The Quest for the Origin of Religion

In this paper, Mircea Eliade concerns himself with the study of a period in which the scholars of religion created a variety of works and put forward different theories in their quest for the primordial form of the religious beliefs. Such attempts, which began with the Renaissance, were the result of a tendency to fill the gap which appeared in human spirituality. He also deals with the pseudo-religious movements which during the nineteenth and twentieth century came into being so as to fulfill the spiritual needs of the modern man. He also considers the development of the history of religions as a discipline and elaborates on the role played by the scholars of this discipline with regard to the "man's primordial religion". Although Eliade criticizes the empirical and relativistic orientations of some of the historical and sociological schools, he holds that an appropriate question can revive the science of the history of religions.