The Middle Panel of a Three-Volume History

The second volume of Eliade’s A History of Religious Ideas, published in French in 1978 and in Willard Trask’s English translation in 1982, carries the history from the Buddha’s Awakening to the victory of Christianity over the ancient world. The span is an argument, not a convenience. The chapters move through the religions of ancient China, Brahmanism and Hinduism as the first philosophies and techniques of salvation, the Buddha and his contemporaries, Roman religion, the Celts, Germans, Thracians, and Getae, Orphic eschatology, the ordeals of post-Exilic Judaism, Hellenistic syncretism, the Iranian syntheses, and the birth and consolidation of Christianity — and across this entire geography the same mutation appears. Existence itself becomes the religious problem, and salvation becomes the answer. Even the volume’s China chapters belong to this arc. Confucius, whom Eliade insists is not properly a religious leader yet profoundly influenced Chinese religion, turns the traditional rites into a discipline of the superior man under the mandate of Heaven; Lao Tzŭ gives the archaic cosmogonic myths a metaphysical dimension in which the Tao precedes even the primordial One. Eliade repeats Ssŭ-ma Ch’ien’s account of the meeting between the two masters, after which Confucius told his disciples he understood every animal’s ways, “but the dragon I cannot know; he rises into heaven on the clouds and the wind. Today I saw Lao Tzŭ, and he is like the dragon!” The anecdote condenses the volume’s polarity: the religion of rite and social order alongside the religion of return to the primordial totality.

The Buddha’s Silence and the Terror of the Eternal Return

The chapters on the Buddha are the volume’s methodological showpiece, and their subtitle names the stakes: from the terror of the eternal return to the bliss of the inexpressible. Eliade opens with the observation that the Buddha never consented to give his teaching the structure of a system, refusing pronouncements even on the state of the holy man in nirvāṇa, and he lets the famous dialogue with Māluṇkyaputta carry the point. To the monk demanding answers on the eternity of the universe and the postmortem existence of the Tathāgata, the Buddha tells the story of the man struck by a poisoned arrow who refuses treatment until he knows who shot it, from what village, with what kind of bow — and dies without knowing. Why the refusal? “Because it is not useful, because it is not connected with the holy and spiritual life” (Majjhima Nikāya 1.426, as Eliade cites it). What the Buddha taught instead was the four Noble Truths, whose first truth — “Birth is suffering, decline is suffering, sickness is suffering, death is suffering” — Eliade is careful to read in its full breadth: dukkha covers even the blissful yogic states, because they too are impermanent. The diagnosis is pan-Indian. In the chapter on post-Upanishadic India, Eliade writes that “All is suffering, all is transitory” is the leitmotiv of all post-Upanishadic religious thought, and that no Indian philosophy or religious message ends in despair; the discovery of universal suffering is everywhere the ground of a technique of deliverance.

The Hindu Synthesis and the Yoga of Action

The Indian chapters trace two movements at once: the imperceptible transition from Brahmanism to Hinduism, accomplished by assimilation and homologation as the Brahmans absorbed autochthonous and popular cults into orthodoxy, and the crystallization of the salvation techniques — Sāṃkhya analysis, Yoga practice, Vedāntic speculation — that the Bhagavad Gītā would finally synthesize. Eliade’s reading of the Gītā centers on its great originality, the yoga of action realized by renouncing the fruits of one’s acts. By detaching from results, “man transforms his acts into sacrifices,” and profane activity is transmuted into ritual; the man of action can save himself and yet continue to act. Eliade names this the principal reason for the Gītā’s unprecedented success in India: deliverance is no longer reserved to the renunciant. The section belongs beside the Buddha chapters as their structural counterpart — where the Buddha’s path leads out of the world through the paradox of the Unconditioned, Kṛṣṇa’s revelation sanctifies action within it — and together they define the poles between which the volume’s remaining soteriologies arrange themselves.

Syncretism and the Promise of Salvation

The Hellenistic chapters carry the volume’s most consequential historiographical claim. Syncretism is the dominant characteristic of the period, and Eliade refuses the decadence reading: “Far from manifesting attrition and sterility, syncretism seems to be the condition for every religious creation.” The promise of salvation is what the mystery religions offer against the era’s distinctive terror — the astral fatalism of Tyche, Chance, hardening into Destiny — and Eliade quotes the Praises of Isis and Osiris, where the goddess proclaims, “I have conquered Destiny, and Destiny obeys me.” His morphology of the mysteries assembles what the fragmentary sources allow: the oath of secrecy, the hieros logos with its new esoteric interpretation, the purifications, and a scenario of symbolic death and rebirth in which initiation realizes a kind of imitatio dei. The chapter on the Iranian syntheses extends the same soteriological canvas — Zurvan and the origin of evil, the eschatological function of time, the Mysteries of Mithra — and Eliade duly quotes Renan’s famous sentence: “If Christianity had been halted in its growth by some mortal illness, the world would have been Mithraist.” The point of the quotation, in context, is its inadequacy; the comparison it invites is exactly what the final chapters undertake.

Christianity, Gnosis, and the Twilight of the Gods

Eliade begins the history of Christianity not with Jesus but with Paul on the Damascus road, because the Epistles are the earliest documents of the community and faith in the resurrected Christ is its fundamental element; only then does he turn back to the “obscure Jew” of Nazareth, John the Baptist, and the proclamation that the Kingdom of God is at hand. Against this he sets Gnosticism, defined not by its borrowed materials but by “the daring, and strangely pessimistic, reinterpretation of certain myths, ideas, and theologoumena that were in wide circulation at the time.” The Valentinian formula preserved by Clement — deliverance comes by learning “what we were and what we have become; where we were and where we have been cast; toward what end we hasten and whence we are redeemed” — states the whole anticosmic myth in miniature: the divine spark fallen into matter, the saved Savior, the demonic Creation. Mani’s system is its grandiose completion, an absolute dualism in which “Human existence, like universal life, is only the stigma of a divine defeat.” Orthodoxy, Eliade shows, was elaborated in the second century precisely through the critique of these heresies, in fidelity to the Old Testament’s cosmogony and anthropology. The closing chapter follows the twilight of the gods to its emblematic scene: Alaric’s burning of the sanctuary of Eleusis in 396, and then — through Saint Demetra, the flower-decked statue, and the old woman put off the Athens–Corinth bus in 1940 at Eleusis itself — the occultation and stubborn survival of pagan religiosity inside a Christianized world, alongside the “cosmic Christianity” of folk piety in which the Christological mystery is projected upon the whole of nature.

Within Eliade’s trilogy, this volume is the hinge. Volume 1 carries the history from the Stone Age to the Eleusinian Mysteries, establishing the archaic and Vedic strata these salvation religions presuppose; volume 3 carries the story onward through the later syntheses Eliade repeatedly signposts here in his forward references — Tantrism, Bogomilism, the monasticism of the High Middle Ages. Patterns in Comparative Religion is the morphological companion — the systematic atlas of hierophanies of which these chapters are the temporal unfolding. Read alongside Armstrong’s Buddha and A History of God, the volume supplies what a single-tradition history cannot: the demonstration that the Buddha’s silence, the Gītā’s yoga of action, the initiate’s rebirth at the taurobolium, and the Christian kerygma are contemporaneous answers to one question, formulated in the centuries when the terror of existence first became the explicit starting point of religious thought.