Although he agrees that knowledge of each other’s language is essential...

Although he agrees that knowledge of each other’s language is essential, he takes a further step in suggesting the need for some common operational or generic terms in which communication across religions can take place. He proposes the construction of conceptual categories to facilitate dialogue and attempts to begin this by redefining the terms faith, salvation, theology, and God.

Some scholars see a very real danger in this approach as the construction of such categories will lead to the formation of a meta-language, which would be yet one more thought form to add to those already existing. The best safeguard against such a danger, they claim, would be to let the various religions speak as much as possible in their own language and thought forms.

Mircea Eliade[^21] Mircea Eliade’s great works The History of Religious Ideas and Patterns in show he dared to interpret all phenomena (i.e. ideas, rituals, myths, symbols, and sacred texts) and illuminate the meaning of each by its relationships and interconnections to each other.

Above all, as in the interpretation of art, Eliade insisted that the interpreter of religion needs to locate and interpret not the period-pieces of religion but the classics; those original religious expressions of the sacred which remain highly particular in both origin and expression.

These classics, for Eliade, also disclose the universal reality of the religious as the manifestation of the cosmos and, ultimately, of Being itself.[^22] By focusing major attention on the interpretation of all religious classics in all religions, moreover, Eliade’s interpretation theory may hold a singular clue to understanding the elusive phenomenon of religion.[^23] By taking this approach, Eliade welcomed the other, the different, and the many as equal participants in the religion of the cosmos that unites all humanity and as equal participants who could teach modern mankind the fuller meaning of a new humanism that would finally take seriously the whole of humanity.[^24] Eliade’s approach teaches us that the interpreter of religion must be willing to interpret the claim to the attention of the other in order to understand even the self.

In seeking dialogue with the archaic other, one needs to pay attention to the archaic traditions alive in the world as well as to remember one’s own repressed archaic heritage. The archaic is as the “Other,” but must not be allowed to be merely a projected Other.