Reading Religion through "the Modern": Three Implicit Audiences of the Chicago School of History of Religions
The Divinity School at the University of Chicago has a renowned PhD offering department called History of Religions, which has brought leading theorists from around the world into the field of academic study of comparative religion. The complex proem of this academic enterprise was to configure a department with an academic focus in a school whose educational commitment had been solely theological. Amongst the variety of schools of religion such as seminaries or the university departments in a secular setting, the path that the Divinity School has taken has no comparable example. Within the tradition of theological faculty in a university, the school faced an age of both religious pluralism and secularization. Responding to these efforts was also a prerequisite for the university’s global presence. For over fifty years, the Divinity School has accommodated a unique academic place of inquiry, holistically called “the Chicago School of History of Religions,” while its method of study has rarely seen a consensus among the faculty members. This paper is a contextualization of the school’s institutional development in light of the history of modern universities.
For the historical sketch of the scholarship in the field of history of religions, a possible convenient viewpoint will be that of the modern audience. Located in the modern research university, the school has a central interest in producing a modern scholarship of religion. The difficulty is, however, a variety of interpretations of “the modern.”[1] There is also a variety of ways to signal the modernity to scholars in various disciplines and fields; specifically, the Chicago School has made a conscious effort to discover and represent their modern identity. The first inevitable task of the Divinity School was, on the one hand, to distinct itself from the confessional, doctrinal, and denominational tradition of theological education, which one usually associates with its name. On the other hand, the Divinity School tended not to permit the reductionistic approach for the study of religion. That is, while each religion may formalize itself by its own truth and may contradict with well-known scientific facts, the refutation of religion is not the only purpose of the academic approach. Any form of the academic study of religion would face this underlying dilemma presented by the umbrella term, “the modern,” and Chicago was not an exception. Nevertheless, the Chicago School has defended the modern paradigm of religion, engaging through at least three strategic modes[2]—diplomacy, self-reference, and advocacy—of inquiry upon an irreducible religious experience.
Against Scientists / Wissenschaftler: The Mode of Diplomacy
The first mode, “diplomacy,” is applicable by all means to every prolegomenon. Any good translators acknowledge the importance of the classical literature in two countries and perform fluency in two cultures. However, as every person has his or her own birthplace, a truly bicultural or bilingual translator is still rare, regardless of if one speaks multiple languages. Joachim Wach, a German-born scholar usually referred to as a theoretical founder of the Chicago School, was well aware of this contradiction and the possible reception of it. In the way that he started to identify religion for the “wissenschaftlich” (or scientific and philosophical enough) colleagues who experienced the Enlightenment, he clearly anticipated three reactions to his study. One is “a yielding to historicism and relativism”; another is “a revert[ing] to ‘classical’ standards”; and the other is “an attempt[ing] at a constructive solution.”[3] To these reactions, Wach responded unsatisfactorily: “We [historians of religions] must hold on to the principle of relative objectivity, developed in the author’s history of hermeneutics in the twentieth century, if we want to escape an anarchical subjectivism which would make all ‘Wissenschaft’ [scholarly disciplines] impossible.”[4] Wach’s diplomacy between religion and academia prepared the common ground for the further dialogues, while it articulated the inerasable legacy owning to the Christocentric language at the same time.
Even Wach’s seminal work, Introduction to the History of Religions (1988), offers a sense of both distance and proximity between theology and history of religions in a reconciling, pastoral tone when he writes:
The Christian religion is a subject that theology and the history of religions both study. There is no need to fear differences and quarrels so long as both sides proceed strictly according to their own principles. […] The result is that theology and the history of religions work side by side in relative separation. […] Theology’s significance for the history of religions consists primarily in the immense amount of material which the latter receives from theological work. […] It is possible to incorporate directly—with certain corrections—the results of systematic-biblical and historical work, but the propositions of systematic theology (dogmatics) must be used indirectly.[5]
His careful but consistent rejection of theological study is because of its being a “normative” discipline, as stated in the same sense that he above describes the “indirect” use of “the propositions of systematic theology.”[6] The indirectness here refers to an additional intellectual operation, which is to use theology, only if necessary to “study,” “understand,” and “portray” it.[7] Wach confirms that “[t]he history of religions can only point to ‘eminence’ [of truth-claim]; it can show ‘uniqueness’ in the sense of extraordinariness, but never in the sense of absoluteness.”[8] However, this view is ambivalent as long as both extraordinariness and absoluteness are self-proclaimed judgments for interpreting one phenomenon.
So much as “a belief” is, the “relative objectivity,” which Wach contends for History of Religions, can only be considered by self-claims. Wach’s contention remains as a Leviathan for historians of religion, as once Thomas Hobbes provisioned the eventual necessity of government, or monarchy in Hobbes’s time. That is to say, in the creation of the discipline of history of religions, Wach needed an exemplary normativity from a field other than the Christian theology for the purpose of peace-making. At least, Wach was in no sense naïve about preeminent Christian language in the comparative religions; he nonetheless admits that historians of religion are never free from the idea of “classical significance” attained from their comparative studies.[9] His priority was rather how “wissenschaftlich” the study of religion sounds like, but less in how “Christian” it sounds. For a disclaimer, Wach shows some hope that “a relative norm […] does not need to do violence to heterogenous phenomena from a preconceived point of view.”[10] This shows some similarity, for example, to saying that Western-style musical notation itself is innocent in describing traditional Japanese music on the musical score—as far as the person who describes has no imperial motivations.
More directly, Jonathan Z. Smith, one of the finest critics of Mircea Eliade as well as a central figure of the Chicago School in the post-Eliade period, once noted in The Journal of the American Academy of Religion issued in 1990 that “Tillich remains the unacknowledged theoretician of our entire enterprise.”[11] Tillich here refers to Paul Tillich, an influential émigré-theologian and one of the contemporaries of Mircea Eliade. Twenty years later, he reconfirmed this view by exploring what this remark can possibly mean. He concluded that no American situation of teaching religion in late 1950s to 1960s could avoid the influence of “a Protestant Christian ‘apologetic’ theological project.”[12] His famously copious footnote furthers this idea, by comparison to Harvard Divinity School’s scholar W.C. Smith, stating that the interpretation of Tillich’s work on the world religions was institutionalized in two ways: first, as W.C. Smith did at Harvard, and second, as Eliade did at Chicago.[13] Jonathan Z. Smith finds Tillich’s influence particularly in “a translation language” of the current “definition of religion,” “a focus on symbols and their interpretation,” and the attitude of cultural inquiry in religion at “public institutions.”[14] As suggested by Smith’s shrewd insight here, religious education in the United States has born and is bearing a burden of Christian predominance.
Moreover, this concern is shared by A. Eustace Haydon, who taught history of religions at Chicago around 1920s—before the fame of “the Chicago School” was established. Not just because the Divinity School succeeded the property from the Baptist Theological Seminary,[15] but also because, on a spiritual level, one does not easily escape from “the unconscious influence flowing from the assumption of the superiority of some form of Christianity,”[16] the studies of comparative religion entailed the apologetical purpose “to demonstrate that Christianity is the highest manifestation of the religious spirit.”[17] In other words, the constant struggle of the field of history of religions has been its methodological formation that mimics the way of studying the Christian religion for analyzing non-Christian religions. Also, the task of the divinity school used to be primarily to educate “men to become preachers of the Gospel.”[18] The difficulty was the secondary nature of non-Christian religious studies to this primary task from its origin.
However difficult the study of historical and international religions in the Divinity School could be, many historical writings have associated the place of academic study of religion with the hope of William Rainey Harper, the first president of the University of Chicago (1891-1906) and also a scholar of Semitic languages. Harper was “increasingly impatient and even strident”[19] about the doctrinaire culture of its precedent seminary so that he repeatedly cautioned the faculty members “to meet ‘the requirement of modern times.’”[20] An accessible account of Harper’s wish appeared, for example, in “Historical Sketch” (1940) in the Announcements of University of Chicago Divinity School (an academic catalogue) celebrating its fiftieth anniversary sessions: “Harper insisted that the new institution should be envisaged as a real university, with a faculty and facilities adequate not only for undergraduate teaching but for the pursuit of advanced studies and research,” while he once “had taught at the Baptist Theological Seminary.”[21] It is still unclear about what it means by “a real university” for the academic study of religion just by looking at this sentence, there are several contexts that may assist in unpacking its meaning, as observed.
Therefore, the diplomatic stage was critically necessary for the groundwork of History of Religions, as admitted not just by its founder Wach but its successors such as Jonathan Z. Smith. The fact that History of Religions is one of the fields posited in the study of the Divinity School indicates its complicated provenance. In a Freudian sense, history of religions suffered from the harsh Oedipal complex against theology and any Christian legacies in defining its real disciplinal father. Ironically, the stronger it denies the Christian influence, the stronger it compensates its emphasis on the cooperative relation between the church and the school in the study of religion. Although Wach and Harper agreed with each other about the creation of real academics, they were both seeking a convincing model of the history of religions. The postmodern criticism over the Christian preeminence in History of Religions is thus valid, but Wach’s modern academic attitude would rather be defensive to it.
Against Philologists: The Mode of Self-Reference
The second mode “self-reference” on the way to the modern is common with all human and social scientific inquiries. The academic claims that have a subject of religion, society, or humans are structurally self-referential. When one claims, for example, “Society is X,” it automatically means that one is discussing one’s own society. This structure does not exclude the generalization of religious phenomena and religious experiences, which the Chicago School has attempted. However, different from “diplomacy” of religious knowledge, the attitude of “self-reference” does not discriminate between religions by using “ours” and “theirs.” By starting the claim with “religious experience is …,” the person making the claim is talking not just about religion in general but also about his or her religion. Self-reference thus prevents the study of religion from being overly particularized, adding a sense of universality to its discipline.
The Chicago School enjoyed its institutional prime time during the prolific authorship of Mircea Eliade and his nationwide influence on scholarship in the United States.[22] Eliade’s own academic mission has been noted in various media, while the mission he specifies in his unfinished work, A History of Religious Ideas (1978), has a conclusive sense: “I [Eliade] hold, in short, that any historical study implies a certain familiarity with universal history. […] This is not a matter of a vain and, in the end, sterile pseudo-encyclopedism. It is simply a matter of not losing sight of the profound and indivisible unity of the history of the human mind.”[23] In another parts, for the inquiry of the ancient human mindset, Eliade did not restrict his archaeological imagination, which later garnered more than a few criticisms. He writes:
As has often been said: beliefs and ideas cannot be fossilized. Hence certain scholars have preferred to say nothing about the ideas and beliefs of the Paleanthropians, instead of reconstructing them by the help of comparisons with the hunting civilizations. This radical methodological position is not without its dangers. To leave an immense part of the history of the human mind a blank runs the risk of encouraging the idea that during all those millennia the activity of the mind was confined to the preservation and transmission of technology. Such an opinion is not only erroneous, it is fatal to a knowledge of man. Homo faber was at the same time Homo ludens, sapiens and religiosus. Since we cannot reconstruct his religious beliefs and practices, we must at least point out certain analogies that can illuminate them, if only indirectly.[24]
The boldness of this statement would prove to be twofold. First, Eliade is self-reliant enough to understand antiquity by his uncritical analogies. In fact, History of Religions could have become nothing but an inspired story if it had been permitted to obsess with fulfilling “a blank” in one’s own imagination. Nonetheless, he defends this in another writing for saving the “victims [i.e., the forgotten religious ideas] of the modern organization of research.”[25] Second, he assumes the universal consciousness so that he could extrapolate “a spiritual unity”[26] by means of what he calls “total hermeneutics.”[27] Here Eliade suggests that historians of religions share the task, unlike a regular sense of historians, to utilize “a spiritual technique” for “unveil[ing] some existential situations that are unknown or that are imaginable only with great difficulty by the modern reader.”[28] These remarkable footprints of Eliade’s unshakable self-confidence in the discipline would both confuse and encourage the later historians of religions, but also these may have articulated a practicable raison d’être for the study of divinity.
Eliade was a scholar whom Chicago expected to represent their academic character. He reflects upon Chicago’s invitation in 1956 as he “could not imagine that, after [his] being named titular professor and head of the Department of History of Religions at the University of Chicago, [he and his wife] would remain for twenty-seven years in this famous, enigmatic, and fascinating ‘Windy City.’”[29] Although he thought that his works were “rather broad and complex,” he pledged himself to “develop them according to the interests and preparation of the students.”[30] On the day of his first visit to the Divinity School, October 2, 1956, Eliade was surprised at Chicagoans’ courteousness including that of Dean Joseph Mitsuo Kitagawa and Charles (“Chuck”) Long, the last doctoral advisee of Joachim Wach, working on his dissertation on Tillich.[31] Further, Eliade commented that the American university system and its students “seemed to [him] less well prepared than their counterparts of the same age in France,” while, “in an unsystematic way—they had a knowledge of certain cultural creation that would have surprised a European at that time (1955-60).”[32] As Eliade discovered the possibility of his new circumstance of scholarly life, the Chicago School at that time was confident of a great harvest of this émigré-scholar’s talent. And in fact, Eliade’s potential for contributing to the Chicago School far surpassed others in its theoretical complexity and creativity.
In this sense, placing Mircea Eliade in the history of the Chicago School is both inevitable and problematic. Eliade was a landmark of the Chicago School, but its skyline was not harmonious with its surroundings. Admittedly, his expertise in comparative mythologies had no predecessors in Chicago, and it would be difficult to find a counterpart in his successors. From this fact, an aesthetic question of why myths should be learned in a divinity school would arise. Especially, how myths exemplify the Chicago sense of the religious experience requires careful consideration. Learning about myths in a divinity school is peculiar in many ways; first, in its relation to the system of the World Religions, and second, in its radical anachronism. History of religions, from its inception, had put an emphasis in philological training, but they had not emphasized its spirituality at least until Eliade.[33] Remember that the Divinity School was originally a place to read the Bible. Welcoming him to teach at Chicago, and in so doing admitting that the Bible and myths configure parallels, the Chicago School opened its way for the critical generalization of religions.
Furthermore, historicizing Eliade will deserve particular care in distinguishing him from Romantics. For example, in the realities represented in myths, he urges students to discover religions so that they can “dedicate most of their efforts to the large civilizations which have a long literary history.”[34] This particular aspect may be reminiscent of romanticism, which was influential in Greco-Roman myth studies in the eighteenth century. In other words, studying foreign myths for one’s own sake has repeatedly and critically been examined in its history. In response, Eliade would say “no,” and explain that the myth study in history of religions is for the sake of, or in appreciation of, “the original past.”[35] In Eliade’s own words,
[W]e believe that the history of religions is destined to play an important role in contemporary cultural life. This is not only because an understanding of exotic and archaic religions will significantly assist in a cultural dialogue with the representatives of such religions. It is more especially because, by attempting to understand the existential situations expressed by the documents he is studying, the historian of religions will inevitably attain to a deeper knowledge of man. It is on the basis of such a knowledge that a new humanism, on a world-wide scale, could develop.[36]
Thus, Eliade’s purpose of study distinguishes itself from romantic pursuit. Although still Eliade’s method may risk misinterpretation or being labeled as an orientalist, Eliade does not shy away from being “universal” and “general” about religion, which, in a larger scale, inspired the Chicago School. At the same time, being “general” about religion might not just connote something reluctant to emphasize its verity but is also a reminder of limitlessness of the field. However, Eliade’s formulation of “a new humanism” here—to deepen knowledge of man—would have been of great assistance in developing the identity of the Chicago School.
Against Secularists: The Mode of Advocacy
The third mode of taming modernity by the History of Religions was “advocacy” of religious phenomena. In part, this comes from their survival in harsh reductionism, the struggle with which actually reduced its way to becoming analytical. As a result of insisting the irreducibility of religious experience, the subject matter for the consideration becomes a “trivial” remainder of any other social dynamics.[37] Inevitably, the writings of those who committed to combatting with “the death of God” became the classics in the later generations, while the death of “the death of God” has rather become the real problem for the community of the Divinity School, according to one of the Eliade’s students, Bruce Lincoln, who notes:
By the end, the topic of religion had lost its novelty, and the frisson of first critical engagement with the previously sacrosanct was long since exhausted. In addition, insofar as many were persuaded that secularization had become a hallmark of modernity and progress, there seemed little need to flail at religion now that it had slid into irreversible decline.[38]
The passage above succinctly addresses the anxiety of extinction, which once was that of religion but also has currently been those of both religion and the academy itself. In Lincoln’s analysis, the critics of religion in the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries would represent the high culture, or in Lincoln’s wording, “Culture with a capital-C.”[39] Lincoln further criticizes that the structure in which this uppercase-C culture has been suppressing the lowercase-c culture, which is supposed to refer to the “mass culture” as opposed to the “high culture,” is becoming apparent and even decisive.[40] Decoding this statement surely explains that both religion and the academy are institutions, and at the same time, that the academy of religion would face the same criticism that religion experienced before.
However, one should hasten to react to Lincoln by asking why Eliade attracted such high levels of reputation and popularity in the late 1960s to 70s in the United States. To ask this question otherwise, one would inquire if Mircea Eliade would have known how the episteme of religious experience would survive in the course of secularization.
In the view of Jonathan Z. Smith, highly related to the notions of “culture” that Lincoln articulates, the minimal unit that entails the religious phenomena was, for Eliade, “civilization.”[41] Smith’s evaluation of Eliade’s A History of Religious Ideas provides some additional queues for reminding that Wach has already illustrated the two way of exploring history of religions, which are defined as “‘lengthwise in time’ (diachronically) and in ‘cross-sections’ (synchronically), that is, according to [a religion’s] development (Entwicklung) and according to [a religion’s] being (Sein).”[42] For Smith, the treatise of cultures in Eliade’s History results in rather “conventional, self-evident, found objects, with no hint of the methodological controversies or complexities,”[43] especially compared to the familiar formulation of “the so-called axial age” of Karl Jaspers.[44] Admittedly, Smith’s critique is fair, regarding Eliade’s negligence of the preceding problematics in the academic methodologies, but, as long as one reads Wach by a sympathizing reading of Kitagawa, Eliade seems rather faithful to Wach’s principle which appeared in the Introduction. At any rate, Smith’s finding of the civilizational outlook in Eliade was somehow hopeful despite the ennui of unavoidable secularism.
Joseph M. Kitagawa, who invited Mircea Eliade as the Dean of the Divinity School in 1956, appreciated Wach and Eliade’s heritage from a completely different viewpoint from that of J. Z. Smith. The view of this Japanese-American scholar who experienced the life in concentration camp in the United States during the Second World War was keenly cautious about and also proficient with the American audience in its history. Kitagawa made a great effort to define History of Religions from an institutional perspective. According to him, in addition to self-standing seminaries and the university departments of religious studies, divinity schools are one of the “products of American experience, and thus all betray similar earmarks of the American ethos,” which “we cannot satisfactorily articulate.”[45] The audience of the academic products must have been a crucial interest for a person who undertook the deanship of the school.
Besides the fatal concern of secularism and civilization, what Kitagawa faced was the American context of religious convergence and prejudice. Insomuch as what is accessible in their scholarly work, Kitagawa, contrasted to Wach and Eliade, concerned the domestic presence of history of religions, hardly detachable out of his personal hardship. In his words,
One of the most shocking and most persistent anomalies in American society has been its attitude to, and treatment of, first generation immigrants. America has always prided itself on welcoming new blood from various cultural, racial, and national groups, and some of the more fortunate or skilled people from other lands were, indeed, warmly welcomed. But many of the less fortunate immigrants have faced a number of serious hardships in this country.[46]
Kitagawa embraces the discipline of history of religions to respond well to this circumstance because he believes it to be the “product of the American world.”[47] His wishful view on the histories of religions is distinct from those on “objective and descriptive studies of religion,” “comparative religion,” and “philosophy of religion.”[48] Situated in a complex religious ecological venue of the United States, Kitagawa not just appropriated but also appreciated the presence of histories of religions, or Wach’s emphasis on “understanding” and Eliade’s “total hermeneutics.”[49]
In particular of Kitagawa’s view, the discipline of history of religions “advocated” and engaged with the present American audience. As often problematized, human curiosity is not free from favoritism, and at worse, curiosity becomes one of the factors of fluency in cultural appreciation. Even if one finds Eliade’s virtuosity unattainable, having a good audience in the community may prevent one from falling into parochialism. Kitagawa discovered the community that the Divinity School must serve in the closest place of the world. The mode of “advocacy” should not be lost despite the prominence of the other two, “diplomacy” and “self-reference,” because it commits to responding to the needs of one of the most important audiences in the long run. Even today, the Divinity School’s field of history of religions stands on the cornerstone that three émigré-scholars founded and attracts many students with a rich variety of backgrounds.
Given that seminaries are for theological instruction and that religious studies departments are for secular academic interests, the Divinity School located at the research university would suit neither of them, nor the synthesis or the bricolage of the two. Rather, the School itself reifies the study of divinity in the modern, pluralistic, humanistic, and universal sense—in a hermeneutic manner, as the institution could only “represent” a form of knowledge. In particular, the History of Religions field of the School has played an intricate role in identifying and contextualizing their disciplines or subjects of study. This scholastic struggle might, however, succeed from the original term, Religionswissenschaft, which can be literally translated from German as, “critical knowledge of religion.” To establish a discipline of religious studies, the academics have refuted the past of being denominationally theological or romantically encyclopedic but instead have acted as if they had been all-comprehensive in the first place, so that they can produce the universal knowledge. Nonetheless, this indicates no pretense that people in antiquity thus thought, but rather states that they assign themselves a social function by the religious tradition. In this respect, being in one of the professional schools of the university would better suit the school than existing in a department of the school of arts and sciences.
The vocation that the Divinity School institutionally produces is also a hermeneutical construction. The School still offers a traditional theological degree of Master of Divinity (M.Div.) not just for those with religious backgrounds but also for “secular humanist students.”[50] While this policy seems to be oxymoronic, the institution believes in such a field of leadership. It is questionable whether such a profession is possible, but the intellectual challenge of self-definition rather intends to enliven the culture of pioneer-ship. The term “divinity” evokes the rigorous and old tradition on one hand and the generosity of allowing various interpretations on the other. The Divinity School is the institutionalized offspring of such delicate inclusivity, which encompasses a unique direction of producing knowledge.
Notes
[1]. My understanding of “the modern” is more consciously contrasted with “post-modern” than “pre-modern,” and I emphasize this because a part of my thesis is to argue that the history of religions has been one of the subjects that the modernity enables. Bruno Latour famously argues the modernity consists of “two dichotomies”: one is to separate human world and non-human world (as separating social from natural science), and the other is to distinguish “Us,” who suppose society and nature are two different entities, from “Them,” whose societies and natures are inseparably overlapping. See, Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 99.
[2]. Unless one fears of running the risk of oversimplification, these may correspond respectively to a learning “of,” a learning “from,” and a learning “for,” religion, thus suggesting three types of the modern audience: scientists, philologists, and secularists. Again, I am about to borrow the term of Bruno Latour, who argues that inquiries in the modern anthropological scholarship has had to satisfy the societal interest and that the acquired knowledge is nothing but such “diplomatic representations.” See, Bruno Latour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013), 67.
[3]. Joachim Wach, Types of Religious Experience: Christian and Non-Christian (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1951), 14.
[4]. Wach, Types of Religious Experience: Christian and Non-Christian, 57.
[5]. Joachim Wach, Introduction to the History of Religions, eds. Joseph M. Kitagawa and Gregory D. Alles with the collaboration of Karl W. Luckert (New York: MacMillan, 1988), 48-49.
[6]. Wach, Introduction to the History of Religions, 49.
[7]. Wach, Introduction to the History of Religions, 19.
[8]. Wach, Introduction to the History of Religions, 49.
[9]. Wach, Types of Religious Experience: Christian and Non-Christian, 55.
[10]. Wach, Types of Religious Experience: Christian and Non-Christian, 51.
[11]. Jonathan Z. Smith, “Connections,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 58 (1990): 6; excerpted in Smith, “Tillich[’s] Remains …,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 78 no. 4 (December 2010): 1140.
[12]. J. Z. Smith, “Tillich[’s] Remains …,” 1140.
[13]. J. Z. Smith, “Tillich[’s] Remains …,” 1142n1.
[14]. J. Z. Smith, “Tillich[’s] Remains …,” 1147.
[15]. “An Historical Statement” (1895), in Circular of Information at the Divinity School (An academic catalogue, The University of Chicago Divinity School, Chicago, IL, 1895-1903), 1.
[16]. A. Eustace Haydon, “What Constitutes a Scientific Interpretation of Religion?” The Journal of Religion 6 no. 3 (May 1926): 244.
[17]. A. Eustace Haydon, “From Comparative Religion to History of Religions,” The Journal of Religion 2 no. 6 (November 1922): 581.
[18]. “General Information Concerning the Divinity School” (1895), in Circular of Information at the Divinity School (An academic catalogue, The University of Chicago Divinity School, Chicago, IL, 1895-1903), 8.
[19]. John W. Boyer, The University of Chicago: A History (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 118.
[20]. Boyer, The University of Chicago: A History, 119.
[21]. “Historical Sketch,” in Announcements: The University of Chicago Divinity School for the Fiftieth Anniversary Sessions of 1940/1941 (An academic catalogue, The University of Chicago Divinity School, Chicago, IL, 1940), 2.
[22]. Daniel L. Pals, “The Reality of Sacred: Mircea Eliade,” in Pals, Seven Theories of Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 161: “When he came to Chicago, there were three significant professorships in the history of religions in the United States; twenty years later, there were thirty, half of which were occupied by his students.” Quoted in C. Neal Keye, “The Resistance to Reading: Genealogies of Interpretation in Theories of Religion and Culture” (PhD Diss., The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, 1999), 108.
[23]. Mircea Eliade, A History of Religious Ideas: Volume 1, From the Stone Age to the Eleusinian Mysteries, trans. Willard R. Trask (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1978), xvi.
[24]. Eliade, A History of Religious Ideas, 1:8.
[25]. Mircea Eliade, The Quest: History and Meaning in Religion (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 59.
[26]. Eliade, The Quest, 69.
[27]. Eliade, The Quest, 59.
[28]. Eliade, The Quest, 62.
[29]. Mircea Eliade, Autobiography, Volume 2: 1937-1960, Exile’s Odyssey (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 177.
[30]. Eliade, Autobiography, 2:176.
[31]. Eliade, Autobiography, 2:182.
[32]. Eliade, Autobiography, 2:186-187.
[33]. Eliade, The Quest, 69: “This is to say that the historian of religions recognizes a spiritual unity subjacent to the history of humanity; in other terms, in studying the Australians, Vedic Indians, or whatever other ethnic group or cultural system, the historian of religions does not have a sense of moving in a world radically ‘foreign’ to him.”
[34]. John A. Saliba, ‘Homo Religiosus’ in Mircea Eliade: An Anthropological Evaluation (Leiden: Brill, 1976), 39.
[35]. Saliba, ‘Homo Religiosus’ in Mircea Eliade, 49.
[36]. Eliade, The Quest, 3.
[37]. Keye, “The Resistance to Reading,” 103.
[38]. Bruce Lincoln, Gods and Demons, Priests and Scholars: Critical Explorations in the History of Religions (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 132.
[39]. Bruce Lincoln, Holy Terror: Thinking about Religion after September 11, 2nd ed. (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2006), 53.
[40]. Lincoln, Holy Terror, 53.
[41]. Jonathan Z. Smith, “The Eternal Deferral,” in Hermeneutics, Politics, and the History of Religions: The Contested Legacies of Joachim Wach & Mircea Eliade, eds. Christian K. Wedemeyer and Wendy Doniger (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 222.
[42]. Wach, Introduction to the History of Religions, 19.
[43]. J. Z. Smith, “The Eternal Deferral,” 223.
[44]. J. Z. Smith, “The Eternal Deferral,” 222.
[45]. Joseph M. Kitagawa, “Introduction,” in Religious Studies, Theological Studies and the University-Divinity School (Atlanta, Ga.: Scholars Press, 1992), 8.
[46]. Joseph M. Kitagawa, The History of Religions: Understanding Human Experience (Atlanta, Ga.: Scholars Press, 1987), 224.
[47]. Kitagawa, The History of Religions, 136.
[48]. Kitagawa, The History of Religions, 136.
[49]. Kitagawa, The History of Religions, 140.
[50]. “The Announcement 2018/2019 of the University of Chicago Divinity School” (an academic catalogue, the University of Chicago Divinity School, Chicago, IL, 2018), 12.
