8/13/2019 American Anthropologist Volume 73 Issue 2 1971 [Doi 10.1525%2Faa.1971.73.2.02a00410] WILLIAM a. LESSA -- R… http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/american-anthropologist-volume-73-issue-2-1971-doi-1015252faa197173202a00410 1/2 The Quest: History and Meaning in Religion. MIRCEA ELIADE. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969. 180 pp., index, n.p. cloth). Reviewed by WILLIAM A LESSA University o California os Angeles We have come to expect that when Mir- cea Eliade publishes a “new” book it is likely to have already seen the light of day in some other language or under some other title. Interesting probing of his publication record could be done; indeed, a prominent anthropologist has already done so in a highly critical review that reveals the repe- titive and interlocking character of his vol- umes. The Quest is no exception, except that it is a collection of sometimes revised essays, all but one of which have already appeared in print, either in English or French. The lone exception is “Prolego- menon to Religious Dualism: Dyads and Polarities,” and is by far the lengthiest of the lot. What ties the eight essays together is a defense of the Religionswissenschaft or “history of religions” approach, as well as a demonstration of that approach, especially insofar as it pertains to the symbolic means for establishing communication between the sacred and the profane. Eliade is an avowed anti-positivist and makes an urgent plea for the recognition of the history of religions as the basis out of which new humanism could develop, saying that one must know the religious sources of values in order to understand them “A New Humanism”). He follows this with an historical review of his discipline but he tries to cover too much in too few pages “The History of Religions in Retrospect: 1912 and After”). He maintains that there are four different approaches to the study of religion-sociological, ethnological, psycho- logical, historical. It would seem that for Eliade functionalism does not exist. He de- votes only one sentence in his whole book to Radcliffe-Brown and none to W. Lloyd Warner, which might seem forgivable in a small book except that he otherwise drops names lavishly. He places most of his stress on Continental writers. The third essay is one of the best. It begins with Renaissance man’s longing for a primordial revelation as eligion 64 hoped for in hermetism, and races in se quence through the beginnings of com- parative religions; materialism, spiritism, and theosophy; and the obsession with origins of such men as Lang, Schmidt, and Marett “The Quest for the ‘Origins of Religion’ ”). Eliade wisely acknowledges that historians of religion no longer try to find the origin of religion, looking instead for important truths about men and man’s relation to the sacred. The fourth essay betrays some discourage- ment about the history of religions field, which Eliade fears may leave to other dis- ciplines the task of interpreting spiritual universes “Crisis and Renewal”). A defeatist attitude, he says, stifles the potential of the history of religions to contribute, as it can, both to the widening of the Western culture horizon and to rapprochement with repre- sentatives of the oriental and archaic cul- tures. The fifth essay turns to methodology and maintains that we can best understand the structure of mythical thought by studying such cultures, as anthropologists have done, where myth is not a fiction but a living thing and is considered to reveal the truth par excellence “Cosmogonic Myth and ‘Sacred History’ ”). However, complains Eliade, most anthropologists have not been com- parative. Yet his own grasp of the canons of the comparative method leaves much to be desired and hardly goes beyond the Fra- zerian stage. His use o comparison is to illustrate rather than to generalize. The sixth essay draws a good deal upon other writers but is nonetheless fascinating, dealing with the quest for an earthly paradise, the “Adamic nostalgia” of such American writers as Hawthorne and Thoreau, and the search of the Guarani Indians for the Lost Paradise “Paradise and Utopia: Mythical Geography and Eschatology”). Here, as well s at many other points in the book, the author writes of a religious “nostalgia” for one thing or another, such as “the longing to reiterate the primordial totality that existed before the creation,” “the longing to recover the primordial epoch that began imme- diately after the creation,” and “nostalgia for the final rest.” Nostalgia is never clearly defined but one gets the uneasy impression