Eliade

[Paul Mackin]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Dave Monroe" <davidmmonroe at yahoo.com>
> Smith's argument is that Eliade constructs his
> opposition of cyclical vs. linear time solely in order
> to distinguish (Protestant) Christian temporality from
> other religious et al. temporalities as a means to
> claiming its unique and perhaps privileged status, but
> that he does so on no significant factual basis.

to put things in perspective however not to forget that his first division
was between sacred time and profane time.rather than between mythical
(cyclic) time the historic time in which important aspects of Christianity
developed (salvation) though many mythic elements remained such as creation
and the fall. Far from privileging Christianity one might even get the
impression that godly intervention in historic time might have constituted a
step back for the archaic religious impulse. Eliade includes this sentence
near the end of chapter 2 of The sacred and the Profane. "Yet we must add
that historicism arises as a decomposition product of Christianity: it
accords decisive importance to the historical event (which is an idea whose
origin is Christian) but to historical event as such, that is, by denying it
any possibiltiy of revealing a transhistoric, soteriological intent."