Abstract
While on his quest for the Holy Grail, the heroic Parsifal comes to a castle and asks a single question which turns out to be the right question. According to Eliade, this episode is instructive about the human condition because human beings have a choice: either to refuse the right question or to ask it. An overwhelming number of humans refuse to ask the correct question because they are lost in the labyrinth of history wandering without direction and purpose. Eliade explains:
This episode from Parsifal illustrates excellently the fact that even before a satisfactory answer is found, the ‘right question’ regenerates and fertilizes — not only man’s being, but also the whole Cosmos. Nothing reflects more precisely the failure of man who refuses to ask about the meaning of his existence than this picture of the whole of nature suffering in anticipation of a question. It seems to us that we are wandering all alone, one by one, because we refuse to ask, ‘Where is the way, the truth, and the life?’ We believe that our salvation or shipwreck is our concern, and ours alone.1
Eliade asserts that the right question is about the nature of being, an ontological question. The question is primary because it is intertwined with the cosmos and meaning. To begin to find one’s way out of the labyrinth of existence involves asking the ontological question.
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Notes
Mircea Eliade, ‘A Detail from Parsifal (from Insula lui Euthanasius)’, in Imagination and Meaning: The Scholarly and Literary Worlds of Mircea Eliade, eds Norman J. Girardot and Mac Linscott Ricketts (New York: Seabury Press, 1982), p. 194.
Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1959), p. 1.
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E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Theories of Primitive Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 65.
Robin Horton, ‘The Kalahari World-view: An Outline and Interpretation’, Africa, 32 (1962): 197–219.
Alfonso Ortiz, The Tewa World: Space, Time, Being, and Becoming in a Pueblo Society (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1969), pp. 9, 17.
Sam D. Gill, Native American Religions: An Introduction (Belmont, California: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1982), p. 34.
Godfrey Lienhardt, Divinity and Experience: The Religion of the Dinka (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), p. 159.
Christopher Vecsey, ‘American Indian Environmental Religions,’ in American Indian Environments: Ecological Issues in Native American History, ed. Christopher Vecsey and Robert W. Venables (Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 1980), p. 31.
Ake Hultkrantz, Belief and Worship in Native North America, ed. Christopher Vecsey (Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 1981), p. 122.
A. Irving Hallowell, ‘Ojibwa Ontology, Behavior, and World View’, in Teachings from the American Earth: Indian Religion and Philosophy, ed. Dennis Tedlock and Barbara Tedlock (New York: Liveright, 1975), pp. 141–78.
Jacques Derrida, Glas, trans. John P. Leavey, Jr and Richard Rand (Lincoln and London: University of Bebraska Press, 1986), p. 9.
Martin Heidegger, Holzwege (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1963), p. 286.
Ake Hultkrantz, Native Religions of North America (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987), p. 62.
Victor Turner, The Forest of Symbols : Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1967), p. 43.
E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Nuer Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956), p. 141.
Benjamin C. Ray, African Religions: Symbols, Ritual, and Community (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1976), p. 24.
Arnold van Gennap, The Rites of Passage, trans. Monika B. Vizedom and Gabrielle C. Caffee (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968).
Dominique Zahan, The Religion, Spirituality, and Thought of Traditional Africa (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1979), p. 60.
James R. Walker, Lakota Belief and Ritual, ed. Raymond J. De Mallie and Elaine A. Jahner (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1980), p. 182.
Joseph Epes Brown (ed.), The Sacred Pipe (New York: Penguin Books, 1979), p. 71.
John S. Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1970), p. 203.
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© 1992 Carl Olson
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Olson, C. (1992). Ontology and the Sacred. In: The Theology and Philosophy of Eliade. Library of Philosophy and Religion. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230378926_7
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