A Study Of Morphological Methods In Mircea Eliade’s Religious Studies

Mircea Eliade’s religious studies have a broad scope of application,and he takes the phenomenology of religion as a start to develop a methodology for the study of religion that differs from the philosophical approach of phenomenology,forming a system of phenomenological-historical study of religion represented by the morphological approach;and the complex theoretical composition leaves the understanding of Eliade’s methodology in a position of conflation of the basic methods of the phenomenology and history of religions,failing to highlight their distinctive features.This paper focuses on the theme of methodology and takes the morphological approach in Eliad’s religious studies as an entry point for the interpretation of Eliade’s methodological system,sorting out the different traces from the approaches of phenomenological philosophy,history of religions and anthropology in his religious studies,and analysing the formation,structure and application patterns of Eliade’s methodological system.Attempting to summarise the internal logic and external presentation of Eliade’s methodology in religious studies from the perspective of morphological methods,and to distil the paradigm of its application.As the basis and background of the method,several fundamental sets of concepts unique to Eliade point to his departure from ontological thinking and focus on transhistorical structures,along with a high-level valuation on the existential significance of the homo religiosus in his theory.The preference point of Eliade’s conception of the sacred settles in the restriction of the essential content of the philosophical approach to phenomenology,which in turn leads to the concept of the hierophany describing the sacred-secular intermediaries.These two fundamental concepts are reflected in his discussion of the meaning of religion and the existential goal,forming a perspective of research in the history of religions with a clear line of synchronicity and a dark line of diachronicity.Through this identification of his research interests,the inner logic of Eliade’s methodology becomes clear: which is from a phenomenological standpoint,but avoiding the inner structure of the divine essence;from a comparative religious approach,but not from a historical evolutionary perspective.To avoid and reject elements of the phenomenological and history of religions approach that might defect the significance of religion as an independent discipline,Eliade endeavours to promote and unify elements of the phenomenological and history of religions approach that might break the temporal and spatial barriers with the religious person,uncovering the sacred nature of religion through the morphological model of the hierophany.The internal logic of the morphological approach determines the integrative and practical nature of its external paradigm,and the standard form of Eliade’s religious studies,as exemplified by the ’alchemical paradigm’ distilled in this paper,manifests itself as an integrative model that is carried out through an initiatory process,purely from the religion itself,without interfering with the unique value of the Supreme Being for each believer.It has both the universal value of the synchronicity and the declining character of the diachronicity,in the form of a universal channel through which man can sanctify himself and the universe simultaneously by connecting with the world.This standard morphology has some application to the study of primitive religions,heterogeneous cultures and the modernity of religions,and the methodological re-unification of Eliade through the lens of morphology also has implications for the construction of a non-conventionalist understanding of the discipline of religion.