[Notes were slightly modified and simplified: references to English translations, when existing, replaced original references to the French ones.]

It could indeed seem paradoxical to inaugurate a collection destined to present an overview of the current different schools of History of religions with Dario Sabbatucci’s The Historico-religious perspective1.

This book in fact develops a critique of the other approaches of the religious object, an approach supported by questioning the autonomy and specificity of this object, leading to a deconstruction of the very notion of “religion”. Sabbatucci does not seem to consider it a working and even relevant category in this research field taken as truly “historico-religious” (and not “philosophico-religious” or “phenomenologico-religious”). What can this paradox, whose formulation may seem sophistry, even mean?

A precision may be needed. This “History of religions”, as the author conceives it, aiming at deconstructing the notion of religion, is not based on an attitude of “renouncement” that would have been inspired to Sabbatucci by certain contemporary philosophical currents such as nominalism, relativism or agnosticism. This deconstructionism rather appears to be the unavoidable consequence of applying to the History of religions the approach of absolute Historicism he claims to adhere to. Coming from the Italian philosophical tradition, from Giambattista Vico to Gramsci through Croce and Gentile, this radical Historicism is underpinned by a fundamental immanentism exercised on two levels: on the interpretation of religious facts, and on the cognitive instruments supposed to be grasping these very facts and reflecting on them.

History of religions and the challenge of absolute Historicism

Absolute Historicism assumes that “everything is history”, and that both history and its cultural manifestations are products of the creative effort of man. This implies an impossibility to consider “the sacred” or “religion” as a priori ontological realities, irreductible to the historical reason, or as permanent anthropological structures such as the “homo religiosus”, whose nature would fundamentally be an-historical. This also implies that we consider as culturally relative and located (and thus, problematic in its applications) the nature of the conceptual instruments the searcher in religious sciences uses, as these tools are also taken as a historical product.

The arguments of Sabbatucci are therefore grounded in the following thesis: as products of the cultural history of the West, marked by the Greco-Roman experience first and then by the Christian one, the interpretative categories in the field of History of religions (such as myth, rite, belief, god, faith, theocracy, polytheism, monotheism, magic, etc) are the result of unique cultural circumstances, and are not exportable outside of the West. Obviously, this goes against most comparative studies on religious matters, which indeed tend to posit “religion” as an objective and autonomous category. Such a tendency can be found from certain currents marked by Protestant theology (in this manner, the phenomenology of Rudolf Otto and Gerard Van der Leeuw), to those set in a trend of romantico-naturalist inspiration (represented, for example, by Friedrich Max Müller, Leo Frobenius, Mircea Eliade), but also in the durkheimian-inspired anthropological schools, and in fonctionalist (Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, Bronislaw Malinowski) or evolutionist ones (Edward B. Tylor and James Frazer). The category of “religion”, taken as self-evident, seems to constitute the inescapable a priori of the History of religions. The religious object hence appears to be that of an analogical science: the anthropologist or the historian of religions will chase in other cultures what is the most similar to what is, for Westerners, “religion”. How can this risk be avoided?

The methodological strategy of Sabbatucci is first and foremost an awareness of the “context of emergence, of use and of development of the interpretative categories”, and even of all concepts used in this practice of research. This realization or awareness is a “historical” one. It focuses on the genesis and cultural implications of this conceptual tooling. Only this can let us turn to other eras, other cultures with a methodological safeguard (and not only good intentions), against all risks of spontaneous ethnocentrism, unmediatized by this work of critical objectivation. In other words, only this effort of simultaneous historicization of the subject of knowledge (taken as the bearer of a set of culturally oriented interpretative categories) and of the object to know can enable us to avoid projecting on the others our own cultural experiences and values.

What we have here is a double operation of putting things in historical perspective. It focuses on the one hand on the religious forms, understood as diverse historical formations, whose specific cultural function, in a given context, and processes leading to their apparition and development are to be traced back case-by-case. On the other hand, it focuses on the conceptual tools destined to trim and grasp on the entry, conceptualization and deciphering of these same forms. We can understand how such an operation pushed Sabbatucci to blow up the very category of “religion” in the end. Unsettling outcome, indeed, to the point we can ask ourselves if this book wouldn’t have been best published to close the collection, in provocative defiance with the reader in humanities: to urge him never to cease interrogating and problematizing his objects of interest.

A good reason legitimates the choice of The Historico-religious perspective as the inaugural text of the present collection [= Histoire de l’Histoire des religions, Edidit editions, Paris]. Its spirit is in a way incarnated by the author’s position. Conceived less as an eclectic folder of the diverse approaches interspersing the field of studies than as a work tool, destined to stimulate systematic confrontation and debate among both specialists and non-specialists, this collection strives toward emphasizing the problematic aspects of this field of research. Accepting to submit the History of religions to different lightings in view of a systematic problematization yet implies the acceptation of two preliminary conditions.

First, one has to recognize, at least on a principial level, the necessity to not limit the sciences of religions to the sole field of advanced specialization (which can confine the sinologist, the inidianist, the egyptologist, the hellenist, etc., each in his own field, exclusively), but rather to restore the centrality of the comparative approach that these religious sciences tried to give themselves since the 19th Century. Then, one has to assume, through the adjustment of relevant theoretical models, the complexity of historical and epistemological issues raised by the confrontation between religions and between respective cultures in which such religions operate. These two conditions seem to be present and fulfilled in Dario Sabbatucci’s works. In regard of the first one, all through his œuvre one can see him summon historical comparatism in order to underline the constrast of different cultural solutions the civilisations alternately adopted facing similar issues. As a result, many inquiries that, be they punctual, are yet major works — the general problematic guiding his researches on relations being far broader than a purely historico-philological approach. We can in this regard mention his analysis of Greek mysticism2, of the simultaneous phenomenons of ritualization and demythization proper to the religion of the Ancient Rome3, the research on the relationship with the royal institution (and the genetic principle that underlays it) established by the Ancient Mediterranean and Middle-Eastern civilisations4, those about the polytheisms, from Mesopotamia to Japan, Korea and China5, and finally, on monotheisms6. This broadening of the comparative method to several cultural areas, focused on a precise issue, presents some difficulties that only a “strong” methodology and epistemology, ie a “constructivist” and self-conscious one, can solve. It is only in that framework of a differential methodology and of a precise historical problematic that the theses exposed in The Historico-religious perspective are given their whole meaning.

Many threads are intertwined in this work: cultural facts, localized in time and space; their contextual interpretation; the reflexion on the methods most adequate to decipher them; the interrogation on concepts destined to realize such a decoding; the critical revision of constructions of the History of religions and of religious ethnology, whose theoretical models often stay tacit. In sum, in Sabbatucci, we find an orientation that now prevails in contemporary humanities. It consists in a work of putting in perspective not only human productions as such (here, magico-religious productions), but also of the practices, discourses and representations proper to the scholarly knowledge on the study of these productions. Indeed, such a “reflexive” attitude, pushing the searcher in religious sciences to look towards both his object and his own vision in the making of its knowledge, still fails to gain a foothold in France, for four reasons that need to be evoked here briefly.

The first reason is linked to a strong scientist control, that often led the historians of religions to the conviction that the scientifical legitimacy of their own discipline could only be assured by a strict and vivid objectivity, based on the elimination of all potential interference between empirical data and the subjective position of the scholar. This position however rarely gets discussed; its problematization and that, simultaneous, of the object of research would be a menace to the cognitive dualism on which a strongly philological and positivist tradition is based, according to these historians. Suspicious towards generalizing and epistemological questions, reluctant to openly admit the loose status of the knowledge built by human sciences, they fear the typical agnosticist and relativistic deviations of our era.

The second reason is that, when the phase opened by authors such as Pinard de la Boullaye, Mauss, Dumézil, Éliade, Lévi-Strauss, etc. was closed, the French historico-religious studies showed a vivid reluctance towards a broadened comparatism, usually identified as sharing the errors of evolutionist and diffusionist theories, and is thus taken as incompatible with a proper historical research7. The choice of an exclusive specialization, in a well circumscribed domain (very wary of putting foot onto the field of other specializations) also prevailed. This choice is generally coupled with the abandon of all general theory of the object. Yet, to force each branch into asking general, federating questions, to ask for the clarification of theoretical models in order to better appreciate the variety and complexity of the cultures is precisely what the comparative demarch is about. It is not about the making of an universal History reducing all different historical universes to a unique and ethnocentric model, but rather about putting an emphasis on the differential variety of all known cultural worlds. In this perspective, the historico-contrastive method, perceptive of both differences and convergences in forms and processes, offers endless resources.

A third reason for resistances opposed to the methodic relativization of the Historian of religions’ perspective as promoted by such a comparatism comes from the fact that scholars operating in that field of studies find themselves to be personally committed to a particular religious denomination (or in particular philosophical or metaphysical positions based on an ontological conception of the sacred). Reluctant faced with a relativist and differential practice of the History of religions — that is to say a History that takes religions as systems of original choices and values, created as a response to specific historical problems —, the advocates of this movement entertain with the comparatist method a relationship both symmetrical and opposed to that of historicists. If they dare practicing comparison, it is however applied with the intention of looking for invariants of religious life and of the human experience of the sacred.

The fourth reason lies with the existence of a program set at the complete opposite of the previous one (its champions claiming to use a meticulously secular approach), but which, just as its opposite, expresses a strong reluctance towards the idea of a compared history of religions. The French academics concerned did not manifest any interest in the historico-religious researches (just as they showed none for the theoretical and epistemological questions such researches are raising). The tendency rather consists in absorbing the study of historico-religious facts in either the sociological, anthropologico-structural, philosophical, linguistical, psychological or psychoanalytical perspectives, or in the logical structures of the spirit, or in a false consciousness dissimulating class realities, or even in a set of repressed pulsions8.

The Italian School of History of religions

According to which procedures The Historico-religious perspective takes its distances from these four positions, ie from scientist philologism, from the anti-comparatist bias, from phenomenological irrationalist and from secularizing reductionism? In order to answer this question, let us try to summarize the principal theses of the author. From the first pages on, even before providing the reader with a precise definition of the religious object (and drawing the boundaries of that field called “History of religions”), Sabbatucci gets to the field of historical debate and methodological controversy. He lets us hear that his eagerness to nail his colours to the mast and to deviate from his predecessors, and also his insistance to expose how he will not do History of religions (distancing himself from rival approaches through that), are tied with the very idea he has on this field of study. Among the comparative human sciences, History of religions constitutes one of the less thematized, problematized and put into perspective fields, both concerning the status of its object (the religions) and its methods. Some sort of tacit agreement seems to postulate that the religious object possesses an undeniable self-evidence, which would assure a certain unity to the studies about it. Of course, specialists are not lacking to underline the fundamental divergence between the “objectivist” and “reductionist” approaches of the religious facts, and the “subjectivist” and “semantico-affective” one. The first is exercised by those who see in religion a detour in relation with an instituating order, dissimulated under the religious forms, which would constitute a set of institutions, practices and conceptions filling a precise role in both social and collective, and psychic and individual life. The second approach, notably of phenomenological and/or hermeneutical type, adresses religion from the problematic of its meaning in the immediate consciousness of the religious subject. Despite the evident differences between these two types of approaches, we yet are in presence of general theories of religion, supposed to take all documentary data back to general and universal frameworks.

It is not at all how Sabbatucci proceeds, whose approach could be said to be symmetrically opposed to the two above-mentioned ones. The essentially critical aspect of this work, the absence of general definitions, that would simplify the task of the reader, the use made of the comparative method — which leads to depriving us of all final landmark in the enquiry —, such are factors that force us to give a closer look at the way this author “does the history of religions”. This manner is revealed in an indirect way, since it emerges from the dialectical confrontation with approaches differing from his own. For this purpose, it is necessary to follow the approach Sabbatucci himself asks us to adopt through his whole book, which consists in situating his own thought in a broader cultural context, to put it into perspective historically, ie to “historicize” it.

He has been considered one of the most original thinker representative of the Italian School of History of Religions9. As we noted earlier, he is first and foremost an advocate for Italian historicism, revisited in light of the contributions of social anthropology10, and of Lévi-Strauss’ structuralism. This triple ascendency is by itself a guarantee of the constructivist (and not deconstructivist!) conception of this discipline, since Sabbatucci is convinced that his method can lead to some progress in the humanities. Let us ask where exactly does this searcher come from.

As early as 1953, in an article devoted to his master Raffaele Pettazzoni11, he tried to give a picture of History of religions as conceived by the founder of the Italian School. He proceeded to distinguish a series of points that would be susceptible to outline the theoretical and methodological platform of the master, which were put in the broader perspective of the Italian tradition of historicism coming from Giambattista Vico and Benedetto Croce. Such an article, seemingly outdated due to its publication date, can yet serve as a useful guide in order to understand the approach of our author, who not only prolonged the foundamental exigencies of the pettazzonian method, but also ended up surpassed them by radicalizing the methodological and theoretical assumptions of his master.

In this article, Sabbatucci explains that Pettazzoni’s approach, elaborated around the 1920s, was from the beginning presented as destined to exercise a critical role towards the historico-religious orientations at the time, coupled with a historicist (so, typically Italian, considering the importance of Croce’s influence in Italy at the time) solution to questions related to the essence, goals and methods of the emerging religious sciences. According to Sabbatucci, the pettazzonian approach asserts its own identity through assuming being historical, secular, and comparative. These three traits imply two presuppositions. The first is denying the existence of a “religious essence” as such. The second consists in a refusal of the idea of an objective, preexisting philosophical meaning in History. Pettazzoni’s methodology was based on these two presuppositions while coming to existence through a relentless dialogue with the other Schools, following in that a form of dialectical process instead of starting from a definite, a priori programmatic position.

Over time, this dialogue with other currents led Pettazzoni to adopt several positions on a number of important issues, principally on the five following ones.
1) By recognizing the merits of phenomenology of religions’ reaction against a philologism that was ripping the bud of the nascent field of History of religions, Pettazzoni adopted the phenomenological thesis on the autonomy and specificity of the religious, grounded in a sui generis type of cultural consciousness. Incidentally, we can note that on this point, he was standing apart from Croce, who contested this autonomy and specificity since he situated religion in the field of ethics.
2) In accordance with the historicist heritage he reclaimed, as opposed to the religious phenomenology, Pettazzoni however refused the idea that such a specificity and autonomy were grounded in an ontological objectivity of both religion and the sacred. Every religious phenomenon, to him, is a “fact” [fait, litt. “made” in Romance languages] and not a “given” [litt. could be “data”; donné]; it is the ending point of an anterior process of formation and development, but also the departure point of an ulterior development, process whose genesis, structure and historical function must be tracked down by the historian of religions (“every phainomenon is a genomenon”, he said).
3) Pettazzoni operated the synthesis of two currents of the History of religions, both characterized by their use of the comparative method: the philological current, represented by the heritage of Friedrich Max Müller, and the anthropological current, represented by Edward B. Tylor and James Frazer.
4) According to Pettazzoni, the comparison, however, mustn’t be done between static religious forms (typological or phenomenological comparisons, necessary yet insufficient), but between dynamic processes of development.
5) The universal vocation of History of religions should not, according to him, be based on the use of the notion of “religion” linked to a particular religion and adopted as an absolute model, but rather on the universality of the historico-religious investigation, which must postulate a sufficiently broad concept in order to understand all particular forms. It precisely seems that this universality can be reached through the use of a method, namely that of historical and singularizing comparatism. This comparatism is not based on the discovery of the convergences between similar forms, rather on uncovering the divergences and originality of historical processes that gave birth to different historico-religious formations: “History can only be made through distinguishing, that is to say through singularizing.” From that comes Pettazzoni’s tendency to build religious history on conceptual antitheses, showing ruptures and cultural revolutions punctuating the history of civilisation Sabbatucci inherited.

Many of Dario Sabbatucci’s works, walking in the steps of his master, will be a testimony to this methodological continuity. In that respect, in Saggio sul misticismo greco (1965), he puts into historical perspective the notion of “mysticism” and/or “mystical”. He relativizes this notion, contextualizing it in relation with the religious context of Ancient Greece from the 3rd to the 1st Century BC, where “mystical” takes the form not of a religiosity that could be defined as such, but of a “secondary” religious attitude, resulting from a dialectical overturning, of a “revolution”, in a way; as such, the outlines of this religiosity would be drawn in relation with preexisting religious forms heading towards a “political” sense, and in contrast with them. In Il mito, il rito e la storia (1978), the Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Babylonian, Indian, Chinese etc. civilisations are compared one to another and studied in light of a double, historical and cultural problematic: namely, on the one hand the question of the relationship between political power and patrician organization of the society; on the other hand, that of relations between a mythical function, founding historicity (and put at the service of an hereditarian organization of power in these Ancient worlds), and a ritual function, transforming this same historicity. The historical singularizing comparison also bore fruits in Sabbatucci’s work on divination in Ancient Rome and in China (Divinazione e cosmologia, 1989), and also in La religione di Roma antica (1988) and Lo Stato come conquista culturale [The State as a cultural conquest] (1975), devoted respectively to the Roman calendar of festivities and to the analysis of religion in Republican Rome, interpretated in light of the demythization process characterizing it, as opposed to the Greek religion. Sabbatucci explores this process of demythization through the dual figure — adopted in Rome — of the historicization of myths founding the Republican values on the one hand, and of the broadening of the ritual function (expressed for example in a juridical conception of the sacred) on the other hand. Another part of Sabbatucci’s production is devoted to a critical revision of the conceptual constructions of the History of religions. Thus, in the 1980s, he engaged with revisiting the documentary material of classical religious ethnology, leading him to demonstrate how and why concepts such as “dema” could emerge (Il dema dei Marind-Anim, 1982; Il dema di Jensen, 1983; Da Osiride a Quirino, 1984), “trickster” (Sui protagonisti di miti, 1981), “polytheism” (Il politeismo, 1989 and 1998), “monotheism” (Monoteismo, 2001), still characteristic in the vocabulary of the History and religions and of religious ethnology.

Here is in what sense we can say Sabbatucci extends the lesson of Pettazzoni, who in the 1920s used the compared History of religions to historicize the Western concept of “god” and of “monotheism”12. But he also furthers the lesson of A. Brelich — who thanks to comparison put in light the profound metamorphoses of the “rites of passage” in Ancient Greece13 — and that of De Martino, who also made use of historico-religious comparatism in the occasion of a methodological questioning of certain Western cultural categories. As we know, this enterprise led De Martino to successively historicize categories such as “subjectivity”, “objectivity”, “nature”, “person”, “reality” and “magic”14.

From these three colleagues coming from this same School, Sabbatucci yet distanced himself on several points15. As opposed to Pettazzoni, De Martino and Brelich16, he does not give an operative status to the category of “religion”. The Historico-religious perspective aims at showing how, through intercultural comparison, such a categorial reality does not have an explanatory value by itself, but rather demands to be explained. It shows its operative limits when one considers it as a product of controversies that opposed the Christian world to the Pagan world first, and then the Christian religion, considered to be the only “religion”, to the public realm of “civic” life, to magic, and to science.

De Martino made a pretext of the History of religions to put back in perspective the cultural constructions of the West. Sabbatucci does so, without however sharing the psychological hypothesis formulated by De Martino, according to which the autonomy of the religious would take ground in a form of particular cultural consciousness, based on a “technique of dehistoricization” established by the mythico-ritual device. Sabbatucci takes back the proper reflexion of De Martino on the relational and differential character of historico-religious knowledge, but by proceeding to its “de-subjectivization”. According to him, in fact, there is no specific substantive “religious”, grounded in particular psychic and affective states common to humanity, whose subjective consciousness would be able to experience. There are only cultures, each of it confronted to specific historical and cultural issues. Only the confrontation between various solutions given to such cultural issues could thus enable us to outline the concrete logics set in motion by each and every of them. This contrastive and relational character of the historico-religious knowledge would then be based not on an abstract logical principle — as would Lévi-Strauss suggest when he talks about inconscious dynamics underlaying the construction of identity and alterity. He in fact builds upon the historical circumstances that led the West (and only the West) to confront itself to other religious and other cultures, up to making this confrontation a specific field of inquiry. In order to be able to historicize the genesis of such an intercultural confrontation, of which the compared History of religions is merely one form, it is yet necessary, according to Sabbatucci, to shed light on the system of references in which this confrontation originates, ie to trace back its formation and development, in order to disentangle its specificity and its internal coherence. Hence why, as Nicola Gasbarro says in his enlightening study17, as opposed to other historians of religions, sometimes even close to him, Sabbatucci does not look into emphasizing on particular elements from a system (the “religious life”, the “mythico-ritual dehistoricization”, the sacred/profane opposition, etc.)—, ie elements prone to be taken out of the particular cultural system they appeared in, in order to be transposed into other contexts. As a matter of fact, if recurrences may well exist in cultures, they require to be explained, less through absolutization, or anthropological generalizations, than by appealing to their nature as specific, historically determined cultural facts. Hence why, for Sabbatucci, the notion of religion can only be used provided that its double lineage is not forgotten: that of the religion-institution such as how Christianity conceived it, and that of religion-experience coming from Greek mysticism. In this aspect of his approach, a closer look shows us that Sabbatucci only radicalizes pettazzonian concepts of “formation” and “development”.

Relativism and constructivism in History of religions

All this work of putting into perspective, relativizing of notions mobilized in concrete investigation is all but a theoretical choice in favour of relativism, a choice that would lead to renouncing the cognitive purpose of that field. This work neither comes from a bias towards underlining the fundamental incommensurability of religions and cultures between one another. It is rather the consequence of applying this systematic method (historical, singularizing comparatism), aiming at refining the heuristic instruments of a knowledge seen not as conceived upon a naturalistic-objective model, but upon an object previously given as such.

History of religions such as Sabbatucci conceives it, as a scientific project, shows itself to be a mobile knowledge, always prone to reinterrogation and revolution. Not only does it evolve with its object, but its true challenge is less the study of the supposed “religions” of others, than the problematization of the West itself, whose cultural landmarks and values need to get historicized through confrontation with other cultures’ values. Simultaneously object and subject of knowledge, they find themselves both summoned and questioned. We can understand that such a methodological orientation, despite being situated in a comparative perspective, leads to a kind of “historical” knowledge with a singularizing vocation, rather than a generalizing “religious anthropology”. For Sabbatucci, the historian of religions’ vocation is not to study man generally speaking and the human condition, but rather cultures taken in their singularity, whose internal intelligibility is based on the use of a contrastive and differential approach, needed to highlight gaps and uniquenesses. Hence why, in the end, instead of approaching cultures through “religion”, which would represent one particular element, he proceeds to an approach of cultural systems by considering them in a whole, trying to draw and compare their respective underlaying logics — in a manner alike to Lévi-Strauss’.

As underlined in a study paralleling Sabbatucci’s method and that of Lévi-Strauss18, while the latter goes on a quest for logico-formal structures deprived of any content, seen as underpinning cultures, Sabbatucci rather endeavours grasping the historical structure, inseparable from its own particular contents, and proper to every single culture. While Lévi-Strauss looks for setting out the logical laws susceptible to reduce the arbitrary of civilisations’ cultural traits to recurring logical relations (since he refuses to acknowledge absolute relativism), Sabbatucci sets out not general laws but cultural tendencies, in which societies make their choices. To him, a culture will always stay a “system of values or of choices” within a number of undefined possibilities. Thus, through the study of myths, of structures of kinship and indigenous taxonomies, Lévi-Strauss sets out homologies, organizing concrete contents, behind which one discovers an abstract combinatory logics, while Sabbatucci reveals the concrete cultural differences, presented as as many solutions to internal issues proper to each civilisation, or as specific cultural conquests. What matters to him, as Gasbarro says, is not what is logically, but what is historically necessary.

We could then say that a philosophical absolutization of relations enables Claude Lévi-Strauss to discover the though per se, as a combinatory system empty of all signification. In contrast, a methodological absolutization of relations and contrasts between cultures enables Dario Sabbatucci to discover the arbitrary character of Western culture unterstood as a unique system of historical choices, and its non-necessity. Here lies the fundamental difference between the approach of Sabbatucci and that of Lévi-Strauss. For the former, the issue of the genesis of cultural forms and logics governing them replaces the universalizing conception of the spirit of the latter, and the naturalism coming from it. Reconstructing the structure of a culture, which is the collection of synchronic and diachronic relations defining and identifying it, is put at the service of properly historical problematics rather than of a generalizing anthropological understanding.

How, asks Sabbatucci, did Christianity end up making “Faith” the central element of its identity? How did religion constitute itself, in the West, as a field differentiated from other domains of the culture? It has to be said that here, religion built itself in opposition to the “civic” sphere first, and to magic and science then. From that comes a series of major consequences. Sabbatucci historicizes not only classical philosophical categories (logics, religion, ethics, politics, etc.) but also, by putting them in their own genetic context, cultural institutions that anthropology and sociology often tend to give a universal value to.

The work of historicization of cultural forms, in the Italian School, can be said to be outlining the genesis, structure and historical function of said forms. Its exemplary character is today more than ever actual. It gives ways to dissolve the essentialist concretions that philosophy, psychology and anthropology lead to when treating certain realities as given [données] rather than facts [faits], and therefore tend to perpetuate. For example, myth and rite, revisited in light of their origins, structure and function, will reveal themselves to be quite not “religious”, taken by Sabbatucci not as structures of the religious life but rather as cultural codes enabling its members to objectivate and interpret a reality always historically determined. Myth and rite do not embody religious functions per se; they help one think and act in the world by making a distinction between what in it is accessible or inaccessible from human intervention (myth would in this case have the immutable, what a culture does not or cannot change as its object, while rite would be about what a culture wants and can change). Such an approach, and we must here underline it with Gasbarro, excludes any risk inherent to relativism, as soon as we give this word not an “ideological” meaning, but a “relational” one — each term of a relation being considered the crossroad of a network of interrelations, constituting a system, each system possessing its own specificity. “That way, values, sense and meaning locally flow from these interactions between systems, which can only take an absolute characted through abstraction from their context, or when one ignores their origins and development (ie, their historicity).”

Historical comparison as practiced by Sabbatucci passes through the exercise of analogy between differing cultural phenomenons, but it is only provisional, in order to look further into differences and relations, since this historical comparatism exists not to entertain the nostalgia for substantial ideas at all. The ways it opens are therefore urging us to give another formulation to deeply contemporary issues, to stimulate our reflections. Putting The Historico-religious perspective in this collection is therefore fully justified.