Ioan p. COULIANU and Ars Combinatoria

At the heart of the analyzes proposed by Moshe Idel is the change of perspective that we find in the work of Ioan P. Coulianu in the last stage of his creation. Coulianu leaves the field of historical-philological approach of religious phenomena to explain the development of religions from a fractal perspective, as an actualization of potentials found from the very beginning, which, combined in different ways, produce different results. Idel finds that the sharp methodological shift that Coulianu has been carrying out since 1986, a stage that also coincides with the one after the death of Mircea Eliade, has been interpreted by two of the most important Romanian intellectuals. Moshe Idel considers that their explanations do not address the specificity of the new approach as formulated by Couliano himself. They appear, on the one hand, as an overly simplistic explanation of a vision of great complexity reduced to a form of psychological complex, and on the other hand, the reduction to a theological perspective that appeals to the intervention of a transcendental power. Idel gives a nuanced explanation of this methodological turn, while suggesting that in order to better understand what is happening in the last stage work, it would be better to talk about the “American Couliano” instead of the “last Couliano”.