By John Crowley
Sunday, October 20, 1996
True scholars rarely take up their fields of
study purely out of intellectual interest, or even for reasons of fashion or
academic advancement. The interest is often deeply personal, obsessive even;
the scholar's work can proceed out of a primitive wounding or longing just as
the poet's can. A scholar who takes a lifelong interest in sex or magic or
power or divinity can do so because there is something he or she very
passionately needs to know or to avoid knowing.
Ioan Culianu was born in Romania and came to
questions of sorcery, religion and power -- and the connections between them --
as a birthright. He was a brilliant synthesizer and would perhaps have gone on
to be a brilliant original thinker as well, who might have transformed the
study of the history of religion. He was 41 when he was shot in the head in the
men's room of the University of Chicago's Divinity School on May 21, 1991.
I am obliged to say that I came to know
Culianu just before his murder and was interviewed on a couple of occasions by
the author of this book, though I could tell him very little. Ted Anton reports
that the effect Culianu had on me he had on many others, including the poet and
radio commentator Andrei Codrescu, the Israeli scholar Moshe Idel, Umberto Eco,
and his own graduate students, one of whom described Culianu as inducing in his
acquaintances "a sense of self-discovery, and fantastic wish-fulfillment
that was mildly hallucinatory." "Yet many people," Anton says,
"realized afterwards they did not really know him." The most valuable
and interesting part of Anton's book is the tracing of a remarkable journey of
self-creation that I, at least, was largely unaware of.
Born into a noble family of notable
intellectual achievements, Culianu grew up in the few rooms of his ancestral
estate which the new communist regime allowed his family to occupy (whenever
they made trouble, they risked losing another room). He also grew up within a
tangled and (so it would prove) inescapable history.
Romanian mystic nationalism of the prewar
period, anti-Semitic and authoritarian, which his father and uncle had battled
in intellectual life, had not so much been defeated or suppressed by the
communists as absorbed by them. Many former "Iron Guard" fascists
found homes in the secret police; other factions escaped abroad; a contingent
ended up in Chicago. To that city also came Culianu's early intellectual hero
Mircea Eliade, the Romanian historian of religion who had not only studied but
practiced yoga and tantra and whose early romantic novels were lifeblood to
trapped young Romanians.
Culianu joined the Communist Party in order
to be able to travel, study and publish; he also, after much wavering, defected
while on scholarship in Italy. He wrote to Eliade in Chicago and received
ambiguous replies. He nearly starved. All that kept him going was an
astonishing capacity for absorbing knowledge and a steely will to work and
survive. He eventually won international renown, though it was not unshadowed
by the suspicion that he was somehow faking something: No one could know so
much about so many things in so many languages.
In his most far-reaching book, "Eros and
Magic in the Renaissance," Culianu recovers the Renaissance theory of
magic as personal power arising from the heart -- not the organ that today only
pumps the blood, but the spirit synthesizer that since antiquity had been
located in the same place. The heart was where the sense-impressions were
gathered. If the spirit that the heart contained was pure and hot, it formed a
brilliant mirror of the world; passion and feeling did not cloud it but made it
brighter; the mind saw and judged what was shown there and willed and acted on
the basis of what the heart knew.
So the greater the strength of feeling -- of
eros -- directed toward the world, the fuller and greater was the world
contained in the heart to be acted on by the mind. Magic is love, said the
Renaissance magus Giordano Bruno, whom Culianu studied, and love is magic. He
meant not the gentle empathies or mild assent we sometimes call
"love" but eros, the fire of transcendent desire.
We who could not really know Ioan Culianu
could not know the strength of his desire nor how far it had carried him: It
was at once the motor of his intellectual inquiries and their object. Bruno
says that two things are necessary for magic to work between souls: The
operator must believe that his processes work, and the subject must believe the
operator. Ioan Culianu was, or aspired to be, a magician: a good magician, in
all senses. It was a game, but he played it for keeps.
Eventually he came to Chicago, still a
somewhat louche figure but on his way to becoming an American (he loved being a
consumer and ordering things from glossy catalogues). Eliade, old and ill,
sponsored him, in part to have someone to take over his own work; he couldn't
know that Culianu, though devoted, was moving away from the older man's ideas.
And among the papers he put in order for Eliade was evidence supporting the
long-rumored connection between Eliade and the Iron Guard.
Not long after Culianu inherited Eliade's
position in Chicago's School of Divinity, the communist regimes in Eastern
Europe began to collapse. Culianu's sister and brother-in-law were active in
the liberation movement. How would Romania go? Culianu published a Swiftian
fantasy of an almost magical prescience, describing an imaginary country,
Jormania, in which the aging and unpopular dictator and his wife are destroyed
by the secret police of the neighboring Maculist empire, using specially bred
housecats called Zorabi. In the succeeding pseudo-revolution, the economy is
captured by the dictator's former henchmen, and the secret police declare
themselves Immaculists. Little changes except that pornography is allowed to be
printed.
Something roughly like this began happening
late in 1989, though few Americans perceived it then. A plan by the KGB to
eliminate the unpopular Ceausescus under the guise of popular reform got out of
hand and became a revolution, forcing the Communists to become, or appear to
become, democrats in order to retain power. In the new regime,
ultra-nationalism again became a political force, and the suppressing of
enemies abroad -- something the Romanian Securitate had always taken seriously
-- continued on an even broader front.
Many of Culianu's American friends didn't
know how involved he was in post-Communist Romanian public life and how much
danger he was in because of it. In his scholarly work Culianu was able to
project an astonishing grasp of the most recondite materials and make them seem
vital, even urgent; in the scathing political and cultural criticism he now
began to publish in Romanian emigre papers, he continually "left the
disquieting impression that its author was only hinting at deeper ideas that he
planned to disclose later." He told his students and friends -- but not
the police -- that he thought he was being followed, and took out additional
life insurance.
In "Eros and Magic" Culianu studies
a little-known work by Bruno in which Bruno shows that the bonds of desire, in
the broadest sense, can be manipulated by the worker who understands how to
project images that can compel the hearts of all men. Culianu saw in Bruno's
prescriptions a more sophisticated Machiavellianism, not using the brute tools
of force and fraud but foreshadowing the whole panoply of propaganda, public
relations and mass media that all modern states would be based on.
Anton errs in supposing that Culianu saw in
the lies and manipulations of the Communist regime an expression of the bonds
Bruno described. Culianu distinguishes between two types of polity: the
magician state -- such as the United States or Italy, where he lived when he
came to the West -- and the police state. The police state becomes a jailer
state, "changing itself into a prison where all hope is lost,"
repressing both liberty and the illusion of liberty in order to defend an
out-of-date culture in which no one believes. It is bound to perish. The
magician state, on the other hand, can degenerate into a sorcerer state,
providing only the illusion of satisfaction, keeping the controls hidden; its
faults are too much subtlety and too much flexibility. "Yet the future
belongs to it anyway," Culianu says. "Coercion and the use of force
will have to yield to the subtle processes of magic, science of the past, of
the present, and of the future."
Odd tone to be taking in a scholarly work.
But is it strange that those who live by language and ideas should think the
world and reality are in fact made from them and can be changed by changing
them? Culianu was a believer in puns, premonitions, coincidences and codes, a
man who was entranced by the game of Logos, or Meaning. Whoever shot him (the
case remains open, though political assassination is assumed) chose to do it in
a toilet, on the victim's mother's name day, a near-sacred day in the Romanian
ethos. Culianu was not the only one who believed in the power of pattern and
connection.
Ted Anton, an associate professor of nonfiction writing at DePaul University, assembles a dazzling, even obscuring, array of connections, hints, foreshadowings, and plots from his many years of research, but he is clear that at the center of this hall of mirrors is a real life, ruined by the operations of brute power. "Chance and fate, truth and fiction, murder and illusory disappearance," Anton sums up. "In many ways, Culianu said, these opposites are the same. The deepest tragedy is that, in the only way we understand, they are not.
Ted Anton, an associate professor of nonfiction writing at DePaul University, assembles a dazzling, even obscuring, array of connections, hints, foreshadowings, and plots from his many years of research, but he is clear that at the center of this hall of mirrors is a real life, ruined by the operations of brute power. "Chance and fate, truth and fiction, murder and illusory disappearance," Anton sums up. "In many ways, Culianu said, these opposites are the same. The deepest tragedy is that, in the only way we understand, they are not.
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