Italy, 1910s-1950s: Pettazzoni's revolutionary rebuttal
Schmidt's modus operandi and works were acknowledged and integrated within the boundaries of a new disciplinary synthesis which attempted to fuse together phenomenology with a more historically oriented approach, while Schmidt's results were at the same time criticized and falsified.
During a tete-d-tete which spanned almost half a century, ‘outstanding Italian scholar' Raffaele Pettazzoni (Sharpe 1986: 184) critically engaged Schmidt's Urmonotheismus on the same comparative and ethnological field of the German priest while recognizing the value and breadth of the Kulturhistorische Methode (on Pettazzoni's international reception, see Rennie 2013). It could even be stated that the entire academic career of Pettazzoni, a freemason and a socialist who in his youth had abandoned Catholicism, had been dedicated to the falsification of Schmidt's Urmonotheismus which, as Pettazzoni recapped, amounted merely ‘to a return, by way of science, to the old position of the doctrine of revelation'. The danger posed by Schmidt's thesis was such that, actually, ‘the parenthesis which Hume and Rousseau had opened in the eighteenth century was now to be closed, and monotheism brought back to the very fountainhead of religion' (Pettazzoni 1954a: 4; cf. Gandini 2005).As early as 1911, Pettazzoni delivered a speech at the First Congress of Italian Ethnology entitled Le superstizioni (‘Superstitions'), in which he tackled the integration of superstitious cults within Catholicism, and praised Schmidt's ethnographical working method (Pettazzoni 1911, from Gandini 1993: 200). One year later, the two scholars started a brief and formal correspondence. However, right at the outset, Pettazzoni's acceptance of Schmidt's Kulturhistorische methodological and theoretical systematization stands in stark contrast to his critique of Schmidt's (and Lang's) theological results (see Gandini 1994: 195-8, 240-4).
A monograph, entitled Lessere celeste nelle credenze dei popoli primitivi (‘The Skygod in the Beliefs of the Primitive Peoples') and ready since 1915, was supposed to provide a conclusive rebuttal to Schmidt's Urmonotheismus, but the outbreak of World War I prevented its publication until 1922 (Gandini 1996: 117; Pettazzoni 1922). Decades of heated confrontations through a panoply of harsh reviews followed the publication of this and the following works (Gandini 1994: 243-4; Gandini 1999a: 157-8; Gandini 2000: 197-9; Gandini 2001a: 31-3; Gandini 2001b: 106-8; cf. Brandewie 1983: 43-4, 242-6, 250-1). For instance, in a commentary published in 1927, Pettazzoni reported the various critiques already published against the Urmonotheismus (among which, most notably, Otto's in his Das Heilige ) and remarked on the ‘extrascientific moments ( momenti extrascientifici) in Schmidt's thought that invalidate the scientific value of his results, notwithstanding the depth of his ethnological knowledge' (Pettazzoni 1927: 111).To recap Pettazzoni's rebuttal, monotheism might take place only after the elaboration of polytheism. The formulation and institutionalization of monotheism are inseparable from the action of reformers who establish a new religion, while ‘discarding all the previous divinities as demons, affirming the uniqueness of one god', and imposing a new or different moral code (Filoramo and Prandi 1997: 76). Monotheism, according to Pettazzoni, was not the product of evolutionary trends, nor a pre-existent divine truth: it was a revolution, a dramatic, sudden, unexpected change. In order to support his thesis, Pettazzoni compared the three Abrahamic religions and Zoroastrianism, their religious texts and new traditions, against the backdrop of each local and previous polytheistic system. The most important methodological point was that only historical data can provide the sine qua non framework for an epistemically warranted study of religious development.
Ethnology alone was insufficient and misleading (however, palaeoanthropology was almost ignored). This is why Pettazzoni attacked the obsessive focus on the ‘uncivilised' (Pettazzoni did not renounce the usual racial jargon) and the lack of knowledge concerning historical documents and data shown by all those scholars ‘from Hume to Lang, from [...] de Brosses and Auguste Comte with their fetishist negroes to Father Schmidt's Pygmies', who, in one way or another, approached the ‘problem of monotheism' (Pettazzoni 1954a: 4). In Pettazzoni's own words, instead, ‘every coming of a monotheistic religion is conditioned by a religious revolution', i.e. a consequence of precise historical factors (Pettazzoni 1954a: 9). Schmidt, in turn, recognized in Pettazzoni's work the ‘expression of a former, classic evolutionism', and downplayed his rebuttal as being a merely ‘terminological problem' for a Supreme Being is nothing less than a god (Schmidt 1935b: xviii-xxvii; from Brandewie 1983: 243-4).As to Schmidt's thesis, Pettazzoni stated that there is no such thing as ‘primitive monotheism'. Instead, what ‘we find among uncivilised peoples is not monotheism in its historically legitimated sense, but the idea of a Supreme Being' (Pettazzoni 1954a: 9), that is, a deity within a pantheon generally provided with omniscience and omnipotence, mostly indifferent or inactive yet sometimes acting as a guarantor of the societal moral order (Sullivan 2005: 8878). Commenting on the research state of the Urmonotheismus after the death of Schmidt in 1954, Pettazzoni built on the growing internal dissent within the Kulturkreislehre and noted the
vanity of [Schmidt's] attempt to demonstrate the existence of which is nonexistent, that is, of that ‘primordial monotheism that existed only in his thought [. ..]. The concept of the Supreme Being should have never been confused with the idea of monotheism. This confusion has exerted - and still exerts - a bad influence in the field of study.
Pettazzoni's personal notes before Pettazzoni 1956a; from Gandini 2008: 61
Why did Pettazzoni bother to engage relentlessly Schmidt's works long after having provided a cogent falsification of his theories? Because, interestingly, and notwithstanding his rebuttal of Schmidt's Urmonotheismus, Pettazzoni still needed the Kulturhistorische Methode heralded by Ratzel, Grabner, Frobenius and Schmidt to support the autonomy of a new academic study of religions and criticize the apparent lack of historical knowledge exhibited by the various Victorian scholars who established progressive stages of socio-cultural evolution.
The aim, as attested by Pettazzoni's earliest writings and personal notes from the 1910s (Gandini 1994: 196-8; Spineto 2012: 12-13, 99), was to unify the study of contemporary ‘primitive' peoples with the archaeological and comparative study of past civilizations within a non-evolutionary perspective (Pettazzoni 1913; see Spineto 2012: 95). Thanks to Schmidt's ideas a new ‘science of religions', i.e. a multidisciplinary endeavour born from philology and anthropology and pertaining to ethnology and sociology (to which Pettazzoni himself added archaeology, mythology and psychology; Pettazzoni 1912b: x), had the potential to become the true heir to the Victorian science of religion.21