Religion After Religion: Gershom Scholem, Mircea Eliade, and Henry Corbin at Eranos

381 Pages·2001·2.12 MB·English

by  Steven M. Wasserstrom

RELIGION AFTER RELIGION
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RELIGION AFTER RELIGION
GERSHOM SCHOLEM, MIRCEA ELIADE,
AND HENRY CORBIN AT ERANOS
Steven M. Wasserstrom
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY
Copyright (cid:1) 1999 by Princeton University Press
Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,
Princeton, New Jersey 08540
In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press,
Chichester, West Sussex
All Rights Reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wasserstrom, Steven M.
Religion after religion : Gershom Scholem, Mircea Eliade, and
Henry Corbin at Eranos / Steven M. Wasserstrom.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
eISBN 1-4008-0837-5
1. Religion—Philosophy—History—20th century. 2. Scholem,
Gershom Gerhard, 1897– . 3. Eliade, Mircea, 1907– . 4. Corbin,
Henry. I. Title.
BL51.W225 1999
200(cid:2).7(cid:2)2—dc21 99-24174
This book has been composed in Galliard
http://pup.princeton.edu
Hero-Gods, Prophets, Poets, Priests are forms of hero-
ism that belong to the old ages, make their appearance
in the remotest times; some of them have ceased to be
possible long since, and cannot any more show them-
selves in this world. The Hero as Man of Letters, again,
of which class we are to speak today, is altogether a
product of these new ages; and so long as the wondrous
art of Writing, or of Ready-writing which we call Print-
ing, subsists, he may be expected to continue, as one of
the main forms of Heroism in all future ages. He is, in
various respects, a very singular phenomenon.
—Thomas Carlyle, 19 May 1840
To give an author—and, in particular, an author who is
a genius—the benefit of the doubt is a mark of our re-
spect for his achievement; so respectful are we that we
rightly tend to include his person in his achievement.
. . . A genius lives in his work . . . [which] may help us
see a reason why Socrates published nothing; he merely
taught. Oral tradition is one thing; tradition and its indi-
vidual talents, published, quite another. “Tradition”
now exists to be broken through by the individual tal-
ent. This subversive activity gives its meaning to “cre-
ativity” and “originality.”
—Philip Rieff, 26 March 1971
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Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments ix
Author’s Note xi
Introduction 3
PART I: Religion after Religion 21
Chapter 1. Eranos and the “History of Religions” 23
Chapter 2. Toward the Origins of History of Religions:
Christian Kabbalah as Inspiration and as Initiation 37
Chapter 3. Tautegorical Sublime: Gershom Scholem and
Henry Corbin in Conversation 52
Chapter 4. Coincidentia Oppositorum: An Essay 67
PART II: Poetics 83
Chapter 5. On Symbols and Symbolizing 85
Chapter 6. Aesthetic Solutions 100
Chapter 7. A Rustling in the Woods: The Turn to Myth
in Weimar Jewish Thought 112
PART III: Politics 125
Chapter 8. Collective Renovatio 127
Chapter 9. The Idea of Incognito: Authority and Its
Occultation According to Henry Corbin 145
PART IV: History 157
Chapter 10. Mystic Historicities 159
Chapter 11. The Chiliastic Practice of Islamic Studies
According to Henry Corbin 172
Chapter 12. Psychoanalysis in Reverse 183
PART V: Ethics 201
Chapter 13. Uses of the Androgyne in the History of Religions 203
viii CONTENTS
Chapter 14. Defeating Evil from Within: Comparative
Perspectives on “Redemption through Sin” 215
Chapter 15. On the Suspension of the Ethical 225
Conclusion 237
Abbreviations Used in the Notes 251
Notes 255
Index 355
Preface and Acknowledgments
THE IDEA of religion after religion has dominated my study of Gershom
Scholem, Mircea Eliade, and Henry Corbin in the quarter century since
they first attracted my attention. Like other readers, I wondered what
kind of religion these awe-inspiring scholars represented. I asked myself
whether they had experiential or even initiatic warrants for their authori-
tative expositions of esoteric and “secret” traditions. Later, when I rou-
tinely used their work as a teacher and scholar in the history of religions,
I tended to push aside these curiosities, which seemed unduly probing.
In postgraduate studies on Jewish and Muslim relations under early Is-
lam, I regularly used many works by Corbin and Scholem. My scholarly
identity, meanwhile, formed as a historian of religions; as such, I had
necessarily also to engage Eliade. Whenever possible, I combined Judeo-
Islamic research with my interest in the history of religions.1
Eventually, as I conceptualized the present project, it occurred to me
that this could not be only a study in the history of “the History of Reli-
gions”—which it is first and primarily. The problem, I realized, was es-
sentially the one I first worried about, though now in a modified form.
That is, I realized that there was no way to take Corbin, Eliade, and
Scholem seriously without understanding their writing as a whole. I
could not “reduce” them to their psyches, their economic locations, or
their societies. And so I sought, instead, to understand them integrally.2
Accordingly, I do not present their lives on a technically biographical
level—their marriages, tastes, adventures (almost nonexistent, so far as I
know, for these sedentary scholars).3 Nor do I provide an introduction to
their work. Since I am neither writing an overview of their respective
works nor undertaking biographies of them, I realized all the more that I
could do what has not been done. And that is to elucidate, for the first
time, their theory of religion. Readers like me have long sensed that the
authority of their stance somehow transcended their control of lan-
guages, editions of texts, or even their masterful works of interpretation.
My search for that “somehow” resulted in this book.
The overarching theory that they shared, I concluded, was a shared
idea of religion after religion. A paradoxical idea on many levels—a non-
religious religiosity, a secular antimodernism, a metarationalism operating
within academic discourse—religion after religion speaks for the mystical
traditions they represented from within and without at the same time.
Religion after religion speaks to this uncanny doubleness in their schol-
arship; it suggests that their stance toward the reader was Janus-faced.