1950: The foundation of the IAHR and the defeat of science

Pettazzoni was aware of the potential risks posed by van der Leeuw's phenomenology, ‘a compromise between theology and history of religions' (Pettazzoni's personal note, ca. 1956; in Gandini 2006: 134).

The institutional success of such an unexpected coalition was unprecedented. Having found a sort of unstable and ambiguous middle ground between the pro- theological phenomenology and the more historically based historicism, Italian and Dutch scholars were instrumental in the establishment of the International Association for the History of Religions in Amsterdam in 1950 (IAHR; initially International Association for the Study of History of Religions), with Pettazzoni appointed as second President (1950-1959) after the untimely death of van der Leeuw, President elect for just a couple of months. The first issue of the official disciplinary review of the association was published in 1954, and the review was named Numen: International Review for the History of Religions (Gandini 2006: 179-87, 222; see Jensen and Geertz 2015).

However, in the long run, Pettazzoni's two-fold gamble was to backfire spectacularly. From an institutional point of view, Pettazzoni's ambiguous and conciliatory approach towards phenomenology was to have the most egregious consequences within twentieth-century academia.

Eventually, Pettazzoni felt that the two strands of the study of religions could not actually be united under the umbrella term of the HoR, so he came up with another term, ‘sacrology', which he was about to officially present at the 10th Congress of the IAHR (held in Marburg in 1960), as a new moniker for the science of religions as a whole (Severino 2015). Pettazzoni's death in 1959 prevented him from doing so and, ironically, the Marburg Congress became subsequently famous for the following frankly fideistic statement by then IAHR Secretary, Dutch Reformed church minister and professor of phenomenology of religion at Amsterdam University, Claas Jouco Bleeker (1898-1983), whose approach stemmed from that of his teacher Kristensen (see Chapter 4): ‘the value of religious phenomena can be understood only if we keep in mind that religion is ultimately a realization of a transcendent truth'. This much feared ‘theological drift', in turn, prompted a vigorous response in the form of a pentalogue of ‘basic minimum presuppositions for the pursuit of our studies' to prevent the re-emergence of a theologia naturalis within the field, and which was signed by seventeen renowned scholars, including the drafter, Hebrew University of Jerusalem professor Raphael J. Zwi Werblowsky (1924-2015) (Schimmel 1960: 236-7).

Similarly, on a national level, the neo-idealistic roots, the ambiguous methodological charter of the discipline, the presence of a persistent socio-cultural anti-evolutionism, the neglect of scientific literacy, and the lack of any solid epistemological support, all contributed to the gradual disintegration of the original Pettazzonian project. In an undated manuscript from the Pettazzoni archive, possibly written in the late 1950s, the Italian scholar listed the ‘enemies of the History of Religions' as follows: ‘1. Theology

2. Psychologism 3. Phenomenology 4. Philology' (from Severino 2015: 12 n. 22, with ‘psychologism' used to describe psychoanalytical trends based on supposedly universal archetypes). According to such a list, with a discipline left in epistemological disarray, what remained to approach the HoR was just historiography, which could barely offer comfort to sustain the autonomy of the discipline. Indeed, with the partial exception of philology, Pettazzoni's successors within the so-called ‘Roman (or Italian) school of the HoR' tried to escape the cul-de-sac in which the discipline was stuck by resorting to the help of those very ‘enemies', in one way or another re-fuelling the endemic and emic fascination for pseudoscience.

In 1958, three outstanding candidates were selected by a panel chaired by Pettazzoni himself to expand the national roster of historians of religions (Spineto 2012: 109-19). These scholars were:

1. Hungarian-born Angelo Brelich (1913-1977), who directly succeeded Pettazzoni in Rome and was one of the signatories to the Marburg document, started his career in the 1930s from the standpoint of the universalizing, phenomenologically friendly ‘psychologism' of Hungarian classical philologist Kàroly Kerenyi (1897­1973), aimed at identifying uniform, universal and experiential archetypes within ancient cultures. However, from the 1950s onwards, Brelich gradually rejected this framework to embrace a historicist approach which moved away from Pettazzoni's autonomy of religion and, eventually, resulted in the abandonment of any dialogue with phenomenologists (most importantly, Kerenyi), the development of a differential comparativism based on the analysis of peculiar differences between different cultures and the keen analysis of the cultural matrix of each religion, and the methodological critique to strict philological principles and outdated historical interpretations (Brelich 1979; Massenzio 2005: 217-19). Because of the gradual voluntary estrangement from national and international disciplinary milieus due to an increasing discomfort with the HoR as such (e.g. the resignation from the office of president of the Società Italiana di Storia delle Religioni in 1967), Brelich's later proposals, which were nonetheless stuck in the usual disciplinary antireductionism, failed to have any significant resonance;

2. Ernesto de Martino (1908-1965) landed a professorship at the University of Cagliari (Sardinia) and advocated an eclectic mix of Crocian historicism, Marxist and Gramscian philosophy, existentialism and, most of all, phenomenology, to approach lower classes' folklore in Southern Italy, resulting in the emphasis on the constant precariousness of human existence.

3. Ugo Bianchi (1922-1995) was appointed professor first at the University of Messina (Sicily) in 1960, then Bologna (1970), and finally Rome (1974-1995), while also holding teaching positions at Catholic institutions and serving briefly as consultant of the Vatican Secretariat for the Non-Christians (later renamed Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue; Casadio 2005b: 862). Bianchi, who did not sign the Marburg response but penned a softer response of his own (Bianchi 1961), was elected President of the IAHR in 1990, after having served

10 years as vice-president of the same organization. With Bianchi, the formal confrontation with Crocian historicism came to an end, thus allowing the official re-entry of frankly pro-theological and/or hermeneutical stances. Working from an avowed Catholic stance, Bianchi sponsored the continuing dialogue between theology and HoR while supporting the autonomy of the latter (e.g. Bianchi 1989), and developed a post-historicist approach which accounted for the typological study of ‘concrete universals' while re-elaborating phenomenological tenets, e.g. the transcendental and primordial rupture du niveau (i.e. the ‘break of [existential] level' towards otherworldly experiences/realities), to approach reputedly universal or innate religious ideas (cf. Casadio 2005b; Sfameni Gasparro 2016).

Regrettably, for reasons of space, I cannot provide a comprehensive list of all the nationally and internationally relevant Italian scholars who tried to advance a more restrained, non-phenomenological and critical approach to the application of the comparative method, such as Cristiano Grottanelli (1946-2010), Alfonso Maria di Nola (1926-1997), and Vittorio Lanternari, another signatory of the Marburg pentalogue (1918-201) (see di Nola 1977a: 292-7; Filoramo and Prandi 1997: 79-96; Spineto 2012: 1289-92). Suffice it to recall here that what held together Pettazzoni's ideal, and unstable, discipline was the opposition to Crocian philosophy and the autonomy of religion (i.e. religious facts and ideas) per se. As soon as philosophical opposition began to slowly wane with the death of Croce, any justification for the very autonomous existence of the discipline as envisaged by Pettazzoni himself seemed to fail (Spineto 2012: 155). Interestingly, opposition to the autonomous charter of the HoR within the Italian field paralleled the never-ending discussions on the name, and implicitly the scope and extent, within the IAHR (e.g. Spineto 2010: 1273, 1291). As Grottanelli and Bruce Lincoln have cogently argued,

in order to justify a disciplinary autonomy which he considered politically and institutionally advantageous, indeed indispensable, Pettazzoni felt constrained to speak of the unique ontological status of religion - its autonomy or irreducibility - something which had (and among many still has) a certain rhetorical appeal, but was (and is) difficult if not impossible to justify in strictly logical terms.

Grottanelli and Lincoln 1998: 317

Crucially, Brelich's professional career attests to the impossibility of pursuing any relevant non-phenomenological approach within the echo chamber of the HoR, while also showing that an epistemologically warranted historiographical study of religion(s) simply develops, in fact, into cultural historiography. Instead, Pettazzoni's heirs de Martino and Bianchi turned to other non-historicist options to justify the very existence and epistemology of the HoR, fuelling the disciplinary confrontational stance against science and reinforcing fideistic approaches, and engaging consistently and empathetically the neo-phenomenological works of another historian of religions, Pettazzoni's friend and colleague Mircea Eliade, whose works and ideas will be the theme of the next chapter.

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