The Myth of the Eternal Return

Although it is comparatively short, the final chapter of The Myth of Eternal Return may be Eliade’s most philosophically dense. “The Terror of History,” as he calls it, outlines a problem that is of greater scope than the rest of the book. Eliade does not attempt a detailed answer to it here, only a short explication of the issue:

We are nevertheless forced to touch upon the problem of man as consciously and voluntarily historical, because the modern world is, at the present moment, not entirely converted to historicism; we are even witnessing a conflict between the two views: the archaic conception, which we should designate as archetypal and anhistorical; and the modern, post-Hegelian conception, which seeks to be historical. We shall confine ourselves to examining only one aspect of the problem, but an important aspect: the solutions offered by the historicistic view to enable modern man to tolerate the increasingly powerful pressure of contemporary history (141).

Eliade provides a brief history of the emergence of the historicist view. First, he reiterates the Christian view that gives meaning to historical catastrophes through the implication of divine meaning and the eventual revelation of divine will. There are still two fundamental conceptions of time battling for philosophical primacy well into the 17th century: cyclical time and linear time. In brief, the archaic ontologies (still alive today, to some degree) are based on cyclical time, but the historicist view is linear. It was still common to think in terms of cyclical time through the Renaissance, though this theory became evermore “immanentized,” or, in other words, more worldly, materialistic, and detached from divine archetypes. The Enlightenment saw a heightened belief in linear time that extended well into the 19th century with progressive evolutionary theory. Eliade, writing in the 1940s, believed that the cyclical view of time was once again gaining socio-cultural traction.

Eliade writes that “[t]he reappearance of cyclical theories is pregnant with meaning” (147). Some of the greatest thinkers of the age, he claims, are “saturated with nostalgia” for the myth of eternal return” (153). It is here that Eliade makes explicit his critique of Hegel and Marx, two of the great fountainheads of historicist thinking, the modern form of thought associated with a linear conception of time. Eliade believes that after Hegel, historical events took on a sense of immanent meaning that did not point to anything transcendent except for the continual development of “Universal Spirit” (148). For Marx, of whom Eliade is even more critical, even this “spirit” is lost. In other words, for Marxists, events are purely intrinsically meaningful—not meaningful in relation to God, the development of spirit, a divine archetype, or as part of some infinite pattern of eternal recurrence. Still, even Marx attempts to escape the “terror of history” through the eventual salvation of humankind in communist utopia. A completely historicist view totally eliminates any transhistorical value to historical events.

For Eliade, this historicist viewpoint is the downfall of the contemporary world and the source of endless despair. This is because it does not allow any escape from the “terror of history” (150). According to Eliade, one cannot withstand the catastrophes of history—”from collective deportations and massacres to atomic bombings” (151)—if they do not have any meaning outside of themselves. If these catastrophes result merely from economic forces or human or natural actions, they are meaningless. They are not only terrible to suffer but are also utterly soul-crushing. Against this, Eliade argues for the ethical value of the cyclical, archaic, and Christian perspectives: “In our opinion, only one fact counts: by virtue of this view, tens of millions of men were able, for century after century, to endure great historical pressures without despairing, without committing suicide” (152). Eliade never defines the metaphysical truth of the archaic belief system, but he does defend its practical, ethical merits.

In “Freedom and History,” the third section of the chapter, Eliade describes the historicist defense of the purely linear view of time and its supposed ethical value. Such a historicist, like Hegel, thinks that history is bound up with freedom and liberty. By stripping time of its connection of divine archetypes and the doomed fate of continuous re-enactment, the historicist believes they are freeing the actor to do as the actor wants, freeing them to give things meanings of their own choosing and volition. In other words, this cosmic disconnection is meant to empower the individual to make their own decisions. To Eliade, this alleged freedom is illusory at best. In reality, the mindless play of historical forces crushes the average person, giving them no more freedom and even less meaning than transhistorical models. Instead of being participants in a cosmic, spiritual drama, humans are crushed by materialistic social forces. At the end of the day, the agency of the historical perspective is illusory.

The final section of the final chapter deals with a fundamental choice: despair or faith. As Eliade has argued, the Romans, the Christians, and the Moderns have all attempted escapes from the archaic myth of eternal return. The effect of this escape hinges on the idea of God (162): “Basically,” Eliade writes, “the horizon of archetypes and repetition cannot be transcended with impunity unless we accept a philosophy of freedom that does not exclude God” (160). In other words, there is no escape from the myth of eternal return without the cost of despair unless one accepts the reality of a transcendent God in which one has faith. It is the experience of faith that is the grounds for true freedom, not the pernicious, misleading “freedom” enmeshed with secular theories of history. While many might think that the experience of faith is entangled with that of divine authority, and therefore antithetical to freedom, Eliade strongly disagrees. For him, the experience of faith is the experience of the greatest freedom humanly possible: the freedom to creatively relate to the fundamental nature of reality:

Faith, in this context, as in many others, means absolute emancipation from any kind of natural ‘law’ and hence the highest freedom that man can imagine: freedom to intervene even in the ontological constitution of the universe. It is, consequently, a pre-eminently creative freedom” (160-61).

There is no other understanding of freedom, according to Eliade, that is in any way capable of justifying “the terror of history” (161). This terror, which is wrapped up in human despair, suicide, and avoided through pernicious totalitarian movements like fascism and communism, is the fundamental practical and existential issue of the contemporary era, as far as Eliade is concerned. The value of faith is in both its affirmation of human creative potential and its rejection of the forces of despair. Eliade never explicitly promotes the truth of any particular faith in The Myth of Eternal Return, though most of his examples are drawn from the Judeo-Christian tradition. For Eliade, it is the experience of faith, not the nature of the divinity in which that faith resides, that separates the truly free individuals from those living in despair. The task of faith is not to believe a set of religious propositions or dogma but to grant human beings meaningful, creative lives grounded in a spiritual relationship with the divine.