Neither with you nor without you: Mircea Eliade
By the mid-1950s, HoR had finally become the theory of everything imagined in Victorian times - although with a twist. Thanks to the Kulturkreislehre, which provided HoR with a historico-ethnological method, and phenomenology, which supplied scholars with a quasi-psychological and theology-friendly taxonomy, academic institutionalization was finally achieved at the very expense of science.
However, science could not be easily shrugged off, for science was and still is - or should be - at the foundation of academia. Therefore, a cognitive dissonance, if not an outright schizophrenic attitude towards science, began to swamp the field, and this became sorely evident in the aftermath of the publication of the Marburg manifesto.On the surface, a scientific ethos shone through the manifesto, whose five basic presuppositions can be summarized as follows:
1. a constant ‘alert to the possibility of scientifically legitimate generalizations concerning the nature and function of religion' (original emphasis);
2. the anthropological nature of the HoR, in the general sense of a worldly, human endeavour and the exclusion of emic theological definitions;
3. the rejection of ‘theologia naturalis or any other philosophical or [sui generis] religious system' as ‘terms of reference of Religionswissenschaft’;
4. the affirmation of epistemological antireductionism, but within a ‘ culture pattern that allows for every quest of historical truth’ (my emphasis);
5. the rejection of religious propaganda, ideological commitments and fideistic advocacy within the IAHR (Schimmel 1960: 236-7; cf. Sharpe 1986: 276-8, and Wiebe 1999: 145).
However, the manifesto made a concession to different ‘nuances of methodological questions' (Schimmel 1960: 237), which basically opened the backdoor to extra- epistemic, crypto-religious phenomenology. The fact that institutionalized HoR did strive to differentiate itself from ecclesiastical and institutional theology did not mean that science was to be automatically embraced, or that an emic and appreciative study of religion was to be abandoned.
Within the same institution, obviously, there were scholars seriously concerned by the abandonment of a truly scientific commitment, but they had been deceived in that, as we have seen, the very foundations of the discipline itself justified a cultural environment sympathetic to conservative, reactionary, fideistic, apologetic and esoteric scholarship from an emic viewpoint (Wiebe 1999: 146).In order to further the religiously appeasing and crypto-theological agendas of the IAHR, as remarked by Werblowsky (1960: 218), the powers that be were tolerant enough, or eager, to expand their ranks by letting in ‘dilettanti' and non- ecclesiastically oriented theological scholars. These were all breaches in the structure of the epistemological edifice, which could withstand only so much before becoming unstable. And yet, the first clues of such schizophrenic developments have always been there, right under the scholars' noses. Ironically, among the signatories of the Marburg manifesto there was Mircea Eliade (1907-1986), a Romanian researcher who previously taught at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes, La Sorbonne, Paris, and who had been recently appointed professor in the United States, a scholar whose bestselling works were to unabashedly break the Marburg statements (bar, quite conveniently, the fourth point on antireductionism). The astonishing fact is that, despite his hard-core phenomenological approach, Eliade was a self-avowed disciple of Pettazzoni.
In 1947, Eliade wrote to Pettazzoni: ‘you were my first master in this exciting [in French, passionante] but elusive [insaissisable] ‘science' of religions, and your approval makes me proud' (Eliade to Pettazzoni, 2 November 1947; letter XLV in Spineto 1994: 166). As painstakingly documented by Natale Spineto (1994), Pettazzoni and Eliade engaged in a 33-year-long correspondence, the first known letter of which is dated 1926. In the same year, a 20-year-old Eliade wrote a newspaper article in which he cited Croce and Gentile for the first time (Eliade 1998: 207-9).
Indeed, the relationship of Eliade with Italian culture was far-reaching, and Croce, Gentile and Omodeo's writings were all part of his background: ‘in 1925, [Eliade] took exams on the logic of Croce and Gentile; in 1927 he took a class held by Gentile in Rome and, the year after, he interviewed the philosopher; he will [also] correspond with Croce' as well as with many other Italian authors (Spineto 2006: 103). In 1928, Eliade graduated from the University of Bucharest with a thesis on philosophy of religion in the Italian Renaissance (Mincu and Scagno 1986: 125-52). From that point onwards, although sloppily conflated with different and often contradictory trends, Italian culture and historicism were to become a central aspect of Eliade's thought and harsh criticism - for Eliade ultimately rejected Pettazzoni's agnostic historicism in favour of an emic, enthusiastically positive view on X-claims and psi phenomena (e.g. Eliade 1960; Kripal 2007: 153; Law 2018; see Spineto 2006: 102-6; Vanhaelemeersch 2007). In addition to Italian Renaissance religious philosophy, this stance resulted from the intellectual interaction between Interwar Romanian ultranationalism, a fascination for occultism and the paranormal, and Eliade’s experience in India during his PhD on yoga techniques (Idel 2014: 280). In any case, Eliade remained always well acquainted with the ongoing disciplinary debates and publications in Italy (e.g. Carozzi 1994; Grottanelli 2000; Casadio 2002; Spineto 2006; cf. Ambasciano 2014: 242 n. 360). When, for instance, Eliade reviewed the 1948 updated French edition of van der Leeuw’s ‘excellent’ Religion in Essence and Manifestation, judged ‘the best introduction to the general history of religions', he began by recalling Croce's own critical review from 15 years earlier, to highlight the resistance of some philosophers before the irreducible and autonomous character of religion per se (Eliade 1950: 108, 110).After the death of van der Leeuw, Eliade’s works became the morphological- phenomenological reference par excellence.
The most important Italian historians of religions, in particular de Martino and Bianchi, were to engage in a constant, albeit complicated, dialogue with Eliade. Pettazzoni himself, while arguing that only phenomenology could provide a much needed ‘deeper understanding’ to historical documents (Pettazzoni 1954a: 217), remained ambiguously undecided between public warm acceptance and private firm refusal of Eliade’s method and theory (Severino 2015).1 Such ‘deeper understanding’ stretched beyond the usual scholarly topics. For instance, in 1956, during a conference held in Royaumont, France, and organized by the Parapsychology Foundation, de Martino and Eliade were involved in a lively discussion in which the former, resorting to Lang, exposed his ideas on the possible field collaboration between parapsychology and ethnology to ascertain the reality of paranormal powers, and the latter speculated that Palaeolithic or Neolithic shamans could really fly (Angelini 2005: 126-39).2Whether or not scholars in the field were sympathetic to such themes, Eliade’s growing fame forced historians of religions and other scholars to confront the supernatural and the paranormal. In a sense, Eliade’s frankly emic approach towards unscientific or fideistic topics exacerbated the many epistemological contradictions of the discipline. When, in the 1970s, Ugo Bianchi wrote about the ‘methodological disagreement’ and the ‘high regard’ (Spineto 2012: 151) in which he held Eliade’s work, he described this methodological relationship with a Latin motto: nec tecum nec sine te, ‘neither with you nor without you’ (Bianchi 1975b: 171; cf. Martial, Epigrams xii, 46, and Ovid, Amores 3.ii.39; from Spineto 2012: 151). And, because of the intuitive appeal exerted by the X-claims entertained by Eliade, the fame of his works gradually obliterated any kind of effective, etic epistemological resistance (Brelich 1979: 9; Idel 2014: 282). This peculiar situation was not limited to Italian historicism - by the 1960s it had become an international issue.
Indeed, the outstanding success of the Chicago School of HoR led by Eliade (Wedemeyer and Doniger 2010) constrained volens nolens the diffusion of any non- phenomenological approach. Writing in 1967 on the official journal of the I AHR (Numen), Swedish historian of religions Geo Widengren (1907-1996) noted that
some of [Eliade’s] books have been real best-sellers, also in English and German translation [at that time Eliade wrote primarily in French], for Prof. Eliade is possessed of an easy style and a suggestive and persuasive manner of arguing. It is quite obvious that these books, very often concerned with the study of symbolism, have met a real need among our time's educated public.
Widengren 1967: 165
Twenty years later, noting the Eliadean use of ‘nonphilosophical and nontheological terms in an elegant literary style', a posthumous encyclopaedic entry dedicated to Eliade and written by University of Chicago colleague and professor Joseph M. Kitagawa (1915-1992), confirmed that, ‘during the latter part of [Eliade's] stay in Chicago, fame and honor came his way from various parts of the world. By that time, many of his books, including his literary works, had been translated into several languages' (Kitagawa 2005: 2756-7). Kitagawa also recalled that Eliade ‘had his share of critics', but also warned that Eliade ‘held a consistent viewpoint that penetrated all aspects of his scholarly and literary works, so that it is difficult to be for or against any part of his writings without having to judge the whole framework' (Kitagawa 2005: 2757). Which were the bases of such a ‘consistent viewpoint', anyway?