notes and comments

Mircea Eliade, Romanian polymath, philosopher, novelist, anthropologist of religion and periodic surrealist saw a division in the human experience of time. Jeremy Biles at The Immanent Frame writes:

‘”In this image [the lightning bolt], we find a dramatic portrayal of Eliade’s “dialectic of the sacred”—the coincidentia oppositorum in which the profane and the sacred achieve simultaneity of form. Eliade explains the dialectic of the sacred as the “manifestation of the sacred in material things.” One of his great interpreters, Thomas J. J. Altizer, refers to it as an ambiguous, even “paradoxical mode of being which is at once both inside and outside of time.” In Youth, the question at stake is the relationship between historical time and transcendent, mythological time, and the role of memory in mediating this dialectic of the sacred in our modern, secular world—a world where, Eliade claims, the sacred is “repressed.” “

Apparently Eliade removed himself from ‘historical time’ as much as possible, rarely reading newspapers, remaining apolitical. I think this brings up a significant problem. It is not the problem of scholarship or study as opposed to the active life, at least not directly. I think it is the problem of how one engages the ideas which one finds most pressing, those which are convulsive and demanding. If history has led to a suppression of the sacred, does history itself subsume the sacred by necessity, or is it simply in our epoch? Can attention to the present moment in its historical place be legitimate archeology, or distraction? I am also not clear if the disjunctive is inclusive or exclusive. The answer might be both, although I do not see how it could be neither. It also seems that one can affirm attention (immersion?) in historical time as Eliade has it without making history itself immanent.