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History of Religions as History of Ideas

It has often and wisely been observed that, whereas a proper "phenomenology of religion" has to be the work of a single author, a "history of religions" must perforce be the combined effort of a team of experts, each contributing a volume (if it is a more ambitious series consisting of, e.g., over twenty volumes such as the Kohlhammer series) or a chapter (if it is a shorter publication) in his field of expertise. The latter tradition goes back to the second edition of Chantepie de la Saussaye's Lehrbuch at the end of the last century and continues to our own day with such publications as the twovolume Historia religionum (1971) edited by Bleeker and Widengren, or the French three-volume Histoire des religions (1970-76) edited by H.-Ch. Puech. Exceptions to this rule are popular paperbacks of the kind which the French would call vulgarisation (as distinct from haute vulgarisation). Eliade's work has so far been mainly of the "phenomenological" type (and the term "phenomenology" is used here in a very loose, broad, general, inexact, and almost "metaphorical" sense). In fact, his first major publication, the Traite d'histoire des religions, was clearly a misnomer, and the English version of this seminal work appeared, with good reason, under the title Patterns in Comparative Religion. Now, the septuagenarian grand old man of comparative religion presents the English-reading public (the original French edition had appeared