Italy, 1920s-1930s: Pettazzoni's two-fold gamble

Despite Pettazzoni's efforts, Schmidt's legacy was not the only tough nut to crack. Any institutional proposal for the reorganization of the discipline had to mediate between phenomenological approaches based on ahistorical uniformity, historiographical approaches based on differential analysis, philological thoroughness in the study of each religion, and the Kulturkreiselehre’s historical continuity between ethnology and history.

In order to achieve this extremely ambitious goal while appeasing and, at the same time, keeping at bay the more unscientific or anti-scientific branches of the field (e.g. like those inspired by Creuzer's meta-historical symbolism and Schmidt's theological approach), Pettazzoni disregarded the Victorian science of religion and resorted to Vico's ‘poetical metaphysics' as a sort of unifying psychological framework and ultimate explanation for the birth of religious ideas, specifically referring to Vico's anthropomorphism (‘corporeal imagination'), according to which ‘the more violent weather-phenomena suggested the first notion of divinity' (Pettazzoni 1956b: 22; see Spineto 2012: 97). And yet, as we have already seen, Vico's primordial history rested on

Figure 11 Pettazzoni's history of religions: original features, influences, and main themes

a Providential development of humankind which incredibly sabotaged Pettazzoni's own solution by resorting to the very same supernatural a priori adopted by Schmidt - i.e.

Preceding by 4 years the Dutch Higher Education Act, the Italian Parliament officially abolished theology chairs in 1873 (Jordan and Labanca 1909: 156). Following the gradual process of annexation of the State of the Church by the Kingdom of Sardinia (soon to be upgraded to Kingdom of Italy) between 1860 and 1870, three concomitant factors contributed to the gradual extinction of theology from university curricula (cf.

1. the vanishing numbers of students enrolled in theological faculties from 1859 onwards;

2. the Catholic intellectual opposition to the new Italian state and its cultural reorganization, sanctioned by Vatican political activity in particular between 1868 and 1874, with the official prohibition for Italian Catholics to engage in political activity at a national level;

3. the general indifference towards theological matters as a long-term consequence of the Counter-Reformation top-down control of religious education.

However, due to a compromised implementation in the first place caused by the continuous interference of the theocratic Vatican enclave, in less than 20 years, ‘partly to avoid troubles that might arise from the group of fanatical Catholics, partly to gratify some of the liberal Catholics, and partly for yet other reasons which have to do with finance, the Government [...] allowed University instruction in religion to lapse and [...] proceeded to wash its hands of the whole matter' (Jordan and Labanca 1909: 185). A faulty distinction between professional and confessional theology and its impact on the academic teaching of religion(s), the persisting focus on Christianity in spite of the institutional advocacy for the establishment of a comparative discipline, the debated presence of Catholic priests and scholars as teachers in such a politically heated context, and other socio-political considerations that could not be severed from the very presence of the Vatican state and its influence (e.g. how should ‘religion' itself and its study be operationalized in such a new national context?), all these problems contributed to hinder any proposal and prevent any major steps forward towards the establishment of the academic and comparative study of religions (Jordan and Labanca 1909: 287-8; Spineto 2012: 8, 13-14).

At last, after ‘a much prolonged apathy', something started slowly to change (Pettazzoni 1912a: 110; in Gandini 1994: 232).

Upon his appointment, Pettazzoni immediately started working on a virtual common ground for a new international HoR (hence the confrontation with Schmidt’s works) while struggling with a complicated national context. As summarized by Marcello Massenzio, the Italian branch of the discipline was ‘the product of a subtle intellectual ability to correlate two apparently irreconcilable schools of thought’, that is, ‘religious phenomenology’ and neo-idealism, in particular that of Benedetto Croce (1866-1952), a most influential anti-positivistic yet agnostic philosopher, conservative yet (mostly) anti-fascist, literary critic, and politician who was a firm critic of both the comparative method and the autonomy of religion as a subject (Massenzio 2005: 213).

Woefully for the field, and for Italian culture in general, science had been long depreciated and obliterated by neo-idealism, with Croce deriding it as a collection of ‘pseudo-concepts’, i.e. hypothetical abstractions useful for practical purposes but historically and philosophically useless - such, for instance, was the comparative method for Croce (Collingwood 1946: 198; cf. also Ambasciano 2013: 157-8). Therefore, conceptually embedded within a neo-idealist culture, and deprived of scientific references (apart from some psychology which he never seemed to have fully mastered; see Spineto 2012: 105), Pettazzoni nevertheless needed something more to justify and ground methodologically the reference to the existential and experiential dimensions of religion, which the Italian scholar, ‘in the wake of Vico, conceived as the product of human “fantasy” ’ (Filoramo and Prandi 1997: 76).