Spirituality and the Sacred

This presentation will examine how the social sciences became a crucial arena of spiritual inquiry in postwar American intellectual life. It will touch on the work of two prominent postwar academics and popular authors, the mythologist Joseph Campbell and the émigré historian of religion Mircea Eliade, to examine how scholars interested in spirituality and the sacred drew on social-scientific discourses to establish the importance of those themes, while using them, in turn, to challenge the intellectual hegemony of modern science.

Campbell’s The Hero With a Thousand Faces (1949) and Eliade’s many examinations of spiritual practices and the sacred—from The Sacred and the Profane (1959) to Yoga: Immortality and Freedom (1958)—straddled knowledge and advocacy. Both scholars wrote as secular thinkers who sought to make religion a branch of modern knowledge. Yet they also sought to show secular moderns that archaic spirituality might indeed be a welcome part of modern meaning and not a “failure of nerve.”

Examining Campbell and Eliade’s science of spirituality enables us to understand a number of key themes in American social thought in this period. First, as two of the major importers of C.G. Jung’s ideas, their work shows how the mid-century American fascination with myth, symbol, and archaic and non-Western religions drew on transatlantic discourses. Second, their work shows how scientific discourses of religion, mysticism, and the sacred moved between the academy and American popular culture at mid-century. And third, they enable us to see how humanistically oriented scholars employed the authority of the social sciences to ask moral questions. Given our understanding of the heightened profile of scientists as public intellectuals and the growing public esteem for scientific knowledge in this period, a focus on Campbell and Eliade allows us to examine the figure of the social scientist as moralist in mid-twentieth-century American culture.