REVIEW ESSAY RELIGION AFTER RELIGION, Bryan Rennie 2003 MTSR.15.68-99.pdf · a turn to myth....

copy Koninklijke Brill NV Leiden 2003 Method amp Theory in the Study of Religion 15 68-99

REVIEW ESSAY

RELIGION AFTER RELIGIONHISTORY AFTER HISTORY

POSTMODERN HISTORIOGRAPHY AND THE STUDY OFRELIGIONS

Bryan Rennie

Steven M Wasserstrom Religion after Religion Gershom Scholem Mircea Eliade and HenryCorbin at Eranos Princeton Princeton University Press 1999 ISBN 0691005397(cloth) 0691005400 (pbk) $7500 (cloth) $2295 (pbk)

Hayden White Metahistory The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe Balti-more Johns Hopkins University Press 1973 ISBN 0801817617 (pbk) $1995(pbk)

Peter Novick That Noble Dream The lsquoObjectivity Questionrsquo and the American HistoricalProfession Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1988 ISBN 0521343283(cloth) 0521357454 (pbk) $6500 (cloth) $2500 (pbk)

Robert F Berkhofer Jr Beyond the Great Story History as Text and Discourse CambridgeMA Harvard University Press 1995 ISBN 0674069072 (cloth) 0674069080(pbk) $5000 (cloth) $2195 (pbk)

The following essay reviews Steven Wasserstromrsquos Religion after Religionmdasha partial history of the History of Religionsmdashand three theoretical works onhistoriography Hayden Whitersquos Metahistory Peter Novickrsquos That NobleDream and Robert F Berkhofer Jrrsquos Beyond the Great Story As well asintroducing readers to the argument of these works the essay uses Wasserstromrsquosbook as an example of a ldquomonovocalrdquo style of the narration of the phenomenal pastin opposition to the polyvocal style called for by the historiographers The purposeof the essay is to indicate the degree to which monovocal representations canapparently justify singular viewpoints by concealing various agendas and lendingauthority to dubious conclusions The essay challenges the elevation of a singleauthorial voice over the plurality of voices representing the plurality of phenomenalpasts and calls for a greater engagement with the pluralism and polyvocality ofpostmodern historiography

Introduction

At the American Academy of Religion conference in November 1999a session was held to discuss Steven Wasserstromrsquos Religion after Reli-

religion after religion history after history 69

gion Gershom Scholem Mircea Eliade and Henri Corbin at Eranos Papersfrom that session were published in the Journal of the American Academyof Religion (June 2001) with the advice that ldquothe issues discussed hereshould be of wide interest to JAAR readersrdquo (427) One of thepanelists writes ldquoin appreciation hellip and in salutationrdquo (Masuzawa2001 429) Another states that the book is ldquoclearly one of the mostimportant and original studies on the history of the history of reli-gions published in recent yearsrdquo (Urban 2001 437) These facts alonejustify a close inspection of this work but there are further character-istics of Wasserstromrsquos writing that make the book both worthy ofclose scrutiny and instructive in the development of historiographyadequate to the study of religion

Religion after Religion

I cannot assume that readers are familiar with Wasserstromrsquos booknor can I deal with all the issues and arguments of this complexwork So I must begin with a detailed summary while insisting thatnothing can substitute for reading the work in its entirety

The three eponymous scholars listed in the subtitle of Wasser-stromrsquos book were the specialists in religion who between 1949 and1978 attended Jungrsquos Eranos circle Their influence was ldquoperhapsthe most dynamic and innovative discourse on lsquoreligionrsquo in the sec-ond half of the twentieth centuryrdquo (Wasserstrom 1999 6) and theHistory of Religions attained its status due largely to these threescholars (8) Wasserstrom concludes that ldquo[t]he overarching theorythey shared hellipwas a shared idea of religion after religion hellip a non-religious religiosity a secular antimodernism hellip some new form ofreligion after the expiration of traditional formsrdquo (ix-x) These ldquoHisto-rians of Religionsrdquo1 differ significantly but ldquoshare important evenfundamental features of their theoryrdquo (19) They used their scholar-ship ldquoin a way that seemed somehow subordinated to a mutedmetahistorymdashif not to a covert theologyrdquo (24) They ldquoretroject[ed]theosophy into the core of their respective traditionsrdquo (35) and ldquode-manded acquiescence to the proposition that this esoteric core was

1 Wasserstrom uses the term ldquoHistory of Religionsrdquo to refer specifically to thethought of Eliade Corbin and Scholem as distinct from other historians of religionsFor the purposes of this essay I will adopt the convention of writing ldquoHistoryian ofReligionsrdquo when I follow Wasserstromrsquos usage

70 bryan rennie

the religious stuff of religion hellip this theosophical assumption and themystocentrism they derived from it led them to certain conclusionsabout an autonomous reality for religious phenomenonrdquo (36 [sic])

Wasserstrom argues that both Corbin and Eliade ldquowere involvedwith so-called speculative masonry though by uncertain channels ofinfluencerdquo (38) ldquoReintegrationrdquomdashcrucial to all three scholarsmdashwas atechnical term of Reneacute Gueacutenon (47) and the ldquoultimate sourcerdquo of theidea was Martines de Pasqually who ldquowas of Marrano ancestryrdquo (39)J F Molitor who made claims for ldquoChristian Kabbalahrdquo (269 n 18)ldquohad perhaps the single biggest impact on Scholemrsquos conceptualiza-tion of Kabbalahrdquo (39) and ldquobequeathed not only to Corbin andEliade but also to Scholem the concept of theosophy a notion at theheart of their History of Religionsrdquo (39) Molitor translated Kabbalahldquotraditionrdquo (40) and so Wasserstrom concludes that the categoryldquotraditionrdquo in Scholem like ldquotraditional societyrdquo in Eliade has itssource in Christian Kabbalah (40) Although ldquoit would hellip be patentlyabsurd to consider Scholem an lsquoinitiatedrsquo or lsquopracticingrsquo Christiankabbalistrdquo (41) it is ldquonot at all implausiblerdquo that Scholemrsquos concep-tions of Kabbalah have a Christian Kabbalistic source Wasserstromasserts that

Christian Kabbalah provided key terms including ldquoreintegrationrdquo ldquotra-ditionrdquo and ldquotheosophyrdquo and a formative intellectual inspiration forScholem Eliade may or may not have been an initiate but certainlytraveled in close proximity with initiates (Evola Gueacutenon Corbin toname a few) hellip Corbin quite unabashedly and Eliade at most ob-liquely each portrayed himself to be a spiritual heirmdashinitiatemdashof thisselfsame ldquotraditionrdquo Scholem most emphatically did not but hellip heremained dialectical hellip openly in conversation hellip with this tradition (49)

So the ldquoHistorians of Religionsrdquo were religious even as they rejectedexoteric modes of belief and practice Their understanding of religionis a ldquoreligion after religionrdquo a paradoxical belief in the transcendentafter that belief has been rejected as untenable and Scholem andCorbin are ldquopreeminent examples of the lsquoreligious study of religionrsquordquo(66)

However with this paradoxical understanding of ldquoa monotheismbeyond exoteric ethicsrdquo their views of

Judaism and Islam hellip had passed through the looking glass of theoso-phy emerging unrecognizable to most Muslims and Jews hellip their inter-pretation of religion is itself religious even as it is post religious hellip It isitself a paradoxmdasha purportedly ldquoreligiousrdquo study of monotheism that


rejects monotheismrsquos fundamental emphasis on the transcendence ofGod and the demands of law (63)

Under the influence of German Romanticism Scholem and Corbinmade mysticism rather than law the center of their own traditionsand excluded law from their view of religion (58) which resulted in aldquomonotheism without lawrdquo (59)

Wasserstrom further argues that the strategies of the ldquoHistorians ofReligionsrdquo were enabled by their ability to piece together originalcreations from historical data (98) Such creation is poesis artifice artrather than science and he considers ldquoHistory of Religions hellip amodernist art formrdquo (100) Wasserstrom focuses most on Eliadersquosldquoanalogous dramaturgyrdquo (104) Not only was Eliade ldquoa fiction writer ofsome noterdquo (101) but also he understood the power of magic andshamanism to be that of spectacle and drama assimilable to all ritualtheatre This is ldquofictionally expressed in his 1978 novella NineteenRosesrdquo (105) where ldquoaccording the protagonist hellip the dramatic specta-cle could become very soon a new eschatology or soteriologyrdquo (106referring to Eliade 1989 205-206) Such ldquoaesthetic esotericismrdquo how-ever is no answer to the disenchantment of the worldmdashldquoIt was notdesigned to be a workable socio-religious program but rather anaesthetic critiquerdquo (109-110) Wasserstrom sees the work of art consti-tuted by the ldquoHistory of Religionsrdquo as ldquonot so much a total work of artso much as it was a work of art about totality The lsquorealrsquo is the lsquowholersquo inthis conception This unrealizable vision elevated a vision no onecould actually seerdquo (110) This gave each ldquoHistorian of Religionsrdquo hisauthority as the only one able to see the whole on which he centeredhis own work (of art) Along with the turn to Romantic philosophy wasa turn to myth Widespread from the late nineteenth century this waseven embraced by scholars such as Rosenzweig Bloch CassirerBuber and by Martin Heidegger who represented this ldquonew think-ingrdquo according even to Rosenzweig However for the Weimar Jewsldquo[t]he turn to myth was a turn to history hellip unlike proto-Nazi mythinfatuation their myth studies were not regressiverdquo (114) Most Jewishthinkers who made this turn to myth ldquoabandoned it after the NationalSocialist appeal to myth was actualizedrdquo (123)

For the three ideas of renovatio and of nationalism were signifi-cantly linked since they ldquowere importantly engaged in the nationalis-tic struggles of Iran Romania and Israelrdquo (129) While Eliadersquos na-tionalism was ldquodifferentrdquo from Scholemrsquos Zionism it was ldquoperhapsequally vehementrdquo (131) since Eliade according to Wasserstrom

72 bryan rennie

ldquoevoked the spiritual revolution of the Legion of the ArchangelMichael in its own terms without the slightest criticismrdquo (131) One ofthe central themes of the fascism typical of the Legion was that of theldquonew manrdquo and this theme links Eliadersquos pre- and post-war writings(132) Likewise Corbinrsquos ldquopersophiliardquo integrally involved the con-cept of rebirth and ldquoarticulated a certain spiritual nationalismrdquo (133)The conception of Weltalter among which the current aeon is themost decadent lent itself to this theme Wasserstrom states thatldquoEliade wrote throughout his career on the Hindu theory of worldages which seemed to underpin his implied belief that we are pres-ently living in an age imminently due for dissolutionrdquo (141) Out ofthis dark age the ldquoHistorians of Religionsrdquo apparently could hope toescape by renovatio (143) This could be a renewal of the existing orderor a new creation after the destruction of the existing order AlthoughEliade did not explicitly choose between the two Wasserstrom con-cludes that his preference for the latter is revealed by several sources(Eliade 1977 145 ldquothe eventual catastrophic disappearance of hu-manityrdquo and Eliadersquos Freud Lecture of 1974 ldquoThe occult and themodern worldrdquo in Eliade 1976 47-68 Wasserstrom 1999 313 n112) For Eliade ldquocollective renovatio will come after the annihilationof this stage of historyrdquo (143) Wasserstrom concludes that the apoca-lypse has already happened ldquoThe apocalypse becomes the modernitself Eranos is afterward as suchrdquo (144 emphasis original)

It is argued that Corbinrsquos understanding of religion ldquorested on hisconception of the imaginal hellip [which] argued for the ontologicalreality of the objects of visionary experiencerdquo (148) Further histheory of hidden authority is grounded in Shilsquoi imamology and theOccultation of the last Imam (149) Thus Wasserstrom concludesldquoCorbin was neither a historian of religions nor an academic philoso-pher hellip Corbin understood himself to be a prophetrdquo who was ldquocon-ducting a private war on reasonrdquo His esoteric art of writing derivedfrom Schellingrsquos narrative philosophy was in fact ldquoa form of lyinghellip covering half-truths in something exotic like camouflage or heav-enly deception or higher truthsrdquo Wasserstrom quotes Weber to theeffect that ldquoplain intellectual integrityrdquo is the only relevant virtue inthe academy and affirms that ldquoour work as historians of religion ispointless if it is not honestrdquo (154)

While the book depicts Scholem as one who ldquochampioned histori-cal research and the historical methodrdquo Corbinrsquos ldquoimaginalrdquo andldquopropheticrdquo turn characterizes his anti-historicism and he developed


ldquothe foundations for a full-blown metahistoryrdquo (159) He claimed thatonly some reference to a divine extra-historical origin for past historyrescues history from absurdity The three ldquoargued mightily that ametahistorical reality is involvedrdquo which transcends time (160-161)Wasserstrom compares them in their response to ldquocreatio ex nihilordquoCorbin repudiated it and Scholem ldquoremarked rather pointedly on thedistinctiveness of this Jewish conceptrdquo (164) However all three ldquoHis-torians of Religionsrdquo marginalized the concept and ldquoinstead of apersonal God willing creation out of nothing at a moment in timeCorbin and Eliade preferred instead the recurring cyclic process ofbirth and rebirth inside the divine liferdquo (164) Furthermore ldquothe cen-trality of esoterism stressed by the Historians of Religions may haveshunted aside the claims these monotheisms normatively made aboutthemselves In so nudging God from his role as creator within thesetraditions they could shove into his place Nature or Life or theCosmos For this move they drew from Naturphilosophierdquo (164)Scholem saw this Naturphilosophie as ldquoa smuggled sort of seculariza-tionrdquo incommensurable with Judaism Thus his ldquopersonal commit-ment forced him to part company decisively from Corbin andEliaderdquo However this commitment was not ldquoto Judaism but ratherto the theologico-political project of Zionismrdquo Scholem rejected asoteriology of nature and ldquoalone of the three committed himself toidentifying with and living publicly in a religious communityrdquo Healso faced ldquothe real question lsquoWhether when and in what form willreligion be an effective force in societyrsquo Corbin and Eliade chose esoteri-cism which by definition begs this questionrdquo (166) Theirs was asecularization however that permitted a salvation in history anldquoapocalypse alreadyrdquo (144) or ldquoRealized Eschatologyrdquo (167)

Wasserstrom further claims Eliade and Corbin ldquoemployed themyth of Ahriman-as-planetary-antagonist in ways that tended to blurinto a kind of philosophical anti-Judaismrdquo (177) that is they eitheridentified Ahriman with the Hebrew God or claimed that ldquothe Jewswere responsible for creating Satan out of Ahrimanrdquo (178) Corbinand Jung are said to have ldquoagreed in effect on the fundamental (ifesoteric) principle that the High God of the Hebrew Bible was in facta monstrous demiurge one of whose many names is Ahrimanrdquo (179)Wasserstrom employs a distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Judaism here The former indicates the racist bias against a culturalgroup the latter a religious position created by inverting fundamentalHebraic themes He is explicit that there is no evidence that Corbin

74 bryan rennie

was anti-Semitic (179) although he must have been anti-Judaicmdashgnosticism is in this sense inherently anti-Judaic Wasserstrommakes it plain however that he considers Eliade to have borne anldquoanti-Jewish animusrdquo that went beyond ldquoanti-Judaismrdquo and moreclosely approached anti-Semitism

This apparent equation of the High God of the Hebraic traditionwith the gnostic demiurge and the evil Ahriman leads to a ldquoMephisto-phelean theory of religionrdquo (203) For Eliade this promised to ldquoreversethe direction of history to follow the signals of myth back to originalconsciousness Eliadersquos History of Religions in this sense constitutes apsychoanalysis in reverserdquo (183) says Wasserstrom ldquoFreudian theory likeMarxist historicism according to Eliade was to be identified as aJewish sinrdquo furthermore ldquothis is not the only animus towards Jewsthat stimulated Eliadersquos reading of lsquohistoryrsquo rdquo (185) Accordingly theappreciation of the ldquoHistorians of Religionsrdquo for Jungrsquos Response to Jobldquoa post Holocaust assault on the God of the Jewish peoplerdquo (177) andldquoan attack on the Jewish God so shortly after the Shoahrdquo (324 see also323) is seen as evidence of their collusion in that attack

One final thememdashthat of the androgynemdashmuch discussed byJung Eliade and Corbin implies to Wasserstrom a theory of religionthat ldquopresumed an eschatological totality with certain social conse-quences A kind of theology of higher crime analogous perhaps tode Sadersquos lsquoSociety of the Friends of Crimersquo this theory evoked fanta-sies of release from the natural ordermdashGendermdashin order to elicit if notaccelerate even more potent fantasies of release from the constitu-tional ordermdashLawrdquo (212) Thus while the androgyne might representthe ldquowhole manrdquo this ldquo lsquowhole manrsquo hellip stands on a pile of corpsesrdquo(213) According to Eliade ldquothe Gnostic feels that he is freed fromthe laws that govern society he is beyond good and evilrdquo (1982 374)andmdashas gnostics themselvesmdashthe ldquoHistorians of Religionsrdquo mustsimilarly consider themselves beyond good and evil

In conclusion Wasserstrom points out that the ldquoHistory of Reli-gionsrdquo is ldquoon the decline in Religious Studiesrdquo and ldquoit is the New Ageto which much of the spirit of History of Religions has fledrdquo (238)This spirit ldquomay be most continuingly influential in the arts becauseit lies on the Arts side of the Arts and Sciences and on the romanticside of the classicalromantic dichotomy in the artsrdquo (239) Althoughwe cannot move beyond these scholars without understanding themfinally our relation to them must be one of recovery in the sense ofrecovering from them as well as ldquorediscovering their legacyrdquo (247)


There is much to commend about the book It is informative and agripping academic detective narrative It constitutes an interestingaccount of ldquophenomenologyrdquo as it was practiced particularly byCorbin (25-28) with the dangers inherent in any claim to revealsomething otherwise inaccessible to the senses That ldquothese Historiansof Religions effectively suspended ethics in favor of ontic depthsrdquo (225)is a salutary warningmdashany subordination of ethics to intellectualmetaphysics is liable to distract us from the important realities ofbehavior by focusing on second order intellectual justifications of thatbehavior Wasserstrom is rightly concerned ldquofor the fate of the study ofreligion restricted to the visionaryrdquo and about the assumption thatldquowhat is lsquoreally religiousrsquo hellip is something that turns out to fall underthe rubric of mysticismrdquo (240) He is rightly concerned that an eso-tericist study of religion has not ldquoprovided a wide enough program forpostmodern History of Religions to proceed and thriverdquo (240-241) Toadvance ldquowe also must find out what all sorts of believers have done asbelievers in the public life of believersrdquo (241) This is an admirable intent Itis appropriate that he historicizes his subjects drawing our attention tosocio-political influences all too often neglected The historical con-nection among these scholars the Eranos circle and the Bollingenfoundationrsquos financial subsidy of the formerrsquos activities is an importantobservation (153) Corbinrsquos connections to Iran its politicians and theoil it produced constitutes another significant link between the Eranoscircle and the three scholars The invocation of Schellingrsquos ldquonarrativephilosophyrdquo and ldquotautegoryrdquo are also admirable elements of Was-serstromrsquos analysis (40 57 100 124) and important issues in thehistoriography of religions The recognition of the interweaving ofGerman Romanticism in the history of religions is a valuable insight(54-55 see also Permenter 2000) The realization that the history ofreligions as practiced by these and other scholars is not only itselfreligious but also a ldquomodernist art formrdquo (100) is a potentially fertileobservation as is Wasserstromrsquos insight concerning the imperative ldquotolocate the History of Religions in the disciplines at largerdquo (239) Fi-nally the bibliographic material is extremely useful Few interestedparties could read his work without finding some obscure but valuabletextual references

Despite these admirable elements I have serious disagreementswith both Wasserstromrsquos conclusions and his method specificallywith his representation of history which especially in respect ofEliade differs significantly from my own (see Rennie 1996 2000

76 bryan rennie

2002) I cannot accept that the establishment of specific commonali-ties between two or more authors justifies the quotation of one ofthem as representative of another in some way other than thoseestablished Wasserstromrsquos indication of ldquoresonant parallelsrdquo amongGueacutenon Evola and Eliade in their antipathy to Freudian psycho-therapy in no way justifies his citation of Gueacutenonrsquos observation of aconnection between Einstein Bergson and Freud through theirJudaism and its ldquomaleficentrdquo aspects as representing Eliadersquos opinion(184 and 328 n 14) The support for Wasserstromrsquos accusation thatldquoFreudian theory like Marxist historicism according to Eliade wasto be identified as a Jewish sinrdquo is a long footnote (328-329) inreference to Eliadersquos analysis of history in Cosmos and History whichnowhere substantiates the claim that Eliade saw psychoanalysis as aldquoJewish sinrdquo (Wasserstromrsquos argument is similar to that of Dubuisson[1993] to which I have already responded [Rennie 1996 86 167])Another example is the observation that Corbinrsquos description of nar-rative philosophy as ldquoabsolved of the dilemma which obsesses thosewho ask is it myth or is it historyrdquo (Spiritual Body and Celestial Earthxii cited in Wasserstrom 1999 57) I agree that this constitutes aldquoliberating apathyrdquo a reprehensible independence from historicalrealities However its ascription to anyone other than Corbin himselfis unwarranted and Eliade is simply assumed to espouse an anti-historicism identical to Corbinrsquos In fact Eliadersquos insistence thatldquoevery manifestation of the sacred takes place in some historical situ-ationrdquo (1958 2) militates against that conclusion Urban (2001 440)is aware of Wasserstromrsquos stretching to ldquosee connectionsrdquo in this way

Similarly Benavides (2001 450) raises the question of ldquoindictmentsby associationrdquo One example would be that whenever Wasserstromhas cause to mention Julius Evola a self-styled ldquosuperfascistrdquo and one-time ideologue for Mussolini he insists on the latterrsquos closeness toEliade who he claims was ldquoa longtime colleaguerdquo (Wasserstrom1999 17 77) even calling Evola ldquoEliadersquos mentorrdquo (101) Wasser-strom refers to his own work ldquoEliade and Evolardquo to support theseclaims (18 n 65 108 n 57) but there are no further bibliographicreferences and this work remains unpublished2 That Eliade is fre-

2 Although Wasserstrom has circulated the text privately and read from it at the1999 New York University conference on mysticism I cannot cite unpublished workThe proceedings of the aforementioned conference are currently in press as TheUnknown Remembered Gate (Wolfson and Kripal 2002) and when they appear will givesubstance to my argument


quently and exclusively associated with rightist authors such as Evolaand Juumlnger (87) supports Wasserstromrsquos critical representation How-ever it is a purely rhetorical device Eliadersquos other correspondence andfriendships are suppressed to achieve this appearance For examplethe correspondence between Eliade and the liberal Italian historian ofreligions Raffaele Pettazzoni contains over 130 letters exchangedover a period of 33 years until Pettazzonirsquos death in 1959 (Spineto1994) The correspondence between Eliade and Stig Wikander inUppsala Sweden is comparable in its significance to that withPettazzoni and likewise shows Wasserstromrsquos emphasis on the rela-tively minor correspondence with Evola to be misleading (Timusup3 andCiurtin 2000)

The endnotes often betray circularity and lack of support for thetext For example ldquo[t]hese esoteric influences on Corbin might implyan initiatic connectionsrdquo (327 n 54) remains a statement of barepossibility rather than evidence A note given in supposed support ofGueacutenonrsquos influence on Eliade cites Enrico Montanarirsquos articleldquoEliade e Gueacutenonrdquo (273 n 71) However Montanari actually pointsout a series of significant disagreements between the two and con-cludes that Gueacutenonrsquos influence should not be over-emphasized (seeSpineto 2001 75) Wasserstrom says that ldquoCorbin and Eliade hellipseem to have enjoyed initiatic warrants for their esoterismrdquo (212) anda note refers the reader back to his own chapter two for support (339n 57) However the strongest claim made there was that ldquoCorbinquite unabashedly and Eliade at most obliquely each portrayed him-self to be the spiritual heirmdashinitiatemdashof this selfsame lsquotraditionrsquo [ofChristian Kabalah]rdquo (49) This is not evidence

Wasserstrom is a master of a mosaic form of argument in whichcomponent parts appear to represent something that they themselvesare not He makes his work appear a coherent whole but inspectionreveals the mortar that binds the fragments to be largely in the sub-junctive mood made malleable with what ldquomightrdquo ldquomayrdquo orldquoseems tordquo have been and even what ldquomay be possible perhapsrdquo(163) For example on the strength of nothing more than a ldquomayperhapsrdquo a whole paragraph actually describing Heidegger is appliedto Corbin and by mere association to Eliade (173)

Many slippery slope arguments go from implying what might pos-sibly seem to be the case to affirming that this is in fact the casewithout evidence to warrant the transition Eliadersquos relation to Chris-tian Kabbalah begins with a vague connection to ldquospeculative ma-

78 bryan rennie

sonryrdquo through ldquouncertain channels of influencerdquo (38) movesthrough his use of the notion of theosophy (39) to his familiarity withGueacutenon (40) until (by page 43) it becomes a confident assertion ofldquoEliadersquos lifetime infatuation with Christian Kabbalahrdquo The ques-tion of the three scholarsrsquo ldquotheosophyrdquo proceeds by similar means areal connection is established to the German Romantics who em-braced a self-styled theosophy then this same theosophy is ascribedto the scholars whom they influenced on the slender grounds thatthey show an interest in theosophy and use the term Their under-standing of religion is then ldquotheosophicalrdquo the German Romanticview being read back in to their thought as if it is identical with thepersonal beliefs of the scholars Later it is simply stated as a matter ofcourse that their understanding is a ldquohermeneutics of monotheistictheosophyrdquo (67) the source of a ldquonew logicrdquo (nowhere actually de-scribed or explicitly embraced by the scholarsmdashbut as ldquoesotericistsrdquowe can only expect them to hold beliefs they do not express) How-ever in his synopsis of recent work on Eliade and ldquotraditionalismrdquoNatale Spineto concludes that the evidence is ldquonot enough to justifya description of the Eliadean position as lsquoesotericrsquo rdquo (2001 80)

The argument is proposed that the ldquoHistorians of Religionsrdquo over-emphasize the mystical component of the history of religions at theexpense of normative religion is increasingly widespread Howeverdoes normative religion need to be ldquoprotectedrdquo from mystical religionas if they were somehow competitors It is more reasonable to as-sume that religion involves both mystical and normative elementscomparable to Thomas Kuhnrsquos ldquorevolutionaryrdquo and ldquonormalrdquo sci-ence The former provides the ldquoparadigm-shiftingrdquo insight and thelatter consists of the ldquomopping-uprdquo and ldquopuzzle-solvingrdquo activities ofthose who accept the paradigm as their way of seeing the world Ashistorians of religions one of our tasks is to determine how and whya normative tradition became normative It is scarcely surprising norI think culpable that the scholars of the mid-1900s focused on themore dramatic and arguably more foundational mystical elements ofhuman religious behavior The question is does this focus necessarilymake them mystics themselves

Throughout Wasserstromrsquos work the belief of the believer is as-cribed to the scholar This attribution is at the heart of the claim thatthe ldquoHistory of Religionsrdquo is itself a religion after religion Even accept-ing that the perspectives of these scholars (in fact the whole of thestudy of religion) should be studied as a religion as Benavides con-


cludes (455) this does not make their perspectives identical to theperspectives of the believers they study This is an elementary fallacyin the history of religions In the study of literature the comparablefallacy is that of identifying the views of a character or narrator asthose of the author (Wasserstrom employs that fallacy too attribut-ing the views of Eliadersquos character Thanase to Eliade [106]) Theuniverse imaginare that Wasserstrom attributes to Eliade (245) may bemore reasonably attributed to the believers Eliade describes Simi-larly the transference of Eliadersquos understanding of the shamanrsquos per-formance and the dramatic function of the rope trick to his ldquoself-understanding of his own performancerdquo (104) is unsupported Yet itis used not only to justify the assertion that the ldquoHistorians of Reli-gionsrdquo were themselves modern artists but also to identify Eliadewith the shaman who ldquopretends at the height of his ritual to be theUniversal Sovereignrdquo (105) implying massive hubris In the sameway although the coincidentia oppositorum can ldquodissipate the power ofethical imperativesrdquo (78) that is for the adherent of the tradition ratherthan for the scholar and actual evidence is needed to warrant theimplication that this ethical ambivalence affected the scholars Doesthe fact that ldquoEliade wrote throughout his career on the Hindutheory of world agesrdquo actually ldquounderpin his implied belief that weare presently living in an age imminently due for dissolutionrdquo (141)Spineto brings to our notice that Eliadersquos optimism regarding thecreation of culture distinguishes him from the ldquotraditionalistsrdquo andthis is not consistent with any such apocalyptic expectations

It is by means of this unsupported contention that the scholarsrsquoldquoreligionrdquo is identical to religions that they describe that many impli-cations about their personal beliefs are warranted Wasserstrom actu-ally claims that his project ldquois not determined to reveal their lsquorealrsquoreligious identities Besides being indiscreet the answer to that ques-tion is in any event imponderablerdquo (242) Yet he does so in veryspecific terms telling us that they were gnostics in the specific senseof seeing the world as ldquoa pit a mistake a foul abortionrdquo (128) wholdquoagreed in effect on the fundamental (if esoteric) principle that theHigh God of the Hebrew Bible was in fact a monstrous demiurgeone of whose many names is Ahrimanrdquo (179) Their belief was theo-sophical resting on the concept of an eschatological renovatio Theywere esotericists who ldquoseem to have enjoyed initiatic warrants fortheir esoterismrdquo (212) and ldquoCorbin was Zarathustran through andthroughrdquo (244) These are all specific claims regarding religious iden-

80 bryan rennie

tity Such inconsistency pervades the work Despite a claim ldquoneitherto indict nor to uncover conspiraciesrdquo (11) he has variously drawnthe threemdashespecially Corbin and Eliademdashas megalomaniacs with amessiah complex (168) anti-Jewish (177) fascist (155) and withoutethics (213 225) whose central concept of eschatological renovatioldquostands on a pile of corpsesrdquo (213)

It is ironic that Wasserstrom complains of his subjectsrsquo ldquopromiscu-ous application of connectionsrdquo (142) by which they ldquopieced togetheroriginal artifacts from the raw materials of historyrdquo (98) He is veryclose to his subjects in this way (ldquoI must explicate connections be-tween various seemingly unrelated textsrdquo [203]) If there is a work ofart here it is surely his skillful construction of such a solid-seemingedifice out of such tenuous connections Certainly his description ofthe ldquoHistorians of Religionsrdquo as employing ldquoextreme formulationsgrandiose projects and pyrotechnic displays of eruditionrdquo (216) ap-plies precisely to his own work as Urban (2001 440) realizes

History after history

Two questions unavoidably arise concerning my disagreement withWasserstrom First is this a matter of objectivity and accuracy or oneof alternative but equally justified interpretations Second if the ar-gument of Religion after Religion is as flawed as I suggest how has itachieved its success I believe it necessary to acquire an understand-ing of the contemporary discourse on historiography both to give aninformed response to these specific questions and to reap the benefitsof work done by theorists in the field of academic historiography Tothat end I have undertaken to review three major works An intro-duction to these books will help us to understand the developmentand nuance of contemporary problems of historiography and theconflicts and solutions to which these problems have given rise I willendeavor to allow each to remain what it was in context keeping theeditorial mortar to a minimum maintaining the original ordering ofselections and thus encouraging the voices of the original authorsAgain no summary can be a substitute for reading the originalworks but I hope to summarize these sources fairly in making myown points Historians have already given much thought to the sortof problems that beset the history of religions and we have much tolearn from them


As we have seen Wasserstrom is concerned with the thriving of aldquopostmodern History of Religionsrdquo (240-241) and his description ofthe ldquoHistorians of Religionsrdquo as ldquoantimodernist moderns whose mod-ernism was defined by its opposition to modernityrdquo (60) sounds almostlike a definition of postmodernism But what is postmodern historio-graphy Peter Novick has called Hayden White the ldquomost radicalrepresentative of the epistemological avant-garderdquo (1988 599) whoinsisted that ldquo[h]istorical stories like all others were made rather thanfoundrdquo (1988 600) and that there was no single correct view of anyevent or process but rather many correct views ldquoeach requiring itsown style of representationrdquo (White 1986 487) Thus White was aldquocentral symbolic figurerdquo of what might be called postmodernhistoriography (Novick 1988 603) Although Novick insists that ldquothenoncrusading nonmembers of this nonschool had no need of leader-ship hellip those who viewed the new mood with alarm required asymbolic embodiment of extreme lsquonihilistic relativismrsquo within the pro-fession and Hayden White was made to order for this rolerdquo (1988499) He is thus a suitable author with whom to begin

Hayden WhitemdashMetahistory

White ldquoconsider[s] the historical work as what it most manifestly ishellip a verbal structure in the form of narrative prose discourse thatpurports to be a model or icon of past structures and processes in theinterest of explaining what they were by representing themrdquo (2 ix emphasisoriginal all references are to White 1973) In the nineteenth centuryhistory as a ldquoprofession became progressively academicized The pro-fessorate formed a clerisy for the promotion and cultivation of asocially responsible historiography it trained and licensed appren-tices maintained standards of excellence ran the organs of intra-professional communication and in general enjoyed a privilegedplace in the humanistic and social scientific sectors of the universi-tiesrdquo (136) However appeals to methodological rigidity and non-partisanship were made without any clear idea how to achieve them(137) The ldquohistorical methodrdquo

consisted of a willingness to go to the archives without any preconcep-tions whatsoever to study the documents found there and then to writea story about the events attested by the documents in such away as tomake the story itself the explanation of ldquowhat had happenedrdquo in the

82 bryan rennie

past hellip The idea was to ldquotell the storyrdquo about ldquowhat had happenedrdquowithout significant conceptual residue or ideological preformation ofthe materials (141 142)

Whitersquos study of four ldquomaster historians of the nineteenth centuryrdquomdashMichelet Ranke Tocqueville Burckhardtmdashindicates that ldquothey allagreed that a true history should be written without preconceptionsobjectively out of an interest in the facts of the past for themselvesalone and with no aprioristic inclination to fashion the facts into aformal systemrdquo (142) However ldquo[w]hen hellip they purported to besimply lsquotelling what actually happenedrsquo and to be explaining the pastby telling its lsquostoryrsquo they were all explicitly embracing the conceptionof explanation by description but were actually practicing the art ofexplanation by emplotmentrdquo (143) This is not so novel a claimldquoContinental European thinkersmdashfrom Valeacutery and Heidegger toSartre Leacutevi-Strauss and Michel Foucaultmdashhave cast serious doubtson the value of a specifically lsquohistoricalrsquo consciousness stressed thefictive character of historical reconstructions and challenged historyrsquosclaims to a place among the sciencesrdquo (1-2) White for his part aimsldquoto establish the ineluctably poetic nature of the historical work andto specify the prefigurative element in a historical account by whichits theoretical concepts were tacitly sanctionedrdquo (xi) He argues thatldquoin any field of study not yet reduced (or elevated) to the status of agenuine science thought remains the captive of the linguistic modein which it seeks to grasp the outline of objects inhabiting its field ofperceptionrdquo (xi) Among other things he concludes that the possiblemodes of historiography (and philosophy of history)

are in reality formalizations of poetic insights that analytically precedethem and that sanction the particular theories used to give historicalaccounts the aspect of an ldquoexplanationrdquo hellip there are no apodicticallycertain theoretical grounds on which one can legitimately claim anauthority for any one of the modes over the others as being moreldquorealisticrdquo hellip as a corollary of this the best grounds for choosing oneperspective on history rather than another are ultimately aesthetic ormoral rather than epistemological hellip the demand for the scientizationof history represents only the statement of a preference for a specificmodality of historical conceptualization the grounds of which are eithermoral or aesthetic but the epistemological justification of which stillremains to be established (xii)

The past is a ldquochaos of beingrdquo (144) from which the historian mustcreatively fashion a coherent narrative Again this is not new Whitepoints out that ldquoGibbon Hume and Kant had effectively dissolved


the distinction between history and fiction on which earlier thinkerssuch as Bayle and Voltaire had based their historiographical enter-prisesrdquo (48) but while even in 1973 this may have been old news toliterary critics and philosophers of history it was still disturbing toacademic historians and has still today not percolated through tomany historians of religions

In the physical sciences progress is made by way of agreementregarding what will count as problems and what form explanationwill take For historians however ldquono such agreement exists or hasever existedrdquo (13) and so White concludes that there is ldquoan irreduc-ible ideological component in every historical accountrdquo (21) and ldquonoextra-ideological grounds on which to arbitrate among the conflictingconceptions of the historical process and of historical knowledge ap-pealed to by the different ideologiesrdquo (26) Faced with such critiquethe problem of historical knowledge ldquohad moved to the center ofconcerns of the philosophersrdquo by the early nineteenth century (39)Historians were inspired ldquoby the hope of creating a perspective onthe historical process that would be as objective as that from whichscientists viewed the process of naturerdquo (39) but ldquothe consistentelaboration of a number of equally comprehensive and plausible yetapparently mutually exclusive conceptions of the same set of eventswas enough to undermine confidence in historyrsquos claim to lsquoobjectiv-ityrsquo lsquoscientificityrsquo and lsquorealismrsquordquo (41)

Marx and Nietzsche contributed by historicizing objectivity and sobringing its very nature under question For Nietzsche there were asmany truths about the past as there were perspectives on it (White1973 332) Nietzsche implies that ldquohistorical wisdom hellip is dramaticinsight fabulation or hellip lsquoemplotmentrsquordquo (352) and despite other disa-greements with Hegel he ldquotook up and pushed to its conclusion aninsight which underlay all of Hegelrsquos thinking about historical knowl-edgemdashthat is the extent to which the rules governing thought abouthistory had their origins in linguistic habits and conventionsrdquo (374)

The Italian historian and philosopher of history Benedetto Crocemdashldquothe most talented historian of all of the philosophers of history ofthe centuryrdquo (White 1973 378)mdashalso subsumed history under thegeneral concept of art (381) Crocersquos critique of Hegel

hinged upon the charge that Hegel having failed to perceive the au-tonomy of art had necessarily failed to understand the autonomy ofhistory hellip This permitted Croce to say that historiography could neverbe anything but ldquoscientifically rigorousrdquo in one of its aspectsmdashthat is in

84 bryan rennie

its preliminary gathering of datamdasheven while it remained ldquoa work ofartrdquo in the othermdashthat is in its narration of what it had found (411)

Whitersquos conclusion is that ldquodebates over how history ought to bewritten [are] essentially matters of stylistic variation within a singleuniverse of discourserdquo (427) since

no single linguistic protocol succeeded in carrying the day among thehistorians (or among the social sciences in general) in the way thatmathematics and logic has done for the physical sciences from the timeof Newton on Since history resisted every effort to formalize discoursehistorians were committed to the plurality of interpretative strategiescontained in the uses of ordinary language (428)

In the consideration of his own subjects White

moot[s] the issue of which represents the most correct approach tohistorical study Their status as possible modes of historical representa-tion or conceptualization does not depend on the nature of the ldquodatardquothey used to support their generalizations or the theories they invokedto explain them it depends rather upon the consistency coherence andilluminative power of their respective visions of the historical field (4)

From this viewpoint it is a matter of the internal characteristics ofldquoconsistency coherence and illuminative powerrdquo of respective view-points that allow readers to adjudicate between conflicting readingsof history rather than external characteristics of accuracy or objectiv-ity This is the sort of postmodern position that threatens to paralyzethe capacity to judge between competing interpretations that appearcomparably consistent coherent and illuminative to a reader whodoes not possess the detailed information available to the competingauthors However if there is any substance to Whitersquos claims thenthe question is not so much one of devaluing written histories asaesthetic confabulations but of locating them within a field of humanundertaking that is inherently aesthetic Beyond that however re-mains the question of how to evaluate the respective significance oftwo or more ldquopoetic insightsrdquo which result in different representa-tions of history such as Wasserstromrsquos and my own Is one moreobjectively accurate than the other

Peter NovickmdashThat Noble Dream

Novick traces the idea of objectivity from the founding of the Ameri-can historical profession in the 1880s and shows various reasons for


its establishment as the central norm of history and how a changingcultural social and political climate produced ldquohistorical relativismrdquowhich ldquoput believers in objectivity on the defensiverdquo This led to ldquoanew somewhat chastened objectivist synthesisrdquo which many factorscaused to collapse thus ldquothe idea of historical objectivity has becomemore problematic than ever beforerdquo (Novick 1988 16-17)

The concept of historical objectivity reached America from thewissenschaftliche Objectivitaumlt of the German academy where history wasone of the Geisteswissenschaften distinct from the NaturwissenschaftenLeopold von Ranke ldquothe father of modern historical scholarshiprdquowas one of the most influential figures in this process However therewas an ldquoalmost total misunderstandingrdquo of von Ranke in the Anglo-phone academy His ambition was to show the past ldquowie es eigentlichgewesenrdquo which has habitually been translated ldquoas it really wasrdquo orldquoas it actually wasrdquo In fact it has been established that in the nine-teenth century eigentlich also meant ldquoessentiallyrdquo and Ranke charac-teristically used it that way (28) For Ranke the historianrsquos task was topenetrate to ldquoessencesrdquo His epistemology was ldquonaturalizedrdquo into anEnglish empiricist idiom and read as meaning that truth was accuraterepresentation which might seem simple common sense in the Eng-lish-speaking world but is a view not held in Germany since Kant(30 31)

In its passion to establish its authority Anglophone historiographywas ldquoprone to scientific imagery and the assumption of the mantle ofsciencerdquo (33) and it repudiated theorizing as anathema (38) Histori-ans disparaged ldquohistory as literaturerdquo and ldquohistory as artrdquo (40) andldquothe adjective lsquoobjectiversquo when applied to knowledge has manymeanings and implications One of the most problematic but at thesame time one of the most highly valued of its connotations is lsquoau-thoritativersquo Objective knowledge is knowledge which commands as-sent which is clearly distinguishable from lsquomere [ie subjective]opinionrsquordquo (51) Assent was achieved by the professionalization of dis-ciplinary history and ldquostandardized technique was the foundation oflsquotranspersonal replicabilityrsquomdashone of the most important and perhapsthe most coherent definitions of objectivityrdquo But this reveals objectiv-ity to be ldquoa social phenomenon brought into existence by the estab-lishment of methodological consensus hellip objectivity cannot be said toexist before professionalizationrdquo (52) Even that consensus was in-complete and Novick traces ldquoa descent of attitudes concerning ob-jectivity that it is easily attainable that it is attainable with difficulty

86 bryan rennie

that it is unattainable but approachable and that at least in mostcommon usages it is an incoherent idealrdquo (101)

By the eve of the First War the relativity of historical knowledgewas beginning to emerge In 1910 Carl Beckermdashlater to becomepresident of the American Historical Associationmdashquestioned thevery notion of hard fact (Novick 1988 105-106) Fact he wrote wasldquoalmost impossible to distinguish from lsquotheoryrsquo to which it is com-monly supposed to be so completely antitheticalrdquo He also ldquodenied hellipthe traditional distinction between (scientific) analysis and (interpreta-tive) synthesisrdquo (106) Even after its conclusion the war was ldquothesubject of interminable historical controversy undermining the faiththat professional historical scholarship would converge on a consen-sual objective truthrdquo (111) and contributing to the confirmation ofBeckerrsquos thesis

Along with Becker Charles Beard another AHA president com-posed the most influential front in the attack on historical objectivityin the inter-war years These two were convinced that the goal ofobjective reconstruction was not only unattainablemdashthe ldquoRankeanrdquoprogram of objectivity was inherently conservative The process ofdeciding what was a fact depended on values The approved profes-sional posture of impartiality was (often unconsciously) dishonestmdashldquothe only way to play fair with the reader was to make onersquos valuesand purposes explicitrdquo (Novick 1988 271)

World War II saw American culture turn toward affirmation andthe search for certainty (281) Consequently ldquothe attack on moralrelativism was part of an effort to rearm the West spiritually for thebattle with the totalitariansrdquo (282) It was argued that we couldnrsquot actpassionately and with commitment unless we act out of a belief in the(singular) truth and the (singular) right (286-287) Both right and leftfor different reasons attacked relativism (288) It was held thatdoubts about the existence of objective truth figured prominently inthe rise of fascism (289) and ldquoclaims that Becker and Beardrsquos relativ-ism legitimized Nazi and Soviet historical practice multiplied fromthe late 1930s onwardrdquo (290) The denigration of ideology character-istic of American culture in the cold war years was directly related toclaims that objectivity was the hallmark of thought in the Free World(299) Yet the denial that dominant thought is ideological is one ofthe greatest strengths of ideologymdashldquothe key move in the subordina-tion of intellect to power Postwar historiansrsquo insistence that their


work was free of ideological taint was a textbook illustration of [this]pointrdquo (301)

Other factors provoking opposition to historical relativism weresimilarly explicable in socio-political rather than epistemologicalterms As the Cold War set in ldquofewer and fewer analytic philoso-phers of history defended the traditional norms of historical objectiv-ity The majority hellip concluded that in selecting elements either of adescription or an explanation historians had no choice but to makedecisions based largely on their own values and intentionsrdquo (396)Many philosophers and historians who began as objectivists movedtowards some species of relativism (396) Arthur Danto gave thephrase ldquonoble dreamrdquo to the ideal of objectivity and claimed thatldquohistorical relativism will finally be vindicated hellip we cannot conceiveof history without organizational schemesrdquo (397) Karl Popper ldquoin allother respects a determined antirelativist hellip took what was thoughnot labeled as such a very lsquorelativistrsquo stancerdquo concerning history (395)and ldquoBecker and Beard were frequently acknowledged to have per-formed an important service in freeing historians from the belief thatlsquothe facts spoke for themselvesrsquordquo (410)

From the 1940s to the 1960s there was a diminution of confidencethat historiansrsquo interpretations would converge on a singular TruthPerspectival relativism was tolerated without abandoning the com-mitment to objectivity (415) However in the late 1960s and 1970sthe emerging historiographical left agreed with Marx and Engels onldquothe objective and scientific character of Marxismrdquo and of history(422) which rekindled the objectivity question (437) Subsequent re-appraisal was not all in favor of objectivity and ldquo[i]n the last thirdof the twentieth century the wind has been blowing from quite adifferent direction assaulting the old idea of objectivity with unprec-edented forcerdquo (522) Thus

in one field after another distinctions between fact and value and be-tween theory and observation were called into question For manypostures of disinterestedness and neutrality increasingly appeared asoutmoded and illusory It ceased to be axiomatic that the scholarrsquos orscientistrsquos task was to represent accurately what was ldquoout thererdquo Mostcrucially and across the board the notion of a determinate and unitarytruth about the physical or social world approachable if not ultimatelyreachable came to be seen by a growing number of scholars as achimera hellip

There is no satisfactory term with which to describe the multiple butloosely convergent assaults on received notions of objectivity which

88 bryan rennie

swept across the academic world from the 1960s onwards The mostcommon designation is ldquopostmodernrdquo (523-524)

Despite Novickrsquos evident misgivings about the word ldquopostmodernrdquohe uses it (554 567 570 573) as an umbrella term for the newassault on objectivity and he describes compellingly relativism andldquopostmodernismrdquo and their challenges to objectivism and scientismin philosophy (537-541) literary criticism (541-546) the social sci-ences (546-555) the judiciary (555-558) and psychoanalysis (558-563) Despite these currents

[t]he mater-of-fact antitheoretical and antiphilosophical objectivistempiricism which had always been the dominant stance of Americanhistorians continued to be enormously powerful For those in this groupit remained taken for granted that truth was ldquoout thererdquo somethingfound rather than made unitary not perspectival Though interpreta-tion was necessary it was at bottom the facts that mattered (593-594)

Yet there were too many examples of interpretative differences thatcould not be resolved by appeal to some neutral principle of disinter-ested scholarship (614) Demonstration of the ldquoautonomy of the argu-ment from details of the evidencerdquo was too frequent for the naiveobjectivist stance to remain tenable (617) ldquoThe absolute certitude ofhistorical factrdquo finally appears to be ldquoa position both philosophicallyuntenable and historiographically naiumlverdquo (620) Kuhn and Rorty hadsuggested a functional equivalent for objectivitymdashdisciplinary con-sensus (626)mdashalthough this cannot satisfy demands for some extra-human or absolute warrant for historical certitude With the frag-mentation of the field over these internal disagreements ldquo[a]s abroad community of discourse as a community of scholars united bycommon aims common standards and common purposes the disci-pline of history had ceased to existrdquo (628)

Robert F Berkhofer JrmdashBeyond the Great Story

In 1995 then Berkhoferrsquos Beyond the Great Story is a ldquohistory afterhistoryrdquo inspired by the fact that historicization has become so vitalin so many disciplines just when its whole approach is being chal-lenged in disciplinary history itself (Berkhofer 1995 ix) Berkhoferldquotreats some of the implications of the linguistic and rhetorical turnsas incorporated in modern literary and rhetorical theory for the writ-ing reading teaching and reviewing of historyrdquo and ldquoexamines his-


tory and histories as forms of representationrdquo He ldquosurveys the chal-lenges now gathered under the rubric of postmodernism and howhistorians have responded [and] covers the diverse roles of narrativein the creation of historical facts and their synthesis into what istermed (a) history and the possibility of multiple storiesrdquo (xi-xii) Healso treats the problem of ldquovalidating evidence deriving facts [and]producing a synthesisrdquo considering the incompleteness of the sourcesand problems of political partisanship moral judgment and advo-cacy (139) Following literary theorists in discussing voice in textsBerkhofer takes into account who speaks for whom and to whomrecognizing the implied author who speaks in or through the text tobe a convenient fiction (156) whose voice and viewpoint are thosemost compellingly represented

The recent ldquohistoric turnrdquo in the humanities ldquoto many Anglo-phone historians hellip appears to authorize their traditional practicesFrom their perspective Anglophone empiricism has survived a pe-riod of attack and vanquished Francophone theorizingrdquo But ldquothisself-congratulatory verdict seems not only premature but also un-founded for it fails to consider how the linguistic and other turnshave reinterpreted what any historic (re)turn could mean as method-ology or practice hellip What is now called the postmodernist challengeto traditional history began as the crisis of representation raised bylate modernist and structuralist theoristsrdquo (2 3) The contemporarydilemma is this advised to historicize and reveal the social and tem-poral location of thought text and action our very ability to do so issimultaneously undermined All of ldquothe theorizing in the human sci-ences resulted in no single paradigmrdquo and ldquomulticulturalism hellip que-ries whether the non-Western or the nondominant Other can berepresented fully in any form resembling traditional historyrdquo (9) Themost extreme challenge to the normal historical paradigm is the de-nial of ldquothe separation of history as the past from history as writingabout that past hellip [which] denies the ability of historians to know thepast as such For all practical purposes the past and written historyare the same for only as present-day text is the past constitutedrdquo (14)

The historian initially confronts a largely unconnected mass ofmaterial and goes on to show that sense can be made of it by reveal-ing certain pervasive themes (32) In normal historical practice

historical methods usually refer to the ways in which historians derivefacts from sources rather than how those facts are combined into a

90 bryan rennie

larger expository synthesis The standard handbooks discuss how tovalidate sources as evidence and how to derive reliable facts from suchevidence but they say little about how to connect those validated factsinto a coherent narrative or other exposition (29)

Despite this the normal historical paradigm presupposes coherent nar-rative as the sine qua non of historiography it is the way of describingthe past (36) In fact

only by predicating that the plenitude and context of the past consid-ered as history are comprehended from the viewpoint of a third personan omniscient or at least synoptic narrator can normal history prac-tice be understood hellip The Great Story hellip applies both to the largercontext of the partial histories and to the whole past conceived as his-tory that justifies the synthetic expositions of normal historians (38)

Such Great Stories ldquomake sense of the grand sweep of history andilluminate human destiny itselfrdquo While historians may be wary ofsuch Great Stories ldquoit seems that they cannot do without themrdquo (44)They serve as the context for histories both by connecting disparateelements and providing political and ethical grounding for history astext and discourse

The problem is that Great Stories while by definition presumed tobe singular are in actual practice plural The ldquovery premise of itssingularity and thus its superiority supposedly supports one interpre-tive version against all others in the professional disputes amonghistoriansrdquo (49) but past attempts to develop criteria for the identifi-cation of the ldquoSingle Right or Best Interpretationrdquo have failed be-cause the category itself is a ldquoFallacyrdquo (50) that ldquodenies multiplevoices and viewpointsrdquo (53) Berkhofer convincingly supports this ar-gument with reference to earlier historians who demonstrated thesetheses Lynn Hunt he says ldquoconcludes that histories do not have lsquoanunproblematic ground of truthrsquordquo Donald McCloskey Berkhofer ar-gues demonstrates ldquothat notwithstanding the explicit goals of econo-metric history to make it a science by writing according to the canonsand rhetoric of science much of that science was based upon tropesand metaphors appeals to authority and other devices of persua-sionrdquo John Nelson claims Berkhofer ldquoargues that rhetoric holds aplace equal epistemically as well as practically to logic in the wayscholars of the human sciences communicate among themselves andwith the publicrdquo (75 80 101) From these and other sources Berk-hofer concludes ldquohistorical representation is an art of arrangementwhether as narrative or argumentrdquo (105) He agrees with Hayden


White that emplotment ldquotransforms or configures a multiplicity ofevents characters and conditions into a narrativerdquo emplotment isthe ldquoanatomyrdquo of the narrative (118) Thus historians need to inves-tigate the shaping of historical discourse by literary and rhetoricalconventions which constrain the representation of history and thepatterning of the past itself as history (135)

Berkhofer accepts that only by taking a point of view can histori-ans ldquoseerdquo the past as history and thus create historical narrative Butauthor viewpoint ldquocreates the biases that confound historical prac-ticerdquo (168) the text produced under the normal historical paradigmldquois meant to be read from the same viewpoint that constructed it inthe first placerdquo (169) The challenge of dialogism in historical dis-course lies in representing viewpoints other than that of the historianAttempts to incorporate the Other into Western hegemonic historyhave maintained a singular (ldquobestrdquo or ldquorightrdquo) viewpoint under whichthe voices of the Others are subsumed (188) and have conceivedreality according to a single viewpoint (190) The spectrum ofhistoriography begins with this ldquosingle and univocalrdquo point of viewand moves through histories in which polyvocality is contained bythe historianrsquos own voice and viewpoint (198-99) The other end ofthe spectrum is not yet fully formed ldquotrue experiments in multi-vocality are rare because they challenge the normal historical para-digm of an ultimately single authorial viewpointrdquo (199) Examples ofpolyvocal histories include Richard Whitersquos The Middle Ground whichdepicts the Great Lakes Region as a world of multi-ethnic villagescomposed of tribal remnants and factions European and Americantraders and others instead of the traditional discrete white and Na-tive American social entities (123) and Judith Walkowitzrsquos City ofDreadful Delight which offers two beginnings and four endings for onechapter The book ldquoas a whole has multiple beginnings and endingsbecause hellip the same documentary artifacts have multiple readings inthe presentrdquo (124)

Berkhofer concludes that ldquothe practice of history as discourseought to be reflexiverdquo (243) ldquoReflexivityrdquo is a problem posed bypolitics epistemology perspective ethnocentrism ideology he-gemony and totalization in which reflexivity works among mutuallyreinforcing elements of a single paradigm However on inspection ofmultiple viewpoints competing paradigms reflexively deconstructone another and ldquothe very definition of history must take on a morereflexive meaning one that shows its socially constructed nature its

92 bryan rennie

self-consciousness of its own creation and the social conditions thatallow such a practicerdquo (7-8) Voice and viewpoint in histories aremultiple and so ldquothe practice of history as discourse ought to bereflexiverdquo (243) The reflexive stance may be a mixed blessing entail-ing the very irony disparaged by Hayden White (266) yet a ldquoreflexivecontextualization tries to surmount the basic dilemma of representa-tion itself by incorporating texts and counter texts discourses andcounterdiscourses into the same textualizationrdquo (268) Reflexive post-modern historiographies should seek to explicate both medium andmessage to ldquooperate in the conceptual spaces posed by the contra-dictions between textualism and contextualismrdquo (266) They mustengage all the problems of valuing diversity without uncriticallyprivileging a single viewpoint of multiple histories multiple realitiesmetahistory and the value of theory Thereby they might ldquodemystifyand deconstructrdquo what goes into history as text

The idea of multiple viewpoints suggests a multiplicity of timesand histories (270) Julia Kristeva has considered ldquoWomenrsquos Timerdquoas opposed to male time which tends to emphasize its own linearityFinally ldquothe idea of multiple times involves surrendering the idea(l)of a single past for many historiesrdquo (272) Postmodern historiographyshould ldquocombine metahistory and history Great Stories and historio-graphy hellip historicizing itself as it historicizes its subject matter hellipconflicting discourses will result in different approaches for differentpurposesmdashbut all it is to be hoped in reflexive dialoguerdquo (275)

Religion after Religion after history after history

The general drift of these three historiographical works is clear it istowards a painstaking self-awareness of the narrative construction ofhistories and towards a disciplined restraint of the singular authorialvoice in the face of phenomenal polyvocality Many works make noattempt to consider their own mode of representation or theirtextualization of time The singular authorial voice as in Wasser-stromrsquos case assumes complete authority over its textual materialand it presents its own telling of history as a simple objective descrip-tion of part of the Great Story of history No doubt Wasserstrom hadno intention of producing a ldquopostmodernrdquo history and thus no inten-tion of considering or extending the limitations of conventionalhistoriography and he cannot be faulted for failing to do so How-


ever the conventional historiography Wasserstrom employs effi-ciently renders credible even conventionally flawed historical argu-mentation by conferring upon the singular voice of the author asingular position of authority It conceals more effectively latent au-thorial agendas by presenting the singular narrative as the objectivedescription of actual event Novick draws our attention to questionsthat need to be asked in the light of the postmodern critique ofhistoriography what myths are at stake in any historical disagree-ment over interpretation (453) for whom is the historian working(513) and why construct this version of history What is its use (561)We can and I would suggest that we should disclose the answers tothese questions explicitly in our work

While appreciating postmodernism Berkhofer does not reject thenormal historical paradigm which may be the ldquobest way of policingand preserving their discipline in addition to being the best mode ofhistorical practicerdquo (228) Conventional historiography permits cer-tainty despite relativism distinguishes history from fiction and legiti-mizes history as an authoritative discipline (233-234) However con-ventional historiography as was seen at the outset of Hayden Whitersquosanalysis ldquoconsisted of a willingness to go to the archives without anypreconceptions whatsoeverrdquo (141) and it was not lost on either HughUrban (2001 445) or Gustavo Benavides (2001 454) that Wasser-stromrsquos approach far from being free of preconceptions is latentlytheological Urban points out that ldquoone might be tempted to accuseWasserstrom of being a kind of lsquocloset theologianrsquordquo (2001 445)Benavides states in stronger terms that Wasserstrom ldquobecomes atheologian an advocate of Yahweh hellip and more generally of mono-theism his assumption being all along that monotheism is a goodthing and that its rejection is fascist or racistrdquo (2001 454) and goes onto ask ldquoIs not this advocacy insofar as it is not explicit the mirrorimage of the esoteric advocacy of those he criticizesrdquo (2001 454)Benavides reiterates the point brought to our notice by RussellMcCutcheon (2001) and Benjamin Beit-Hallami (1999) that there isa tendency among scholars of religion to protect and defend the self-understanding of the religious believer to become ldquocaretakersrdquo andldquocelebratorsrdquo of and even ldquocollaboratorsrdquo with the religions understudy Obviously it is not the supposed religion after religion that isprotected here on the contrary an apparently critical stance isadopted by attacking this quasi-religious phenomenon It is a cham-pionship of nomocentric ethical monotheismmdashspecifically Judaism

94 bryan rennie

mdashthat is undertaken The actual and widespread (although far fromhomogeneous) religion of nomocentric monotheism is placedthroughout in opposition to a mystical elitist esoteric religion afterreligion Despite the attempt to present his scholarship as objectivetraditional religious beliefs clearly intrude at certain points Esoteri-cism is presented as ldquoshunt[ing] aside the claims these monotheismsnormatively made about themselvesrdquo and ldquonudg[ing] God from hisrole as creatorrdquo so that Nature or Life or the Cosmos can takes hisplace (Wasserstrom 1999 164) This is proposed as a self-evidentfault simply assuming the rectitude of the traditional belief Furtherit is claimed that Eliade and Corbin marginalized the creatio ex nihiloand ldquopreferred instead the recurring cyclic process of birth and re-birthrdquo (164) Did Eliade and Corbin actually ldquopreferrdquo the theory ofcycles Or were they rather describing a theory prevalent in thehistory of world religions The more important question is whyshould they prefer ldquoa personal God willing creation out of nothing ata moment in timerdquo This is after all a specific religious belief whichthey were under no compulsion to adopt When Wasserstrom speaksof ldquoretrojecting the current flaws of creation back into a unifyinggodheadrdquo his acceptance of the alternative traditional theologicalmetaphysics is unquestioned (81) The juxtaposition of traditionalnormative belief to esoteric gnostic theosophists who conducted aldquowar on reasonrdquo (154) and ldquoa post Holocaust assault on the God ofthe Jewish peoplerdquo (177 323 324) serves to denounce Eliade andCorbin but more importantly it simultaneously serves to elevate thatbelief

That it is particularly the Jewish tradition of normative monothe-ism that Wasserstrom champions is equally clear It was the WeimarJews for whom ldquo[t]he turn to myth was a turn to history hellip unlikeproto-Nazi myth infatuation their myth studies were not regressiverdquo(114) and he identifies both Corbin and Eliade with the proto-Naziversion thus keeping the more acceptable version a matter of purelyldquoJewish thinkingrdquo (115) The Gentile (now equated with proto-Nazi)turn to myth was culpable and produced the Holocaust The Jewishturn to myth was innocent creative and almost lost in the blood-bath However such a presentation neglects the fact that the originalsource of this turn to myth in German Romantic thought showednone of this JewishGentile polarization That Wasserstrom shouldequate the historicalahistoric distinction with a Jewishnon-Jewishdistinction is disconcertingly biased in favor of the Jewish tradition


Of course most Jewish thinkers who made this turn to myth ldquoaban-doned it after the National Socialist appeal to myth was actualizedand the Nazi myth became realityrdquo and thus ldquoJewish thinkers wres-tled the daimon of history without losing social consciousnessrdquo (123)Just as clearly a great number of non-Jewish people lost their socialconsciousness with horrific consequences but to construct a ldquoJewishthinkingrdquo which alone survived the turn to myth with conscienceintact is scarcely credible In order to maintain an appearance ofcredibility Wasserstrom has no choice but to insist that neitherCorbin nor Eliade could have survived the turn to myth morallyintactmdashand to exonerate Scholem from the faults of the others atalmost every turn

Let me be quite explicit here I agree that it is crucial maintain aconscientious critique of all intellectual expression that can justifyunethical behavior Furthermore I have no objections whatsoever toa positive presentation of Jewish theology As one among many theo-logical positions and one that has arguably suffered more from andcontributed more to human civilization than any other its voice fullydeserves to be heard However to present that voice as the voice ofobjective historical fact and to elevate it by attempting to disgracealternative positions whilst at the same time pleading that intellec-tual integrity is the only relevant virtue in the academy and that ldquoourwork as historians of religion is pointless if it is not honestrdquo (154) is tosay the least a dissimulation Crusading on behalf of a specific tradi-tion should be done openly and honestly and with full self-conscious-ness and with respect for both onersquos subject and onersquos audience notas a concealed agenda with tendentious and misleading representa-tions of historical interpretations Urban recommends that ldquoweshould instead render our [ethical] positions as up-front and explicitas possiblerdquo (2001 445)

In the light of the preceding discourse on historiography my pur-pose in pointing out the flaws of Wasserstromrsquos argument is to indi-cate the degree to which the monovocal narrative of conventionalhistoriography can conceal agendas and authorize extremely dubiousconclusions While Berkhofer concludes that ldquofull disclosurerdquo is prob-lematic and finally inadequate to the problems of historiography(1995 146) it is I feel necessary as a starting point especially in thehistory of religions where personal commitment can hardly but influ-ence our historiography and must be treated with scrupulous hon-esty However when the authorial voice is presented as the narrator

96 bryan rennie

of the ldquoOne True Storyrdquomdashthe voice of complete objectivitymdashit is anattempt to speak from the singular true point of view which compre-hends the plenitude of the past from the viewpoint of an omniscientor at least synoptic narrator (Berkhofer 1995 38) In such a mode ofdiscourse the personal commitments of the author can only be pre-sented as self-evident facts To voice interpretations other than onersquosown is thus not only a matter of a postmodern insistence on repre-senting the Other but equivalent to the standard practice of testinghypotheses by entertaining alternatives thus allowing the reflexivedeconstruction and reconstruction of competing viewpoints Exclu-sive emphasis on the authority of the singular authorial voice its tacitpresentation as equivalent to objective reality and the refusal to al-low others to speak with their own voices vitiates other significantinsights and conceals agendas even from authors themselves

Berkhofer the most recent of our postmodern historiographerspoints out that ldquoan extreme view of the postmodern project producesits own reflexive problems If postmodernism is a self-consciousnessof a culturersquos own historical relativity with the consequent loss of theabsoluteness of any Western account of history then what about thehistory assumed in the Great Story of postmodernismrdquo (1995 226)Postmodernism paradoxically seems to become its own metanarra-tive I suggest however that the postmodern ldquometanarrativerdquo is aself-consciously local mythology Metanarratives and myths are bothexemplary narratives The modern world sought the hegemony of itsown metanarratives as absolute realities and thus sacred truthsmdashmyths in the sense preferred among scholars of religion The finalfailure of these metanarratives to achieve hegemony leads to thedenial of all metanarratives as absolute truths and the resurgence ofparticular local narratives as myths in the self-consciousness of theirlimited and constructed nature Hence the appearance of Christianldquoradical orthodoxyrdquo and Eugene Borowitzrsquos ldquopostmodernrdquo Jewishtheology (Batnitzky 2001)

Probably every holder of a bachelorrsquos degree in the US and manyelsewhere in the Western world have take an ldquoIntroduction to Phi-losophyrdquo course in which they were taught without significant criti-cal challenge that philosophy began in Ionian Greece with men suchas Thales Anaxagoras Anaximander whose great innovation andgreat leap forward was to seek unity in diversity This innovation ispresented with little or no question as a salutary move the beginningof ldquoreal thinkingrdquo and the origin of the Western Culture On the


other hand in many native and non-Western traditions the dualismof the One and the Many with the concomitant elevation of theOne is resisted in favor of a non-dual integration of one and manyIt is this elevation of the one over the many or more accurately theconcept of some privileged access to a singular but plenary viewpointauthorizing a singular Great Story which is challenged here

Berkhofer raises but does not attempt to answer the question ofwhether events inherently possess plot and narrative structure or re-ceive these through their constitution as story I suggest that the plotand structure of narrative representation must in some way modelphenomenal event in order to have any claim to verisimilitude How-ever every potential plot is enfolded within an infinity of detail whichmust be omitted (chipped away like all the marble that was not thefinished statue) to bring out the particular narrative No doubt themonovocal narratives that the majority of scholars produce derivefrom the pre-existing structure of our lived experience and are tothat extent accurate However when one presumes to speak with thevoice of simple objectivity one unavoidably represents onersquos ownmetaphysical assumptions as reality Wasserstrom has his owntotalizing viewpoint invokes a metaphysical reality is both religiousand aesthetic and subordinates consistency and illuminative powerto the authorization of his singular authorial voice In Religion afterReligion the presentation of that voice as the singular truth relies ontoo procrustean an omission of detail to be finally credible Thehistory of religions is characterized by the conflict of different narra-tive representations of the real and simple humility and honesty callfor the pluralism and polyvocality of postmodern historiography

Westminster CollegeNew Wilmington PA 16172USA

References

Batnitzky Leonora (2001) Postmodernity and historicity Reflections on EugeneBorowitzrsquos postmodern turn Religious Studies Review 27 363-369

Beit-Hallami Benjamin (1999) The politics and ethics of research on new religiousmovements Making the world safe for Scientology Unpublished paper given atthe Annual National Conference of the Society for the Scientific Study ofReligion Boston

98 bryan rennie

Benavides Gustavo (2001) Afterreligion after religion Journal of the American Academy ofReligion 69 449-457

Berkhofer Robert F Jr (1995) Beyond the Great Story History as Text and Discourse Cambridge MA Harvard University Press

Ciurtin Eugen (2000) Review of Religion after Religion Archaeligvs 4 487-531Dubuisson Daniel (1993) Mythologies du XXe siegravecle (Dumeacutezil Leacutevi-Strauss Eliade) Lille

Presses Universitaires de LilleEliade Mircea (1954) Cosmos and History The Myth of the Eternal Return Willard Trask

(trans) Princeton Princeton University Pressmdash (1958) Patterns in Comparative Religion Rosemary Sheed (trans) London Sheed

and Wardmdash (1976) Occultism Witchcraft and Cultural Fashions Chicago University of Chicago

Pressmdash (1977) Journal II 1957-1969 Fred H Johnson Jr (trans) Chicago University of

Chicago Pressmdash (1982) A History of Religious Ideas vol 2 From Gautama Buddha to the Triumph of

Christianity Willard Trask (trans) Chicago University of Chicago Pressmdash (1989) Youth Without Youth Three Fantastic Novellas Mac Linscott Ricketts (trans)

London Forest BooksMasuzawa Tomoko (2001) Reflections on the charmed circle Journal of the American

Academy of Religion 69 429-436McCutcheon Russell (2001) Critics Not Caretakers Redescribing the Study of Religion

Albany State University of New York PressNovick Peter (1988) That Noble Dream The ldquoObjectivity Questionrdquo and the American His-

torical Profession Cambridge Cambridge University PressPermenter Rachela (2000) Romantic postmodernism and the literary Eliade In

Bryan Rennie (ed) Changing Religious Worlds The Meaning and End of MirceaEliade 95-116 Albany State University of New York Press

Rennie Bryan (1996) Reconstructing Eliade Making Sense of Religion Albany State Uni-versity of New York Press

mdash (ed) (2000) Changing Religious Worlds The Meaning and End of Mircea Eliade AlbanyState University of New York Press

mdash (2002) Mircea Eliade A secular mystic in the history of religions In EliotWolfson and Jeffrey Kripal (eds) The Unknown Remembered Gate Religious Experi-ence and Hermeneutical Reflection in the History of Religions New York Seven BridgesPress

Spineto Natale (ed) (1994) LrsquoHistoire des religions a-t-elle un sens Correspondance 1926-1959 Paris Cerf

mdash (2001) Mircea Eliade and traditionalism Aries 1 62ndash87Timu Mihaela and Eugen Ciurtin (2000) The unpublished correspondence be-

tween Mircea Eliade and Stig Wikander (1948-1977) ndash 1st part Archaeligvs 4 157-185

Urban Hugh (2001) Syndrome of the secret ldquoEsocentrismrdquo and the work of StevenM Wasserstrom Journal of the American Academy of Religion 69 437-447

Walkowitz Judith (1992) City of Dreadful Delight Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London Chicago University of Chicago Press

Wasserstrom Steven (1999) Religion after Religion Gershom Scholem Mircea Eliade andHenri Corbin at Eranos Princeton Princeton University Press

White Hayden (1973) Metahistory The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century EuropeBaltimore Johns Hopkins University Press

mdash (1986) Historical pluralism Critical Inquiry 12 480-493


White Richard (1991) The Middle Ground Indians Empires and Republics in the GreatLakes Region 1650-1815 Cambridge Cambridge University Press

Wolfson Eliot and Jeffrey Kripal (2002) The Unknown Remembered Gate Religious Expe-rience and Hermeneutical Reflection in the History of Religions New York SevenBridges Press


gion Gershom Scholem Mircea Eliade and Henri Corbin at Eranos Papersfrom that session were published in the Journal of the American Academyof Religion (June 2001) with the advice that ldquothe issues discussed hereshould be of wide interest to JAAR readersrdquo (427) One of thepanelists writes ldquoin appreciation hellip and in salutationrdquo (Masuzawa2001 429) Another states that the book is ldquoclearly one of the mostimportant and original studies on the history of the history of reli-gions published in recent yearsrdquo (Urban 2001 437) These facts alonejustify a close inspection of this work but there are further character-istics of Wasserstromrsquos writing that make the book both worthy ofclose scrutiny and instructive in the development of historiographyadequate to the study of religion

Religion after Religion

I cannot assume that readers are familiar with Wasserstromrsquos booknor can I deal with all the issues and arguments of this complexwork So I must begin with a detailed summary while insisting thatnothing can substitute for reading the work in its entirety

The three eponymous scholars listed in the subtitle of Wasser-stromrsquos book were the specialists in religion who between 1949 and1978 attended Jungrsquos Eranos circle Their influence was ldquoperhapsthe most dynamic and innovative discourse on lsquoreligionrsquo in the sec-ond half of the twentieth centuryrdquo (Wasserstrom 1999 6) and theHistory of Religions attained its status due largely to these threescholars (8) Wasserstrom concludes that ldquo[t]he overarching theorythey shared hellipwas a shared idea of religion after religion hellip a non-religious religiosity a secular antimodernism hellip some new form ofreligion after the expiration of traditional formsrdquo (ix-x) These ldquoHisto-rians of Religionsrdquo1 differ significantly but ldquoshare important evenfundamental features of their theoryrdquo (19) They used their scholar-ship ldquoin a way that seemed somehow subordinated to a mutedmetahistorymdashif not to a covert theologyrdquo (24) They ldquoretroject[ed]theosophy into the core of their respective traditionsrdquo (35) and ldquode-manded acquiescence to the proposition that this esoteric core was

1 Wasserstrom uses the term ldquoHistory of Religionsrdquo to refer specifically to thethought of Eliade Corbin and Scholem as distinct from other historians of religionsFor the purposes of this essay I will adopt the convention of writing ldquoHistoryian ofReligionsrdquo when I follow Wasserstromrsquos usage

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REVIEW ESSAY RELIGION AFTER RELIGION, Bryan Rennie 2003 MTSR.15.68-99.pdf · a turn to myth....

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Transcript of REVIEW ESSAY RELIGION AFTER RELIGION, Bryan Rennie 2003 MTSR.15.68-99.pdf · a turn to myth....