Prisca Theologia and Retrograde Phenomenology at Eranos : Corbin, Eliade, not Scholem

The article proposes a re-evaluation of the Eranos meetings by analyzing its underlying aspects as a «laboratory of spiritual scholarship». To this aim, the first half of the article highlights R. Otto’s approach to religious experience as a source of inspiration for the Eranos project, as the mentor of Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn, and it advances three key terms to understand the atemporal character of the lectures held at Ascona and their connections to Renaissance thinking. The first one, prisca theologia, is the assumption that Christianity «preserved» an ancient mystery which granted it a triumphalism perspective both over other religions and traditional forms of Judaism. I will propose the second key term as retrograde phenomenology, an essentialist approach designed to uncover alleged ancient mysteries and superior forms of religious ontology. The third term necessary to comprehend the Eranos enterprise is academic mystagogy, here regarded as the elaboration of uniquely «inspired» methods of interpreting religious texts. The second part of the article revisits the scholarly triad of Henry Corbin, Mircea Eliade, and Gershom Scholem, famously associated with the Eranos enterprise by Steven Wasserstrom, more than two decades ago, and suggests a reassessment of their roles at the Ascona meetings. I suggest that Henry Corbin’s form of academic mystagogy embodied forms of subjective interpretations of the role of imagination in Sufi texts, while Mircea Eliade’s search for pristine origins promoted an imagined archaic highly endowed with ontological significance. Finally, I situate Gershom Scholem’s historical approach in direct opposition to Corbin and Eliade’s mystagogical and perrenial projects and suggest considering the Kabbalah scholar as a theoretical mystic, whose work explored the tensions between academic and metaphysical approaches to religion.