Reconstructing Eliade: Making Sense of Religion by Bryan S. Rennie Review by: Eric J. Ziolkowski History of Religions, Vol.

39, No. 1 (Aug., 1999), pp. 77-79 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3176648 . Accessed: 11/10/2013 16:48
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Reconstructing Eliade: Making Sense of Religion. By BRYAN S. RENNIE. Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1996. Pp. xii+293. $59.50 (cloth); $19.95 (paper). The raison d'etre of this importantstudy is Rennie's assumption "that Eliade has been so widely misread"(p. 192) and that "we should not simply ignore his work as corruptedby egregious flaws" (p. 212). Yet it is not only "the thought of the eminent scholar" (p. 1), but, as implied in the book's title, the reputationof Eliade himself that apparentlyneeds "reconstructing." Whereas the first of the book's three parts is devoted to clarifying a selection of Eliade's most basic scholarly concepts and concerns (hierophany,the sacred, the profane, coincidentia oppositorum, homo religiosus, symbol, myth, illud tempus, and history), the second part assesses various criticisms that have been made of him. These include not only the standardcomplaints about his scholarship (i.e., its allegedly relativistic perspective, irresponsible use of source material, defective comparativemethod, and so forth), but the well-known charges concerning his political sympathies and involvements during the 1930s and 1940s. To the book's first two parts the third serves as a kind of coda, seeking to bring Eliade'swork to bearon postmodernism. Of the three parts, the first seems the strongest. What it accomplishes through careful synthesis and assessment of Eliade's notoriously unsystematic writings in the history of religions is a thoughtful systematizationof his scholarly grammar, whose underlyingphilosophy and method Rennie astutely probes. This partof the book alone would serve well as a critical introductionto Eliade's work, though the section on "Myths and Mythology" relies too much on the work of G. S. Kirk (pp. 61-76) and concludes with the misleading suggestion that "the concept of 'myth' was formed as 'otherpeoples' myths' ratherthan as 'myths'tout court" (p. 76). In making this claim and contending that Eliade "correct[ed]this misapprehension" (p. 76), Rennie has set up a kind of straw man. For there definitely were important contributorsto the formation of the modem notion of "myth"who did not associate myth exclusively with "other people." Schelling, F Schlegel, and Carlyle come immediately to mind as contemplatorsof "myth"who invoked thatcategory in reflecting on their own culture and society as well as on others. In the book's second part, where he establishes himself as a formidableand unabashed defender of Eliade, Rennie is sometimes quick to dismiss statements or allegations by the latter's detractorsas "simply inaccurate"(p. 163), "simply incorrect"(p. 175), or "simply untrue"(p. 190). His impatience is understandable; wading throughthe dense slough of criticisms and innuendos leveled against Eliade, especially in the years since his death, is a patently daunting task. Although as a rule Rennie'sjudgments seem responsible and reasonable, in a few instances greater care could have been taken in his own appeal to secondary sources. For example, referringto the "inherent"anti-Semitism "in the fundamentaltenets of the Legionary movement" with which the young Eliade was associated, Rennie claims that "antisemitism could be said to be fundamentalin Christianityin the same way" (p. 161), a claim that he tries to supportby referring(in n. 20) to John Dominic Crossan'sWhoKilled Jesus? Exposing the Roots of Anti-Semitismin the Gospel Story of the Death of Jesus (San Francisco:Harper,1995). Yet readersmay recall that Crossan goes out of his way to distinguish between early "Christian anti-Judaism"as "religious prejudice,"and modem "Europeananti-Semitism"as

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Book Reviews

"racial prejudice"(Who Killed Jesus? p. 32). Elsewhere, Rennie seems to credit J. Z. Smith for having "suggest[ed]" in a book published in 1978 that Goethe's influence is manifest in Eliade'sconcept of "morphology"(ReconstructingEliade, p. 47, n. 1), when in fact Eliade himself had noted this connection as early as an 6, 1960, in his journal,publishedlateras Fragmentsd'unjournal entryof February (Paris: Gallimard, 1973). Rennie proves himself most engaging as an archival researcher, sifting through and assessing all the pertinentBritish Foreign Office files in order to refute allegations tying Eliade to the Iron Guard and even to the cause of Nazi Germany.Although I have not examined those files and therefore cannot assess them myself, Rennie's handling of them seems meticulous, thorough, and fair. This section of the book will be particularlyuseful to readers interested in the ongoing controversy surroundingthe question of Eliade's politics. This does not mean, however, that Rennie succeeds in maintaining a neutral stance in all his treatmentsof the charges against Eliade. For example, Rennie asserts that Daniel Dubuisson "'poisons the well' of discourse"when the latter-as his words are accuratelytranslated,excepting a typo, by Rennie (p. 172)-refers to "the chaste (pudique) version [of Eliade's past] proposed by Eliade himself: 'the imprudenceand the faults committedin my youth constitute a series of misunderstandingswhich followed my [sic] all my life.'" (This is Rennie'squotationof Dubuisson, Mythologiesdu XXe siecle [Dumezil, Levi-Strauss,Eliade] [Lille: Presses Universitairesde Lille, 1993], p. 221, who in turnis quotingfrom Eliade, Les moissons du solstice: MemoireII [1947-1960] [Paris:Gallimard,1988], p. 135.) If, as Rennie complains, Dubuisson "simply does not permit the possibility that Eliade might be telling the truthhere" (p. 172), what "truth"is it that Rennie (or Eliade) has in mind? Whose "misunderstandings" (malentendus)was Eliade speaking of? His own, or those of his detractors? In saying that those misunderstandings "followed" (poursuivraient)him, was Eliade blaming himself? Or was he blaming others?If he was concerned about those misunderstandings, why did he not try to clear them up in any of his publishedvolumes of autobiography, journals,memoirs, and interviews? What I am suggesting is that the above-quoted statementfrom Eliade begs the question and is so semantically vague as to be practically meaningless. Hence, if Duboisson seems prejudicial in insinuating that it betrays an effort by Eliade to whitewash his own past, Rennie seems no less partialin suggesting that it may be a self-critical statement of "truth." To be sure, Rennie should be commended for that Eliade be judged fairly. However, regardlessof whetheror not he has insisting proven that "thereis to date no evidence of actual membership,of active services rendered,or of any real involvement with any fascist or totalitarianmovements or ideals" (p. 177), it seems flippantto allow only that "insistent nationalism in the thirties is certainly distasteful, especially to our palate in the nineties" (p. 177). In its effects on countless lives, and certainly on those of its victims, and no less "especially" in the thirties than today, "insistent nationalism" has amounted to more than a mere matter of taste. Combined with the book's first part, the third part compellingly demonstrates the ongoing pertinence of Eliade's work to the contemporaryacademic study of religion and to the contemplation of religious phenomena in the postmodern world. Given Rennie's admission that "Eliade's thought" and "postmodernism"

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are both "to some extent imaginary constructs,"his effort to use these two "constructs" to clarify each other seems somewhat contrived (pp. 232-41). Yet he manages to draw some highly suggestive (though far from fully developed) parallels between Eliade and a number of postmodernist theorists on questions of ontology, historicism, and other matters. While surely not marking the end of the deconstructing or reconstructingof Eliade, Rennie's book will have to be taken into account by anyone who aspires to engage seriously in either enterprise within the near future. ERICJ. ZIOLKOWSKI Lafayette College

Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America. By COLLEEN MCDANNELL. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995. Pp. xii+312, 153 illustrations. $35.00 (cloth). Colleen McDannell writes in her introductoryparagraphs,"ThroughoutAmerican history, Christians have explored the meaning of the divine, the nature of death, the power of healing, and the experience of the body by interacting with a created world of images and shapes" (p. 1). Her book explores some of the material trail these Christiansleft in the nineteenth century and continue to leave in the twentieth, using Protestant, Catholic, and Mormon documentation. A major part of that documentation is contained in the illustrations that accompany the text, some 153 of them, with a numberfull color, making this book about an often sensuous religious material culture itself a sensuous object. In eight chapters,the volume offers assortedcase studies to argue a set of propositions regardingChristianityand materialculture.Most of these work from analysis of artifacts, landscapes, or art. At least three, however, are more broad ranging, either in advancing theoretical and methodological claims or in examinof materialChristianity. Given this format,the book ing traditionsof interpretation comes acrossas a collection of essays exploringclosing connectedthemes-popular conflation of sacred and profane, gender issues, lay clergy boundaries, and the like. This does not make it less effective as a book, but it does suggest the experimental and suggestive, more than definitive, characterof the project. McDannell herself, in her epilogue, refers to the "case studies" in her book (p. 271), seeing them as evidence for the conclusion that "the practice of Christianityis a subtle mixture of traditionalbeliefs and personal improvisations"(p. 272). What do these essays and case studies include? An introductorychapterargues for a contextual, not intrinsic, reading of religious meaning through its material expressions. Acknowledging historianJon Butler,here McDannell offers a broadly Catholic-in contrast to Puritan and Reformed-perspective on American religious history. She is "incarnational"-at home in material culture-finding the sacred interfused with the profane and what many would call the productions of kitsch. Importantto her argumentis the thesis that there is nothing new about any of the mingling, that historically sacred and profane were always intertwined in American culture and are not recent spin-offs of secularization. Her work falls into line, too, with a recent cultural studies critique that suspects mass readings

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