Nationalism, Mircea Eliade, Easter 1937

In this article from the interwar period, Mircea Eliade discusses race, nationalism, and universalism.

Nationalism is – and this is known from (Mihai) Eminescu onwards – an act of spiritual creation. The awareness of self of a human community, the awareness of participation in a long historical process, and especially the valorisation of life through this participation – are acts of a spiritual life. The myths, the apocalypses, the historical myths which every nation claims – don’t have anything to do with biological life, or economy or human settlement.

Anchored, through its own being itself, in spirituality – a nation can have only one single destiny:  to create ecumenical spiritual values. To impose – in other words – its universality to all other peoples. In spiritual hierarchies, as in other hierarchies, a “universalism” is not created through synthesis of all virtues, through a more complete amalgamation of values. Rather, “universalism” is obtained by the deepening until exhaustion of the specific, of the local, of the particular. The true act of spiritual creation is precisely this complete valorisation of an act of individual life. A genius does nothing else but valorise certain states of life which until then remained obscure, inert or insignificant.

Until Shakespeare, that part of the human soul in which the tragic mixes with the grotesque, in which madness and sleep is tangled up with invective – has not been valorised, and thus didn’t have any kind of significance. People experienced those states of the soul with indifference or with shame. That tragical grotesque did not have, until then, any grandeur or sense. Shakespeare managed to show precisely the grandeur and significance of these obscure and grotesque states. Only when the genius of Shakespeare was imposed unto the European consciousness, people saw how little was known about the “human soul” until him, this “human soul” full of life, mediocre, confused, thirsty for happiness and corrupt.

Dostoevsky commits a similar act of spiritual creation: he valorises parts of the human soul that are even more obscure. Gestures without any moral significance, awkward experiences, opaque suffering, spiritual wandering and intellectual stuttering – an ocean of small and frightening acts, which we ignore or hide, which we are ashamed of, and we never mention – all of these have been transfigured through the intervention of Dostoevsky in history. After the apparition of Dostoevsky, there remain almost no spiritual acts which cannot be valorised.

Any new valorisation of life – and we did not give, until now, but a couple examples from the history of literature – immediately attains universal valences. There is no spiritual creation which cannot be, if not assimilated, at least contemplated by a considerable number of humans belonging to particular peoples and cultures. This fact is even more true if we look at species of spiritual creation other than literary ones. For instance, the values which the ancient Greeks enriched their life with: measure, melancholy, resignation, etc. – values which could be assimilated by peoples that were very different from each other (from Syrians to the Romans and Anglo-Saxons).

Every new “ideal” which is discovered by a single man for the whole of humanity – attains universal valances. This is the only “universalism” which was accepted and assimilated by history.

If the Greek spirit modified the mental structure of the entire European world – creating a continental unity – it did so through a couple genius creations, which valorised the life of every man. Christianity managed to darken the spiritual horizon which was raised by the efforts of the Greek genius – precisely because it offered a valorisation of life that was even more fertile and universal.

There is, thus, no viable “universalism” except for a certain valorisation of life discovered by a people, a man or an elite – and imposed on others in an organic fashion, naturally. Creating a single spiritual value with universal valences – a peoples dominate, naturally, more or less, a step of history. Accepting the primacy of “democracy”, a peoples recognises itself as dominated by a French valorisation of life. If now, in our days, democracy seems to be a common good, won by solidary efforts of humanity – is another proof for the universal efficiency of this creation specific to the French spirit.

Because the ideals of modern democracy summarise the solutions found by the French spirit to the problem of freedom – a problem which was imposed anew to European consciousness after the Renaissance and Reformation, which every race was trying to solve in part, but which only the French genius managed to solve in such a way as to be capable of assimilation by everyone. “Assimilation” is a figure of speech; more precisely, accepted for a period of time, as the Germanic tribes accepted for a period of time the Roman civil notions.

 “Nationalism”, therefore, has only as the first aim, the reinforcement, purification and organisation of national forces. The fight of nationalism against borrowed forms, against foreign notions, against false creation is just a step, and not the most precious, in the function that it proposes for itself in the life of the state.

Because a nationalism which didn’t manage to create ecumenical spiritual values, values which could be imposed on other races – didn’t attain its mission. “The fight against forms of foreign life” cannot stop together with the instauration of “forms of autochthonous life”. These things can have a great civil importance – but not one in universal history. The toughest fight, the fight in which the creative forces of the race are verified, comes only after the victory of nationalism. Meaning, in the hour when it tries to become universal.

A nationalism doesn’t become universal by abandoning forms specific to it and trying for an “understanding” with other forms – rather it becomes universal when it manages to valorise life in its own way, creating a new sense of existence.

What is called “spiritual creations” of a race, are its own way of valorising life – through a new model of heroism, of justice, or of salvation, or maybe through a creation of genius in the domain of the arts, etc. “Nationalism” doesn’t aim just at making such spiritual creations possible and promoting them within the frame of the race – it aims especially to provoke ecumenical values through which it can manifest outside its borders. To “manifest”, evidently, doesn’t necessarily mean just creating forms which can be borrowed by others – but to create forms through which others could become effectively aware of our race, becoming aware of certain realities which this race has discovered. When Dostoevsky or Shakespeare travelled over the borders of their countries, this didn’t lead directly to a “borrowing” of those creations. Rather, in the first place, to an awareness of a new spiritual universe, discovered by Shakespeare or Dostoevsky. When Romanian “doina” [folkloric musical form] became known abroad, it wasn’t “imitated”; it valorised, though, a certain part of the human soul, which until then was not touched by other folkloric creations. Through “doina”, just as with Dostoevsky and Shakespeare, a foreigner penetrated into certain levels of reality, unknown until that moment; valorising, at the same time, certain parts of the soul, inert, obscure, lapsed.

In this way, the spiritual creations of a race move across the border and “dominate”. Creations which, again, never start from a “universal”, but from a specific experience, from a profound life of the local realities, from a total exhaustion of an “ethnic” sentiment; in order to reach, through the transfiguration of a genius, a new valorisation of life.

It is easy to understand, though, that such efforts of transfiguration cannot bear fruits but in an organic, national state in which man finds fundamental issues: death, love, “sense”, freedom.

All of world history is nothing but the history of national myths and the fight between various types of valorisations of life. In fact, human existence is itself just the long and tragic series of attempts to give a sense to this existence. It is paradoxical, it is tragic if you want – but that’s how it is. And just as the greatest glory in the life of a man, and the start of his salvation is the attempt to find a fertile sense of one’s own existence (act of spiritual creation) – likewise the greatest worry of a race is the attempt to find it’s sense of own historical existence, thus of an own valorisation of life (act of spiritual creation as well). Everything else is only economy, politics or biology: history which is consumed, and not history which is made.

Easter, 1937