MIRCEA ELIADE, AUTHENTIC BEING, AND DIALOGICAL MAPPING OF LIVED RELIGIOSITY
MIRCEA ELIADE, AUTHENTIC BEING, AND DIALOGICAL MAPPING OF LIVED RELIGIOSITY

Summary/Abstract: This paper suggests a way to allow religious persons their own voice, seeking to privilege neither the perspective of people claiming to have religious experiences nor that of scholars. Instead of taking Eliade’s claims as absolute they are taken as subjective expressions of the perspective of the religious person. Eliade’s ‘Center’ and ‘the sacred’ are compared to Heidegger’s ‘Urgrund,’ which may be manifest in particular time and place but not confined to either because its meaning does not arise from any singular manifestation but from repetitions and relations. The role of language in the study of religious experience is thus reconsidered and the possibility is raised of representing religious experience in comprehensible etic terms that do not distort the emic perspective. ‘Translation’ from emic to etic terms is not to render individual words or concepts but to find ‘rules’ used to determine the nature of a given description. This allows an understanding of religious categories as created by language and thus extant as human constructions, and in that sense real. Religious experience is not a rational choice but a cognitive response to experience in which ‘the sacred’ is a ‘fact’ existing in the inter-subjective ‘terrain’ of society, culture, tradition, and language. Persons believing in gods exist, and they, not gods, are the subject of dialogical understanding. Their explanations must be taken seriously, not because they are true or false, but because privileging any one position prevents new knowledge.

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