Література

1.Аляєв Г.Є. Філософський універсум С.Л.Франка. Персоналістична метафізика всеєдності в горизонтах нової онтології ХХ століття: Монографія. – К: ПАРАПАН, 2002. – 368с.

2.Бердяев Н. Философия свободного Духа //Бердяев Н. Диалектика божественного и человеческого. – М: Фолио, 2003. – С.15-340.

3.Евлампиев И.И. История русской метафизики в ХIХ-ХХ веках. Русская философия в поисках Абсолюта. – В 2-х ч. – Ч.1. – СПб: Алетейя, 2000. – 415с.

4.Крекшин И.,о. Метафизика зла (Пролегомены к теодицее в философии позднего С.Л.Франка) //Вопросы философии, 2001, №12. – С.128-139.

5.Ларіонова В.К. Етичні теорії російського інтуїтивізму (М.Лосського, С.Франка). – К: б.в., 1997. – 172с.

6.Франк С.Л. Духовные основы общества. – М: Республика, 1992. – 511с.

7.Франк С.Л. Крушение кумиров //Франк С.Л. Соч. – М: Правда, 1990. – С.113-183.

8.Франк С.Л. Непостижимое //Франк С.Л. Соч. – М: Правда, 1990. – С.183-556.

9.Франк С.Л. Реальность и человек: Метафизика человеческого бытия. – М: Республика, 1997. – 480с.

10.10.Франк С.Л. Свет во тьме. Опыт христианской этики и социальной философии //Франк С.Л. Духовные основы общества. – М: Республика, 1992. – С.405-471.

Summary

Maria Mazuryk. The Triumph of Light over Darkness in the Philosophy of Semen Frank. The article is dedicated to the investigation of the problem of Good and Evil in the ontological foreshortening, based upon Semen Frank’s work “Light in the Darkness”. The ontology of Good and Evil is analysed in the context of the Russian learnt man’s ideas about freedom and the trans-rational and meta-logical nature that pertains to it; about transcendental and empirical all-unified nature of freedom; about creativity and love that are related to freedom. The attention is focused on the principal difference between Salvation and moral improvement of world and human being.

УДК 2-584

© Ioana-Andreea Panzar

Chernivtsi Jurij Fedkovych National University

THE SACRED AND THE PROFANE

TO THE ROMANIAN PHILOSOPHER MIRCEA ELIADE

"For religious man, space is not homogeneous;

he experiences interruptions, breaks in it;

some parts of space are qualitatively different from others..."

Mircea Eliade

Стаття присвячена розглядові діалектики концепцій священного та профанного у спадщині румуно-американського філософа Мірча Еліаде.

Mircea Eliade (March 13 [Other Sources : February 28] 1907 – April 22, 1986) was a Romanian historian of religion, fiction writer, philosopher, and professor at the University of Chicago.

He was a leading interpreter of religious experience, who established paradigms in religious studies that persist to this day. His theory that hierophanies form the basis of religion, splitting the human experience of reality into sacred and profane space and time, has proved influential. One of his most influential contributions to religious studies was his theory of Eternal Return, which holds that myths and rituals do not simply commemorate hierophanies, but, at least to the minds of the religious, actually participate in them. In academia, the Eternal Return has become one of the most widely accepted ways of understanding the purpose of myth and ritual.

Eliade starts by positioning his study relative to Rudolf Otto's The Idea of the Holy (1917). Otto had examined the sacred as an irrational experience, but Eliade will be concerned with what he calls the 'sacred in its entirety' [1].

He offers an initial definition of the sacred as 'the opposite of the profane' [p. 10] and goes on to explain what he means by this in terms of the concept of hierophany. This is 'the manifestation of something of a wholly different order' [2], Otto's ganz andere [wholly other], in the ordinary profane world.

Fundamental to Eliade's explanation is his idea of 'religious man'. This is 'man of all pre-modern societies' , for whom anything in nature could be the subject of religious experience, as being sacred: stones, trees, whatever.

Religious man tried to live in the presence of the sacred because he desired access to the ultimate reality and to the power (enduringness and efficacy ) of the sacred [3].

Eliade proposes to show how religious man differed from the non-religious man of modern societies, who lives in 'a desacralised cosmos' [4]. But he is not going to attempt to explain how the transition from religious to non-religious man came about historically. Eliade's understanding of religion centers on his concept of hierophany (manifestation of the Sacred) – a concept that includes, but is not limited to, the older and more restrictive concept of theophany (manifestation of a god) [5]. From the perspective of religious thought, Eliade argues, hierophanies give structure and orientation to the world, establishing a sacred order. The "profane" space of nonreligious experience can only be divided up geometrically: it has no "qualitative differentiation and, hence, no orientation [is] given by virtue of its inherent structure" [6]. Thus, profane space gives man no pattern for his behavior. In contrast to profane space, the site of a hierophany has a sacred structure to which religious man conforms himself. A hierophany amounts to a "revelation of an absolute reality, opposed to the non reality of the vast surrounding expanse" [7]. As an example of "sacred space" demanding a certain response from man, Eliade gives the story of Moses halting before Yahweh's manifestation as a burning bush (Exodus 3:5) and taking off his shoes.

Origin myths and sacred time. Eliade notes that, in traditional societies, myth represents the absolute truth about primordial time [8]. According to the myths, this was the time when the Sacred first appeared, establishing the world's structure – myths claim to describe the primordial events that made society and the natural world be that which they are. Eliade argues that all myths are, in that sense, origin myths: "myth, then, is always an account of a 'creation'" [9]. Many traditional societies believe that the power of a thing lies in its origin [10].

If origin is equivalent to power, then "it is the first manifestation of a thing that is significant and valid" [11] (a thing's reality and value therefore lies only in its first appearance).

According to Eliade's theory, only the Sacred has value, only a thing's first appearance has value and, therefore, only the Sacred's first appearance has value. Myth describes the Sacred's first appearance; therefore, the mythical age is sacred time, [12] the only time of value: "primitive man was interested only in the beginnings [...] to him it mattered little what had happened to himself, or to others like him, in more or less distant times" [13]. Eliade postulated this as the reason for the "nostalgia for origins" that appears in many religions, the desire to return to a primordial Paradise [14].

In The Sacred and the Profane, Eliade argued that "the manifestation of the sacred ontologically founds the world." The traditional man, 'homo religious', had a strong will to live within the sacred or near the sacred objects. A sacred place possesses an unique existential value for religious man, but for nonreligious man, space is neutral. Although modern man seems to experience the world completely as profane, ancient myths, taboos, and rituals still nourish life in the West, but in a corrupted form.

Crowned and the layman constitute two methods to be in the world, two existential situations assumed by the man with the length of his history. These modes to be in the World do not interest only the history of the religions or sociology, they do not constitute only the object of historical, sociological, ethnological studies. In last authority, the to be crowned modes and profane depend on the various positions that the man conquered in Cosmos; they interest the philosopher as well as any researcher eager to know possible dimensions of the human existence.

The Sacred and the Profane is based on a fundamental contradiction. Eliade wants the sacred to be 'wholly other' and simultaneously wholly familiar. He defines the sacred in terms of the 'wholly other', yet sets out to demonstrate that his 'religious man' lived a life immersed in the sacred.

Churches as Wholly Other? At the start of his book, Eliade offers an example of the sacred ~ profane distinction that a modern, non-religious person will understand: the contrast between the inside and the outside of a church, separated by the threshold. Let's consider this example as illustrative of Eliade's problem.

A modern, non-religious person will certainly appreciate the point Eliade is making. Thus tourists who go inside a medieval church today will very likely get some vague sense of the 'wholly other'. That's because a building like that will be wholly outside their ordinary experience.

But what about the kind of person who actually attended such a church regularly in its heyday, the medieval peasant, Eliade's religious man in the flesh. It is extremely difficult to believe that such a person's experience was not that of the wholly familiar.

Medieval Churches. We can imagine that when the Anglo-Saxon peasants first entered the new stone built churches of their new Norman overlords, they felt some sense of awe and maybe even of the wholly other. To overawe was, after all, the Normans' intention. But that effect must have soon dissipated, as familiarity set in.

May be the rood screen separating the people from the liturgy sustained some slight sense of mystery, but not much, very likely.

Indeed, it could be that one of the causes of the Reformation was that familiarity had bred contempt in the churches, with people using them to get out of the rain, meet friends, or whatever. Don't I recall something in Chaucer about people going to church to see and be seen? One can imagine that the same kind of contempt through familiarity had happened at the Temple in Jerusalem for Jesus to have to cast out the moneylenders.

It is difficult to believe that a similar tendency was not at work in the past in any sacred precinct to which ordinary local believers were encouraged to participate in rituals on a regular basis. You can be sure that if local Salisbury Plain religious man had gone to Stonehenge every Sunday and Holy Day of Obligation it would soon have lost its mystique!

Exclusion from the Sacred. But we may suppose that on the whole ordinary people were in fact excluded from sacred precincts in ancient times, thus maintaining their 'wholly other' feel. This of course leaves Eliade with the alternative problem. If the sacred places and their sacred rites were kept wholly other to ordinary people's experience, what sense does it make to say that that ordinary people were immersed in the sacred?

It does not help to say that that there was more to the sacred in pre-modern times than churches, temples, stone circles etc and the rituals that went on inside them. Let's step our way through all the various sorts of manifestations of the sacred Eliade discusses in the course of his book, hierophanies as he calls them, and see how the fundamental contradiction is always there.

Cosmos. Eliade's first and most wide reaching hierophany is cosmos, the 'our world' of his religious man, given its form by a creator god. Here, already, there is an inescapable contradiction. Formed by the divine, the cosmos is sacred, by Eliade's definition wholly other, but at the same time it is 'our world', meaning it is wholly familiar.

Chaos. And the confusion gets worse. Eliade contrasts cosmos with chaos, the initial formless space from which it was shaped by the creator god. Now this gives us a problem when we think of chaos in terms of either of Eliade's definitions of cosmos.

If cosmos, being sacred, is wholly other, where does that leave chaos, which is 'not cosmos', therefore 'not wholly other'? What can that possibly mean: 'not wholly other'? 'Wholly familiar' perhaps?

On the other hand, what is chaos if cosmos is 'our world'? Surely, chaos must be 'not our world', which amounts to 'wholly other', i.e. sacred. So, if we understand cosmos as 'our world', we make chaos sacred!

In short, if cosmos is wholly other, what can chaos be but wholly familiar; if cosmos is our world, what can chaos be but sacred. Are you with me?

Territory. The problem is repeated when Eliade makes cosmos and chaos more specific, suggesting that religious man sees his own territory as cosmos and that of surrounding enemies as chaos. This time, we end up with enemy territory as either familiar or sacred to religious man!

Axis mundi. One of the bits of Eliade that has seeped somewhat into our general culture, (apart from the material on shamanism, which hardly comes up in The Sacred & the Profane,) is the axis mundi idea on sacred trees etc. Eliade's example of the sacred pole of the Australian nomads does not stand up to scrutiny. It just cannot be that this pole was carried around openly by a nomadic band or whatever on its peregrinations without everybody being totally familiar with it and its sacredness derived from that, rather than from it being experienced as wholly other. You cannot regard something as wholly other that you have seen every day for as long as you can remember.

We have to think of sacred poles as comparable to the military banners and standards that soldiers used to die for, as we are told. These were doubtless in a sense sacred, but not because they were experienced as wholly other, but because they symbolized the group in its triumphs and its adversities. The fact that that this particular sacred had been made and consecrated by a band's mythic founder, who had then vanished up it into the sky, cannot have made it seem wholly other either. For people become familiarized with stories of miraculous happenings as they do with most things they are exposed to long term.

The Cross. Thus, the equivalent for the Catholic Church of the sacred pole, along with the founder disappearing up it, was the Cross, along with the Crucifixion, Resurrection and Ascension of Christ. A typical believer would have understood in theory that this was wholly other, but would not have felt it in practice. Rather the Cross, for instance, would have seemed sacred because of familiarity derived from its omnipresence in the believer's world in images and symbols.

Clearly, in the Middle Ages alleged relics of the True Cross must have been sacred as wholly other. But that would have been because to see them you had to go on a long pilgrimage just to get a brief glimpse in a ceremony and a setting stage managed to maximize the impact.

Sacred Mountains. Similar analyses can be applied to Eliade's other axis mundi hierophanies. Sacred mountains would have stayed sacred as wholly other only if they were a long way away and life threatening to climb: such as Andean mountains in some South American religions. Ziggurats and other artificial sacred mountains might have initially seemed sacred because wholly other, though probably not to those who elaborated on their construction. It is difficult to see how trees in their native state could ever have been experienced as wholly

THE SACRING, UNIVERSAL DIMENSION. An ontological rupture of level "For antiquated ontology, reality is identified above all with a" force ", with a" Life ", a fruitfulness, with a opu­lence, but also with all that is strange, singular, etc; in other words, with all that exists in a full way, or proclamation an exceptional mode of existence. The sacrality is to the first chief real. The more the man is a monk and the more real it is, the more it is torn off with unreality to become private of significance " [15]. To define crowned, Eliade borrows from Van der Leeuw the central concept of power. Crowned is included/understood like the power which appears like the source of the life, but which does not appear with the men, if not in an ambiguous form. Otto, already, had indicated like an essential characteristic of crowned its ambiguity and its ambivalence. The demonstration, in the world of the men, of what is crowned is not differently shown than very the other, very an other which is always at the same time attractive (fascinans) and terrifying (tremen­dum): what knows and what says all the religions, as what know and say the same terms of which we are useful ourselves (Latin sacer and the Greek hieros). Crowned is necessarily ambiguous, because the puis­sance which expresses the life is without common measurement with the man, and the life which appears with the man can appear to him only in the form of a power who exceeds it, in time when it appears to him. Crowned is thus makes of it ultimate reality, which is and what exists in a full and real way, by what it is distinguished from all the rest of the world which, is to him the layman. Layman indicates, in a way gene­ral, which external with is crowned, which is not invested by him and which belongs to only becoming time. To return account of what is crowned and of what is not it, the thought of the traditional and antiquated religions uses of a distinction of which philosophy is useful when it separates and links the essence or the substantial one on a side, and other the simple phenomenal one. Essence or the substantial one (the ousia) is what has by oneself and in an effective way a reality; the simple phenomenal one, as for him, has consistency and reality only in so far as it is brought back to the gasoline. The distinction thus made of what is crowned and of what is not it makes it possible to understand that between one and the other of these areas of reality there is a difference in level ontological. Also initiation is passage from one state to another of the life only because it is passage from one level to another of reality, the passage to really real.

The hierophanie in the think tank of Eliade, therefore, the question of crowned, or more exactly the question of the manifestation of crowned (the hierophanie) to the man and in the world of the homes. Also the study of the history of the religions is the study of a history of the religions only because it is study of the religion, i.e. the investigation and the examination of the hierophanie, in the diversity of its forms. To this diver­sity the study testifies to the religious forms and the representa­tions in which they represent this experiment. But this plentiful diversity itself is ordered according to a structure, because it remains that, under the apparently infinite variety of the beliefs, the representations and the rites, the constants are repeated of a religious form to others. To include/understand the hierophanie, it is also to include/understand the dialectical characteristic with crowned. Because if crowned comes to mani­fest in things from the world, places, objects, sites, etc, if it is essential on the religious conscience by its irruption in the profane world, nothing nor no thing, by oneself, is crowned. This last always invests something which belongs to the profane world and, so trans­form this thing in sign of crowned, while remaining other than the thing itself, because it never appears in its entirety neither in an immediate way, nor in its totality. Crowned is not a thing among the things, it is, in the thing in which it appears, the sign of the presence of the life and the power of the life. It is thus primarily a dimen­sion, and it is as a thing or that a place has report/ratio with this dimension which they belong to the sphere of crowned. Crowned dimension such is thus the direction of this dialectical crowned: it is there only like one meant presence. It is in space that it goes proclamation, but the places of the space where it becomes recognizable are only the signs of its presence in the world. The men and the companies devote places (in nature or in buildings especially dedicated to crowned) because it is there and from there that communi­ties can live their relation with crowned. The man lives in space and the space of the world ordered by the community to which it belongs became, for him, the place of its stay in the world: place where the life can be lived and where life can take direction. This is why space, stay of the daily live, cannot be such for men that because it is ordered and first of all directed starting from the privileged places in which crowned proclamation in a privileged way goes. Thus it is Center, not focal and originating in the world of the men because it is not determining totality of their life, where their existence enracine in not crowned, place where the life takes direction because it in constant relationship with is crowned. The privilege recognized in the Center confers another ontologi­cal statute to him that with the other places of space, because essence remains what appears there: crowned which is including it and ultimate rea­lity. In the Center, it is the dimension of any space which goes proclamation, like symmetrical manner; this is the Time which appears. There appears that the time of the men very takes direction only in relation at a Time other, the Time of the origin, because it is the Time of the founda­tion of the world of the men. To remain in the proximity of the Center is to remain in the direction; to exceed profane time is, in the same way, to reach ultimate reality and to live according to the rate/rhythm of the divine one. Time of formerly (illud tempus that the myths tell by telling what was in illo tem­pore), i.e. time of the essence of what only is effec­tive real. In space, the men recognize places which are devoted, and in this space they come to revive the epic of the foundation of the Cosmos in which their world is registered. They are not satisfied to tell, but they live again in the ritual and by the ritual, they reactivate the act founder and the power present in this act founder. What is this that thus crowned that the men indicate under the name of God either of gods or spirits? It is primarily this dimension in which the power appears on which they depend for their life, the power which makes be the men in Cosmos.

References

1. The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, translated from French: W.R. Trask, Harvest/HBJ Publishers, 1957, p.10; 2. Ibidem, p.11; 3. Ibidem, p.12; 4. Ibidem, p.14; 5. Ibidem, p.20-22; 6. Ibidem, p.22; 7. Ibidem, p.21; 8. Ibidem, p.23; 9. Mircea Eliade, Myth and Reality, Harper and Row, New York, 1963, p.6; 10. Ibidem, p.15; 11. Ibidem, p.34; 12. Mircea Eliade, Myths, Dreams and Mysteries (trans. Philip Mairet), Harper & Row, New York, 1967, p.23; 13. Ibidem, p.44; 14. Ibidem, p.44; 15. Mircea Eliade, Treaty of history of the religions, p. 385.

Summary

Ioana-Andreea Panzar. The Sacred and the Profane To the Romanian Philosopher Mircea Eliade. The article is devoted to examination of Mircea Eliade dialectic conception of sacred and the profane.

УДК 17(07)

© Аліна Клічук

Чернівецький національний університет імені Юрія Федьковича