Renowned for Myth, Religion Studies : Prominent Historian Mircea Eliade

Mircea Eliade, considered among the world’s foremost historians on religions and myths and an academician who helped establish those disciplines in the United States, is dead at the age of 79.

Eliade, whose best known works are “The Myth of the Eternal Return” and “The Sacred and the Profane,” died Tuesday at a hospital at the University of Chicago, where he had taught at the Divinity School since 1956.

“The Divinity School is profoundly grateful for the humanity and singular distinction of Mircea Eliade. He is the most exceptional scholar of religion in the 20th Century,” said Franklin Gamwell, dean of the school.

“More than any other, he has opened the Western mind to the religious possibilities and the immense religious experience of the human adventure.”

Eliade’s body of works includes scholarly works and fiction in which he utilized literature as a device to develop his theories of the sacred and profane. He also wrote numerous books on religious history, including a three-volume series, “A History of Religious Ideas.”

Thirty of his 50 books and hundreds of articles were published in English. Most of them appear in 15 other languages.

And he founded the Journal of the History of Religions in 1960 to provide a forum for scholarly discussion of the new discipline.

In all his works, Eliade emphasized man’s temporal nature and maintained that that restriction can be transcended only by a knowledge of ancient thought and a sense of cosmic order.

“As long as there is the rhythm of day and night, winter and summer, man will continue to dream, to believe in being saved,” was a major premise of his output.

In a review of Eliade’s work, Harvard theologian Harvey Cox said he was “by nearly unanimous consent the most influential student of religion in the world today.”

Eliade was born in Bucharest, Romania. As a young student of philosophy at the University of Bucharest, he accepted a scholarship from a maharajah in 1928 and studied Eastern religions and philosophy in India for four years.

He received a Ph.D. from the University of Bucharest in 1932 after completing a dissertation on yoga, and taught there until 1939.

Eliade also was a visiting professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes at the Sorbonne in Paris and president of the Centre Roumain de Recherches in Paris before joining the faculty at the University of Chicago.

He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Academie Royale de Belique and a corresponding member of the British Academy and the Austrian Academy of Science.