ABSTRACT
Born in 1907 in Bucharest, Mircea Eliade exhibited the first signs of his astonishing intellectual gifts at an incredibly young age. He published his first newspaper article when he was 14. Before turning 16, his works included newspaper articles on entomology, literary criticism, alchemy, and the history of religions. While still in secondary school, he began to try his hand at literature and wrote his first novel, to be published just a few years afterwards. Starting with 1925, he enrolled in the Literature and Philosophy Department of Bucharest University, from which he graduated in 1928 with a thesis on Italian Philosophy, from Marsilio Ficino to Giordano Bruno. Prior to the university period Eliade entertained a passionate interest in Oriental culture and religions, reading everything he could find on the subject. In the year of his graduation this passion was rewarded with a scholarship that allowed him to go to India as a student of Surendranath Dasgupta. Here he elaborated a comparative analysis of Yoga techniques.1 The topic enthralled him to such an extent that he spent six months in an ashram at Rishikesh where what he learned in abstracto became a lived experience. However, almost unfathomably, in 1932 he decided to return home where a year later, he obtained a doctoral degree from the University of Bucharest. An outstanding career followed during the period between the wars. Books on religious topics, novels, academic articles, university lectures, public conferences, a tireless journalistic activity-they all created for him the allure of a myth, revered to this very day in some Romanian circles. World War II found him abroad as a cultural attaché in the Romanian Legations in London and Lisbon. In 1945 he left Portugal for Paris where he spent eleven years, lecturing at the Sorbonne and publishing assiduously on various topics in the phenomenology and history of religion. From 1957 on, he held a permanent professorship at the University of Chicago, Divinity School. He died in 1986. It is also important to remember that Eliade was a prolific diarist. The publication of his autobiographical authorship is still under way, although an impressive part is already available. Besides his monumental correspondence,
I wish to express my gratitude to The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for financial support in writing this material. 1 The results of this research were published after Eliade’s return to Romania. Mircea Eliade, Yoga. Essai sur les origins de la mystique indienne, Paris: Librairie Orientaliste Paul
Eliade’s journalistic authorship still awaits its complete critical publication.2 Given the gargantuan proportions of Eliade’s appetite for knowledge, the encounter with Søren Kierkegaard was bound to happen sooner or later.
