But Eliade never returned to Romania. In the West, his status as an anti-communist probably protected him for a while from unpleasant questions about his relationship to fascism. In the end, however, the questions came. They were raised not by the communist enemy, but by the democratic society that Eliade had always regarded with deep skepticism. And they required a reply, not least because public opinion is stimulated by unsatisfactory answers to probe further. Eliade’s confrontation with his past was not pleasant, even if it was not as dramatic as it might have been under a totalitarian system.
III
Echoes of these confrontations appear in the last volume of the Journals. On June 6, 1979, Eliade writes:
I learnt that Furio Jesi has devoted a chapter of calumnies and insults to me in his book that has come out recently, Cultura di destra [Culture of the Right]. I learned long ago that Jesi considers me an anti-Semite, fascist, Iron Guardist, etc. Probably he accuses me also of Buchenwald …. It makes no difference to me if he abuses me in his book (I shan’t read it, and therefore I won’t respond to it).
His annoyance is so great that he drops his cool scholarly attitude and denounces as libelous a book that he has not even read, that he does not intend to read, so as not to be obliged to reply to it; and he invokes Buchenwald in a wry tone that is, to put it mildly, inappropriate.
A few weeks later, on July 4, 1979, he has resumed his blasé mask, and we find an evasive reply in his Journal. “Barb
neagr relates to me that Jean Servier said to him recently: that from Israel they have received precise instructions that I am to be criticized and attacked as a fascist, etc. Jean Servier, says “Barbneagr, was indignant …. I believe it, but there’s nothing to be done.” Is this annoyance — passed off as irony, transmuted into tired self-pity — a sign of vulnerability, or guilt, or some higher detachment from the claims of ordinary life? To those who knew Eliade as an affable émigré of delicate sensibilities and stylized civility, always sociable and receptive (“the last man in the world to have a totalitarian thought,” said one of his friends), such accusations were inconceivable. But it is not easy to triumph over such an accusation, if you cannot prove it false.
The infamous human experiment known as Nazism — with its hysterical propaganda, its arrogant brutality, its devastating warfare, its extermination camps — cannot be removed from the context in which it arose. In a period of economic, political, moral, and intellectual crisis, it offered a simplistic, violent, “radical” solution. Nazism did not at first mean the crematorium; it developed slowly, slyly, cruelly, to its sinister culmination. (At the opposite pole, or so it seemed, was communism, which derived its totalitarianism from the humanism of an egalitarian and rationalist utopia.) Still, there were those who saw from the start the horror of the totalitarian project, and they must not be forgotten as we strive to comprehend the collective or individual guilt, happy or otherwise, of all those who were “fellow travelers” with the missionaries of horror. There were some men and women who had real clarity of vision. We might cite, for example, one pre-Holocaust opinion, not a philosopher’s or a writer’s, but a journalist’s: the American journalist Dorothy Thompson, who was expelled from Germany by Hitler for her anti-Nazi writing, considered Nazism
a repudiation of the whole past of Western man. It is … a complete break with Reason, with Humanism, and with the Christian ethics that are at the basis of liberalism and democracy. … In its joyful destruction of all previous standards: in its wild affirmation of the “Drive of the Will”: in its Oriental acceptance of death as the fecundator of life and of the will to death as the true heroism, it is darkly nihilistic. Placing will above reason; the idea over reality; appealing, unremittingly, to totem and taboo: elevating tribal fetishes, subjugating and destroying the common sense that grows out of human experience: of an oceanic boundlessness. Nazism — that has my consistent conviction — is the enemy of whatever is sunny, reasonable, pragmatic, common-sense, freedom-loving, life-affirming, form-seeking, and conscious of tradition.
If we knew how Eliade would have responded to such a view during the years of his connections with the Romanian fascist movement — with its specific references to the Christian ethic, to the oriental vision of a heroic death, to the “Drive of the Will,” and to the tribal rituals of blind subjection to the Leader, all of which were so important to the Legionary movement — it would help to explain why so many of the eminent Romanian intellectuals of his generation chose this sinister affiliation. It would also help to explain how a stubborn conservative intellectual is transformed into a right-wing fanatic, in the way that a humanistic, “progressive” intellectual is transformed into a simplistic and militant communist. Does the fault lie simply with the confusion of a society in crisis, a society that could not consolidate its democracy or offer a coherent “faith” to those who were exposed to the temptation of these radicalisms?
Eliade always avoided a clear analysis of his militancy. About these potentially unpleasant matters, he preferred ambiguity and evasion. Even about less controversial matters, about scholarly questions on his view of the history of religions, he sidestepped direct confrontation or open, concrete debate. “From the articles which Ioan Culianu has dedicated to me, I understand, that in recent years the ‘methodological’ criticism brought against my conceptions of the history of religions have increased” (September 15, 1985). Eliade gives the impression that it was only by this indirect means that he learned of the objections to his method. “I’ve never replied to such criticism,” he says, “although I ought to have done so.” He promises himself that he will do so to explain “the confusions and errors,” but he knows that he will not, for “I’m afraid I’ll never have time.”
When he is called a Nazi or an anti-Semite, when he meets the stony weight of accusations that simplify the story of his life, Eliade’s tendency to withdraw is even more marked. To be sure, there is dignity in silence, and there is delicacy, not just cunning, in evasion: but in silence and in evasion there is also much that is reprehensible. To retract one’s former beliefs, to denounce the horrors, to disclose the mechanisms of mystification, to assume the burden of guilt — probably few are sufficiently clear-eyed and courageous for this. But it is precisely those few who do have the courage for such a confrontation with the past who justify the stature of the intellectual.
In order to be truly separated from the errors of the past, one must acknowledge them. Is not honesty, in the end, the mortal enemy of totalitarianism? And is not conscience the proof of one’s distance from the forces of corruption, from totalitarian ideology? In his Memoirs, Andrei Sakharov confessed without embarrassment his youthful admiration for Stalin. The honesty of that admission was precisely the honesty that enabled that great scientist and humanist to achieve a profound understanding of the nature of the communist system, and to become its unyielding critic.
When questions do not come from within, they come from without; but in the end they come. It is a matter of constant surprise, perhaps, that Eliade’s “enemies,” and not his admirers, posed the questions. Would it not have been more natural that his admirers should have been his most exacting judges? (On July 23, 1979: “C. Poghirc comes to see me …. He talks also about the campaign against me in Italy, provoked by F. Jesi. The aim: to eliminate me from among the favorites for the Nobel Prize.”) And why is it, we must also ask, that those who have borne honest witness to the totalitarian tragedy have emerged largely from the victims, and only rarely from the victimizers? After all, the latter are the ones who could definitively establish the essentials of the evil.