concerns man and his god [sic]; at most, man recognizes that he is responsible not only to God but also to history. But in these man-God-history relationships there is no place for the cosmos. From this it would appear that, even for a genuine Christian, the world is no longer felt as the work of God.
This is a powerful book. It presents basic elements of religious experience, and allows the reader to notice where their lack can be felt in modern society and his own life. Eliade suggests no solutions to the problems which this consideration may raise. If one is inclined towards the Christian tradition, Matthew Fox's writings, particularly ORIGINAL BLESSING, may offer hope. For others, more exploration is required.
Rating: 5
Summary: Critical text to understanding religious history.
Comment: Eliade's book picks up the thread from Rudolf Otto's The Idea of the Holy and attempts to explain the nature of the Sacred by pairing it with its opposite-- the profane.
This little book is a deceptively easy and quick read, but take the time to think it through carefully. He uses the oppositional pair sacred/profane to examine the notion of space, time, nature and human existence and it's worth spending the time to go back after each chapter and reconsider the chapter before it.
Bound with a chronological survey on the history of religion and a selected bibliography, a must have before trying to do further reading in religious thought.
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Title: Images and Symbols by Mircea Eliade, Philip Mairet ISBN: 069102068X Publisher: Princeton University Press Pub. Date: 05 June, 1991 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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Title: The Myth of the Eternal Return: Or, Cosmos and History by Mircea Eliade, Willard R. Trask ISBN: 0691017778 Publisher: Princeton University Press Pub. Date: 01 November, 1971 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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Title: The Idea of the Holy by Rudolf Otto ISBN: 0195002105 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: 01 June, 1958 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: Patterns in Comparative Religion by Mircea Eliade, Rosemary Sheed ISBN: 0803267339 Publisher: University of Nebraska Press Pub. Date: 01 November, 1996 List Price(USD): $22.95 |
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Title: Shamanism by Mircea Eliade ISBN: 0691017794 Publisher: Princeton University Press Pub. Date: 01 May, 1972 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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