True crime at the div school

On May 21, 1991, an emergent Romanian scholar was shot to death in a men’s room stall at the University of Chicago Divinity School—a murder that rocked the campus community, bedeviled law enforcement, and remains unsolved to this day. Murdered at age 41, Ioan Petru Culianu—an expert on Gnosticism, Renaissance magic, and the occult—had come to teach in the school through the advocacy of his mentor, fellow Romanian expatriate and distinguished religion scholar Mircea Eliade. So impressed was Eliade with Culianu and his research that he tapped the younger scholar as his literary executor and heir apparent, an imprimatur which earned Culianu a permanent faculty appointment after Eliade’s death in 1986. Bruce Lincoln, emeritus professor of history of religions at Chicago, who also studied under Eliade, frames Culianu’s brief career and tragic death within the context of a 50-year controversy centered on Eliade’s early roots in Romanian fascism.

In the 1930s, Eliade became immersed in a Romanian nationalist, antisemitic, and anti-democratic terrorist group known as the Legion of St. Michael, also known as the Iron Guard, founded by the charismatic leader Corneliu Zelea Codreanu. In the face of increasingly trenchant exposés of his past, beginning in the 1970s and renewed after his death, Eliade refused to admit his close ties to this (ostensibly) Orthodox Christian nationalist movement, whose members terrorized and murdered Jews and assassinated high-level public officials deemed national traitors. As Lincoln shows, the young Eliade, initially drawn to the legion’s mystical spirituality and idealization of sacrifice, became one of its key leaders and apologists, actively campaigning for its candidates in national elections.

When King Carol II assumed dictatorial power to suppress the legion in 1938, Eliade and other legionaries were interned in concentration camps. After being released on the condition that he sign a statement eschewing all political activity, Eliade received a diplomatic appointment to England and fled his homeland. He later moved to Lisbon and then to Paris, where he garnered the scholarly accolades that earned him a professorship in Chicago, where he taught for two decades. Eliade denied the full scope of his involvement with the legion; he also never fully renounced it. He may have feared that former legionaries among the Romanian expatriate community, which held him in very high regard, would deem him a traitor and perhaps even exact vengeance.