Cosmic Christianity in Mircea Eliade's Hermeneutics on “Mioriţa”: The Possibility of a Cognitive Perspective on the “Sacred” in the Traditional Romanian Culture (original) (raw)
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Cosmic Christianity" refers, according to Mircea Eliade, to a new religious development, which characterises South-Eastern Europe, where the Christological mystery is projected over the entire nature, with emphasis on the liturgical dimension of human existence in the world. In this paper I will demonstrate that Eliade's analysis of the ballad can be also exploited from a cognitive approach, in an attempt to emphasise the fact that transfiguring death into an event of cosmic proportions and structure, as well as the mystic sympathy between man and nature, highlighted in Miori a, reveal new significances of the "sacred". The manner in which Eliade exploits the text of the ballad from the view of ethno-psychology and sociology can be integrated into a cognitive perspective, according to which ethnic, psychological and mental mechanisms largely determine religious beliefs and practices specific to a geographic area, such as South-Eastern Europe. The cognitive approach projected on Miori a can be considered a type of critical discourse on one of the founding myths that represents a cultural and spiritual model in the Romanian space and history.
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TEOLOGIA, 2019
In his study The Romanians. A Historical Summary, Mircea Eliade makes reference to the material and spiritual culture of the Geto-Dacians and of the ancestors. Taking over the thesis of Vasile Pârvan, the Romanian historian of religions, believes that Zal-moxis and his cult will prepare the Daco-Romans for embracing Christianity. Characterizing the Romanian Christianity, M. Eliade shows that his specifi city is given by his presence on this teritory,by the Dacian-Roman heritage, by the serenity, naturalness and the absence of any excess. The Romanians are considered to be a faithful, human, natural, vigorous and optimistic people who disregard any sickening exaltation of the so-called "mysticism", having as a dominant feature the common sense, kindness, tolerance and hospitality, which they show through the long exercise of suffering during history, these being also considered characteristics of the Romanian spirituality. A fundamental feature of the Romanian Christianity in Eliade's vision is that of "the cosmic Christianity", which he mentions in an early writing: "The fi rst duty of man", he said, "is the fi rst parable of God: his cosmization" (Soliloquies, p. 20). For Eliade cosmization is the harmony of man with everything that is concrete and unique outside of him, the ordination and the matching of the human rhythm with the rhythms of nature, integrating into a hierarchy, cosmicizing all the chaotic experiences. Keywords Mircea Eliade, the Geto-Dacian religion, the spirituality of the Romanian people, the cosmic dimension of the Romanian Christianity TEOLOGIA 2 / 2019 43 STUDIES AND ARTICLES
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This article introduces Mircea Eliade. His biography and his understanding of religion are outlined and the possibly formative influence of Eastern Orthodoxy is considered, as are recent publications on the issue. His early essays present Orthodoxy as a mystical religion in which, without some experience of the sacred, profane existence is seen as meaningless and he later identified this same basic schema in all religion. Orthodox theologians Vladimir Lossky and Dumitru Stăniloae are inspected for similarities to Eliade. Ten consonances between Eliade’s thought and Orthodox theology are considered. However, dissonances are also noted, and for every potential Orthodox source of Eliade’s theories there is another equally credible source, causing a controversy over the formative influences of his Romanian youth as opposed to his later Indian experience. It is suggested that Eliade gained insight from Orthodoxy, but that this was brought to consciousness by his sojourn in India. Theology in the form of categorical propositions is present in the Eastern Church but exists alongside other equally important expressions in the visual, dramatic, and narrative arts. The Eastern Church as a multi-media performative theater prepared Eliade to apprehend religion as inducing perceptions of the “really real”—creative poesis exercising a practical influence on its audience’s cognitions. Orthodoxy is a tradition in which categorical propositions had never come to dominate the expression of the sacred, and Eliade wrote from a vantage point on the border, not only between East and West, but also between the scholar and the artist.