Literary Research / Recherche littéraire, nos. 39-40, 2003

LR/RL

Literary Research/Recherche littéraire 20.39-40 (2003): 299-302

Sorin Antohi, ed., Religion, Fiction, and History. Essays in memory of Ioan Petru Culianu. Bucharest: Nemira, 2001; 2 vols.; 415+590 pp.; ISBN: 9735694913

The two volumes of Religion, Fiction, and History: Essays in the memory of Ioan Petru Culianu are the result of an ambitious editorial project initiated by Central European University Professor Sorin Antohi: an attempt to "tell the story" of Ioan Petru Culianu, a Professor of the history of religions at the University of Chicago's Divinity School at the time of his execution-style murder in 1991, at the age of 41.

Ioan Petru Culianu was born in Romania in 1950 into a family of University Professors (his grandfather and his great-grandfather had acted as Deans of the oldest university in the country, the University of Jassy). A university degree in Italian Studies and a thesis on Marsilio Ficino allowed him to win a scholarship at an Italian university, and this was his ticket out of Romania, where the communist régime of Ceauşescu had made the publishing of his writings impossible. During his university years, he had come in contact with the works of Mircea Eliade, a famous Romanian historian of religion living in the West Culianu continued his studies in Italy, obtained a doctorate from the Sorbonne, taught in Holland for a almost a decade, and moved to the University of Chicago, where Eliade was also teaching. By this time, he had become Eliade's friend, collaborator, and biographer. Although Culianu remained to the end an admirer of Eliade's work, in his final years he progressively distanced himself from his master's philosophy and political views.

The Culianu "case" is the subject of a book not devoid of sensationalism, Ted Anton's 1996 Eros, Magic, and the Murder of Professor Culianu. Anton suggests that Culianu's political murder might have been linked in some occult ways to his fascination with magic.

Most of the texts that discuss Culianu's death in Antohi's collection openly reject such a hypothesis — Umberto Eco's arguably more than any other — in an attempt to separate the spectacular from fact, and at to protect Culianu's memory from hagiographical temptations. This is, in fact, one of the achievements of Antohi's volumes: the juxtaposition of friendly and scholarly voices which draw the map of Culianu's intellectual itinerary while abstaining from transforming him into a hocus-pocus figure of magic high potency.

Culianu wrote in Italian, French, German, English, and Romanian; the editor included in the two volumes texts written in theses languages. The volumes are formally divided into six different sections, of which the introductory one juxtaposes two short pieces of prose written by Culianu in [end page 299] Gröningen in 1977, and published here in both Romanian and English, Antohi's Introduction and a somewhat melancholic and eclectic biography of Culianu by his sister, Thérèse Culianu-Petrescu.

The first section, Encounters, groups a series of recollections of Culianu as a friend and a fellow student/scholar written by some of his Romanian, Italian and American friends. Included here are biographical and critical contributions to Culianu's Romanian and Italian years by leading Romanian intellectuals Andrei Pleşu, Gabriela Adameşteanu, and Matei Călinescu, as well as by Italian scholar Elémire Zolla and American author John Crowley.

The second section, "Out of This World," groups contributions by the Romanian writer and dissident Dorin Tudoran, by Culianu's younger friend and former student, Michael Allocca, by Ted Anton and Umberto Eco — texts that look at Culianu's "path" and try to formulate explanations of his murder. The first volume's last section features Culianu as both fictional character (in Liviu Antonesei's less inspired story "If, an 'alternative reality'") and author of very powerful fictional worlds that spring from and return to the inner layers of his mind (in texts by Gabriela Gavril and Grazia Marchianò).

From an academic point of view, the second volume of Antohi's editorial project is of greater interest. The first section, "Elective Affinities," groups a series of studies on Culianu's work. Moshe Idel's "On Magic and Judaism" (to also be published in the multi-volume Encyclopedia of Magic that Culianu had planned), argues that the magic component of Judaism is attested to by numerous sources and is not a mere matter of adopting external influences). Paul Richard Blum ("Das Opfer des Ruhms. Religionsphilosophie und Ethik bei Giordano Bruno"), Călin-Andrei Mihăilescu ("Framing, Magic," an essay that puts in perspective Culianu's view of Renaissance natural magic as a culture of the phantasm by employing the works of Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, Giordano Bruno, and an interpretation of the magus as a "frame" of his world, one who is both "living on and being the limit"), Gregory Spinner ("The Use and Abuse of Morphology," a challenging essay trying to define the direction of thought Culianu's works had been preparing — a new approach to the study of history, which he referred to as "morphodynamics").

Vladimir Tismăneanu's "Malaise, Resentment, Disenchantment: Threats to democracy in post-communist societies," an essay found in the fifth section of the book, looks at the post-1989 evolution of the ex-communist East-European countries (including Romania) trying to shed a light on some of the reasons why the mechanisms of democracy don't seem to be able to overcome resilient legacies (of either the half a century of Communism or the pre-World War II undemocratic régimes) such as myth, ideology, utopia, and eschatology. Such an essay finds its proper place in a book dedicated [end page 300] to the memory of a man whose courage of speaking and writing bitingly about the post- (or, as he saw it, neo-) communist Romanian realities has probably led to his murder.

"Legacies," the last section of the book, groups a few outstanding approaches to Culianu's works. The first essay, "Religione e potere: in margine a uno scritto giovanile di Ioan Petru Culianu," is written by Giovanni Filoramo, Professor of History of Christianity at the University of Turin, and deals with a very interesting writing Culianu published in 1981 (in a volume he co-signed with G. Romanato and M.G. Lombardo), Religione e accrescimento del potere. Sorin Antohi's L'Imaginaire de la Renaissance et les origines de l'esprit moderne. Le modèle Ioan Petru Culianu discusses the importance of Culianu's seminal Eros et magie à la Renaissance. 1484 (1984; English transl. 1987) in the context of contemporary attempts to reshape the history of science and the theory of culture. Ştefan Afloroaiei explores the implications of Culianu's works for contemporary debates of a metaphysical character (metaphysics being addressed here in both its doctrinary form and its "tacit presence" in presuppositions and representations). Nathaniel Deutsch, himself an author of works on Gnosticism and Jewish mysticism, explores in "The Three of Gnosis: Ioan Culianu and the study of Gnosticism" Culianu's theoretical contributions to the subject — and concludes that he employed Gnosticism as a "case study" for an original poststructuralist method, attempting to integrate system and history, synchrony and diachrony. Another essay that addresses this most challenging aspect of Culianu's writings — the attempt to find a method capable of adequately grasping the ways in which spiritual acts develop — is written by Romanian writer and media figure Horia Roman Patapievici and concentrates on the two existing versions (in English and French) of Ioan Petru Culianu's book on the gnosis and dualism: Les Gnoses dualistes d'Occident. Histoire et mythes (Plon, 1990) and The Tree of Gnosis. Gnostic Mythology from Early Christianity to Modern Nihilism (Harper Collins, 1992). In the latter part of his life, Culianu started to believe that everything can be defined in terms of a mind game, as the result of a series of binary choices or decisions (he had adopted the relaxed definition of the fractal as "any infinite ramification that conforms to a rule"). Patapievici traces the process of thinking which ended with Culianu formulating his conclusion that, since any infinite system tends to explore all possibilities that are compatible with its initial data, then — if sufficiently expanded — science, philosophy, religion will necessarily overlap.

At the end of the second volume, editor Sorin Antohi includes a list of Culianu's works (books, theses, articles, book reviews etc.); a list of works on Culianu; short abstracts (in English) of all the contributions in the two volumes; and, short presentations of the contributors. A highly profe-[end page 301]ssional format characterizes this ambitious editorial project which manages to bring together the life and the writings of a scholar, and make the "story" look round. It is the merit of Religion, Fiction, and History that, somewhere on the way, it makes the reader forget that they shoot scholars too — and enjoy the living presence of Ioan Petru Culianu.

Cristina Ionică

University of Western Ontario