MIRCEA ELIADE'S COSMIC CHRISTIANITY: APPROACHES TO AN INTERPRETATION

This article examines the construct of cosmic Christianity in Mircea Eliade's project of the history of religions. Connections are established with other concepts of the author, such as creative hermeneutics, homo religiosus, the horror of history, etc. Furthermore, parallels are drawn with German Idealism, Protestantism, traditionalism, Jungian psychoanalysis, and conservative revolutionary thought. The criticism of A. Lenel-Lavastin and D. Dubuisson is drawn upon, which argues that the construct of cosmic Christianity can work within the framework of a national -conservative synthesis, in such a way that the nation becomes the guarantor of the purity of church tradition. Eliade's method, by which he counterposes cosmic Christianity to Judeo-Christian messianism, is analysed. Within the concept of cosmic Christianity, the implicit use of the author's original concept of tradition as a virtual chain of initiations is revealed. Eliade's assemblage is viewed through the lens of P. Berger's social constructivism. It is argued that Berger bases his theory of secularisation on Eliade's working defi nition of religion and the concept of cosmisation. At the same time, the metaphysical opposition of Eliade's vital immanentism to Berger's transcendentalism is stated. Immanentism is shown to correlate with the traditional and archetypal folk revaluation within cosmic Christianity, transcendentalism with the radical and historical interpretation of the Gospel in Lutheran theology. Eliade's history of religions is characterised as a modernist theory, with inherent qualities of modernism, such as the desire for a totalising worldview, an interest in building a synthetic ideology on the border of archaic myth and scientific knowledge, a sense of the removal of the divine and the acceleration of the end of history. A connection is established between Eliade's theory of religion and the metaphysical framework of the "natural" in the science and culture of the modern era. The reality of the sacred is characterised as a living self -organising system and its manifestation - as a hierophany of the natural. It is concluded that the essentialism and naturalism of such metaphysics do not allow the history of religions to transcend the categories of the modern era's science and culture, which, according to the author of this article, was the goal of Eliade's project.