Similarities And Differences Between Eliade And Lincoln

Ali vs. Frazier. Mayweather vs Pacquiao. After doing our assigned readings about Eliade and Lincoln and listening to the presentations you gave about each of them in class, I got the same kind of rivalry vibe between Eliade and Lincoln. I saw Eliade as being the dreamer while Lincoln was the harsh realist. I’d like to break down this essay by asking an essential question to the field of religious study in each paragraph, then analyzing how these two men would answer this question. This way, it will be easy to distinguish similarities and differences between their respective ideas.
The first question seems obvious enough: how did Eliade/Lincoln define or interpret religion? Eliade essentially saw religion as human’s fundamental relationship with the sacred. Eliade was strongly opposed to reductionism, the practice of oversimplifying religion and saying religion isn’t really religion but rather something else in disguise. Religion, to Eliade, was simply a way for human beings in any time period can connect with the sacred. Lincoln, …show more content…
I’d like to start off with Eliade. With his theories on the human interaction with the sacred, Eliade’s view on religion can be applied to a range of different cultures. For example, Eliade emphasized the term “hierophany”, used to describe a moment in time when the sacred reveals itself to humans. The original location of a hierophany is referred to as a “cosmic center”, and humans recreate them through an “imago mundi”, or a mirror reflection of the original cosmic center. Examples of these recreations include the Buddhist temple Borobudur, or the Kaaba of Islam. Eliade’s beliefs on religion, myths and rituals definitely aid his ability to understand practices of many other religions than his own. His beliefs are straightforward, and can be directly used to study real life