Coincidentia oppositorum and its ontological and logical foundations, at Mircea Eliade

Abstract

Mircea Eliade’s methodology has been often criticized for the excess of making an ontology of the interpretations of the religious phenomena. At its essence, the Romanian theorist infers that reality is sacred, even if it is perceived, through the eyes of the man “fallen into history”, as being profane. Interpreting this permanent dialectics between the sacred and profane, the professor from Chicago imposes a model of knowledge of religious facts which relies on special logics, in which the relations between opposite terms are no longer seen as antithetical but rather as synthetic. Such logics, obviously Aristotelian, rather close to the Vedantic mystics or negative theology, has the Cusanian concept of coincidentia oppositorum as a starting point. In the thinking of the Romanian historian of religions, the coincidence of the contraries is an all plans functional concept. From an ontological point of view, it is found in the internal cloth of the world, as a “breach at ontological level”, for the archaic man, as well as a structure of the sacred. The sacred-profane dialectic is the “domain” prone to develop this concept, at least from the perspective of the union of the contraries logics. Eliade’s hermeneutics also lie under the sign of the unity of contraries. The interpretation of the symbolic facts, to the extent in which it is complete, is more a technique of the real, which aims at creating a new structure of awareness, similar to the one of the yogi found in the supreme stasis or of “the freeman alive” (jīvanmūkta). Thus, the coincidentia oppositorum develops as a paradox of non-conditioning, of freedom, of a new consciousness, which transcends the common logical categories. This is why the language which describes such a “state” is an unusual one, paradoxical and enstatic, resembling the reality described. Mircea Eliade is the promoter of a new logical eon, of symbolical type, which is meant to eventually be a new humanism. As it has an internal logic, a goal, specific attributes and concepts, Mircea Eliade’s conception about the sacred analysed through the unity of the contraries may be considered consistent and it may be imposed as aWeltanschauung of the author.