게라르두스 반 델 레에우와 미르체아 엘리아데의 종교현상학에 대한 비교연구 - 유형론과 비교론을 중심으로

This essay is to compare G. van der Leeuw’s phenomenology of religion with M. Eliade’s one in terms of their morphology and comparison. Even though their approaches are heavily criticized by social scientists and anthropologists, their contributions to the study of religion are hardly overlooked. Van der Leeuw argues that phenomenon is the object related to the subject and the subject related to object. He criticized evolutionary and rationalistic explanation of religions. He attempted to understand religious phenomena as manifestations of power in historical and existential contexts. His theological and philosophical assumptions, however, became the major targets of his critics. Eliade emphasizes the significance of ancient people’s worldviews in sacred space and time, differentiating the ancient from the modern. He idealizes primordial archetype and the myth of eternal return to the paradise in his discourse. Debunking the strategies of reductive approaches of social scientists, he claims that religion can not be reduced into other phenomenon. Regarding to the issue of history or historicity to their methodologies,van der Leeuw includes the historical dimension into the structure and meaning of religious phenomena, but Eliade recognized the importance of history, finding trans-historical meanings among religious phenomena. Recent critics, including Ninian Smart and Jonathan Smith, reorganized the phenomenological methods with the help of contextual and comparative studies, but their models are also conditioned by their own cultures,languages and even religions. Therefore, Korean scholars of religious studies need to create their own viable models of phenomenology of religion,which are based on Korean religious traditions and cultures.