Page "Mircea Eliade" Paragraph 125

In The Structure of Religious Knowing: Encountering the Sacred in Eliade and Lonergan, John Daniel Dadosky argues that, by making this statement, Eliade was acknowledging " indebtedness to Greek philosophy in general, and to Plato's theory of forms specifically, for his own theory of archetypes and repetition ".

However, Dadosky also states that " one should be cautious when trying to assess Eliade's indebtedness to Plato ".

Dadosky quotes Robert Segal, a professor of religion, who draws a distinction between Platonism and Eliade's " primitive ontology ": for Eliade, the ideal models are patterns that a person or object may or may not imitate ; for Plato, there is a Form for everything, and everything imitates a Form by the very fact that it exists.