concluzie e aceea că el favorizează o anumită orientare arhaică şi generalizează de la religia arhaică la religie în general.“, Douglas Allen, Mit şi religie la Mircea Eliade, Casa cărţii de ştiinţă, Cluj-Napoca, 2011, p. 151.

1199 Moshe Idel, „Mircea Eliade şi Zoharul: nisipuri mişcătoare“, Dilemateca, august 2011, p. 22.

1200 Ivan Strenski, „Love and Anarchy in Romania. A critical review of Mircea Eliade’s Autobiography, Volume One, 1907-1937“, Journal of Religion and Religions, London, 12, no.4, 1982-1983, apud „Dosarul“ Eliade, XIII, 1982, Conspiraţia tăcerii, Curtea Veche, Buc., 2007, pp. 156-190.

1201 Bryan Rennie sintetiza astfel criticile aduse lui Eliade: „Much of the foregoing criticism, particularly in the case of Daniel Dubuisson, has relied on established analyses of Eliade which have become almost standard in the academic world. The survey of criticisms given by R. F. Brown in his article «Eliade on Archaic Religions: Some Old and New Criticisms», although he insists it is not exhaustive, is full and informative and makes an excellent basis for a consideration of the criticisms levelled against Eliade. Brown identifies two main areas of criticism. First, a number of ways in which critics find Eliade’s general methodology wanting. In this he recognizes seven separate criticisms of Eliade’s approach; 1.His use of anthropological source material is irresponsible. Specifically: (a) He often neglects to evaluate the quality of his sources and therefore uses data which contemporary anthropologists repudiate as inaccurate or outdated by later or more thorough fieldwork. (b) He fails to take sufficient account of the interpretative bias of authors, treating secondary sources as if they were usable in the same way as primary data. (c) He lumps together the most heterogeneous kinds of data (scriptures, artifacts, ethnographic reports, etc.), deploying them as if they were uniform in meaning and evidential value. 2.Eliade’s use of the comparative method is defective. 3.The procedures of generalization which Eliade employs are not properly inductive and fail to satisfy scientific criteria. 4.Eliade utilizes Lévy-Bruhl’s discredited theory that non-literate peoples lack the scientific attitude because their mental structure and logical thought differs fundamentally from that of modern Western people. 5.To construct his profile of the archaic religious mind, Eliade groups living non-literate peoples together with ancient cultures no longer extant. 6.Anthropologists are sharply critical of Eliade’s „descending approach“ [a term taken from John Saliba’s book, Homo Religiosus, 40], which begins with the assumption that in religious phenomena one has to do with a transcendent sacred reality disclosing itself. 7.Many censure Eliade’s „science“ as not value free. His overriding personal wish to recover and preserve the religious values of the archaic perspective, is itself a religious program of the sort that ought not to be distorting a genuine quest for knowledge. The second area or type of criticism concerns objections to Eliade’s particular theories and explanations, of which Brown highlights a further six arguments. 8.The sacred/profane contrast is not an all-important category for non-literate peoples. 9.Non-literate peoples are not constantly preoccupied with religion, with myth, or with origins. 10.Eliade presents a one-sided portrait of religion as an effort to escape from the profane sphere. However, in most societies religion involves a variety of rites and techniques employed to cope directly with the challenges of ordinary life, taken on their own terms. 11.His interpretation of myth largely ignores its social functions and consequently treats it in a onedimensional manner as almost exclusively religious in orientation. 12.In his treatment of symbolism Eliade is guilty of ignoring two levels of investigation and concentrating only on the third. [He ignores the ethnographic and exegetical level in favor of the explanatory level.] His procedure needs to be emended by attending to how the people themselves use these [symbolic] objects, and what they say about the structure and meaning of their own symbols. 13.In particular, Eliade dwells far too much on death/rebirth symbolism“ în Bryan S. Rennie, Reconstructing Eliade: Making sense of Religion, State University of New York Press, 1996, pp. 179-180.

1202 Vezi aici pentru critica reducţionistă a hermeneuticii nonreducţioniste a lui Eliade: Thomas A. Indinopulos, Edward A. Yonan (eds.), Religion and Reductionism. Essays on Eliade, Segal, and the Challenge of the social Sciences for the study of Religion, E.J. Brill, Leiden, 1994.

1203 Pentru critica, i-aş spune „negaţionistă“, a operei eliadiene sunt de consultat cu precădere: Daniel Dubuisson, Mythologies du XXe Siecle, Presses universitaires de Lille, Lille, 1993), vezi trad. rom. deja citată; Daniel Dubuisson, Mitologii ale secolului XX. Dumézil, Lévi-Strauss, Eliade, Polirom, Iaşi, 2003; Robert Ellwood, The Politics of Myth: A Study of C. G. Jung, Mircea Eliade, and Joseph Campbell, State University of New York Press, Albany, 1999, aici critica este totuşi raţională şi relativ echilibrată; Alexandra Laignel-Lavastine, Cioran, Eliade, Ionesco: L’Oubli du Fascisme, Presses universitaires de France, Paris, 2002; Russell McCutcheon, Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia,