Thus we can be comfortable that he was already aware of, and undoubtedly influenced by, both the Italian Renaissance humanists and their precursors such as Dante Alighieri and Boccaccio, whom we know from the Autobiography that Eliade had read in his youth. It seems beyond doubt that among the many contributions to Eliade’s understanding of the history of religion was Ficino, whose translations of Plato introduced the term ‘Platonic Love’ to Renaissance Italy and whose translations of the Corpus Hermeticum supported the idea that all truth is one. Of the twelfth chapter of the book, Storm at the Hermitage, Ricketts is confident enough to say ‘I believe that the views on religion expressed by the narrator of the book are indeed Eliade’s own at that time’. Here, not only does the narrator repeatedly express his inability to believe in God, he also expresses an understanding of the development of the monotheistic God that is clearly indebted to the work of Raffaele Pettazzoni, with whom the young Eliade had corresponded since 1922.
Accusations of anti-Semitism have long dogged Eliade’s path, unsurprisingly, since he gave his enthusiastic written support to the Legion of the Archangel Michael for about a year spanning 1936-1937. The Legion was a fervently Nationalist Romanian political organization which spawned the terrible Iron Guard (Garda de fier), guilty of heinous anti-Semitic atrocities. Eliade never disavowed his support for the Legion and some have seen this as incontrovertible evidence of his anti-Semitism. Others (including myself, to be fully open) have defended Eliade against these accusations, pointing out that he cannot be accused of any known actions against any Jewish person or persons – especially of no acts of literary defamation for which he had infinite opportunity. Gaudeamus provides fuel for this debate. Although there is casual reference to anti-Semitism throughout the book, not only is this an accurate representation of the Bucharest of 1928, but it is never ascribed to or embraced by the narrator. On the contrary, one of his student friends warns him that ‘Before long you’ll turn into an anti-Semite too …’ – implying that he is known not to be such. In fact, the narrator explicitly denies being anti-Semitic, and those who do (proudly!) identify themselves as anti-Semitic are either very dubious characters, such as ‘Melec’ and ‘the Boss’ who gate-crash a student gathering in the narrator’s attic; or profoundly confused, such as the young medical student who is engaged to, and obviously in love with, a Jewish girl, yet still claims to be an anti-Semite. Although little is overtly made of the fact in the novel, one of the narrator’s best friends, ‘Marcu’ is known to be based on one of Eliade’s real friends, Mircea Mărculescu, who was Jewish. The Romanian commentator, Liviu Bordaș, is not alone in explicitly using Gaudeamus to defend Eliade against accusation of anti-Semitism.6
Far more problematic, in my estimation, than this putative anti-Semitism is the apparently dreadful sexism of the text. Eliade was explicitly influenced by the dolce stil novo, with its familiar theme of angelicata – elevating the female to a position of inhuman adoration, as with Dante’s Beatrice or Petrarch’s Laura. Eliade’s childhood vision of ‘the little girl on the Strada Mare’, familiar to readers from the first pages of his Autobiography, is reminiscent of Dante’s first encounter with Beatrice Portinari (although Eliade was four or five years younger than Dante was when this happened). In Gaudeamus, the narrator transforms his love for Nișka from what could have been a simple student infatuation to an act of heroic self-denial, ‘elevating’ her from a flesh-and-blood woman to a sacrificial fetish. Eliade explicitly invokes Dante (and Don Quixote) in the novel, and he overtly referred to the relation of Dante and Beatrice in an article from January of 1928 on ‘Beatrice and Don Quixote’, where he says, ‘why don’t we seek a Beatrice as an occasion for heroism – rather than sentimental love and sensual satisfaction?’7 (He sees both Dante and Don Quixote as ‘mad’, but heroic in their madness.) Gaudeamus paints a picture of the narrator’s ‘fathering’ of Nișka as object of adoration in a Pygmalion-like process of spiritual sculpting until she becomes the woman of his dreams, with whom he can fall utterly in love – and then resist! Immediately after this incredible act of manipulation and objectification, the narrator meets another female friend, Nonora (based on Thea of the Autobiography), with whom he has had earlier, superficial sensual encounters. He treats her, physically, even more callously in an act which brutally inverts his relationship with Nișka.
Eliade was aware of early 20th century feminism, introducing ‘a snub-nosed girl who read German philosophy books and was proud of her feminist views’ in the opening pages of the novel. Yet, throughout, the novel is littered with statements of shocking male supremacy: ‘Waiting is a feminine attitude … The feminine soul reveals itself through the process of confiding itself in a masculine soul … the feminine soul is passive, waiting to be fecundated by masculine spirit … the feminine soul tires easily … woman alone is not capable … the furrow of her soul ached for my will as for the sower.’ And here the major theme of the novel emerges: the ‘masculine’ will. For the narrator, the truly ‘masculine’ soul is equipped with an ithyphallic will to which the ‘feminine’ yields. We know from the Autobiography and elsewhere that Eliade had read – and been much impressed by – both Jules Payot’s L’éducation de la volonté and Ibsen’s Brand. He recommended both to Rica. It is a central theme of Renaissance humanism that humanity can ascend (or descend) the great chain of being by an act of will. Papini and Friedrich Nietzsche, both authors who praise the power of the will, were models for Eliade’s writing. These are ingredients in a heady brew engendering intoxicating visions of indomitable will. The true education of the student narrator of the novel lies in disciplining his will to the point that he can seize any opportunity presented to him, simply because he wants it (which is, no doubt, why he feels more sympathy for magic than for monotheism).
However, the narrator’s shameless treatment of Nonora towards the end of the novel resulted from something he felt ‘more strongly than my will, more strongly than my respect for Nonora’s love’. The point seems to be that such acts of brutality emerge from a failure of the will, contrasted to the ‘success’ of the steadfast will required to reject Nișka. From our perspective in the 21st century, the physical abuse of Nonora casts light on the spiritual abuse of Nișka, revealing it to be a corresponding opposite: two extreme – and extremely ‘masculine’ – vices between which a morally virtuous mean is yet to appear. The objectification of Nișka is thus another act of violation – but it seems improbable that, in 1928, either the 21-year old Eliade, or his fictional narrator, could see that.
Known in the English-speaking world as an historian of religions, Eliade authored more than twenty major works, including Patterns in Comparative Religion, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, and Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return. However, decades before this success as a scholar of religions, Eliade achieved recognition as a novelist in his native Romania with Maitreyi in 1933 and continuing with Huliganii (The Hooligans, 1935), Șantier: Roman Indirect (Work in Progress: An Indirect Novel, 1935), Domnișoara Christina (Miss Christina, 1936), Șarpele (The Serpent, 1937), and Nuntă în cer (Marriage in Heaven, 1938). After his exile from Romania at the end of the Second War he focussed more on his career as an academic and his publication of novels became sporadic. In his Journal for 15th December, 1960, Eliade claimed that he was “more and more convinced of the literary value of the materials available to the historian of religion. … what I’ve been doing for the last fifteen years is not totally foreign to literature. It could be that someday my research will be considered an attempt to relocate the forgotten sources of literary inspiration” (Journal II: 1957-1969, 119). If there is any truth in this observation – and I am sure that there is – the understanding of the scholarly and the literary worlds of Mircea Eliade are finally interdependent and the appearance of this novel, available for the first time to the English-speaking public, constitutes a significant contribution to both.
Bryan Rennie is a British historian of religions and Professor of Philosophy and Religion at Westminster College, Pennsylvania, USA. Rennie is known for his works on Romanian scholar Mircea Eliade and was awarded the Mircea Eliade Centennial Jubilee Medal for contributions to the History of Religions by then Romanian President, Traian Băsescu, in 2006.
