In 1905, Italian novelist and future Nobel prize laureate Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936) published a short story entitled L’eresia catara (“The Cathar Heresy”). In his novella, Pirandello follows the pitiful personal and professional misadventures of Bernardino Lamis, a shy and modest Full Professor of History of Religions (professore ordinario di storia delle religioni) in an unnamed Italian University.
We met a worn out and frustrated Lamis in medias res, resentful of the acclaimed reception of a monograph by a German scholar, Hans von Grobler. The main topic of said monograph was Catharism, a topic which Lamis had thoroughly investigated three years earlier in “two imposing volumes” (due poderosi volumi) that slipped under the radar of Italian academia and passed almost unnoticed in von Grobler’s account – except for a footnote in which the German scholar judged en passant Lamis’ work as bad scholarship.
Hit hard by such a poor reception, Lamis had promptly penned an editorial reply to von Grobler’s work. This editorial project, however, was rejected twice as a combination of academic indifference, Lamis’ own fastidious philological zeal, and his point-blank criticism against the whole of Italian academy. Exasperated and rancorous, Lamis thus decides to prepare an inflamed and masterful class of his course – assiduously attended by just a couple of students – entirely centred on a meticulous rebuttal of the German scholar’s work. Those who would attend the class, this was Lamis’ hope, would surely take the Italian professor’s side and rightfully restore his good name before the entire European academy.
Pirandello’s novella painfully ends with Lamis engaged in a futile and fervent explanation of von Grobler’s shortcomings to what he thinks is a room full of students – which at the very end are revealed to be just the raincoats of those who were attending a law class in a classroom nearby. Amidst the laughter of the students who are eavesdropping on the threshold, Lamis’ pathetic plea echo thunderous in the empty and dark space of his classroom (Pirandello 1993: 848):
“But manicheism, gentlemen, manicheism, at the end of it all, what is it really? Ask that yourselves. Now, according to our illustrious German historian, Mr. Hans von Grobler, if the first Albigensians…” [my translation]
Pirandello’s take on the History of Religions was possibly inspired by the equally bitter career of Baldassarre Labanca (1829-1913), the first Italian scholar to be appointed a Chair in the History of Religions at the University of Rome in 1886 and co-author of The Study of Religion in the Italian Universities with comparative religion scholar Louis Henry Jordan (Oxford University Press, 1909; Pincherle 1956: 26; cf. Preti 2004). Taken together, both Pirandello’s novella and Jordan and Labanca’s account converge in their unmerciful portrait of Italian higher education in general, and of the field of the History of Religions in particular, whose main problems might be recapped as following:
apathy towards religious education as a historical result of top-down Catholic control and Counter-reformation;
the struggle to come to terms with modern science;
lack of intra- and interdisciplinary dialogue;
subservience to outdated models of textual analysis.
Now, in the Oxford Dictionary, “Pirandellian” is defined as follows: “Of, resembling, or characteristic of Pirandello or his plays, especially with reference to the relationship between illusion and reality.” One of the main features of Pirandello’s works was a tragicomic and existentialist account of the “modern erosion of meaning” in many ways prescient of the Theatre of the Absurd (Turner 1990: 6). In the wake of Pirandello’s own view of that nascent academic field, it can be thus asserted that at the hard core of the History of Religions there lies an absurdist predicament, for all the problematic features highlighted above have successfully contributed to the establishment, survival, and diffusion of the History of Religions as an academic religion-friendly discipline in the modern secular university, resulting in a Pirandellian tragic farce.
Like Prof. Lamis, over the course of the past century, the most important scholars were constantly locked in neverending, meaningless, or futile disputes instead of working on the epistemological statute of the discipline. Like Prof. Lamis, mutatis mutandis, scholars fighting for a scientific renewal of the field were ridiculed, silenced, or ignored by their successful religiocentric peers. Like Prof. Lamis, mutatis mutandis, the same scholars fighting for a new, secular, and scientific status quo were metaphorically doomed to teach to empty classrooms and fail. More than a century later, the situation does not look all that different (Ambasciano 2019). Are we inexorably destined to repeat this trend?
Refs.
Ambasciano, Leonardo (2019). An Unnatural History of Religions: Academia, Post-truth and the Quest for Scientific Knowledge. London and New York: Bloomsbury.
Pincherle, Alberto. 1956. Cristianesimo antico e moderno. Rome: Edizioni dell’Ateneo.
Pirandello, Luigi. 1993 [1905]. “L’eresia catara.” In Novelle per un anno. Vol. 2, t. 1, 838-848. Edited by Mario Costanzo. Milan: Mondadori. Originally published in La Riviera ligure, February 1905; republished in Novelle per un anno, edited by M. Lo Vecchio-Musti and A. Sodini, vol. 1. Milan: Mondadori.
Preti, Cesare. 2004. s.v. “Labanca, Baldassarre.” Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani (62). http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/baldassarre-labanca_%28Dizionario-Biografico%29/ [Last accessed: December 15, 2018].
Turner, Bryan S. (ed.) 1990. Theories of Modernity and Postmodernity. London: SAGE.