Eliade and Weber on Religion

A by-product of psychological distress, Freud argued that it should be possible to eliminate the illusions of religion by alleviating that distress. For Durkheim, religion is "the system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden" (106). His focus was the importance of the concept of the sacred and its relevance to the welfare of the community. Religious beliefs are symbolic expressions of social realities without which religious beliefs have no meaning. For Marx, religion is a social institutions which is dependent upon material and economic realities in a given society. Marx argued that religion is an illusion whose chief purpose is to provide reasons and excuses to keep society functioning just as it is. .
             Eliade endorses Durkheim's dichotomy of the sacred and profane, but employs it quite differently. Durkheim associates the sacred with the clan or society and the profane to individual; however Eliade "define the sacred as the sphere not of society, but of the supernatural – the realm beyond earthly life, full of changeless perfection, order, power, and beauty [and] the profane, by contrast, is not just the personal, but the entire changeable, chaotic, often dreary realm of ordinary human earthly life, stained by struggle and suffering and bordered by death" (272). This illustration of Eliade's concept of the sacred is similar to that of Otto in that "the sacred always manifests itself as a reality of a wholly different order from 'natural' realities" (275). He calls this "act of manifestation of the sacred [a] hierophany" (276), which means to reveal the holy. Eliade uses this concept to assert that "the history of religions – from the most primitive to the most highly developed – is constituted by a great number of hierophanies" (276). By understanding religion on its own term, Eliade contends that "the sacred is equivalent to power [and] to reality , thus it is easy to understand that [the] religious man deeply desires to be, to participate in reality, to be saturated with power" (276).