[The] literary work of Mircea Eliade presents itself to us open to a global understanding, through the well-armed and lucid critical spirit of its author. We misjudge the creative personality of this Romanian author if we place the accent exclusively on his vast and solid scientific work. The fundamental elements of his complex subject in the field of scholarship, the search for and comprehension of homo religiosus, are present in his literary creation: Mythos, Eros, Thanatos, and Logos are the fundamental resolutions of his literary themes. They are themes which are parallel to Eliade's scientific investigations as a historian of religions; the predominant accent, however, is never philosophical or erudite, but rather literary and artistic. His literary creativity goes pari passu with his scientific erudition, and both, in a certain way, reflect the preoccupation of those moments which correspond to the grasping of reality. It is not necessary to seek in one of the forms the means for completing the other; rather, the search should be for a modality which expresses in another way the spiritual disquiet of the author in search of an expressive, creative plenitude.
For that reason we believe that Eliade's literary work … offers some profiles of the whole, independently including the themes that are common to the themes of his work as philosopher and essayist and leaving us free from any dogmatic and theoretical freight in an aesthetic experience with its own dignity and economy.
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