A Great Scholar's Hidden Past and his Protégé's Unsolved Murder
October 23, 2023
In this tantalizing whodunit, Lincoln (Apples and Oranges), professor of the history of religion at the University of Chicago’s Divinity School, plays Poirot after being entrusted with a mysterious packet of translations into English of articles by the influential University of Chicago religious historian Mircea Eliade. Written when Eliade living in his native Romania, the articles illuminate Eliade’s involvement in Romania’s “intellectual, cultural and political life” between WWI and WWII. The manuscript leads Lincoln into an investigation of the connection between Eliade, the militant right-wing group the Iron Guard, and an unsolved murder: the May 1991 slaying of Eliade’s protégé Ioan Culianu, who was shot to death in the Divinity School’s men’s room. Noting that Eliade dodged accusations of antisemitism and Nazism that embroiled the University of Chicago campus in the 1970s because definitive proof was lacking, Lincoln reveals how, after Eliade’s death in 1986, Culianu, troubled by his mentor’s past, was determined to publish translations of damning articles by Eliade that he’d managed to uncover. Culianu passed his manuscript to a friend for safekeeping the week before his death (the one that eventually passed into Lincoln’s hands), leading Lincoln to persuasively hypothesize that Culianu was killed by immigrant Iron Guard members living in Chicago intending to stop their publication. This thrilling saga sheds new light on a decades-old mystery.