Date of Award

2020

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Humanities

First Advisor

Michalson, Gordon

Area of Concentration

Religion

Abstract

The contents of this paper critically examine The Sacred and The Profane by Mircea Eliade. This paper analyzes and criticizes two major argumentative points put forward by Eliade in The Sacred and Profane regarding the nature of sacredness as a concept and what it means for something to be sacred. Mircea Eliade makes some arguments which would be compelling if the premises from which they stem were better substantiated. The First Chapter is most chiefly concerned with the nature of sacredness and engaging with the ideas which stem from Eliade’s flawed premise that sacredness is a manifest quality of the world we live in. Eliade asserts that sacredness can be discovered and the religiously minded peoples that encounter sacred things orient themselves around these divinely created points. The Second Chapter examines and critiques Eliade’s overzealous efforts to make general, broad reaching statements about religious experience of the sacred. Eliade’s efforts to find broadly applicable truths about religiosity stem from a desire to examine sacredness from a non-sectarian perspective, but he fumbles by making over-broad claims about religious people. Chapter Three outlines a number of important and valuable insights that Eliade provides in The Sacred and The Profane and makes the argument that despite the aforementioned flaws within the text, The Sacred and The Profane is still a valuable religious studies text for the purposes of understanding not only sacredness but religious histories and behaviors as well.

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