Chapter 

History of Religions: The Comparative Moment

Guy G. Stroumsa

L’étude comparée des religions, quand elle sera définitivement étab-

lie sur la base solide de la critique, formera le plus beau chapitre de
l’histoire de l’esprit humain, entre l’histoire des mythologies et l’his-
toire des philosophies.
Renan 1949, p. 945

…
A Science of Religion, based on an impartial and truly scientific
comparison of all, or at all events, of the most important, religions
of mankind, is now only a question of time.
Müller 1873, p. 34–​35

…
The comparative study of religion has always been plagued by this
peculiar embarrassment:  the elusiveness of its subject matter …
Our problem, and it grows worse by the day, is not to define religion
but to find it.
Geertz 1968, p.1

…
Méthode phare dans le dernier quart du XXe siècle, le comparat-
isme semble voué à disparaître.
Scheid 2012, p. 111

∵
The epigraphs of this essay reflect the fascination exerted by the idea of compar-
ative religion, on both sides of the Channel and of the Atlantic and for over more

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/​9 789004387638_010

History of Religions: The Comparative Moment 319

than a century. Geertz and Scheid, however, are much less sanguine than Renan
and Müller about what the method has achieved –​or indeed may achieve altogeth-
er. Geertz goes on, indeed: “And when, as in the case of comparative religion, it has
not even been elaborated into some form of systematics, an organized taxonomy
(as indeed, given the ad hoc nature of the whole enterprise, it cannot be) …”1
In the days the young Ernest Renan was daydreaming about science (including
what is called in English “Humanities” and in French, more inclusively, “sciences
humaines,”) as the religion of the future, the modern comparative study of reli-
gion had barely started. It is only during the second half of the nineteenth century
that it would fully come to fruition. The last three decades of that century would
see the method’s full bloom, a bloom to a great extent charted by the pioneering
work of Renan and Müller on both sides of the Channel.2 Since that time, and
despite various achievements, throughout the twentieth century, a succession of
attempts, which sought to recreate the excitement of the new method and the
power of the new faith, would never recover the full momentum of the compar-
ative moment at its acme, when the impact comparative religion upon modern
thought has been compared to that exerted by Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.3
Since the Enlightenment, the idea of comparison had stood at the core of
the new project of a non-​confessional study of religious phenomena, past and
present, and throughout all cultures. As Renaud Gagné shows in his superb
introduction to this volume, there are of course a number of ways of study-
ing cultures in comparative fashion, denoting highly different valences shap-
ing the purposes of comparatism. There is no need to refer here to these dif-
ferent modes of comparatism in relation to our topic. Suffice it to note the
obvious: in the European study of religion, Christianity retains an essentially
ambiguous status, as it is the fundamental model of any comparison, while re-
maining beyond any possible true comparison with any of the other religions
of humankind, past and present. The main goal of this essay is to recapture the
conditions through which comparatism became the method of choice of the
history of religions, when it emerged as a discipline in a number of European
countries, more or less during the three last decades of the nineteenth century.
Although appeals to approach the study of religions from a comparative per-
spective were regularly made throughout the twentieth century, my argument

1 Geertz 1968, 23.
2 See Simon-​Nahum 2002. One should note here that Renan’s wife translated into French
Müller’s Introduction to Mythology, a book prefaced by Renan, although the translator’s name
is not mentioned. See Renan’s letter to Müller from 30 January 1858 (Renan 1961, p. 224–​225,
reference in Müller 2002, Introduction, p. 5, n. 1). My thanks to Elsa Courant for calling my
attention to this document.
3 Schwab 1950, p. 183–​184.
320 Stroumsa

will be that the magical moment of those early days of the new discipline
would never be recovered. We shall also seek the reasons for this fact.
As a social fact, a discipline is more than a discourse, i.e., a special language,
with a vocabulary and argumentative patterns of its own, the ritualization of
speech. A discipline is constituted by a web of specialists able to perform in
a discourse of their own, but also by institutional structures. Within the uni-
versities, Faculties, Departments, Schools offering lectures and seminars, orga-
nizing exams and delivering diplomas. Outside them, academies, publishing
houses, learned societies, conferences, etc …
In order to grasp why those few decades when comparative religion emerged as
a discipline may be called a magical moment, one must realize that as social facts,
disciplines are situated at the intersection of a number of different worlds, which
all impact upon them, directly or indirectly. To start from the closest and obvious,
a discipline exists side by side with other disciplines, and no wall is high enough
to prevent infiltration of ideas and methods from one to another. The modern
study of religion grew from dissatisfaction with traditional theology, and at the
intersection between theology and Oriental and classical studies. Traditional bib-
lical hermeneutics had been transformed into biblical criticism in the eighteenth
century. The critical moment in this transformation is best reflected in the birth of
Homeric studies with the Göttingen Classicist Friedrich August Wolf. His pioneer-
ing Prolegomena ad Homerum (1795) was itself strongly influenced by the biblical
studies of the Hebraists Johann David Michaelis and Johann Gottfried Eichhorn,
also from Göttingen. It is in the early nineteenth century that in the leading Ger-
man universities, the various disciplines become associated with different Facul-
ties: Theology, Philosophy, Oriental Studies. The study of religion would emerge
only progressively, at first within the theological faculties, and the first chairs de-
voted to the new field would not be established before 1873 (the date of the first
such Chair, in Geneva). Other disciplines, moreover, were directly implicated in
the birth and early growth of the new discipline: linguistics, history, archaeology,
ethnology, and of course, above them all, philosophical reflection, in particular
Romantic philosophy, which for much of the nineteenth century polished the
lenses through which once interpreted religious phenomena, from all times and
all religions, and through which their understanding, through the viewpoint of a
history of the spirit culminating with Christianity, received its full significance.
One must however broaden the circle. As a discipline, history of religions
played a role in the various European societies, at the intersection between
religion, culture and politics. In an era of acute nationalisms in Europe, often
pitted against one another in the search for the definition of nations, religion
was often moving from the core identity of a nation to becoming an essential
part of its cultural capital. The secularizing process, which had started earlier,
History of Religions: The Comparative Moment 321

was now picking up momentum –​of course with highly different patterns in

Catholic and in Protestant countries.
During the Enlightenment, a strong interest in rituals and myths had per-
mitted to move from the study of beliefs –​which had been paramount in the
classical understanding of religion, true or false, so far –​to that of religious
practice.4 The nineteenth century would not erase the dimension of ritual, but
would add a new one, which had been almost ignored so far: that of language.
The dramatic advances in the nineteenth-​century study of language started
with the European re-​discovery of Sanskrit, as a language akin to Greek, Latin,
and other European languages, by Sir William Jones. The subsequent major
works of grammarians and linguists, as well as the huge interest generated by
India, its languages and its literature among Romantic philosophers, would
have an immediate and lasting impact upon European scholarship, and much
beyond. Let us mention here only the extensive comparative work on Indo-​
European languages done by the linguist Franz Bopp, whose interest was kin-
dled by Schlegel’s Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier (1808).
What I have called “the magical moment” reflects a rare state of equilibrium,
as it were, between all these different trends. None among them was predomi-
nant enough for the others to pale, for the balance to be tipped. Like all states
of equilibrium, this one was precarious, and from the beginning of the twenti-
eth century, the comparative method underwent major transformations, as its
heuristic import seems to have become significantly weaker. To a great extent,
twentieth-​century phenomenology of religion perceived itself, and to a large
extent was perceived, as the inheritor of turn-​of-​the-​century comparative reli-
gion. It made constant appeal to phenomena picked up from different cultural
backgrounds, and yet did not really compare them, as it used them as more or
less interchangeable elements in an essentially unwavering tale. While com-
paratism highlights differences between systems, by eroding or even erasing
differences between religious cultures, phenomenology, from Gerardus van
der Leeuw (1890–​1950),5 mainly active in Groningen to Mircea Eliade (1907–​
1986),6 seems to do exactly the opposite. In a sense, the cognitive approach to

4 The entry “Mythologie” in the Grande Encyclopédie, written by the polymath Nicolas Fréret,
shows that the word referred then to what we usually call today comparative religion. See
Stroumsa 2010, p. 161.
5 Van der Leeuw taught mainly in Groningen; his most important book, Phänomenologie der
Religion (1933), had a major impact in its English garb, Religion in Essence and Manifesta-
tion. In the 1930s, of course, ‘Phenomenology’ was associated with the names of Husserl and
Heidegger in German.
6 The Romanian Eliade taught at the University of Chicago from 1957 on. The fact that his
seminal Traité d’histoire des religions (Paris, 1949) was published in English under the title
322 Stroumsa

the study of religion represents today the true follow up of phenomenology

of religion, by erasing the significance of differences between cultures in its
search for the single core of human nature.
It would be tempting, then, to describe the history of the comparative study
of religion in terms of “Rise and Fall,” as it were, of an academic discipline.
Tempting, but ultimately misleading, for a number of reasons. Firstly, students
of religion, or at least those among them who enjoy playing this kind of seman-
tic games (and who indulge in calling themselves “theorists”) are still arguing
on whether their craft is best defined as a field or as a discipline. Secondly, the
modern, non-​theological study of religion never succeeded in getting a name
of its own. More precisely, it never succeeded in sticking to a name of its own.
It has been known under names as different as “science(s) of religion,” “his-
tory of religion(s),” “study of religion(s),” “comparative religion,” while today,
in the Anglo-​Saxon world, the ubiquitous and amorphous “Religious Studies”
predominates. In German one speaks of Vergleichende (or Allgemeine) Reli-
gionswissenschaft (or Religionsgeschichte), while French traditionally refers to
Histoire des religions, more rarely to Science des religions. In these various ex-
pressions, “history” is to be understood in the original meaning historia already
has in Herodotus: “research.”
The reference to Herodotus alludes to the fact that the comparative activity
belongs to the oldest thought patterns: it reflects a desire to evaluate oneself
vis-​à-​vis the other. In that sense, in involves contrast and ranking: one system
(usually one’s own) must be better, superior to the other –​that of the stranger,
the outsider. Hence, comparing never reflects a neutral account of the other,
remarks Geoffrey Lloyd,7 while Bruce Lincoln insists that comparing is never
an innocent activity.8
While there are a number of comparative methods, quite different from one
another, they all possess some common elements. Hence, for instance, Marc
Bloch points out that comparing always involves (at least) two entities that
must possess both some similarities and some differences.9 It assumes, then,
those entities to be comparable.

Patterns in Comparative Religion (London, 1958)  reflects the different sensitivities in the
study of religion across the Channel. As a term defining the discipline, ‘Comparative Religion’
may have already been a bit outdated at the time.
7 See Lloyd 2015. See also Lloyd 2009, in particular the chapter on Religious studies.
8 See Lincoln 2018, Introduction. I wish to thank Bruce Lincoln for sending me this text previ-
ous to publication.
9 Bloch 2006.
History of Religions: The Comparative Moment 323

If attitudes to comparative religion vary a great deal, this is because so much

hangs not only on religious beliefs, both implicit and explicit, or the lack there-
of. It also depends on what one means by ‘comparative religion.’ As elsewhere,
however, attitudes often seem to precede analysis, rather than to derive from it.
John Stuart Mill, already, pointing out that there were essentially two kinds of
comparisons, was referring to what he called the “method of agreement” and
that of “difference.”10 The comparative interest in religions seems to have never
really decided which one of these two methods it was to follow. By tradition,
the study of other religions (i. e., other than one’s own) has been a child of
religious polemics, and then started by focusing on differences between both
theologies (or myths) and ritual systems. Yet, as it started at a time when tol-
eration and understanding between cultures was, at least in theory, the order
of the day among enlightened Christians, rather than highlighting points of
discord, it soon sought to identify patterns of similarity between religions. Al-
though this trend, which reached its natural expression in what is called today
“Interfaith dialogue,” does not really belong to the scholarly study of religion,
this fact is often blurred.11 This is no doubt due to the fact that too often uni-
versities delegate the study of religion to their Faculty of Theology, sometimes
baptized anew as Faculty of Theology and Religion (as in Oxford) or Faculty
of Divinity (as in Cambridge), this in direct disregard of Cornelis Tiele’s pow-
erful caveat. Tiele, who had appointed Professor of the History of Religions at
Leiden in 1877, had indeed cautioned already: “the science of religion is as dif-
ferent from confessional theology as astronomy is from astrology, or as chem-
istry is from alchemy.”12
Throughout the long Middle Ages, the ubiquitous European religious tax-
onomy of the world distinguished between Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and
paganism. This fourth category included all those nations that did not follow
one of the three Abrahamic religions. This traditional taxonomy would eventu-
ally break, in the wake of the great discoveries.13 The vastly different religions
of the Americas and in South East and East Asia now starting to be known to
the Europeans could not easily be dumped together into the overall category of
‘paganism.’ Although none of them could be identified as monotheistic, they

10 See the discussion of this point in Kocka 2003.

11 The formal origins of modern interreligious dialogue may be located in the 1893 Chicago
Parliament of the World’s Religions. Nathan Söderblom (1866–​1931), who was the bishop
of Uppsala and received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1930, was one of the main leaders of the
ecumenical movement in the twentieth century.
12 See Platvoet 1998. I owe this reference to Philippe Borgeaud.
13 See Stroumsa 2015a.
324 Stroumsa

clearly did not all belong in the same bag. Iroquois, Aztecs or Incas had both
a worldview and rituals highly different from those of Zoroastrians, Brahmins,
Buddhists or Confucians. While the American Indians, were identified as “sav-
ages” (mainly due to the existence of human sacrifices among some of them),
the great Asian literary civilizations represented, for the European, Christian
“West,” the “East.” East versus West would become the major axis around which
the new religious taxonomies would be organized after the Enlightenment,
from Hegel and Schelling, the major Romantic philosophers, to the birth and
crystallization of the concept of “world religions” towards the end of the nine-
teenth century. The Orient, where the sun rises, had always been the locus par
excellence of religion, of its birth and of its early and most natural growth [ex
oriente lux].
From Matteo Ricci on, the Jesuits had revealed China and its civilization
to Christian Europe. Accused by their Dominican enemies of flirting with pa-
ganism in their adoption of Chinese manners, the Jesuits had countered the
accusation by arguing that Confucian rituals, which were in their nature es-
sentially political rather than religious, were not to be considered as pagan.14
The so-​called Querelle des rites famously ended with the Dominicans’ victo-
ry and the condemnation of the Jesuits at the Sorbonne in 1700, and yet the
point made by the Jesuits would retain its power of conviction, and from now
on Asian religions would not seriously be considered to be “pagan” anymore.
More and more, “the East” would be seen in parallel to “the West,” and as a
corollary Eastern patterns of religion would be compared to the Western ones.
So much is clear.
What is less clear is what ‘East’ and ‘West’ meant. Now it had always been
a self-​evident truth that religion came from the East. In his De Dis Syris, pub-
lished in 1617, and which ushers in a new age in the study of religion at the
dawn of modern times, John Selden had clearly affirmed that all religion came
from the East, “ex oriente numen,” in a sense, similar to the time-​honored “ex
oriente lux.” But for Selden, and until the Enlightenment, “the East” meant the
Near East, the cradle of Biblical historia sacra. The Enlightenment was the time
of European infatuation with chinoiseries and, on another level, of the intel-
lectual attraction exerted by Confucian wisdom among intellectuals seeking
to rid themselves of Christian revelation. At the turn of the nineteenth cen-
tury, the Near East was finally dethroned, under the powerful impact of Sir
William Jones’ comparative studies on Sanskrit and the European languages,
and the birth of the concept of an Indo-​European family of languages. As a

14 See for instance Mungello 1985.

History of Religions: The Comparative Moment 325

consequence, the seductive powers of Asia moved East, to India and to China,
which from now on would be considered, together with Japan, as the loci of
the great Asian civilizations, which also had the advantage over those of the
ancient Near East of being still alive. The Far East, the true, deep, new and fas-
cinating Orient, had dethroned the Near East, the old Orient, identified with
Jews and Muslims, both believers in two false versions of revealed truth. The
Jews were suspect because they were unable to decipher it properly, the Mus-
lims, because their founder had been a false prophet, an impostor. From now
on, the comparative study of religions would revolve around two major axes.
The first axis was that of the postulated two main families of religions, Se-
mitic and Indo-​European, following the same linguistic families.15 As is well
known, the birth and growth of this axis had been closely connected to the de-
velopment of racist anti-​Semitism, and would retain an intricate relationship
with it throughout the first half of the twentieth century. It is between the cat-
egories of East and West that the second axis revolved. The fifty volumes of The
Sacred Books of the East would become, in due course, the leading monument
to this approach. This major translation project of classical texts, from various
Oriental languages, had been planned by Max Müller and published between
1879 and 1910. Indeed, The Sacred Books of the East had been conceived as noth-
ing less than an alternative Bible. They included the Qur’an, a fact whose signif-
icance seems to remain much underappreciated, although it speaks volumes.
Indeed, it highlights the deeply ambivalent attitude of European Christians
towards Islam, and their deep resistance to the idea of an Abrahamic family
of religions, which would include Islam together with Christianity. Positioning
the Qur’an within the Sacred Books of the East entailed, of course, that Islam
did not belong to the spiritual inheritance of the West. This was equivalent
to the argument that Christianity owed precious little to its Jewish origins, an
accident of history, as it were (that was the prevailing view), or else, explained
away through a postulated Aryan genealogy of the Galilean Jesus.16

15 The idea of only two main linguistic families is of course a shocking oversimplification,
one that was not usually made by nineteenth-​century scholars. Both Renan and Müller,
for instance (to stick to those students of religion discussed here) knew full well that
Chinese, for instance, belonged to another linguistic family, the “Turanian” one. But as
neither of them was a Sinologist, they both soon reverted to what remained for them the
central axis of world history, that around the opposition between the Semitic and the
Indo-​European peoples, their languages, cultures and religions.
16 Before the well-​known apologists of Nazi Anti-​Semitism (on which see Heschel 2008),
the idea of an Aryan Galilean Jesus would circulate widely in the nineteenth century,
and would be promoted, for instance, by the prolific and mediocre historian of religions
Emile-​Louis Burnouf (1821–​1907), the author of La science des religions (Paris, 1885) and a
326 Stroumsa

It is during the long nineteenth century that the East-​West axis for com-
paring religions (as well as languages and civilizations) flourished. This was
also the golden age of imperialism, when various European states (one usually
refers mainly to Britain and France, but Germany and Russia should not be for-
gotten) established colonies in conquered territories, mainly in Asia and Afri-
ca. Imperialistic, indeed, is in our own days of post-​colonial fashion, a common
slur addressed to the comparatist project, as it usually reflects an approach to
India common in Victorian times: as remarkable as it may be, Indian civiliza-
tion, in its various aspects, remains fundamentally inferior to that of Christian
Europe. Comparison, certainly comparison on a grand scale, between cultures
and religions, is then perceived as imperialistic, as a continuation of colonial
domination.17 In other words, comparison is always founded upon implicit
presuppositions on the respective value of the terms of the comparison. In
that Foucauldian sense, knowledge is never free from a hidden agenda about
power. On that view, there would be no such thing as real, honest intellectual
curiosity.
Some reflections on the idea of comparison might be in order here:
There seems to be another paradox in the comparatist method. On the one
hand, comparing entails, at least implicitly, giving equivalent truth-​value to the
terms to be compared to one another. On the other hand, there seems to be
no comparatism without ranking. In other words, one system is always judged
preferable to the other one, in the eyes of the beholder. The paradox is resolved
by the adjunction of the time dimension: all religions are true, but each one is
true only in its own time.
In his major study of the modern approach of the religions of Asia, Urs App
has insisted upon the fact that the European discovery of Asian religions re-
flects the gradual emancipation from Biblical studies.18 Both these phenome-
na, however, took place over a long period, starting from early modernity. After
the Enlightenment, however, in the early nineteenth century, an epistemolog-
ical rupture happened, which hastened the process of secularization, and, to-
gether with it, a new equilibrium, as it were, between all religious traditions,

nephew of the great philologist and scholar of Buddhism Eugène Burnouf. (On the latter’s
comparative approach, see Despland 1997. Such views on the Aryan Jesus would be fur-
ther developed by Houston Stewart Chamberlain in his Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten
Jahrhunderts (first published in 1900 and in English translation in 1911). Renan’s attitude
here is quite complex, and I cannot do justice to it here. See further Stroumsa 2017. On the
one hand, he could claim that “Au fond, Jésus n’avait rien de juif.” But he was also able to
argue at length for the Jewish roots of Christianity. See further Olender 1989, p. 75–​111.
17 Rüpke 2018. See further Filoramo 2016, p. 30–​31.
18 App 2010.
History of Religions: The Comparative Moment 327

which put Christianity, to some extent, and certainly not without long Kul-
turkampf, on a par with the other religions of humankind, past and present.
It is thanks to this fragile equilibrium that the new discipline, the compara-
tive study of religions, would emerge, out of traditional theology, to eventually
blossom toward the end of the century. In Protestant climate, theological Fac-
ulties would learn to make room for the new field, and even to put to good use
the results of comparative and historical enquiry in order to refresh Biblical
studies (see especially the Göttingen religionsgeschichtliche Schule).19 At the
same time, some linguistic disciplines would leave the theological Faculties,
to form the core of the Oriental Faculties.20 Hence, while Hebrew belonged to
the turf of Theology, Arabic was taught in Oriental Studies, which created an
immediate caesura between Judaism (needless to insist on the fact that only
Biblical Hebrew was taught, and that Judaism from the Rabbinic times on was
barely acknowledged: what we call now “early Judaism” was then called “Spät-
judentum” as it reflected the decadent state of religious life among the Jews in
the days of Jesus) and Islam.
Catholic countries would offer a much more aggressive resistance to the
sounds of modernity, and neither in Italy nor in Spain would the Church per-
mit serious incursions of critical methods to the historical and comparative
study of religious phenomena. There, it is only in the twentieth century that
some kind of aggiornamento would occur, and that things would start moving.
France, however, provided a special case, with the dismantling of the Faculty
of Theology at the Sorbonne and its replacement, in 1886, by then newly es-
tablished Section des Sciences Religieuses (Ve Section) at the Ecole Pratique
des Hautes Etudes, with the Protestant Albert Réville as its first President. In
1879, already, Réville had been elected the first incumbent of the new chair of
History of Religions at the Collège de France.
A paradoxical consequence of secularization must be emphasized in our
present context. Giving up on the traditional Christian religious identity of Eu-
rope happened just as national identities were being revived, discovered or ex-
acerbated. The Christian heritage, however, did not disappear –​and could not
have disappeared. Rather, it was transformed, and from theological became
a cultural heritage. This secularized Christian identity had a subtle, but dra-
matic effect on attitudes to members of other religions, more particularly to
Jews. Attitudes to Jews throughout Christian history had been somewhat less
than respectful or dignified. Yet, the place reserved to Judaism (and hence to

19 See for instance Lüdemann and Schröder 1987.

20 On Orientalism and the study of religion in nineteenth-​century Germany, see in particu-
lar the major study of Marchand 2010.
328 Stroumsa

Jews) in traditional Christian doctrine, as the erstwhile chosen people, and the
eschatological hope of their conversion, inscribed in the economy of salvation,
both demanded and permitted a modicum of toleration, at least most of the
time. Giving up on the traditional theological framework of reference meant,
as collateral damage, the weakening or disappearance of such demand for tol-
eration of vetus Israel. The Jews, from Herder and Hegel on, would be identified
as a people from Asia, somehow lost in Europe. Theological anti-​Judaism had
now mutated into racial Anti-​Semitism, a much more lethal illness.
The century then beginning would see a dramatic rise in secularization,
across many Western European nations, and the increased transformation of
Christianity, in Catholic as well as in Protestant milieus. This secularization
had as a major (and too often unacknowledged) consequence the transforma-
tion of Christianity into what we have learned to call, following Pierre Bour-
dieu, “cultural capital” (more precisely, the cultural capital of Europe). Yet,
what is remarkable is the fact that this secularization went hand in hand with a
romantic revival, and rejection of the Enlightenment tradition of rationalism.
Romantic secularism is a paradox of sorts, but a highly powerful one, which
had a dramatic impact upon approaches to religion, including approaches to
the comparative study of religion.
It is to this last topic that the following pages are devoted; they will focus
upon the growth of the discipline itself, and on its golden age, in the last third
of the nineteenth century, in the age of imperialism. Before I seek to highlight
some major trends of the emergence of a new discipline, born from the odd
union of theology and orientalism, I wish to offer some general reflections on
the context in which the idea of comparing religions develops in the nine-
teenth century.
In their modern sense, “religion” and “the religions” seem to be an invention
of the Enlightenment.21 It is now customary to say that the European discovery
of the Asian religions reflects the gradual emancipation from Biblical studies.
The new appeal of India and China in the days of the Enlightenment certainly
betrays a clear weakening of the traditional centrality of the Biblical tradition.
But it also permits a binary, comparative approach: we (the West) versus the
rest (the East). In that sense, comparison served during the Enlightenment to
reduce the apparently infinite variety of beliefs and rites to a limited number
of common patterns, a fact highlighted by Jacques Revel.22
For the Enlightenment, the nature of religion was one and the same, irre-
spective of its historical garb. The Parable of the Three Rings, as recounted by

21 See in particular Harrison 1990 and Nongbri 2013.

22 Revel 2010, p. 331.
History of Religions: The Comparative Moment 329

Lessing in Nathan der Weise (which was first played in Berlin in 1783), and the
Book of the Three Impostors (which was in both its French and Latin versions
the most famous samizdat of the eighteenth century) had opposite views on
the truth-​value of the three Abrahamic religions. And yet, they both taught
that although Judaism, Christianity and Islam seemed on surface to be dif-
ferent, indeed had fought one another throughout history, their fundamental
teachings were fundamentally identical.23
Perhaps the most striking comparative study of religion to emerge from the
Enlightenment is the mammoth work of the French savant and revolutionary
Charles-​François Dupuis, Origine de tous les cultes, ou religion universelle, pub-
lished in twelve volumes in 1795. On 1 Frimaire of An xii (21 November 1803),
Dupuis lectured at the opening session of the Collège de France, where he was
professor of Latin rhetoric. In the text of this lecture, reprinted as an introduc-
tion to later editions of his magnum opus, he states that the annals of almost all
peoples deal with theogony, in the ambiguous style typical of oracles. Dupuis
claims to have analyzed and compared all those “histoires merveilleuses” in
order to detect the relationship they hold between them and with Nature, and
to determine their true character and the impact they have had on history and
on other branches of human knowledge. Such a synoptic perception of all the-
ologies should convince us once and for all of the uselessness of all attempts to
cross the boundaries of nature. In other words, writes Dupuis, the comparative
study of all religions of the world represents a full tour of philosophical errors.
Dupuis, indeed, together with “l’idéologue” Volney, was at the origin of the idea
that Jesus, rather than a historical person, represented, rather, an avatar of the
solar cult. For Dupuis, a son of the radical Enlightenment, the comparative
study of religion was a powerful instrument, which could bee of great use to-
ward the disenchantment of the world, a weapon in the hands of those who
fought for enhanced secularization, which so often went hand in hand with
the Voltairian motto “Ecrasez l’infâme!”
Dupuis’ encyclopedic work, a typical child of the Enlightenment, permits
us to measure the route accomplished since Cérémonies et coutumes de tous
les peuples, the collective encyclopedia published by Bernard Picart in Am-
sterdam in seven massive volumes from 1723 to 1743 –​a work recently dubbed
“the book that changed the world.”24 Cérémonies et coutumes did not represent
the achievement of a single author. Neither did it propound one single thesis
about the nature of religion and the origin of religions, but sought as complete

23 See Stroumsa 2015b.
24 Hunt, Jacob, Mijnhardt 2010.
330 Stroumsa

an atlas as possible of all known forms of religious rituals throughout the earth.
The emphasis on rituals, rather than on beliefs, is striking, and reflects an eth-
nological curiosity typical of the Enlightenment. Giambattista Vico’s Scienza
Nuova, published in 1724, represents of course a different intellectual enter-
prise altogether.25 And yet, its attempt to deal with the myths of all nations –​
barring those of Israel –​also reflects the same Zeitgeist.
A remarkable work of comparative religious history from the early eigh-
teenth century is the Irish freethinker John Toland’s Nazarenus, or Jewish, Gen-
tile and Mahometan Christianity, Containing the history of the antient Gospel
of Barnabas, and the modern Gospel of the Mahometans, attributed to the same
Apostle: this last Gospel being now first made known among Christians, published
in London in 1718, but written in French already a decade earlier, in 1708. Estab-
lishing his argument upon the apocryphal Gospel of Barnabas, Toland sought
to reveal the hidden thread linking the early history of the three Abrahamic re-
ligions –​through the vicissitudes of the Ebionites, a Jewish-​Christian sect from
early Christianity. Toland’s scholarly instincts would prove here nothing less
than amazing, as the problem of Jewish-​Christian influence upon the Qur’an
is today at the forefront of contemporary scholarship. Nazarenus may well be
considered as the scholarly expression of Lessing’s message of tolerance in Na-
than der Weise and its parable of the Three Rings. It represents what one may
call “interfaith comparatism” between the Abrahamic religions, insisting on
similarities rather than on differences. To be sure, such an approach cannot
be really called comparative, as it tends to negate the differences between the
sides of the comparison, or at least their significance.
Side by side with the encyclopedic genre represented by Cérémonies et cou-
tumes and the intra-​Abrahamic genre reflected in Nazarenus, another genre
of works of comparative religion were published in the early eighteenth cen-
tury, which would provide a model for future works in the field. I shall refer
here to two examples of the genre. In 1704 was published in Brussels, anony-
mously, a book written by the Marquis de la Croquinière, entitled Conformité
des coutumes des Indiens orientaux avec celles des juifs et des autres peuples de
l’antiquité.26

25 That same annus mirabilis would see the publication of Fontenelle’s L’origine des fables (a
text composed before the end of the previous century) and of Lafitau’s Moeurs, coutumes
et religions des sauvages américains.
26 Indian Brahmans (Abrahames):  Direct descendants of Abraham, G.  Postel, De Origini-
bus (1553), 68–​69. Postel’s Abrahamic Brahmans soon became the object of criticism, for
example in Henry Lord, A discoverie of the sect of the Banians (1630, 71–​72). Indians had
never heard of Abraham. But Newton supported Postel (“Brachmans, or sons of Abraham,
from Abrahamans”), an idea well received by Pierre Huet.
History of Religions: The Comparative Moment 331

The following year, John Toland published in London an English translation

of this book, Agreement of the customes of the East Indians with those of the
Jews.27 Twenty years later, the French Jesuit Josef-​François Lafitau, who was
active as a missionary in New France, published Moeurs, coutumes et religions
des sauvages américains comparées aux moeurs des premiers temps. Lafitau’s
massive work is often considered as the precursor of modern social anthropol-
ogy.28 To some extent, these two works can be compared. They both represent
a decision to use comparative tools in order to understand new, exotic, poly-
theistic religious phenomena through the light of known ones, from Biblical
or classical antiquity. It should be noticed that these books do not compare
the religions of colonized peoples to those of colonizers. Rather, the religions
of the newly discovered peoples are compared to those of the pagans of an-
tiquity, or to those of the Jews, who may be perceived, in Christian Europe,
as colonized from within. Such an approach also had the advantage of keep-
ing Christianity outside the comparative game, just as Vico had stopped at the
doorstep of Christianity when dealing with comparative mythology. This habit
that would remain ingrained for a long time in many theological institutions,
both among Catholics and Protestants. In Montesquieu’s Lettres Persannes,
published in 1721, perhaps the most powerful reflection on the changing per-
ception of cultures and religions in eighteenth-​century Europe, Judaism would
be presented as “an old trunk” from which both Christianity and Islam (Ma-
hometanism) had been born.29
What is perhaps even more important, they are less interested in highlight-
ing isomorphic myths, a favorite Enlightenment activity (“mythology” referred,
in the Enlightenment, to what we usually call “religion.” See the entry “Mythol-
ogie” in the Grande Encyclopédie, which might have been penned by D’Alem-
bert himself). Comparatism, for both La Créquinière and Lafitau, permitted
not only to move out of the monotheistic world, but also to circulate freely

27 On this book, see the analysis of Ginzburg 2015. See also, for a different approach, Ru-
bies 2016.
28 On Lafitau, see for instance Borgeaud 2016. See further Hartog 2009 (This text also ap-
pears in French in F. Hartog 2007).
29 “La religion juive est un vieux tronc qui a produit deux branches qui ont couvert toute
la terre, je veux dire le mahométisme et le christianisme; ou plutôt c’est une mère qui
a engendré deux filles qui l’ont accablée de mille plaies; car, en fait de religion, les plus
proches sont les plus grandes ennemies.” Quoted by Teixidor 2006, p. 145. Similarly, in
Picart’s Cérémonies et coutumes (v, 288), we read: “As the Religion of the Mahometans is
a compound only of the Doctrine of the Jews and the Christians, we have thought proper
to give the Reader an Abstract thereof.” Cf. Nongbri, 2013, p.  123. Schopenhauer would
reiterate the same idea when he wrote about “the Jewish faith and its two branches, Chris-
tianity and Islam.” Quoted by Marchand, 2010, p. 301.
332 Stroumsa

throughout the world, both in time and in space, from the newly discovered
savages to the polytheists of the distant past, and also from India in the East
to America in the far West. For both, comparatism is a machine permitting
to move through time and space, a fact upon which Philippe Borgeaud has
insisted.
The passage to India would intensify dramatically in the nineteenth century,
with the re-​discovery of Sanskrit by European scholarship, together with the co-
lonialist drive of European powers.30 For the comparative study of religions, the
impact of America would mainly be later, in the twentieth century, through the
progress of social anthropology and the development of pre-​Columbian history.
For the nineteenth century, America was a land of Naturvölker, while the real
Kulturvölker all came from Asia. Hence, it is legitimate to put the emphasis here,
at least for the time being, on the study of Asian languages and cultures. The
same passage to India would also spell the early demise of the Abrahamic reli-
gions: the awakening European nations were identified through their languag-
es, and these were Indo-​European. Hence, their nature, and their culture –​and
that entailed their religion – were also, essentially, Indo-​European. How could
Christianity be described as being “essentially” Indo-​European?
In an important book, the pre-​historian archaeologist Jean-​Paul Demoule
argues that it is in order to get rid of the biblical myth of origins that the
Europeans invented the myth of the Indo-​Europeans.31 In other words, this
permitted them not to have the Jews as their parents. Demoule’s insight is
convincing, and reflects the power of anti-​Semitic leanings in the nineteenth
century. Demoule, however, does not ask why that myth was not invented ear-
lier. The obvious answer to this question, it seems to me, lies in the fact that it
is the process of secularization that permitted evacuating the story of Gene-
sis. The equilibrium of sorts between the Bible and Homer, which had been in
existence since the seventeenth century, had broken down, and the Near East,
that extension of the Biblical East, had been replaced by the new, exotic, liv-
ing East of India. The similarities between Sanskrit and European languages
reflected deeper family resemblances between the peoples of India and those
of Europe, and between their religions.
While there are obviously more than two families of languages in the world,
the two categories that mainly caught the fancy of nineteenth-​century schol-
ars are those of Aryan, or Indo-​European (or else, Indo-​Iranian), and Semitic

30 Much has been written on this topic, obviously. I wish to record here, at least, Raymond
Schwab’s seminal work (Schwab 1950).
31 Demoule 2015.
History of Religions: The Comparative Moment 333

languages. The so-called Turanian family, to which belonged, for instance, Chi-
nese, always remained of secondary importance, and was brushed aside, al-
most ignored, in the various discussions and taxonomies. The Indo-​European
myth stated that ethnic groups, or races, must correspond to languages. Hence,
those who speak Semitic languages are Semites, while those who speak Aryan
languages are Aryan. Thus was born the idea of Semitic versus Aryan religions.
Comparatism could then take two forms: either between, or within, these two
great postulated families of religions.32
As linguistic demands forced most scholars to study mainly either Semitic
or Indo-​European languages, and hence to focus their research either on the
religions of either the Semites or the Aryans, comparison was usually done
between either one or the other great categories –​a fact which of course did
not prevent scholars to compare the one to the other, or, more precisely, to
express their preference for the one upon the other. As these scholars were,
in their great majority, European Christians, they perceived themselves as the
inheritors of the Aryans of old. Jews and Muslims were for them identified as
Semites (even when the latter, like the Turks, for instance, could obviously not
be called Semites in any true meaning of the word).
During a few feverish months in 1848–​1849, under the impact of the events
of the recent revolution, the young Ernest Renan (he was born in 1823) wrote
L’avenir de la science, a long pamphlet dedicated to Eugène Burnouf that he
published only much later, in 1890. Much of Renan’s program for the next de-
cades was there already, pêle-​mêle, as it were –​Renan is not particularly wor-
ried about internal contradictions in his own discourse. It is mainly in Chapter
xv that Renan deals at length with religion. For him, while the study of religion
does not require religious faith on the part of the scholar, it does require that
scholar to be a former believer (“Il n’est pas nécessaire d’avoir la foi. … mais il
faut avoir cru.”). The true history of philosophy is the history of religion. At
the same time, there is a clear distinction between those areas that favor re-
ligion (Asia), and those in which philosophy thrives (Europe). Religion is ev-
erything:  it represents the very core of creativity, from the earliest stages of
human history up humanism, to the religion of the future. For Renan, there
are basically two kinds of religions. To the higher class belong “organized” reli-
gions, those that possess sacred books and detailed dogmas, while natural re-
ligions remain lower. But essentially, religious creativity (les facultés créatrices
des religions) belonged to the earliest, non-​philosophical period, and would be

32 On the crucial role of the comparative method in the study of both languages and reli-
gions in the nineteenth century, see Rambault-​Feuerhahn 2008, p. 143–​252.
334 Stroumsa

weakened with the development of rational thinking. “The East (L’Orient) is

essentially non-​philosophical, but there belong the great religions, while Eu-
rope has produced not even a single sacred book. Another difference noted
by Renan between Asian religions, which teach to suffer evil, and European
religion (he does not specify, but must mean Christianity) for which evil is to
be fought. It is interesting to note that he refers to three families of Asian reli-
gions: the Semitic, the Iranian and the Indian ones, concluding that religion is
not a matter of race.33
The young Renan had started to think about religions, past and present,
through the means of their classification. In the next half century a number of
proposals would be made by scholars of religion, which would refine Renan’s
fundamental approach. Meantime, a fundamental event had happened with
the publication, in 1859, of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. The impact of
Darwin’s book on all branches of science was fast and phenomenal. It was now
obvious that science meant classification, and that comparing was the root to
understanding evolutionary processes.
Friedrich Max Müller (1823–​1900) came to Oxford from his native Germany,
in 1848, and would remain there for the rest of his life.34 As a young man, he
had studied in Berlin with Bopp and Schelling, and with Eugène Burnouf in
Paris. His first calling was Sanskrit philology, and it is through the prism of
language that he made his contributions to the study of mythology (for him
a disease of language) and to that of religion. It is in his Introduction to the
Science of Religion (London, 1873) that Müller presents most clearly his views
on the comparative study of religion. If one asks: “What is gained by compari-
son?,” the obvious answer is to look at the study of language. Müller applies to
religion Goethe’s famous saying about language: “He who knows one, knows
none.” For him, the full-​fledged development of a science of religion is only
a question of time. It should come as no surprise if this science is born in Eu-
rope, since Christianity, due to its constant memory of its Jewish roots, makes
the best soil for comparative religion.35 Upon the two main races, the Ary-
ans and the Semites, are established two families of religions, and a series of

33 Despite a significant lack of rigor and a number of racist expressions, this reflects Renan’s
fundamental attitude to race and religion. When speaking about Semitic religion, for in-
stance, he usually makes it clear that ‘race’ must be understood metaphorically.
34 On Müller’s biography, see Van der Bosch 2002.
35 With the same logic, one could of course have made at least as good a case for Islam or
Buddhism, but Müller chooses not to raise this point. The impact of the ‘discovery’ of San-
skrit and of the family of “Aryan” languages would fast be dramatic. From Comparative
Philology, one moved fast to Comparative Mythology and then to Comparative Politics.
See Freeman 1873.
History of Religions: The Comparative Moment 335

canonical texts belong to these families. Müller develops here an idea that we
saw germinating in Renan about the difference between natural and revealed
religions. Again, he follows Renan in distinguishing between the transcendent
monotheism of the Semites and the nature polytheism of the Aryans. For him,
the comparative study of religions (which he calls “Comparative Theology”)
permits to identify the dialectic growth and decay of any religion, to study its
life in evolution. Müller states that for the comparative student, religions are
all true, albeit in different ways, and at different times. Again, one can perceive
here Darwin’s impact quite clearly, as well as sense the attempt at “objectivity”
that one would later identify with the phenomenological approach.
In 1877, Cornelis Tiele’s Outlines of the History of Religion to the Spread of the
Universal Religions would be published in English translation. Another step
was made with this concept of “universal religions.” We saw already how Tiele
insisted that the study of religion should disentangle itself from its theological
cradle. And yet, the concept of “universal” or “world” religions (this last expres-
sion is used by Tiele already in 1864),36 which would have a brilliant future, re-
tained a theological indelible coloring. Indeed, universal religions were those
comparable to Christianity: mainly Buddhism, but also Islam, or, as it was still
usually called, Mohammedianism. For Tiele, Max Müller was undeniably the
creator of the science of religion, as he writes in his Gifford Lectures.37
The Dutch Semitist and Biblical scholar Abraham Kuenen (1828–​1891), a
friend of Tiele, gave in 1882 the Hibbert Lectures at Oxford and in London.38
Here too, we can follow the development of the concept of universal religions,
soon to become known as “World Religions.”39 For Kuenen, who also did sig-
nificant work on Arabic texts, Islam was “the kernel of Judaism, transplanted to
Arabian soil.” (p. 28). The Jewish roots of Islam reflected its artificial nature and
original poverty (It would of course not have occurred to him to argue similarly
about Christianity). Although Islam could not be denied a universal dimension,
“the true character of universalism” is missing there (p. 37). Such disparaging
views of Islam were quite common among late nineteenth-​century scholars of
religion. Buddhism, a religion considered until recently as “nihilistic” or athe-
istic, was thought to be much more similar, at least in dignity, to Christianity.
It certainly did not present an inherent and close threat similar to that of the
prophet Muhammad, who had come to supersede (also) Jesus Christ.

36 See Molendijk 2016, p. 173 ff.

37 Tiele 1897–​98. See esp. 4–​5 and 16.
38 Kuenen 1882.
39 On this, see especially Masuzawa 2005. In 1893, the first Parliament of the World’s Reli-
gions, held in Chicago, represented a major event.
336 Stroumsa

Even more than Anti-​Semitic attitudes or instincts, it is (latent or patent) Is-

lamophobia, a remnant of traditional Christian anti-​Islamic polemics against
the false prophet Muhammad, which prevented the recognition of the “family
resemblances” between Judaism, Christianity and Islam and comparative work
on the Abrahamic religions in the late nineteenth century. For most Christian
scholars (even when their Christian identity was more cultural than religious),
Christianity belonged to Europe, while Judaism and Islam remained Asian in
nature. Christianity, even when its Jewish roots were recognized, was essen-
tially an Indo-​European phenomenon, while Judaism and Islam were squarely
anchored into the Semitic world.
A major exception to the prevalent negative view of Islam was that of the
Scottish Orientalist William Robertson Smith (1846–​1894). Like his friend
and former teacher from Göttingen Julius Wellhausen, and also like Renan,
his critical views on the Bible brought him early into conflict with his native
church, bringing him to leave Aberdeen and Biblical studies and move to Cam-
bridge and the study of Arabic. His path breaking Lectures on the Religion of
the Semites he considered to belong to Comparative Religion, a discipline he
considered to be “indispensible to the future progress of Biblical research,”
(p. v), adding that “in modern times Comparative Religion has become in some
degree a popular subject.” (p. vi). He approached Judaism Christianity and Is-
lam (which he called “positive religions”) on the same level  –​but of course
the kernel of his work was elsewhere, as he sought to reconstruct the earliest
stages of Semitic religion.40 The newly discovered Second and Third Series of
his Lectures, left unpublished by his early death, show that had he lived longer,
he might well been able to do comparative work on the Abrahamic religions.41
The Lectures on the Religion of the Semites would have a major impact. To a
great extent, both Durkheim’s Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse (1912)
and Freud’s Totem und Tabu (1913) are established upon ideas first developed
by Smith. Moreover, James Frazer owed much of his own comparative bold-
ness to Smith, his Cambridge friend.42 As noted by Sheldon Pollack, the fact
that Max Weber, the leading sociologist of religion across civilizations, did not
seek to reflect upon “the comparative method itself, its historical ontology, its
logic, even its purposes” remains quite puzzling.43

40 Smith 1890. On Smith, see Maier 2010. On the birth of the modern concept of Abrahamic
religions, see Stroumsa 2011.
41 Smith 1995.
42 On Frazer and his context, see Ackerman 1971, esp. p. 44–​65.
43 See Pollock 2010, esp. p. 185–​186.
History of Religions: The Comparative Moment 337

The comparative impetus, however, was not to everyone’s taste. Maurice

Vernes (1845–​1923) was a French “Protestant d’Etat” at the time of Kultur-
kampf between the Republic and the Catholic Church, a biblical scholar who
launched the Revue de l’Histoire des Religions in 1880. He was the first incum-
bent of the Chair of History of religions at the Collège de France in 1879, and
was appointed in 1886 President of the newly established Section des Sciences
Religieuses (Ve section) at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, Sorbonne.
Vernes, who failed in his efforts to launch the teaching of comparative religion
(a discipline he liked to call “hiérographie”) in French schools, argued power-
fully against the comparative method in the study of religion, in particular in
the study of the Semitic religions. His main objection was to the attempts to
explain Israelite monotheism from the context of ambient polytheism.44 Sim-
ilarly, the Archiv für Religionswissenschaft, which would soon become a lead-
ing journal in the field, was established in 1898 as a “reaction against the Max
Müller-​Kuhn sort of comparative religion.”45
In France as elsewhere, however, comparatism would remain the favor-
ite approach to the study of religions. Salomon Reinach (1858–​1932), a poly-
graph archaeologist and Hellenist, would publish in 1909 Orpheus, Histoire
générale des religions, a book that would see new editions and reprints for
many years. It would also immediately appear in English, and soon in Italian
translations. Orpheus has indeed been dubbed a “catéchisme de la méthode
comparative.”46
Louis Henry Jordan’s Comparative Religion, Its Genesis and Growth (Ed-
inburgh, 1905), which presents a systematic and detailed sympathetic over-
view of the comparative study of religion in the second half of the nine-
teenth century, may be considered to seal what we may call the floruit of the
comparative approach. For Jordan, comparing meant “respecting the claims
and values” of the religions compared. From there, slope would be slippery
to “Interfaith studies.”47 In the twentieth century, phenomenological stud-
ies took the place of pride. In 1917, Rudolph Otto (1869–​1937) published
his study of the numinous, Das Heilige: Über das Irrationale in der Idee
des göttlichen und sein Verhältnis zum Rationalen. It is a sign of the times
that this book would be destined to an extraordinary Nachleben, while his

44 Vernes 1887.
45 See Marchand 2010, p. 230.
46 See H. Duchêne, Introduction, in Reinach 1999, p. lxii.
47 The bi-​annual Jordan Lectures in Comparative Religion, held under the auspices of the
Department of Religious Studies at soas, honor the memory of Reverend Jordan, who
over the years, published a number of other studies on the comparative study of religion.
338 Stroumsa

comparative study of the mysticism, based on the thought of Sankara and

Meister Eckhardt, West-​östliche Mystik:  Vergleich und Unterscheidung zur
Wesensdeutung (1926) would have a much smaller impact.
Can we detect the main cause for the weakened power of the comparative
ethos after the First World War? Further distance from Christianity certainly
played a role: it is n smaller circles that the missionary instinct remained ac-
tive. Disenchantment with European culture, or “the West” (“Nous autres, ci-
vilisations, nous savons maintenant que nous sommes mortelles!” would write
the French poet and intellectual Paul Valéry in 1919) was also, obviously, a ma-
jor factor. Furthermore, disenchantment with imperialism and the realization
that colonialism did not only represent a generous offer of Western culture
and values to the rest of the world, all those did much to discourage the epis-
temological optimism inherent in comparatism. Most of all, however, was the
end of the rather static vision of distinct societies, cultures and religions, inde-
pendent from and comparable to one another. For the phenomenologists, the
different historical contexts of the phenomena were either ignored or pushed
to the background. This erasure, or even negation of history, pushed to its ex-
treme limits by Eliade, meant for all practical purposes the disappearance of
comparatism.48 A striking exception to what I have called the disappearance
of comparatism is represented by Georges Dumézil.49 In particular from the
1950s to the 1970s, he published a long series of comparative studies on Indo-​
European religions. Dumézil’s “tripartite function,” which did not work equally
well in all ancient Indo-​European societies, had for a few decades a deep im-
pact, although mainly on French scholarship.
In a sense, we have tried here to retrieve the unconscious of a discipline.
If the case of comparative religion is so complex, this has much to do with
the fact that it developed at the juncture between theology, the humanities
and the social sciences, and finds it hard to this day to understand, partly for
institutional reasons, that it must deal with men and women, not with gods
and goddesses. Today, comparative religion does not enjoy a good press. Most
scholars seem to have given up on the grand ambitions of earlier generations.
Research remains usually focused on a single object, topic, or period. Reading
text in (historical, cultural and linguistic) context is certainly the elementary
rule of scholarly investigation. On the other hand, reading texts only in their

48 Although I cannot develop this point here, it seems to me quite clear that Eliade’s total
lack of interest in concrete history is not unrelated to his political options. A similar argu-
ment could be made about Heidegger, for instance.
49 On Dumézil, see for instance Eribon 1992. On Dumézil’s comparative method, see Scheid
and Svenbro 1997.
History of Religions: The Comparative Moment 339

immediate context, rejecting any attempt at comparing phenomena, leads to

the ruin of critical thinking. The historian Carlo Ginzburg refers to a bon mot
on comparison attributed to the social anthropologist E. E. Evans Prichard: the
comparative method may well be the only possible method of investigation,
but it is not feasible.50
What has failed, and may well disappear for all practical purposes, is com-
paratism as an all powerful, over-​arching method, established on a grand
theory and seeking to reach to the very root of religion, beyond its multiple
phenomena. More precisely, what has carried scholars for a long time through
so many promising suggestions, and which eventually turned to have been a
fata morgana, is the idea of a parallel between the families of languages and
families of religions, a shining path in which Renan and Müller led the way,
and which a Dumézil was a latter-​day follower. But we now know better, and
have learned to realize that the heuristic promise turned into an intellectual
catastrophe –​only the weak afterglow of an apocalyptic Götterdämmerrung.
If comparatism as a grand method searching for overarching theories has
failed, comparatism as an ethos remains as valid as ever.51 As an ethos, com-
paratism is also a method, but one with much reduced ambitions, seeking only
to find ad hoc isomorphisms, similitudes and parallels between phenomena.
As an ethos, it may be less than a method, and is perhaps more akin to brico-
lage. It is an intellectual habitus to always, and immediately look also else-
where in any investigation. We must learn to compare as we go, avoiding the
essentialism of static entities through focusing on points of contact, models of
transformation, dynamics of reciprocal impact between religious movements.
In the twenty-​first century, we know that religions, everywhere, for better and
(usually) for worse, are a major component of the way people identify them-
selves. And we also know that we don’t really understand how it works, except,
vaguely, that in many cultures around the world we see now intensified and
amplified versions of the lethal conundrum of secularization and nationalism
that we followed in nineteenth-​century Europe.
We must learn to recognize, side by side with its intellectual advantag-
es, the major ethical value of the comparative ethos. Marcel Detienne has
argued convincingly, in a powerful essay in support of comparing religions,
that the comparative activity retains an invaluable ethical value, certainly
in times of nationalist and religious closure.52 It prevents the mind from

50 Ginzburg 2017, 24, where he refers to Shirokogoroff 1935, 413. I wish to thank Carlo Ginz-
burg for kindly calling my attention to this text.
51 On comparatism today, see Paden 2005.
52 Detienne 2000.
340 Stroumsa

blocking out any outside data that might offer a new perspective on the
problem at hand. In contradistinction with a method, an ethos makes no
promises, and it cannot be taught through clear and precise rules. As a grand
method, comparatism might have represented a special moment of the then
new discipline, perhaps its zenith. As an ethos, postulating that to under-
stand is to compare, it is not only possessed of a great heuristic value. It
also represents, essentially, intellectual curiosity. As such, it has been with us
since the days of the Hebrew Bible and of Herodotus’s Histories. News about
its death is premature.

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 Regimes of Comparatism:
Frameworks of Comparison in
History, Religion and
Anthropology

Edited by

Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, Geoffrey E. R. Lloyd

LEIDEN | BOSTON