Spirituality Studies 9-1 Spring 2023 45 Barbora Čaputová eucharistic elements of bread or wine, but extending to every kind of ‘substance’, in order to measure the distance separating a primitive religious experience from the modern experience of ‘natural phenomena’.” (Eliade 1978, 143). However, the ideas and thoughts of a person of ancient times is very different from those of a person of the 20th century or today. Part of mythology and religious ideas have shaped modern civilization due to culture. The spiritual world has been gradually desacralized and mythology demythologized. In the book Myth and Reality (1963; Aspects du mythe 1963), Eliade perceives this victory of logos over mythos. Ancient Greek religion and mythology survived in secularized European culture because they found expression in literary and artistic masterpieces. Folk religions and mythology were Christianized and survived in the traditions of the village population. Since these were mainly religions with an agricultural structure, whose roots go back to the Neolithic, European religious folklore probably still preserves a prehistoric heritage (Eliade 1963, 160). According to Eliade, the experience of myth and archaic spiritual behavior is minimally reflected on the level of culture, even though it represents an important spiritual phenomenon. In order for this traditional oral heritage to interest modern man, it must be given to him through a book (Eliade 1963, 161). And that’s what Eliade was trying to do. That is why we can read his message on so many pages of so many books. Since he was a man of modern times, who lived through all the cataclysms of the 20th century and felt the consequences firsthand, his work was aimed at bringing the thinking of an archaic spiritual man as close as possible to a modern man. At the same time, he revealed the rich imagery hidden in it. 4 Eliade’s Philosophy of Time What has the greatest hold on Eliade’s theories is his philosophy of history. It touches a person on an existential level, because it solves his attitude towards life, the world, and himself. Unless a person discovers the essence of homo religiosus in himself, and with it also a certain ideational “anchor” in the sense of perceiving the integrity of the world; if he identifies himself as a victim of historical events, which modern man often does, he can fall into a loss of meaning, even nihilism. Why is it happening? This is because the inner essence of every person is religious, spiritual, and bound to the sacred. Eliade explains this in his Encyclopedia of Religion (Eliade 1987, vol. 6, 442): “Determined by history, modern man is thus determined by his unrenouncable precursor, homo religiosus.” According to Eliade, homo religiosus long for an authentic temporality that defines being, while modern man submits (essentially “artificially”) to inauthentic temporality, which results from the material world: “homo religiosus is driven by the desire for being; modern man lives under the dominion of becoming” (Eliade 1987, 442). Eliade connects the reality of the world with the sacred, which completes its integrity and puts this kind of reality in opposition to historical conditioning, which causes an inauthentic, only partial grasp of reality. Here we can identify a certain connection with the ideas of Martin Heidegger, whose analysis of being takes place against the background of temporality. Heidegger defines the reality of time in terms of the ontology of being. The essence of authentic temporality lies in being itself, in authentic existence (Hroch 1997, 42). This idea is followed by Hans-Georg Gadamer, who, like Eliade, tried to stand against the destructive moments of the existentialist conception of human mortality and his determination by time, when he claimed that the original authentic temporality does not lie in the subjectivity of humans being-in-the-world, in its projected direction into the future, but in being by itself (being happens) (Hroch 1997, 42). According to Martin Heidegger, man is thrown into the world in which he exists as a finite being. The reality of one’s own mortality closely connects a person with the understanding of one’s own being. Understanding is associated with feeling all the possibilities of being-in-the-world, including the possibility of not being. “A person preserves his identity in time, while the experience of time, temporality consists primarily in the anticipation of death” (Novosád 1995, 81). The death of being-in-the-world enables one to be oneself, whereby “the freedom of all possible self-determination comes from the freedom of death… but no matter how being-in-the-world chooses to stay, he is always concerned only with his individual possibility to be” (Novosád 1995, 81). Eliade’s philosophical concept is oriented towards understanding the existence of human as a finite, mortal being, who in a certain way always participates in its history. According to Heidegger, historicity arises from a series of choices that exist in relation to the ultimate possibility (Novosád 1995, 81). It can be said that Eliade orients his philosophy on man in order to facilitate his existence. Human consciousness can reflect things in their fullness if it realizes that they are completed by sacredness. In the well-known essay Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return, he developed a special conception of history, where he criticizes historical (modern) man, “who consciously and voluntarily creates history” (Eliade 1959, 141). He points
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