Historicizing religion,
or the significance of the Roman School of History of Religions
“This School does not view the sacred and religion as a priori ontological realities, irreductible to the historical reason; neither does it view them as permanent, anhistorical anthropological structures: it is the perfect opposite of the perspective dear to Mircea Eliade.”1
In the subchapter of a quite big book on Right-winged Third Worldism, one can find a very short but enticing presentation of a — sadly — quite unknown academic current from Italy, with the above description from its author.
Philippe Baillet is one of those who, far from looking for fame, rather choose to evoke key figures who can accompany us in our reflection. Hence why he mostly chose translation2 and presentation3, be it in articles, forewords, afterwords or footnotes, rather than pure authorship. Even his most original work, this big book on a very precise topic, is embedded with lots of interesting, seemingly yet never off-topic remarks and references.
Mircea Eliade himself recognized the significance of the early Roman School, despite being mentioned here as completely opposed to its approach; being an avid reader of its founder Raffaele Pettazzoni (1883-1959)4 during his youth, he wrote to him in 1926, at age 19, became a lifelong correspondant of his, working and writing to enable a broader diffusion of his works (reviews in his magazine Zalmoxis, for example), and went as far as to say that Pettazzoni was “[his] first” and “only master” in his studies5. In his old days, he wrote in his Journal, on December 1, 1977: “From Pettazzoni, I did not learn how, but what to do.”6
“[I]n an afternoon of 1924 (it was my last year in high school), I stumbled upon this title in an Italian magazine: I Misteri: saggio di una teoria storico-religiosa by R. Pettazzoni. It was the year when I just had discovered Frazer. I immediately ordered R. P.’s book, I read it, troubled, excited, for nights, in my mansarde.”7
“I tremendously admire the theoretical efforts of Italy [...]. However, it is odd to witness how impermeable to the results of Italian thought the rest of the world is. (When I see what kind of foreign leaven stimulates French philosophy these days...).” (Eliade to Pettazzoni, May 19, 1947.8)
Yet, as Pettazzoni himself said to him, “you know what unites us and what separates us.”9
Dario Sabbatucci, a student of Pettazzoni, whose 1990 The Historico-religious perspective10 Philippe Baillet happens to have translated, ends with an interesting consideration on why he chose Eliade as his main opponent (after God, Mircea Eliade is the most mentioned person in the book, as per the Index; his name appears 44 times in Sabbatucci’s book):
“We will end this book with a comparison [of the historico-religious perspective] with Mircea Eliade’s perspective: not with the phenomenological one in general, but with the specific eliadian one. Eliade is yet again our preferred discussion partner. It is Eliade who interests us, and not this one or that one phenomenologist, not even Gerardus Van der Leeuw, the founder of religious phenomenologism. Why such a preference? First, due to the broad diffusion of Eliade’s works, not even close to Van der Leeuw’s; I am not talking of a diffusion in the restricted field of academic researchers, I am talking about his exceptional popularity among cultured people, who operate casually in the most diverse areas: figurative arts, music, literature, theater, etc.”11
But exposing in detail such differences would take too much room; 271 pages, in fact.
Why is the Roman School so interesting? As Baillet says, this School shines with its profound iconoclasm12 and its ability to fundamentally question what he calls universalism. Just as in cultural anthropology, and in a way reminiscent of the Begriffsgeschichte, decentration is key to the searcher’s method, as he recognizes through this reflexive process that he is himself a product of history. In doing so, he will be forced to question the validity of his own concepts, as they appear to be historicizable, resulting from particular — relative — cultures, historical situations and choices.
This “would go along very well with the racialist perspective”, such as that developed by authors of the French New Right, says Baillet.
“The History of Religions problematized the objects of faith, but not faith itself. In that I mean: it has not made of it a historical problem. Psychology, philosophy, anthropology, which are fields interested in the human nature instead of in his history, were asked to take care of this issue, as if faith was a generically human quality, just as are language, bipedalism and so forth.”13
This quote by Sabbatucci gives an example of this method pushed to the extreme; it represents perhaps the most radically historicist perspective within the whole School, and it applies not only to the concept of faith and religion, but also to others, such as myth, rite, belief, god, theocracy, polytheism, monotheism, magic, mysticism, sacred, which he chose to consider as historical products of a particular context, as we’ll see.
Baillet is a quite staunch Pagan; the Romans were usually agnostic at best — one can find a couple of cutting remarks towards Christianity in Sabbatucci’s book — and were historically proponents of a secular, non-confessional study of this field, in direct opposition with clerics such as Wilhelm Schmidt14, trying to refute his theories on the evolution of religions and on the idea of a “primordial monotheism” (Urmonotheismus). These methods could then obviously seem antichristian to some.
However, as a Catholic myself, I think this destructive potential is also incredibly refreshing, and that it could actually help Christians gain a better understanding of the actually transcendent and unique character of their religion, which is not to be seen as the fruit of a natural evolution towards a more (the most) evolved and perfect kind of religion, or the religion that will politically save a country, or the one that will cure mental illness, or the religion that enabled whatever I like the most socially (be it democracy, monarchy, socialism, liberalism, capitalism, fascism) to appear15, and all other kinds of pseudo-apologetics that tend to reduce the Christian faith16 to some thing all too human.
Even for the sake of evangelization, we might be helped by this exercice of decentration, since Christianity is not about making the whole world interchangeable. But that is another, and very broad topic.
Before delving into Sylvia Mancini’s preface to Dario Sabbatucci’s Historico-religious perspective, it should be noted that the postface parallels the methodological approach of the Roman School with that of American scholars Robert Segal, Ninian Smart and Ivan Strenski, and expressed a wish for these academics to take a look at the works of their Italian colleagues and forerunners. (Another similar current, not mentioned here, called “critical religion”, has a website on that issue, with publications from academics such as Timothy Fitzgerald.)
It may be important to give a brief — incomplete for secondary literature — bibliography of works on or by the Roman School available in English.
Raffaele Pettazzoni (1883-1959) had a couple of works translated: some Essays on the history of religions (1954), The Supreme Being: Phenomenological Structure and Historical Development (1959, in The history of religions; essays in methodology). His Correspondance (1927-1958) with Herbert Jennings Rose (who translated Pettazzoni’s book on The All-knowing God in 1956) too (Brill, 2014). About him, one can read an article on Raffaele Pettazzoni And The History Of Religions In Fascist Italy (1928–1938)17 in The Study of Religion under the Impact of Fascism (ed. Junginger, Brill, 2007), a short essay on his reception in the Anglophone Academy (2013), and the long article For a secular return to the sacred: Raffaele Pettazzoni's last statement on the name of the science of religions (2014).
Carlo Diano’s (1902-1974) 1952 classic on Form and Event: Principles for an Interpretation of the Greek World has recently (2020) been translated. The editor considers it as “anticipating the work of Deleuze, Badiou, Esposito, and Agamben”.
Two of Ernesto De Martino’s (1908-1965) monographs on magic in Southern Italy (from 1958, 1959 and 1961) have been translated: Magic: A Theory from the South (2015 [1959]), The Land of Remorse: A Study of Southern Italian Tarantism (2005 [1961]); his posthumous retrospective The End of the World: Cultural Apocalypse and Transcendence (2023 [1977]) too. His translator Dorothy L. Zinn, who also wrote a short Introduction to Ernesto de Martino's Relevance for the Study of Folklore in 2015, considers the 1972 translation of his Primitive Magic: the Psychic Powers of Shamans and Sorcerers [1948] to be avoided18, but it exists. To spark the curiosity of the reader, I could say that De Martino used not only a crocian framework but was also inspired by Heidegger, Cassirer and Gramsci. For secondary literature on De Martino, two monographs are available: F. M. Ferrari’s Ernesto de Martino on Religion: The Crisis and the Presence (2012) and F. A. Geisshuesler’s The Life and Work of Ernesto De Martino: Italian Perspectives on Apocalypse and Rebirth in the Modern Study of Religion (2021).
One fascinating book by Vittorio Lanternari (1918-2010), The religions of the oppressed: A study of modern messianic cults (1963 [1960]), has been translated19.
Alessandro Bausani (1921-1988) has been translated two times: The Persians, from the earliest days to the twentieth century (1971 [1961]), and Religion in Iran: From Zoroaster to Baha'u'llah (2000 [1959]).
Ugo Bianchi’s (1922-1995) The history of religions (1977 [1970]) and a booklet on The Greek Mysteries (1976) are the sole translations of his works available to the English reader, who also possesses a 1995 article In Memoriam Ugo Bianchi.
Finally, Dario Sabbatucci (1923-2002) has yet to be translated, since only a short study on Scientology: Its Historical Morphological Frame (1983) can be read in English; an article on Kingship, Cosmos and Cult of the Ancestors in Ebla: Some New Perspectives presents and uses Sabbatucci’s concept of “comicization”.
The French possess translations of two other works of his, namely his classic on Greek mysticism Le mysticisme grec (1982), a booklet on Etruscan painting, La peinture étrusque (1996), and two articles in the Encyclopedia Universalis (Religion, Syncretism).
Coming soon: part 2, a translation of the substantial Preface to Sabbatucci’s work.
Philippe Baillet, L’Autre Tiers-Mondisme, 2016, p. 418. He considers Guénon’s work and (what he calls) his “very Western (…) obsession with unity” to be a radical opposite of the Roman School’s approach.
Since the 1970s, he is one of the most important French specialist of Julius Evola, having translated a dozen of his books, with substantial forewords to Ride the Tiger and Revolt against the Modern World. He translated major figures of the Italian radical Right such as Claudio Mutti, Giorgio Locchi, Rinaldo Massi, Gianfranco De Turris and Adriano Romualdi, but also of Traditionalists Guido de Giorgio and Attilio Mordini, among others. His work is not limited to radical and niche publications: he translated academic works such as Emilio Gentile’s Fascism and the Italian Road to Totalitarianism, Augusto Del Noce’s Age of Secularization and The Problem of Atheism, Casagrande and Vecchio’s work on the medieval Sins of the tongue, Ernst Nolte’s (unpublished in other languages) Historical foundations of National Socialism. The list could in fact go on, both for translations and original publications.
His Pour la contre-révolution blanche (2010), Le Parti de la Vie (2015) and Écrits à l’écart de toute meute (2024) contain articles from different magazines about figures as varied as historian Georg L. Mosse, French great writer and collaborationist Abel Bonnard, Jewish-Russian émigré and anti-stalinian Boris Souvarine, Alain de Benoist, Yukio Mishima, George Orwell, novelist Pierre Mac Orlan, Ernst Kantorowicz, and avant-garde poet and artist Antonin Artaud.
Who graduated in Italian literature and archeology, and introduced History of Religions as an academic discipline in Italy, teaching it from 1924 to 1952 at the Sapienza in Rome.
See Mircea Eliade, Raffaele Pettazzoni, L'histoire des religions a-t-elle un sens ? Correspondance 1926-1959, 1994.
Junginger (ed.), The Study of Religion under the Impact of Fascism, 2008, p. 334.
L'histoire des religions a-t-elle un sens ?, p. 34.
Ibid., p. 154.
Ibid., p. 254, Letter from Pettazzoni to Eliade, December 17, 1952. The whole Introduction about the relationship and differences is extremely enlightening.
La prospettiva storico-religiosa: Fede, religione e cultura, 1990; fr. trans. 2002.
Ibid. (fr. trans.), p. 281.
Especially since the popular views of the History of Religions are so one-sided.
Dario Sabbatucci, La perspective historico-religieuse. Foi, religion et culture, 2002, p. 29.
On that note, every person concerned with understanding both the truths and limits of such arguments ought to read another classic product of Historicism, Ernst Troeltsch’s masterwork on The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches (1912, vol.1 and vol. 2), and his 1911 Frankfurt and 1922 Bern lectures, published in French as a booklet called La philosophie sociale du christianisme in 2018.
But also the Church. I’d recommand Karl Adam’s very accessible and influential classics on The Spirit of Catholicism (the foreword here is quite caricatural, considering his views on National Socialism) and The Christ of faith: The Christology of the Church.
The French reader can find an article on Raffaele Pettazzoni Et Mircea Eliade: Historiens Des Religions Généralistes Devant Les Fascismes (1933–1945) in the same volume.
Translator’s Note, p. vii of Magic: A Theory from the South: “the only monograph by de Martino currently available in English is his first treatise on magic, Il Mondo magico (1948, translated as Primitive magic [1972]), but due to some serious reservations I have about the approach utilized in that translation, I cannot endorse its usefulness.”
One must note that the English translation is abridged, but not lacking any essential element. As a reviewer wrote, “Professionals or those looking not only for general facts but also for small details will use the French translation” Les mouvements religieux de liberté et de salut des peuples opprimés (1960) or the original Movimenti religiosi di libertà e salvezza (1960, reed. 2003). An abstract from the Preface to the second edition (1974) can be read online in a French translation.