ABSTRACT
Historians of religion, in their enthusiasm to establish disciplinary autonomy, have distanced themselves from ordinary historiographical practice. As Mircea Eliade asserted programmatically in his 1951 study of shamanism, for example: ‘the history of religions is not always the historiography of religions’ (Eliade 1964, xvi). Although Eliade acknowledged that ‘historical conditions are extremely important in a religious phenomenon (for every human datum is in the last analysis a historical datum)’ (Eliade 1954, xiv), he argues a few pages later that ‘in the [now really?] last analysis’ religious life is ‘ahistorical’ (Eliade 1964, xix; for a discussion of Eliade’s view of history, see Allen 1988). Eliade’s ahistorical ‘phenomenological attitude’ (Eliade 1964, xv) echoes Joachim Wach’s observation that ‘phenomenology knows nothing of any historical ‘development’ of religion’, a theoretical dictum subsequently cited approvingly by both van der Leeuw and Pettazoni (Wach 1924, 82; van der Leeuw 1938, 688; Pettazoni 1967, 217). Unless, however, the realities of religions be confessed as the manifest consequence of some transcendental ‘essence’, they remain — as Eliade concluded in his initial ‘last analysis’ — historical data, subject, thereby, to ordinary historical inquiry (Martin 1991, 120; Martin 1994a, 335). Consequently, the history of religions as an academic enterprise is, or should be, a species of general historiography and its historiographical explanations must be pursued without recourse to any deus ex machina (following Carr 1961, 96). As is the case with general historiography, the proper objects of the history of religions are res gestae, ‘human doings in the past’, and not theological claims to hierophanous gestae dei that are properly the subject matter of Heilsgeschichte (Collingwood 1956, 9).
