UULA Adult RE: An Introduction to Religious Studies Part 2.2, Mircea Eliade

Adult RE Comparative Religion class given, Friday, April 19th, 6:30 at the UULA Church.

An Introduction to Religious Studies Part 2.2: Mircea Eliade.

Mircea Eliade was one of the most important of the early scholars of comparative religion. He believed that there was something "real" in the experience of "the sacred", and that the many similarities we find in human religious expression are due to a shared encounter with this sacred reality. Eliade therefore worked to catalog the many similarities that can be found in how people from wildly different cultures and ties responded to whatever they considered to be sacred.

From an epistemological perspective, it is impossible to distinguish between his belief that the many similarities he found were due to contact with a shared sacred reality, and the idea that they are due to a shared human nature. As with many who pursue this "typological" approach to the study of comparative religion, some of the similarities and patterns he found were likely due to the human propensity to see patterns and meaning in random noise. Nevertheless, Eliade's work set the stage for the study of comparative religion for years to come, and his writing was some of the first exposure I had to these ideas, and it largely motivated my own study of the topic of comparative religion.

Eliade was especially interested in the concepts of sacred time and sacred space as manifest in the sacred calendar for sacred time, and in temples, churches, and other sacred places of worship for sacred space. He was interested in the ideas of the sacred center, what he called the "axis mundi" of the world, and he noted that people from all around the world oriented their lives towards their sacred centers. He was also interested in the mythology of the "return", in this case, the return to sacred time, or to the sacred spot, or to the moment of creation.

The influence of Eliade's work can be seen in the writings of people such as Joseph Campbell (and his work "The Hero With a Thousand Faces"), and in the "Temple Typology" of scholars like John Lundquist.

Previous Lecture: An Introduction to Religious Studies Part 2.1, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung
https://youtu.be/T_y9vftH59I
Related lectures:

An Introduction to Religious Studies Part 1: Defining Religion
https://youtu.be/knWcr0qH0aU

I have given two lectures that served as an introduction to comparative religion:

UULA Forum: Similarities and Typologies: An Introduction to Comparative Religion (Part 1): https://youtu.be/7LFbWiSCjas
UULA Forum: Differences and Divisions: An Introduction to Comparative Religion (Part 2): https://youtu.be/yeYrOO3Avsc
Recommended additional resources:

"The Myth of the Eternal Return: Cosmos and History" By Mircea Eliade
https://www.amazon.com/Myth-Eternal-Return-Cosmos-History/dp/0691123500/ref=sr_1_1

"Introduction to the Study of Religion" by Charles B. Jones, The Great Courses.
https://www.audible.com/pd/Introduction-to-the-Study-of-Religion-Audiobook/B00DCY20RM

"The Varieties of Religious Experience" William James
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0140390340/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_U_V9v9Cb4CQZ9K8
Course Web Page;

For more resources, links to other lectures, etc. visit the UULA Comparative Religion Course Web Page: https://sites.google.com/view/comparativereligion

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