نمادپردازی، امر قدسی و هنرها

by Mircea Eliade, مانی صالحی‌علامه (Translator)

نمادپردازی، امر قدسی، و هنرها مجموعه‌ای از مقالات میرچا الیاده است در بررسی پیوند و مناسبات مشترک میان دین و هنرها. این مقالات انعکاس‌دهنده‌ی تایید الیاده از "...احتمال برانگیخته شدن احساسات دینی به واسطه‌ی تصویر و نماد" است. برای الیاده پیشینه‌ی تاریخ دینی در نمادها و تصاویر و صور خیال هنرها زنده می‌ماند.
این مجموعه با بررسی ادراک و شناخت الیاده از نماد آغاز می‌شود و با کتابشناسی گزیده‌ای از مقالات انتقادی پایان می‌یابد که آثار تخیلی و نقد هنری الیاده و ارتباط‌شان (یا عدم ارتباط‌شان) با جهان علمی او را تحلیل و بررسی می‌کنند. (متن پشت جلد کتاب)

Genres: Art, Nonfiction, Religion, Philosophy

328 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 1393

About the author

Romanian-born historian of religion, fiction writer, philosopher, professor at the University of Chicago, and one of the pre-eminent interpreters of world religion in the last century. Eliade was an intensely prolific author of fiction and non-fiction alike, publishing over 1,300 pieces over 60 years. He earned international fame with LE MYTHE DE L'ÉTERNAL RETOUR (1949, The Myth of the Eternal Return), an interpretation of religious symbols and imagery. Eliade was much interested in the world of the unconscious. The central theme in his novels was erotic love.

Reviews

[Nima · Rating 4 out of 5]

راستش این کتاب یکی از سخت‌ترین کتاب‌هایی بود که خوندم. خیلی جاها خواستم کنار بزارمش اما یه چیزی مانع می‌شد. اینکه بین صفحات تخصصی کتاب یهو یه سری اطلاعات خیلی بی نظیر و جالبی میداد که تلافی نثر سخت و پراکندشو می‌کرد.
از یه جایی به بعد دیدم رو در مورد کتاب عوض کردم و به جای اینکه به چشم یک کتاب با اطلاعات لذت بخش بخونمش به عنوان یک کتاب لازم برای کتابی که میخوام خودم بنویسم
خوندمش.

[Abner Rosenweig · Rating 3 out of 5]

Eliade was, without doubt, a fantastic writer and scholar. That said, I am somewhat disappointed with this book. There is little that's new and the density of stimulating ideas is not great. A few of my favorite essays were: I/3, II/1, II/2, II/5, IV/4, yet on the whole I would have liked to have encountered more original thoughts here.

[Jeffrey Dixon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mircea Eliade (1907–86), though best known as the pre-eminent historian of religions of the second half of the twentieth century, was also a novelist and short-story writer; and it is the quality of creative imagination which he brings to bear in his fiction that spills over into his scholarly writing, and that gives him insight into the creativity of others. It is therefore an inspired idea to put together a collection of his essays on artistic creation. Some of the essays have appeared elsewhere in English translation; the majority, however, have not, having originally been published in Romanian or French.
The earliest essay in the collection, dating from 1932, compares the “aesthetic thrill” of European with the metaphysical nature of Indian art, “laden with magic power”. The values of Indian art are “spiritual, not physical”; its plane is “qualitative, not quantitative.” It requires “an effort of abstraction, of breaking away from the everyday, of ascension and purification” in order to understand it. The images of the gods are not “idols” but vehicles which take the meditator “to other states of consciousness, another life.”
In contrasting metaphysics with aesthetics, Eliade here shows an affinity with the work of Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, for whom this contrast was central to his advocacy of ‘traditional’ over ‘modern’ art, with its “profane” sentimentalism. Eliade himself, in an essay from 1937, defines a “traditional” culture as one “which is dominated in its entirety by norms whose religious or cosmological (metaphysical) validity is not doubted by any members of that community.” In such cultures, “the majority of human gestures had symbolic significance”, meaning that “the activities of the individual, even in the most ‘profane’ intervals of his life, were oriented constantly toward a trans-human reality. Man tries, that is, to integrate himself into an absolute reality which … is intuited as a ‘totality’: Universal Life, Cosmos. As such, every human act had … a symbolic meaning which transfigured it.” Eliade then discusses a particular “symbolic temple”, Barabudur in central Java, as an exemplar of the “architectonic constructions of traditional cultures,” where symbol has a “metaphysical function” as “the generator of myths and the creator of culture”, while aiming at “the re-integration of man into the All … into a living body which can unite all planes of reality without annihilating them … Without the tiniest thing in the world being obliterated or being ‘lost,’ all things lose their form and significance in that ‘enclosed seed’ which is the Cosmos before the first ‘division’ at Creation.”
In another essay from the same year, Eliade criticises the poverty of artistic representations of folkloric themes. Instead of copying dead motifs or re-interpreting them, artists need to connect with the living, irrational source which he calls the “fantastic presence”, by the magical technique “of a creation in the depths, of a penetrating into the dark and fertile zones of the folk spirit.” This “eternally creative source” is the Sacred, which he always defines in opposition to the Profane: “The Sacred … transcends this world. It is for this reason that the Sacred is the real par excellence. A manifestation of the Sacred is always a revelation of being.”
Eliade finds this sacred, fantastic presence in the work of his fellow countrymen, the sculptor Brancusi – whose masterpieces in stone are “an extension of the world of Romanian folk mythology” as he transmutes matter into transcendence – and the playwright Eugene Ionesco, for whom the creative imagination is not just essential for mental health, but the means to bring forth a new world.
In the final essay in the collection, ‘Literary Imagination and Religious Structure,’ Eliade discusses his own creativity. While still a very young man, he realised that he had a dual vocation: However committed he was to the path of scholarship, he could never give up literature, if he was to avoid neurosis; for he needed “that freedom which the writer knows only in the act of literary creation.” Oscillating between the diurnal mode of the intellect and the nocturnal mode of the imagination assured his “spiritual equilibrium”, for they expressed “a profound unity”: Literature as much as science “constitutes an instrument of knowledge” because it “reveals unknown dimensions or aspects of the human condition.”
Moreover, just as we need to dream, so we need mythology, which “means above all narration, because it consists in the envisioning of a sequence of epic or dramatic episodes.” Like “the writer of fiction, the historian of religions is confronted with different structures of sacred and mythical space, different qualities of time, and more specifically by a considerable number of strange, unfamiliar and enigmatic worlds of meaning.” It is these worlds that Eliade has revealed to us, so imaginatively, in both his literary fiction and his scholarship.

There is more on Eliade and religious symbolism in my Goodreads blog: Myth Dancing (incorporating the Twenty Third Letter). A series of posts on Eliade begins here: https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog...

[Kat Pitré · Rating 4 out of 5]

For lovers of critical theory, myth and religious studies! Eliade's work is among the classics, and for good reason; it's the definition of 'food for thought'.