The Italian school of ‘history of religions’

This study sets out to cast light on the most significant theoretical and methodological aspects of the Italian School of History of Religions, a school that owes its particular character to the cultural commitment of Raffaele Pettazzoni, Ernesto de Martino and Angelo Brelich. Since these scholars are not well known internationally, this article aims at providing some keys to their interpretation for the purpose of a wider circulation. The thought of Pettazzoni, de Martino and Brelich has not exhausted its potential and can make a far from negligible contribution to today's discussions on subjects such as the role of the history of religions in contemporary culture, the meaning of the secular approach to the religious phenomenon, and the search for new conceptions of the comparative method. The most pregnant image of the history of religions provided by an analysis of the works of these Italian scholars is that of a discipline committed to tackling the problems of our time.     

SCIENCE,RELIGION, AND ITALY'S SEVENTEENTH‐CENTURY DECLINE: FROM FRANCESCO DE SANCTIS TO BENEDETTO CROCE

Historians have often argued that from the mid‐sixteenth century onward Italian science began to decline. This development is often attributed to the actions of the so‐called Counter‐Reformation Church, which had grown increasingly intolerant of novel ideas. In this article, I argue that this interpretation of the history of science is derived from an Italian liberal historiographical tradition, which linked the history of Italian philosophy to the development of the modern Italian state. I suggest that although historians of science have appropriated parts of this distinctive narrative to underpin their account of Italy's seventeenth‐century scientific decline, they have not always fully appreciated its complexity. In this article, I consider the work of two scholars, Francesco de Sanctis and Benedetto Croce. Both explicitly suggested that although the actions of the Church caused Italy to enter into a period of decline, they in fact argued that science represented one of the few areas in which Italian intellectual life actually continued to thrive.     

Re‐viewing Christian Theologies of Religious Diversity

While Christian theology of religions fundamentally revolves around the questions of revelation and salvation, as some scholars have shown, context also plays an important role in dialoguing/engaging with other religions. However, these context‐sensitive perspectives, which focus on common socio‐economic‐ecological concerns and multiple identities that cut across religious boundaries, generally seem to promote a pluralistic position (for commendable reasons). But this need not always be the case. In contexts (like that of rural Dalit Christianity) where communities are marginalized and threatened, it might be necessary and justifiable to make claims of exclusivism; although what is (verbally) professed could be quite different from what is actually practised. Reflecting on these observations, this essay suggests the need for theologians of religions and dialogists to be (self‐)aware of the critical and complex role that socio‐political contexts play in terms of influencing and determining (their) theological approaches toward other religions.     

BIBLICAL POETRY,SPINOZIST HERMENEUTICS,AND CRITICAL SCHOLARSHIP

This article considers a little known chapter in the long history of the question of the nature of biblical poetry. The debate between the Jewish scholar Raffaele Rabeni and the Christian Hebraist Biagio Garofalo (1710–1714) exemplifies shifting attitudes and concerns of eighteenth century Jewish and Christian polemists. Ostensibly, the exchange concerned an apparently innocuous topic, the “Poetry of the Hebrews”, namely, whether Biblical poetry was rhymed or metrical. At a closer look, the two scholars, equally familiar with Spinoza’s biblical critique and the latest philological and critical scholarship, clashed over the textual authority of the Hebrew Bible.

This Italian polemical exchange not only foreshadows emerging developments in the field of biblical studies, but it also differs from previous examples because of its public ramifications. The debate was publicized by the Giornale de’ Letterati, Italy’s foremost scholarly journal of the time, which sided with Garofalo. For his part, Rabeni actively opposed the publication’s “modern” approach to sacred and profane history by supporting the Jesuit Father, Giovan Antonio Bernardi, in the course of a heated controversy over the journal’s historiographical stance and objectivity.

Unlike most cases of early modern Jewish–Christian polemics examined by researchers, the Rabeni–Garofalo affair and its ramifications reflect the birth pangs that accompanied the emergence of the modern study of sacred and diplomatic history in Italy, and is best understood within the context of historical and philological‐critical studies that characterized the early stages of the Italian Enlightenment.     

The Convergence of Cultures and Religions in Light of the Evolution of Conciousness

This article describes a challenge to the cultures and religions of the world that the author believes is the greatest challenge that has confronted the human race in its entire history. Modernity's search for unity and postmodernity's affirmation of pluralism reflect aspects of our current situation, but more needs to be recognized. We must acknowledge that East and West must face the current challenges together. Multiculturalism and unity encompass all world cultures, and we cannot be content to read our present history only through the lens of western developments. Karl Jaspers's theory of the First Axial period of history, 800-200 B.C.E ., in which all the present world religions have their roots, is useful. It reveals that our present flowering of culture and spirit in the Western world, including our science, is not so much a product of the Western Renaissance and Enlightenment, as it is rooted in cultural events that belong to East and West equally. We are now in the Second Axial Period, which challenges the world religions to allow their energies to move toward convergence, just as in the previous millennia they moved toward differentiation. Teilhard de Chardin's thought is a guide for us, in his vision of a complex convergence of consciousness, in which differences will not be abolished but will be transformed in their coming together. This convergent perspective will also join with the perspective of rediscovering our roots in the earth, and it will repossess the spirituality of the primal peoples, in its understanding of the entire human race to be one tribe. The world religions are faced with the task, therefore, of encountering each other in "dialogic dialogue," and channeling their spiritual resources toward the solution of real-world global problems.     

Religious studies in Scotland: A persistent tension with divinity

This article treats the history of the study of religions in Scotland as a chapter in the history of the academic study of religions in the UK and Continental Europe. After sketching traditions of ‘Scottish comparative religion’ from the late nineteenth century to the interwar period, the authors map out an institutional history of ‘Religious Studies’ as a distinctive disciplinary formation in Scotland since 1970. The emergence, consolidation and in some cases decline of this relatively new academic field are charted at the five main contemporary university sites in Scotland where religion, as a distinct subject, is taught: Aberdeen, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Stirling and the Open University. In the cases of Aberdeen, Glasgow and Edinburgh, the authors argue that ‘Religious Studies’ has had to fashion its niche in the context of the ecclesiastical authority enjoyed by Scottish Divinity faculties, resulting in an ongoing ‘tension’ between Religious Studies and Theology. The development of the subject at Stirling and the Open University underscores the historical alignment of Religious Studies with non-Presbyterian educational values in Scotland, whereas the persistence of Religious Studies in Schools of Divinity at the other Scottish universities may veil the traditionally ‘religionist’ stance of most scholars of religion working in these institutions.     

Teaching World Religions without Teaching “World Religions”

Tomoko Masuzawa and a number of other contemporary scholars have recently problematized the categories of “religion” and “world religions” and, in some cases, called for its abandonment altogether as a discipline of scholarly study. In this collaborative essay, we respond to this critique by highlighting three attempts to teach world religions without teaching “world religions.” That is, we attempt to promote student engagement with the empirical study of a plurality of religious traditions without engaging in the rhetoric of pluralism or the reification of the category “religion.” The first two essays focus on topical courses taught at the undergraduate level in self‐consciously Christian settings: the online course “Women and Religion” at Georgian Court University and the service‐learning course “Interreligious Dialogue and Practice” at St. Michael's College, in the University of Toronto. The final essay discusses the integration of texts and traditions from diverse traditions into the graduate theology curriculum more broadly, in this case at Loyola Marymount University. Such confessional settings can, we suggest, offer particularly suitable – if somewhat counter‐intuitive – contexts for bringing the otherwise covert agendas of the world religions discourse to light and subjecting them to a searching inquiry in the religion classroom.     

The Study of Religions in the Third Reich: A Report on Work in Progress

Translator's Note. Possible connections between the study of religions and European fascism, if not indeed Nazism, have sparked considerable discussion and debate in the English-speaking world. Consider the celebrated cases of Mircea Eliade and Georges Dumézil.By contrast, the work of German scholars of religion during the NS period has been relatively little studied. Still, there have been exceptions. Burkhard Gladigow of Tübingen has published ‘Naturwissenschaftliche Modellvorstellungen in der Religionswissenschaft in der Zeit zwischen den Weltkriegen’.¹Recently, the study of religions during the Third Reich has become the subject of an ongoing seminar at Philipps-Universität Marburg. To date, one student has declared his intentions to write a thesis on the topic. Rainer Flasche, who convenes the seminar, has also worked on the topic extensively. The following essay is a preliminary indication of his results.Flasche, born in Hannover in 1942, studied theology, philosophy, German, and the history of religions in Marburg. He has taught history of religions there since 1971, making his habilitation in 1975. His best known work isDie Religionswissenschaft Joachim Wachs(Berlin: de Gruyter, 1978).Readers may wish especially to note what emerges as the central principle of Nazi religio-historical hermeneutics: that only those who belong to a race (gender? class?) can understand it. Thus, only Germans can understand Germanic religion. The essay may also shed some light on the study of religions in Germany after the war. A reviewer of a recent book by Isaiah Berlin has noted how Berlin's lasting confidence in the liberal tradition perhaps derives from the usefulness of that tradition in Eastern Europe, where Berlin spent his formative years. In post-war Germany, the study of religions has emphasized a positivism that remains close to the sources and shuns explicit theorizing, an emphasis in which Flasche clearly concurs. The usefulness of this strategy should not be overlooked. It allowed German scholars of the NS period, but also later under communist rule in the Democratic Republic and to some extent within the confines of state-run theology programs in the Federal Republic, to work independently of and even oppose a sanctioned ideology. The strategy was not to champion competing theories but to oppose ideological claims with ‘facts’. This stance contrasts sharply with the theoretical richness that characterized German thought about religions before 1933, but—once burned, twice cautious.A note on terminology. The development of the nation-state took markedly different courses in the German and English speaking worlds. As a result, the wordVolkand the adjectivevölkischhave no entirely satisfactory English equivalents. The connotations of ‘nation’ are too limited, because the GermanVolkwas an ideal that transcended not only the principalities that dominated German political life from 1648 to 1866 but also the remnants of German glory that remained after World War I and even the extensive empire administered by Prussia from 1866 to 1918. Therefore, I have translatedVolkas ‘people’. But English ‘popular’ has quite a different sense fromVölkisch, so forvölkischI have used the adjective ‘national’ instead. Readers should keep in mind the direct verbal link between the two in the original.     

Religion and Science in Taiwan: Rethinking the Connection

The author draws upon his experience in teaching courses in religion and science in Taiwan, as well as more traditional sources in the history of Chinese religions and the history of science in China, to discuss the relationship of religion and science in contemporary Taiwan. Various aspects of Chinese and Taiwanese understandings of both science and religion are discussed. It is suggested that the nexus for the science-religion dialogue does not lie in a doctrine of creation, which is noticeably absent in Buddhism and most Chinese religions, but rather in the human person who seeks personal health and wholeness, right relations with fellow human beings, and harmony with the cosmos. The author notes that many of these ideas are not unique to China and Taiwan and that in considering other cultures, our understanding of our own culture is enriched.     

The Challenge of Inter‐faith Relations for the Christian Conference of Asia

Asia is the cradle of many religions, and religious diversity is the hallmark of most Asian societies. Religiosity runs deep in the Asian outlook on life. Why then, one would ask, did the Christian Conference of Asia (CCA) not have visible and structured inter‐faith dialogues as one of its programme priorities? This article examines the reasons why it would have been difficult and even inappropriate for the CCA to initiate a robust dialogue programme in the context in which it was founded. However, CCA did respond to the inter‐faith reality by animating theological and missiological reflections that took Asian social realities and religious pluralism as the contexts of these reflections. Today, religions are increasingly entering the public, and especially the political, arena. There is an increase in religious intolerance and militancy in a number of Asian countries. These have resulted in CCA paying more focused attention to inter‐faith relations and religious plurality.     

The Matter of Religion and Science: Response to Huston Smith

Huston Smith's Why Religion Matters is the culminating reflections of one of the most respected religion scholars of our day. In this work, Smith sees modern society to be in the midst of a spiritual crisis. According to Smith, this crisis has been brought about by the advance of science and the inroads into what Smith calls the traditional worldview. While Smith's work is of some importance, I believe that several of its fundamental claims are mistaken. Smith often does not accurately portray the content of science and frequently conflates the actual practice of science with philosophical scientism. Smith wrongly blames science alone for the decline of religion among Western elites. His claim that all religions can be equivocally described in terms of the traditional worldview is also problematic. Despite this, Smith does have a clear conception of what the issues are in the relation between science and religion. It is my hope that these issues will continue to be taken seriously.     

Evolutionism and Early Nineteenth-Century Histories of Religions

Evolutionism influenced the study of religion long before Darwin. Histories of religions feature prominently in the metaphysical philosophies of history of the Romantic period; these philosophies of history, in turn, draw on an essence-and-development concept of evolution constructed within eighteenth-century biological preformationism and theosophy.¹Preformationist and theosophical evolutionisms posit physiological and spiritual development of humanity. Ballanche and Schelling show how Romantic philosophers of history applied essence-and-development evolutionisms to history, to humanity and to God. For both Ballanche and Schelling, history is the unfolding in time of the essence of humanity; for both, the history of religions provides empirical corroboration for the metaphysical order underlying history. Eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century essence-and-development evolutionism historicized, and thereby reconceptualised, Christian providentialism, soteriology and theodicy. Historians of the study of religions have insufficiently appreciated this fact, both historiographically and methodologically.     

以科学发展观研究新兴宗教

19世纪末、特别是自进入20世纪以来涌现出一些不同于传统宗教的新兴宗教之涌现。这种异军突起的新兴宗教现象立意不同、形态各异、变化多样、影响复杂,为宗教研究者提供了一个重要且必要的全新研究课题。笔者认为,应以科学发展观为指导思想来研究新兴宗教,这主要表现为,第一,应该从社会、时代的发展来看新兴宗教的产生及其展示的新特色。第二,应该从人们精神生活的普遍性及其神圣或神秘表达的独特性来观察、区分不同宗教的共性和特性。第三,应该从人类丰富多元的精神及社会生活来看待新兴宗教反应、适应、回应这种生活的形式及效果,论及其张力与和谐、正面与负面、消极与积极。     

Heaven can wait. How religion modulates temporal discounting

Evidence suggests that religious systems have specific effects on attentional and action control processes. The present study investigated whether religions also modulate choices that involve higher-order knowledge and the delay of gratification in particular. We tested Dutch Calvinists, Italian Catholics, and Atheists from both countries/cultures using an intertemporal choice task where participants could choose between a small immediate and a larger delayed monetary reward. Based on the Calvinist theory of predestination and the Catholic concept of a cycle of sin–confession–expiation, we predicted a reduced delay tolerance, i.e., higher discount rate, for Italian Catholics than for Dutch Calvinists, and intermediate rates for the two atheist groups. Analyses of discount rates support our hypotheses. We also found a magnitude effect on temporal discounting and faster responses for large than for small rewards across religions and countries/cultures. We conclude that temporal discounting is specifically modulated by religious upbringing rather than by generic cultural differences.     

Re-reading al-birūnī's India: a case for intercultural understanding

It is argued that until recently the major motive behind the interest in religious traditions other than one's own has been to refute the truth-claims of the former. This attitude was based on the conviction that the religious tradition to which the student of religion belonged contained all that he or she needed to know, since whatever remained outside the authoritative revelation was at best irrelevant and at worst dangerous. Although prevalent throughout history, this approach was not the only model for studying religions other than one's own. There have been scholars within the Islamic tradition who showed genuine interest in studying and understanding other religious traditions on their own terms. Arguably, one of the best representatives of these scholars was al-Birūnī (973–1048 CE) whose accomplishments in other disciplines, notably in natural sciences, overshadowed his crucial contribution to the study of religion. This paper is an attempt to contribute to the current debate in the study of religion by analyzing the method al-Birūnī employed in his treatment of the religious traditions of India. In pursuing the subject, the paper aims to elucidate the phenomenological, dialogical and comparative aspects of al-Birūnī's thought in light of contemporary scholarship.     

Advocacy,brainwashing theories,and new religious movements

Advocacy by scholars in the field of new religious movements emerged during the ‘cult wars,’ which in the U.S. had their peak between 1970 and 1990 and continued in Europe and Japan in subsequent decades. Advocacy focused on the question of whether the ‘cults’ used a persuasion technique known as brainwashing. The idea of brainwashing was born during the Cold War, and originally applied to Communist techniques of indoctrination, but was lately first extended to religion and subsequently used as a tool to distinguish between legitimate and non-legitimate religions, labeling the latter as ‘cults.’ Prominent psychologists and sociologists were involved in these battles, with most scholars of new religious movements appearing in court in order to criticize the brainwashing theories advocated by psychologist Margaret T. Singer and a handful of anti-cult academics. After the Fishman decision of 1990, which seriously hit the anti-cult camp, advocacy in this field did not disappear but became somewhat less partisan.