Any critical and epistemologically warranted comment against the old phenomenological paradigm in the History of Religions is usually declassed by interested apologists as unworthy of attention - like Eliade taught the field to do - and/or labeled in such a way as to elicit hatred and dodge the issue at stake. It is also a form of begging the question to strengthen one’s defence. And as such, it is a dangerous fallacy.
In a 2017 article by Bryan S. Rennie’s (see Fig. 1 above), one can read the following footnote:
"To give but one more recent example, see Leonardo Ambasciano’s diatribe against Eliade as guilty of pseudo-science: Ambasciano (2016)."
The passage refers to those “academic scholars of religion [who] equate Eliade’s concept of the sacred precisely with the uncritical assumption of the existence and activity of some supernatural power that ‘transcends’ the natural.” This “uncritical assumption” by scholars like myself is seen by Rennie as misguided, and therefore he proceeds to explain Eliade’s approach by making him a proto-cognitivist and a religious phenomenologist, justifying the latter position by appealing to the first, and merely substituting “sacred” with “sacrality.”
Now, as to the epistemological vacuity and historiographical unsustainability of such defences, I can easily refer readers to my previous works: Eliade did believe in the “sacred” as supernatural, and his epistemologically unwarranted and fideistic take on the history of religions has long been falsified (e.g., Ambasciano 2018; Ambasciano 2019).
In regard to the suggestion of me labeling Eliade as “guilty,” instead, I would like to point out that I never used such adjective and I never implied any guiltiness in the article Rennie refers to (Ambasciano 2016). Thus, I kindly invite those who are curious to read it carefully or to use Adobe Reader to investigate it. A point of clarification: this is science, and one’s ideas can be - must be - subjected to falsification. These are the rules of the academic game; if you’re not into it, there are other perfectly reasonable and respectable fields, like theology, which are not science and thus are not subjected to such a process. Instead, resorting to such labeling expresses frustration, which is understandable, but, again, this is not how academic and scientific research works. I have never accused Eliade of being simply “guilty” of anything in his academic research. Nor is there any kind of “diatribe” in the field from which my article could be singled out as a “recent example”; as it happens, again, Eliade’s method and theory are epistemically unwarranted, and his research programme has been falsified. Period.
Now, seen in the context of the quite turbulent Eliadean scholarship, Rennie’s use of “guilty” here amounts to a fallacious use of emotive language, exploited as a convenient shortcut to avoid the issue of the epistemological disconfirmation of Eliade’s research programme and arouse strong emotions in the readers against my research. Also, within the frame of the cultural representations which inhabit the disciplinary environment of Eliadology (a label firstly used by Ioan P. Culianu in the late 1980s), “guilty” evokes the spectres of political counteraccusations and nasty allegations.
Words do matter, indeed. But I guess that this is not the case for someone who tried once to save Eliade by making him a postmodernist ante litteram (Rennie 1996) and is now reimagining the Romanian historian of religions as a proto-cognitivist. What’s next in Rennie’s rehabilitative agenda for Eliade? Eliade as a precursor to BLM?
Notes
A draft of this post was originally completed in pre-pandemic January 2018.
Refs.
Ambasciano, L. 2016. “Mind the (Unbridgeable) Gaps: A Cautionary Tale about Pseudoscientific Distortions and Scientific Misconceptions in the Study of Religion.” Method & Theory in the Study of Religion (28)2: 141-225. https://doi.org/10.1163/15700682-12341372
Ambasciano, L. 2018. “Politics of Nostalgia, Logical Fallacies, and Cognitive Biases: The Importance of Epistemology in the Age of Cognitive Historiography.” In Evolution, Cognition, and the History of Religion: A New Synthesis, edited by A. K. Petersen, G. I. Sælid, L. H. Martin, J. S. Jensen, and J. Sørensen, 280-296. Leiden and Boston: Brill. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004385375_019
Ambasciano, L. 2019. An Unnatural History of Religions: Academia, Post-truth and the Quest for Scientific Knowledge. London and New York: Bloomsbury.
Rennie, B. S. 1996. Reconstructing Eliade: Making Sense of Religion. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Rennie, B. S. 2017. “The Sacred and Sacrality: From Eliade to Evolutionary Ethology.” Religion 47(4): 663-687. https://doi.org/10.1080/0048721X.2017.1362833
Warburton, N. 2007. Thinking from A to Z. London and New York: Routledge.