Religions Reviewed

These two chapters give different assessments of the development of “History of Religions”—a term Eliade uses to denote comparativist study of religion throughout history, rather than “mere” historical scholarship or historiography taking one or more religions for its object. (See his note on p. 54.) The first (Chapter 2) provides a survey and inventory of 20^th century accomplishments in the discipline. He inventories them under methodologies, dented as sociological, ethnological, psychological, historical, and phenomenological. Except for the last, he regards any of these methods as somewhat incomplete, and subject to reductionistic theorizing. In the second selection (Chapter 4), Eliade provides a narrative in which academic investigations of religion climax in a set of grand studies at the turn of the twentieth century, and then proceed into a “defeatist” decline, hampered by modesty of ambition, specialization in methods and subject matter, and the “fallacy of demystification.” Eliade provides exhortations for scholars of religion to assert the autonomy of the discipline, which is supposed to serve—according to him—in the role of “a total hermeneutics” which can contribute to “cultural renewal.” He concludes with a discussion of “the irreducibility of the tension between ‘phenomenologists’ and historians or ‘historicists’,” insisting on a balance between the two, but showing a stronger sympathy for the ‘phenomenological’ approach.

• On p. 19, after admitting that “there is no such thing as a ‘pure’ religious fact,” Eliade asserts that “the historian of religions … is supposed to concentrate on the religious signification of his documents.” What are these documents? (Religious scriptures, ritual transcripts, accounts of folklore, perhaps. Would they include other “documents” reflecting religious practices and beliefs, but composed without religious intent?)  How do we know that a signification is “religious,” outside of historical, sociological, cultural, and psychological indicators?
• The latter question of the previous point is again the problem of sui generis religion, which Eliade does not see as a problem. He champions the idea of a essential substance of religion on p. 25, and again on p. 58. What is Eliade’s “sacred”?  (It seems to be no more than a circumlocution for “God,” understood in a radically ecumenical sense.)
• I am a fond reader of Henry Corbin, and this is only a “talking point” if others in the seminar share this interest. I find it curious that Eliade considers Corbin a mere specialized Islamicist (30). Corbin, after all, compared Islamic mysticism to Neoplatonism and Gnosticism, and medieval Grail mythology, as well as modern Western esoteric religion. Corbin was also a theorist of comparative religion (e.g. essays in The Voyage and the Messenger). What about Eliade’s appraisal of Corbin on p. 36? Can one “deny that … Corbin has succeeded in disclosing a significant dimension of Islamic mystical philosophy”? (I am tempted to suspect that he created it, in the manner in which his writings lead one to understand it, mundus imaginalis and all.)
• Is Corbin assigning a quasi-prophetic status to the historian of religion as ‘hermeneut’ on p. 61? (It appears so to me!)
• It is fascinating to see Eliade call for the cultural assimilation of the non-Western world on p. 70! The phrase evidently did not have the valence then that it does now. What is the picture here? (Non-Western cultures are destined to extinction; ‘we’ rescue them through assimilation. “Word culture” is Western culture, plus the integrated features of what it has subordinated intellectually or materially.) This passage puts me in mind not only of Said, but of Baudrillard: ”Doesn’t every science live on this paradoxical slope to which it is doomed by the evanescence of the object in the very process of its apprehension, and by the pitiless reversal this dead object exerts on it? Like Orpheus it always turns around too soon, and its object, like Eurydice, falls back to Hades.” (Simulations,13-14.)