A história das religiões de Mircea Eliade: estatuto epistemológico, metodologia e categorias fundamentais

Abstract

In this thesis a study of Mircea Eliade’s History of Religions is presented carried through on three different approaches: the epistemological approach, the methodological approach and the categorical approach. In the first Chapter of this thesis, it is claimed that Eliade’s History of Religions constitutes an autonomous and integral discipline, with proper object of study – the religious phenomenon in its specific plan of reference, the religious plan - and with proper method of work – a unitary historical-phenomenological-hermeneutic method -; that such discipline turns around two axles – the phenomenology of religion stricto sensu and the history of religions -; that, in its all, the eliadian History of Religions has the statute of an existential phenomenology of religion placing itself in the branch of Philosophy. In the second Chapter of this thesis, it is discoursed on the only implicit method in the eliadian workmanship, which takes in account the historical aspect of the religious phenomenon and which conjugates phenomenology and hermeneutics, developing itself in two plans: the first plan is that of the phenomenological-descriptive analysis of the religious phenomenon carried through on the field of the phenomenology of religion stricto sensu, in which the Rumanian author conforms his morphology of the Sacred; the second plan is that of the hermeneutic-philosophical analysis of the historical religious phenomena in which the cited author proceeds to the interpretation of the religious phenomena historically happened for the elaboration of his history of religions; Eliade also use the hermeneutic-philosophical analysis of the religious symbolisms for the accomplishment of a philosophical hermeneutics of the religious symbols by means of which he formulates normative judgments on the human being condition. In the third Chapter of this work, a study of the main categories of the eliadian thought is developed with emphasis for the hierophany, the dialectic of the hierophany, the dialectic of the Sacred and the Profane, the Sacred, the religion, the religious experience, the sacred space, time and history, homo religiosus, the modern Occidental man of the secularized societies, the archetype, the archetype of coincidentia oppositorum, images and symbols, the non-historicity of the of religious life, the religious symbol, the religious symbolism, the Myth, the Rite, the Camouflage and the Occultation of the Sacred in the Profane, the unrecognizableness of the Sacred in History (or the unrecognizableness of miracle), and the Sacred in the modern secularized Occidental world.