Response paper to Mircea Eliade: The Quest; History and Meaning in Religion (Theories of Religion and Social)

Eliade tried to describe the “origin” of religion by tracing it back from the archaic religion. after his tracing back, he argued that the reality of religion contains two sides, sacred and profane. The scared points the eternal and supernatural entity beyond this world supremely and perfectly. In other hand, profane points the reality in man being as human, a worldly means that have relationship with material thing in the world.

 The separation between sacred and profane raises minimally two problems. The first about how firstly human thinks about whether this is profane or sacred. This is not clearly told in Eliade’s explanation about the archaic religion. When people made a boat with certain rules, the question is when they made their rules about that? Eliade has no clear explanation in this case. He just described that everything occurred as a given by nature, no intentionally made by human being. It is important because from this we can learn why people tend to separate between sacred and profane.

 The second question is about the separation itself. The sacred and profane as a clear separation is a scientific work. It does not occur much in the reality. Even though there are any tight separation in the society, this is only occurs in official activity and symbols of religion such as praying, mosque, temple, etc. The reality is more talking about the unity between sacred and profane. Simply talking, there is no clear separation between sacred and profane in the daily activity of people. For instance, the last issue in Indonesia tried the implementation of Social piety. This term social piety implies all every action of people in social activities must be considered as worship to goodness or God. This requires that there is no separation between sacred and profane. Every action is a sacred, because contains the relationship between human and their God.

 The problem of Eliade’s explanation about religion is about describing religion with historical view. He did not give much space for individual experience in determining the concept of religion. Such as Durkheimian scholar, he implies his explanation from social factor and how people in social interaction make agreement and admission of their opinion and problem.