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Proust got a high-end taste that suits his convoluted and wreathed impressionist prose style well. The way the sentences linger and leisurely unfold reflects the milieu - the Fin-de-Siecle France - better than the content of Proust's thoughts, and hence, at times, the sentences might seem overworked, not suitable for expressing certain moods, conveying certain atmosphere, that are rather crude and don't fit well with the elegant milleu immersed in the fragile paintings of Renoir, pre-Raphaelites and the symbolist irrationalism of art noveau and Gustav Moreau, the ethereal and artistic thoughts of Emerson, Carlyle, Ruskin, the music of Debussy and (early) Ravel.

After reading four hundred pages of flowery and misty proses, it would become clear what Satie and Cocteau were opposing to and why, and that the geometricism of Bauhaus and the pristine simplicity of Eric Gill's font design and sculptures will soon revolt against the rather suffocating climate, to be followed by the uncompromising masculinity and the hyper-rational coldness and abstractness advocated by futurists and vorticists.

I doubt that Marcel Proust really understood the arts of Chardin and Rembrandt. His taste is way too delicate to really appreciate these painters, and sometimes he fails to note the darkness and tragedy behind some seemingly beautiful scenes. It might be that what is seen by Proust is itself something worth studying. Surely when Chardin painted his celebrated La raie there wasn't anything related to death and decay in his mind, but the tradition of vanitas painting and the Mozartian spirit of the age is obviously present in the disgusting - while beautifully and calmly rendered - appearance of the gutted ray. It might also be that Proust lived inside the tradition that was perpetuated from Chardin's time but already exhausted and depleted of its essence, the rationality and the life force intrinsic to which forgotten.

Nevertheless it is a pleasure to read criticisms and reviews by someone who captures Tolstoy so accurately,

[…] humanity is judged […] in Tolstoi, by a serene god. […] This is not the work of an observing eye but of a thinking mind. Every so-called stroke of observation is simply the clothing, the proof, the instance, of a law, a law of reason or of unreason, which the novelist has laid bare.

Also Proust obviously will, if a comparison is required, prefer Tolstoy over Doestoevsky, who is, in my opinion, far too overrated by sentimentalists and those who equate religiousity with hysteria.

This is an authoritative introductory survey to the field of history and phenomenology of religion as a whole, with sincere methodological discussions, informative and at the same time concise introduction to the literature. It might also be the best of Mircea Eliade's oeuvre except for his monumental A History of Religious Ideas and perhaps Patterns in Comparative Religion. His shorter monographs, such as The Myth of the Eternal Return, are written in a rather sloppy manner, leading the readers to doubt that Eliade is not really a thinker with a clear mind, which is thoroughly disproven in the writing of this book.

While the book is factually a survey, even an introductory survey, it is still extremely relevant for those who have more-or-less gotten into the field. Even those who have already read all the major works of Eliade, Frazer, Levy-Bruhl, Levi-Strauss, Durkheim, Freud, Jung, Malinkowski, Dumezil, etc. will find the book helpful in organizing the amorphous thoughts that are still to be given a definite form. I myself was surprised to find out that Eliade himself was also seriously concerned with the impact of the studies of religions on philosophical anthropology. It is evident that Eliade's thoughts on the discipline, expounded as far as I know only in this book, is not at all old-fashioned even half a century has passed, and is unequalled in its broadness of perspective. What I'd like to add to his perspective, after half a century has passed, are, first, that of human evolution and hominization, that religion is older, primordial and 'close to the essence' than the human seen as a specie, which was at best only hinted by Eliade, and second, that of Cosmogony, that the phenomenological world and hence also material world are generated by observers that are in turn generated by the sacred, the center of religion.

Students of the disciplines of phenomenology/history/psychology of religion are commonly not aware of the implications these disciplines can have on the human spirit in general. They often relapse into collecting facts about fancy rituals and mythologies without trying to decipher and understand or even try to feel their meanings, turning disciplines of unfathomable depths into chit-chats. To understand religions is to pursue sciences of human, of the phenomenon of man, to manufacture essential components for the construction of a road to self-knowledge. For the students and enthusiasts that want to get into the field but cannot find a proper way, gazing into the mysterious landscape painted with precious gems adumbrated by the words like 'religion' and 'myth' and 'ritual', this little book of Eliade's would serve as a guide to the most magnificent universe of human spirit and religion.