There is already a standard narrative in place about the birth of religious studies as an academic discipline. It is generally imagined by scholars as emerging from the encounter between the trajectory of Enlightenment rationalism and non-European culture. The rise of higher criticism led to the reappraisal of the Christian Bible as a historical document, while simultaneously European travelers were presented with an unanticipated diversity abroad, which challenged their long-standing assumptions about the autonomy of Christian revelation. To make sense of these diverse cultures, Europeans extended to them the essentially Protestant category of religion. Comparative religion is represented as a self-conscious reaction to theology from which it differentiates itself in the same moment that it is relying on a Protestant conception of religion itself. It is often regarded as secularizing and Protestant in the same breath. This breath is not seen as a contradiction, since some Protestant and Catholic (and even Muslim) scholars have wanted to interpret modernity as an essentially Protestant project. For Weber and other Protestant thinkers, this secularizing Protestantism represents a kind of triumph, while for Catholics the Protestant character of modernity represents its failings. Religious studies, in this account, is thus one engine of Protestant disenchantment.1 While scholars such as Michel Despland, Daniel Dubuisson, Tomoko Masuzawa, Arie Molendijk, and Eric Sharpe emphasize different nations as the birthplace of comparative religion (from France to England to the Netherlands), they generally peg the start of the discipline to the mid-nineteenth century and often describe religious studies as predicated on the formation of an academic discipline independent from theology.2 By contrast, Peter Harrison, Lynn Hunt, Margaret Jacob, and Wijnand Mijnhardt see comparative religion as one component of the Enlightenment itself, emerging from the rise of toleration and the liberation of European rationalism from religious orthodoxy.3 More recently, Guy Stroumsa has tried to push comparative religion even earlier into the Age of Reason, which he places in the sixteenth century.4 Regardless of their chronology, these accounts generally stage religious studies over and against Christian orthodoxy, whether they celebrate or condemn the field's Protestant character.5 In what follows, I invert much of this narrative and show religious studies as emerging from a very different milieu and in a very different context. I place my renarration of disciplinary formation along with a minority account put forward by Jeffrey Kripal, Steven Wasserstrom, Randall Styers, and Hans Kippenberg. Kripal and Wasserstrom have emphasized the influence of Western esotericism on specific scholars' work; Styers has demonstrated the importance of magic as a contrasting object in the formation of religion as a scholarly category; while Kippenberg has noted that religious studies guarded cultural resources that would have otherwise been disregarded by Enlightenment rationalism.6 But the modes that Kripal and Wasserstrom present as exceptions, I show here to be the ordinary functioning of the discipline. As an antidote to the dominant narrative, I show that the discipline emerged in relation to a Counter-Enlightenment impulse and was connected to a vibrant tradition very different from mainstream Protestantism, namely, Western esotericism. The double of religious studies turns out not to be philology but theosophy. The academic study of religion and the nineteenth-century movements known as Spiritualism and Theosophy are rarely discussed at the same time, much less described as having a common origin. In this article I attempt to demonstrate their shared history in a dialectical opposition posited by Enlightenment thinkers such as Diderot and Voltaire. I begin by very briefly laying out the position of a secular study of religion postulated by the contributors to the Encyclopédie. I then discuss the impact of Spiritualism and Counter-Enlightenment discourse on founding figures (both canonical and noncanonical) in the history of the study of religion in the nineteenth century. By demonstrating the way in which religious studies continues to be haunted by the specter of Diderot and the philosophes, I aim to restore religious studies to its larger cultural context.
...MoreDescription An exploration of the development of the discipline religious studies as related to a counter-Enlightenment narrative focusing on spiritualism and Theosophy.
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