Cosmic Christianity in Mircea Eliade's Hermeneutics on “Mioriţa”: The Possibility of a Cognitive Perspective on the “Sacred” in the Traditional Romanian Culture

Ion Cordoneanu

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Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 63 (2012) 129 - 135

The 4th Edition of the International Conference: Paradigms of the Ideological Discourse 2012

Cosmic Christianity in Mircea Eliade's Hermeneutics on "Miorita": The Possibility of a Cognitive Perspective on the "Sacred" in the

Traditional Romanian Culture

Ion Cordoneanua

Postdoctoral scholarship, Romanian Academy, Ia§i branch "Dunarea de Jos " University of Galati, Domneasca Street no.111,Galati, Romania

Abstract

"Cosmic Christianity" refers, according to Mircea Eliade, to a new religious development, which characterises South-Eastern Europe, where the Christological mystery is projected over the entire nature, with emphasis on the liturgical dimension of human existence in the world.

In this paper I will demonstrate that Eliade's analysis of the ballad can be also exploited from a cognitive approach, in an attempt to emphasise the fact that transfiguring death into an event of cosmic proportions and structure, as well as the mystic sympathy between man and nature, highlighted in Miorita, reveal new significances of the "sacred". The manner in which Eliade exploits the text of the ballad from the view of ethno-psychology and sociology can be integrated into a cognitive perspective, according to which ethnic, psychological and mental mechanisms largely determine religious beliefs and practices specific to a geographic area, such as South-Eastern Europe.

The cognitive approach projected on Miorita can be considered a type of critical discourse on one of the founding myths that represents a cultural and spiritual model in the Romanian space and history.

Keywords: Cosmic Christianity, sacred, death - cosmic wedding, man-nature relationship, cognitive perspective, Romanian cultural and spiritual model.

1. The ethnographical perspective on the sacred

Indissolubly linked to the linguistic conventions of Western societies, the sacred is not only a religious concept, but also an anthropological constancy used in various cultural contexts of the human discourse. From a linguistic / etymological perspective, the sacred denotes that which is separated, but in the religious vocabulary this

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term is frequently used as an ontological referent underlining a specific semantics [1]. In this regard, Anttonen noticed: "It is my conviction that scholars engaged in the scientific study of religion have blurred the boundaries of theological and scientific discourses in adopting the sacred as a superordinate category for religious worlds. From a cognitive perspective, the scholarly approach to the idea of the sacred does not entail metaphysical or religious questions about the nature of reality." [2]. The cognitive perspective, on the other side, focuses on the trans-cultural regularities which made a certain reality be considered as sacred in a particular linguistic community and a specific geographical context. In this approach, the researchers of the religious phenomenon have to be familiar with the history of religions and the diverse discourses in which the terms used in different languages denote a "sacred" reality.

From the perspective of an archaeology of the sacred, the human capacity to consecrate and assign a religious significance to different objects and phenomena has represented a mental fluid by which territories, forests, mountains or places marked by anomalies were called "sacred", the term being "an appellative designation for a place, for a specific topos, or for a specific period in reckoning time in order to mark a categorical boundary. The sacred has been used as an attribute whereby distinctions have been expressed between those things that possess a special cultural value and those that do not demand particular attention or specific rule-governed behaviour" [3]. Thus, the concept of "sacred" has a long history as a linguistic concept, its roots universally denoting "to cut", "to set apart", "to mark off" [4].

Beyond the ethnographical perspective on the sacred, the attempt to analyse the significance of the phrase "cosmic Christianity" at Mircea Eliade implies not a metaphysical enigma, but rather an epistemological problem, noticed by the interpreters of Eliade's work when, starting from the papers of the Romanian historian of religions, they underline the tension between the cosmic religiosity of the archaic man and the historical religions. Eliade's view of the cosmic religions contrasts his vision of Western historical religions; Eliade ignored the rationalist, theological, ethical and historical dimensions of Western religious phenomenon and insisted on the anti-historical, cosmic, nature-related phenomena usually ignored by other scholars [5]. Moreover, the way in which Eliade understood cosmic Christianity starting from the ballad of Miorita - one of the most remarkable creations of Romanian and Balkan folklore - allows the possibility of a cognitive interpretation in the context of the primary history of Eastern Christianity.

2. Interpretations of "Miorita" before Mircea Eliade

In his book De la Zalmoxis la Genghis-Han, Mircea Eliade identified three directions in the study of Miorita. Thus, he referred to a historical approach (interested in reconstructing the origin and history of the ballad), a folkloric analysis (aiming to consider the ballad in the general context of Romanian popular culture) and a philosophical approach (which identifies Miorita as a major expression of the national genius, illustrating the Romanians' specific way of existence in the world) [6].

Among historians, Eliade cited the opinion of D. Caracostea, who denied the historical character of the ballad.

Caracostea argued that the basis of the epic conflicts of folk ballads is not represented by historical events, but by the primary human experience which produced a poetic vision of the world [7]. According to Eliade, the decisive contributions were provided by folklorists (Ovid Densu^ianu, Ion Diaconu, Constantin Brailoiu, Adrian Fochi), who ventured to bring forward new hypothesis regarding the origin of the ballad or the Romanian popular mentality. Among philosophers, the most important contributions belong to Dan Botta, with his essay Unduire §i moarte (in which he exalted nuptial death, related with the nostalgia of death, in the Thracian meaning of the term), Liviu Rusu (for whom the hero's passivity and resignation when facing his destiny are essential) or Lucian Blaga [8].

Eliade reserved a special place to Constantin Brailoiu's exegesis, which criticised what had became in that age an exalted direction in the interpretation of the ballad, which he called Miorita-forschung (mioritology). Brailoiu identified two known folkloric themes in the Romanian folk poetry: the first, death assimilated to a wedding, is a folkloric theme with prehistoric roots; the second one refers to the substitution of an element from peasant funerary ceremonies with a cosmic element. For a proper understanding of Miorita, Brailoiu recommended to analyse the ballad in the light of the peasant rituals and symbols. Eliade noted that "the nuptial symbolism of Miorita is united with the rite of posthumous wedding, and this rite expresses the will of the living to defend themselves of the dead, by pacifying him. The lyrics that later rendered the inimitable atmosphere of the ballad formerly constituted the verbal element of an

incantation" (my translation) [9]. What is perceived as regret and compassion was due to the Christian content, before which the ancestral terror was expressed in such incantations - they express neither renunciation (as L. Rusu considered), nor the exhilaration of nothingness (Dan Botta's vision), nor the adoration of death (Lucian Blaga), but, on the contrary, they perpetuate the memory of the pristine gestures of defending life. This anti-mystical and anti-metaphysical interpretation developed by Brailoiu was taken over, from the 1950s, by several folklorists, sociologists and philosophers and represents an important stage in the history of ideas in modern Romania.

Following Adrian Fochi's researches [10], Eliade remarked, starting from the diffusion area of the ballad, that "no other folkloric work enjoys such popularity" (my translation) [11]: the ballad is spread in all Romanian provinces and the Balkan Peninsula. But the vitality of the ballad is proven by its great capacity to adapt itself to geographical and regional realities. Thence, Eliade mentioned, besides its general Romanian character, what he considered as more important, namely its "creative process": "we have to do with a still alive folkloric creation, which moves like no other the people's soul; in other words, there is a total and spontaneous adhesion of the Romanians to the poetic beauties and symbolisms of the ballad, with their ritual or speculative interpretations" (my translation) [12]. Thus, Eliade considered as legitimate the view according to which the ballad Miorita represents an exemplary and privileged expression of the Romanian soul.

3. Cosmic Christianity with Eliade - the sacred

Starting from Adrian Fochi's statistical analysis, Mircea Eliade noticed that the thematic core of the ballad in all Romanian provinces is represented by the shepherd's will, with the following topics: the burial place, the burial objects, the weeping of the sheep. Eliade agreed to Fochi and Brailoiu when he stated, together with the two authors, that the shepherd's will is constructed as such not because he would have believed that life is identical with death, but as he wished to follow a ritual, as one who was not complete in this world as a man; in the same time, Eliade noticed that the replacement of the pessimist formula by reducing the significance of the "mioritic wedding" to a defence against the dead man's malefic powers does not lead the exegesis further [13].

Eliade doubted the importance which Brailoiu granted to the gloomy and terrifying aspects of the Romanian funerary rites, stating that, in the Romanian rural world, the fear of genii seemed to play a certain role only due to collective crises or panics of cosmic or historical calamities, epidemics or perils. The historian of religions is rather interested in the way in which "the clear and transfigured universe of Miorita" is portrayed. "Near a low foothill / At Heaven's doorsill" signifies the entrance into another world, a liturgical cosmos, a sacred world of a Christian structure - a different Christianity from that of the church: "One of the features of the peasant Christianity of the Romanians and of Eastern Europe is the presence of numerous heathen, archaic, sometimes hardly Christianised religious elements. It is a new religious creation, specific to South-Eastern Europe, which we called cosmic Christianity, as, on the one side, it projects the Christological mystery over the entire nature, and, on the other side, it neglects the historical elements of Christianity, and insists, on the contrary, on the liturgical dimension of man's existence in the world" (my translation) [14]. Within the ballad, the entire cosmos is transfigured (death is a great cosmic wedding, following the Christian model of Christian theology), and this reveals the mystical solidarity between man and nature.

This valorisation of Miorita in a religious sense represented, for Eliade, an occasion to assert that there is a secret affinity between the fate of the shepherd and that of the Romanian people and, consequently, to justify the projection over the entire pre-modern history of the Romanians of a similar exegesis developed in his previous studies [15] centred on the concept of "the terror of history": "The Miorita's hero managed to find a sense to his unhappiness by assuming it not as a personal historical event, but as a sacramental mystery. Thus, he imposed a sense to absurd itself, answering by nuptial faeries to unhappiness and death" (my translation) [16]. This interpretation of Christianity, according to which historical moments are assumed to belong to the Christological drama, represents a religious creation which expresses the capacity to annul the apparently irremediable consequences of a tragic event, assigning them values unknown to that moment [17].

3.1. The sacred

In my opinion, Eliade makes an epistemological choice when he decided to interpret the ballad of Miorita into a Christian perspective or, more exactly, into what he called cosmic Christianity. This epistemological option is founded on Eliade's preference for the living, popular, nature-related religions of Eastern European peasants and their distance from the spirit of Western Christianity, characterised by dogmatism, rationalism and ethics. The cosmic religiosity of Eastern Europe, on which historical Christianity was engrafted, gave birth to a new religious creation, in which eschatology and soteriology got to cosmic dimensions. This new religious creation, called cosmic Christianity, ignores the historical element whereas the dogmatic element is hardly present [18]. How can we valorise from a cognitive perspective the fact that Mircea Eliade described the world of the ballad as a sacred world of a Christian structure? What represents, in fact, what the historian of religions recognised as a religious creation specific to this Eastern, Romanian area?

At the beginning of the 20th century, Georg Simmel suggested that the material of history reflects the cognitive functions of the mind, which is the equivalent of saying that history can be defined as a history of mental representations. From this, history of religions can be defined as the history of the representations of superhuman agents (gods, angels, demons, spirits and saints who populate the religious traditions) or of the ideas and practices legitimised by their own authority [19].

From this methodological perspective, the history of religions "requires no special heilsgeschichliche method (...). The methodological problems that confront the historian of religions are, in other words, no different from those that arise in any historical study" [20]. The material of the historian is the same as the material of the cognitivist, only the aim with which each one maps this material is different: the former follows the influence of historical antecedents and the context in which they occur, the latter maps the influences and constraints of the human cognition on the same material.

In the analysis of the phrase "cosmic Christianity", Eliade built, on the one side, a hermeneutics that fully corresponds to his own methodology and which is coherently inscribed into the ensemble of his work: defining the sacred, transfiguring the reality and relating it to a sacred reality, the distinction between archaic and historical cultures, the theory of the symbol, the distinction between the mythical-religious and the modern conscience, the sacred-profane dialectics, the terror of history.

On the other side, many of his analysis can be considered as having a cognitive nature. The phrase "cosmic Christianity" is, undoubtedly, an ideological construct which serves the historian of religions to explain a certain mental configuration and structure specific to the Romanian popular spirituality that characterises a way of life perpetuated from the introduction of Christianity into this area and up to the present moment. Regarding the specific way in which the synthesis named "cosmic Christianity" appeared, Eliade formulated it in a few statements with an accentuated explicative value. Thus, the wish of the shepherd to change the sense of his destiny and to transfigure his own unhappiness into a moment of cosmic liturgy and the death into a "mystical wedding" had its foundation in how societies at the crossroads between the archaic religions and Christianity received what Eliade called "the terror of history": "although you are ready to do anything, with all sacrifices and much heroism, you are condemned by history, lying at the crossroads of invasions (numerous barbarian invasions from the end of Antiquity until the Middle Ages) or in the neighbourhood of great military powers activated by imperialist fanaticisms. There is no efficient military or political defence in front of the terror of history, by the simple fact of the crushing inequality between invaders and invaded peoples. Of course, I do not say that the latter did not defend themselves military and politically, and many times were successful. But eventually the situation could not be changed. The modest political peasant groups could not resist much in front of these invaders" (my translation) [21]. If other peoples (such as the Jews) resisted "the terror of history" by a religious interpretation, the rural peoples of Eastern Europe endured the disasters and persecutions due to their cosmic Christianity, which projected a redeemed cosmos by the drama and resurrection of the Saviour - a concept that allows you to sporadically and symbolically re-find "a world full of the virtues and beauties which terrors and invasions took from the historical world" (my translation) [22] and in which the historical moments are assumed as moments of the Christological drama and transfigured.

4. A cultural model

From the theoretical perspective of cultural epidemiology [23], cosmic Christianity is a synthesis between pre-Christian popular religions and historical Christianity spread in the Balkans: the first factor of the synthesis plays the role of cognitive structure - host, and the second of a pathogen agent acquired and memorised. Applied to Eliade's vision on religion, the synthesis must be explained in terms in which this concept, regarding mainly the process of sacralisation conceived as a dialectics of the sacred-profane, "insists on the central importance of nature and cosmos in the world of archaic religion and of religion in general" (my translation) [24]. If the basis for this synthesis is represented by a cognitive structure in which nature and cosmos are consecrated, the integration of Christianity is made in the direction of harmonising the image of Christ from the Gospels and from the Church with that of popular Christianity. Eliade noticed this reality in the context in which he linked cosmic Christianity with the topic of paradise nostalgia and that of nature transfigured as a defence against "the terror of history".

As a consequence of this argument, the sacred embodied in the expression "near a low foothill / at Heaven's doorsill" (Miorita) should be explained as a difference at an ontological level - as a break revealed by the synthesis called cosmic Christianity. It is necessary to make a clarification concerning the ontological significance of the sacred. In Allen's opinion, Eliade is not employed on an ontological or metaphysical position to support the ultimate reality of the transcendent sacred [25], being interested in the intentional structure revealed within the religious experience. Bryan Rennie went further with reconstructing Eliade, aiming to counteract the scholars' tendency to giving an ontological position to Eliade [26]. Restricting ontology from a vision of independent reality of human perception, consciousness and representations, Rennie credited an interpretation of the sacred at Eliade inscribed within ontological constructions which do not ignore the role of the constitutive subject, and where ontology depends on human consciousness and participation. Eliade offered, according to Rennie, a psycho-phenomenological explanation freed of normative judgements and ontological engagements. Allen clarified, from a phenomenological perspective (Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Ricoeur), the fact that "we experience a world of meanings and structures which is revealed to us, but it is always an endless world, given to us in ways that necessitate our participation as active subjects who constitute" (my translation) [27]. In this fact of institution, we can recognise one of the fundamental presuppositions of the cognitive science of religion, according to which the existence and persistency of religious notions are relative to the way in which the human mind works, to the processes of acquisition and transmission of cultural notions.

Identifying the sacred in "near a low foothill / at Heaven's doorsill" expresses not only a radical ontological separation, but rather an epistemological one and represents the linguistic mark of a constituted cognitive model after the process of transfiguring the world subjected to the "terror of history" - a process which Eliade called "cosmic Christianity" - a cultural synthesis at the crossroads between pre-Christian popular religions and historical Christianity spread in South-Eastern Europe.

In his attempt to explain this process of cultural synthesis, Eliade seems to choose the model of a psychological interpretation, in which the representation of the cosmos is largely determined by historical factors; this representation plays the role of a psychological explanation relative to the subsequent structure of the popular culture and the facts which characterise it, and the explicative model I adopt is rather based on the psychology of cognition (Sperber) than on the psychology of emotion (Malinowski). Sperber did not consider that the psychology of emotion has an irrelevant role in explaining culture, but asserted the necessity to advance on the cognitive side, exactly with the aim to better understand the role of emotion in human culture [28]. Thus Sperber stated that "[Malinowski] saw some cultural representations as based on psychological dispositions and as answering psychological needs (just as he saw other aspects of culture as answering biological needs). I believe that, more important than needs, and at least as important as dispositions, is a psychological susceptibility to culture" [29].

In the economy of a cognitive interpretation of the ballad Miorita, an important role in explaining cultural facts belongs to the process of storage and mainly that of recall, as well as those of communication, which have a cognitive role in shaping concepts and representations. Sperber considered the societies which have no written culture, no schools and no other educational institutions. He noted: "There, most learning is spontaneous, most mental representations are constructed and stored and retrieved without deliberation. I would like to put forward a Law of the Epidemiology of Representations which applies to such a society. In an oral tradition, all cultural representations are easily remembered ones; hard to remember representations are forgotten, or transformed into

more easily remembered ones, before reaching a cultural level of distribution" [30]. The study of oral traditions is one of the fields in which this law has an immediate application.

In the case of Miorita, we have a very large diffusion area (all Romanian provinces, Macedonia etc.) and an impressive number of variants (41 texts collected by Densu^ianu, 91 unpublished texts collected by Ion Diaconu in 1930, 930 variants collected by Adrian Fochi, of which 702 complete versions). Moreover, Eliade remarked the great adaptability of the ballad to geographical and regional realities (names of characters, rivers, mountains), which made the historian of religions state that the ballad can be considered unique in the exceptional experience of the Romanians, having the capacity to reflect the varied geographical environments and different social realities and to be read and sung: "We have to do with a still living folkloric creation (...); in other words, there is a total and spontaneous adhesion of the Romanians to the poetic beauties and symbolisms of the ballad, with their ritual or speculative implications." (my translation) [31].

From these remarks, it is possible to make a cognitive interpretation, so as to answer the questions asked by Sperber: "What is it about these narratives that make them so memorable? What is it about human memory that makes it so good at remembering these tales?"

5. Conclusions

Thus, the model of an epidemiology of representations embodies the explanation of cultural facts and looks to answer the question "why some representation are received by the people with more success, are more contagious and come in handier than others?"; to answer this question, we have to take into account the distribution of representations in general. In this regard, cosmic Christianity is the cultural representation dominant in the popular tradition transmitted along several generations, a proof being the large diffusion area of the ballad and, according to Eliade, the significant adhesion of the entire people to the folkloric masterpiece represented by Miorita [32].

All the effort of the popular spirit to transfigure reality and destiny are related to this mental construct, which Eliade termed cosmic Christianity, a synthesis appeared at the crossroads between pre-Christian popular spirituality and Christianity as a historical factor. Hence we can explain the dominance of this cultural model, circumscribed to a representation of reality, present in the Romanian popular mentality, and the fact that Miorita is considered an exemplary and privileged expression of the Romanian soul.

Acknowledgements

This paper is supported by the project Knowledge-based Society - research, debates, perspectives, co-funded by the European Union and the Romanian Government from the European Social Fund through the Sectorial Operational Programme of Developing Human Resources 2007-2013, POSDRU/89/1.5/S/56815

References

[1] Anttonen, Veikko (2000). Toward a cognitive theory of the sacred: an ethnographic approach. Folklore, vol. 14, 42-48 (http://haldjas.folklore.ee/folklore), 41.

[2] Ibid., 41.

[3] Ibid., 42-43.

[4] Anttonen, Veikko (1996). Rethinking the Sacred: The Notions of "Human Body" and "Territory". In Thomas A. Idinopulos, & Edward A. Yonan (Eds.), Conceptualizing Religion. The Sacred and Its Scholars: Comparative Methodologies for the Study of Primary Religious Data (pp. 36-64). Leiden: E. J. Brill; Lutzky, Harriet (1993). On a Concept Underlying Indo-European Terms for the Sacred. The Journal of Indo-European Studies, Vol. 21, 283-301; Paden, William E. (1991). Before "The Sacred" Became Theological: Rereading the Durkheimian Legacy. Method & Theory in the Study of Religion, Vol. 3, 10-23.

[5] Allen, Douglas (2011). Mit religie la Mircea Eliade. Cluj-Napoca: Editura Casa Cärtii de Dtiintä, 152-160.

[6] Eliade, Mircea (1997). De la Zalmoxis la Genghis-Han. Bucureçti: Editura Humanitas, 239.

[7] Ibid., 240.

[8] Rusu, Liviu (1935). Le sens de l'existence dans la poésie populaire roumaine. Paris: Alcan; Blaga, Lucian (1994). Spatiul mioritic. Bucureçti: Editura Humanitas.

[9] Eliade, Mircea, op. cit., 247.

[10] Fochi, Adrian (1980). Miorita, texte poetice alese. Bucureçti: Editura Minerva.

[11] Eliade, Mircea, op. cit., 248.

[12] Ibid., 250.

[13] Ibid., 258.

[14] Ibid., 259.

[15] Eliade, Mircea (1949). Le Mythe de l'eternel retour: archétypes et repetition, Paris: Gallimard

[16] Eliade, Mircea (1997). De la Zalmoxis la Genghis-Han. Bucureçti: Editura Humanitas, 262.

[17] Ibid., 263.

[18] Allen, Douglas, op. cit., 154.

[19] Martin, Luther H. (2007). The promise of cognitive science for the study of early christianity. In Petri Luomanen, & Ilkka Pyysiainen, & Risto Uro (Eds.), Explaining Christian Origins and Early Judaism. Contribution from cognitive and social science (pp. 37-56). Leiden - Boston: E. J. Brill, 37.

[20] Ibid., 37.

[21] Eliade, Mircea (1997). De la Zalmoxis la Genghis-Han. Bucureçti: Editura Humanitas, 262.

[22] Ibid., 263.

[23] Sperber, Dan (1985). Anthropology and psychology: Towards an epidemiology of representations. Man, 20, 73-95.

[24] Allen, Douglas, op. cit., 152.

[25] Ibid., 104.

[26] Rennie, Bryan (1996). Reconstructing Eliade: Making Sense of Religion. New York: State University of New York Press, 1996.

[27] Allen, Douglas, op. cit., 112.

[28] Sperber, Dan, op. cit., 87.

[29] Ibid., 74.

[30] Ibid, 86.

[31] Eliade, Mircea (1997). De la Zalmoxis la Genghis-Han. Bucureçti: Editura Humanitas, 249-250.

[32] Ibid., 264.

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