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Recent Historiography and the History of Religions

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Recent Historiography and the History of Religions RECENT HISTORIOGRAPHY AND THE HISTORY OF RELIGIONS: AN APPRECIATIVE RESPONSE TO ARTHUR McCALLA LUTHER H. MARTIN One of the several ironies that characterizes the modern study known as the "history of religions" is that this approach has come to designate for many an essentially ahistorical method.' For those of us who maintain that the study of religion should include the history of religions, Arthur McCalla's recent article on "The Importance of Recent Historiography for the Study of Religious Thought" (MTSR 2/2 [1990], 167-179) is a welcome contribution to the theoretical literature of the field. McCalla's article is born from his concern with religious thought and its fate following the attacks, in the 1930s, on the history of ideas generally by Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch. These historians, in the summary of McCalla, denounced the practice of intellectual history for its isolation of "ideas from the societies in which they were produced and operated" (168). Their alternative historiography, associated with the French Annales school, emphasized the collective conditioning of inte- llectual and cultural artifacts, a historical practice that became known by the 1960s, as "the history of mentalitis" (168-9).2 This concern with collectives rather than with individuals, or with their thought, directed this 1 See, for example, the discussionof "Eliade and History" by Douglas Allen, The Journal 68 (1988),545-565. 2 of Religion In additionto the literaturecited by McCalla,see PatrickH. Hutton,"The Historyof Mentalities:The New Map of CulturalHistory," History and Theory20 (1981),237-259; and, Peter Burke, "Strengthsand Weaknessesof the History of Mentalities;"History of EuropeanIdeas 9 (1986),439-451. 116 new historical practice toward considerations of religious data-for whatever else religion might be it is first and foremost a social fact. The principle underlying mentalitgs history, an understanding of human events and ideas as dependent upon the social order, may be traced back almost a century before the Annales school to the work of Giambattista Vico who wrote, in his eighteenth-century Principi di Scienza Nuova, that "the order of ideas must follow 1'ordine delle cose," "the order of things," usually interpreted contextually as "the order of [social] institutions."3 Vico's recognition of a necessary reciprocity between ideas and their social context anticipated the work of Auguste Comte, Lucien Uvy-Bruhl and Emile Durkheim on "collective representations" and provided the theoretical basis for the initial interest by Febvre and Bloch in the workings of "'everyday thought' as well as elaborated theories," and in "how people think as well as what they think.". It was Ldvy-Bruhl who gave currency to mentalitis as the term encompassing collective rather than individual attitudes.s His recognition of the relationship between the collective nature of mentalit6s and language anticipated, for example, Michel Foucault's project of histor- ically differentiating the various discursive practices of Western culture.6 "To be able to perceive the shades of meaning" in the ideas of others, Ldvy-Bruhl had written, "to grasp how these are bound up with one another in their myths, legends, rites, it would be absolutely indispensable to master the genius and intricacies of their languages."? The mentality of any people must be situated, in other words, within their own coherent and structured system of knowledge 8 The history of mentalities, which McCalla focuses upon, belongs to a larger coalition of historical scholarship that has emerged in both France and the United States during the final quarter of the twentieth century under the broad nomination, the "new historicism."9 This new movement shares with nineteenth- century historicism the fundamental premise that 3 TheNew Scienceof GiambattistaVico, trans. and ed., T. G. Berginand M. H. Fisch NY: Comell Press, 1961), 238. (Ithaca,4 University par. Burke,439. 5 Burke,444. 6 See Patrick H. Hutton, "The Foucault Phenomenonand ContemporaryFrench Historical Historiques17 (1991),77-102, esp. 92-3. Historiography,"7 Reflections/Réflexions LucienLévy-Bruhl, Primitive Mentality (New York:MacMillan, 1923), 22. ' See LutherH. Martin,"The Encyclopedia Hellenistica and ChristianOrigins," Biblical TheologyBulletin 20 (1990), 123-127. 9 See the interesting collection of essays edited by H. Aram Veeser, The New Historicism(New York, London:Routledge, 1989). .
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