Mircea Eliade: 'Secular mysticism' and the history of religions

This essay considers the origins of theoretical understanding in lived experience and the implications this principle might have on our understanding of Mircea Eliade's approach to religion. It inspects possible sources of Eliade's theoretical understanding of religion in his descriptions of his lived experience and considers whether specifically 'religious' experience would be most likely to be determinative. This necessitates some analysis of the relation of experience to expressions of that experience and of the iterations of the scholar using one to elucidate the other. It suggests that the scholar's own understanding must be open to transformation rather than automatically redescribing the expressions of subjects of research. The main claim of the article is that Eliade can be appropriately termed a 'secular mystic' because of the effective openness that he maintains to the transformative potential of the experience of the world of the other. The Eliadean identification of the sacred and the real, far from being a normative assumption, is a principle of hermeneutical openness, comparable in secular terms to openness to mystical experience.