Due to their utter incompatibility with the findings of modern historical criticism, these two traditional perspectives [apologetic and anti-apologetic currents] were unable to keep up with scholarly progress in the study of ancient religions, and they have lost all credit in modern academic discourse: it is hardly an exaggeration to say that modern academic research in all relevant domains of history (such as Egyptology, or the study of ancient Iran) begins where these narratives end, and continued adherence to them is the easily recognized mark of the dilettante. But in the decades around 1700, two new paradigms evolved out of these traditional models, and these have become highly successful in establishing foundations of how “Western esotericism” came to be conceptualized in academic contexts after the Enlightenment. The first of them has been referred to here as “religionism,” and traced to Gottfried Arnold’s innovative construct of the history of Christianity. Religionism may be defined as an approach to religion (in Arnold’s case: Christian religion) that presents itself explicitly as “historical” but nevertheless denies, or at least strongly minimizes, the relevance of any questions pertaining to historical “influences,” and hence of historical criticism, because of its central assumption that the true referent of religion does not lie in the domain of human culture and society but only in a direct, unmediated, personal experience of the divine. In Arnold’s case, this was a highly effective strategy for ignoring any line of argumentation that might threaten the integrity of Christian religion by relating it to “pagan” influences. In its later development, as will be seen, the essential logic of religionism would allow academics to ignore, or reject, any argumentation that might threaten the integrity of “religion” as such by relating (and thereby potentially reducing) it to historical or social factors. In all its phases of development, the crucial reference of religionist approaches is to an irreducible experience of “the sacred,” considered as a reality sui generis. […]
The second new paradigm emerging in the decades around 1700 was based upon Enlightenment eclecticism, and clearly emerges in the work of authors such as Heumann and Brucker. Whereas the core concept of religionism is direct, personal, unmediated religious experience, its Enlightenment counterpart is autonomous human rationality and “sound judgment.” The basic assumption of the Enlightenment paradigm is that Reason is the universal yardstick for evaluating the truth or seriousness of any worldview, whether religious or philosophical. Religious or philosophical currents and ideas that are perceived as not satisfying the criterion of rationality lose their right to be taken seriously in intellectual discourse: they are delegated to the categories of “prejudice,” “superstition,” “foolishness,” or “stupidity.” In that process of exclusion – and this point is particularly important to emphasize – they are tacitly divested of their traditional status as players in the field of history, and transformed into non-historical universals of human thinking and behavior. In other words, one no longer needs to discuss them as traditions, such as “platonism,” “hermeticism,” or even “paganism,” but can dismiss them as synonymous with irrationality as such.
The Enlightenment paradigm and its religionist counterpart have more in common than one might think at first sight. Both are ideological, not empirical: they do not start by investigating historical evidence, but by stipulating “absolute” criteria of truth a priori, and whatever does not satisfy those criteria is without any further interest to them. Applied to historical materials, this necessarily results in highly selective procedures: the goal is that of finding the treasures of truth hidden in the forests of history – not that of exploring those forests for their own sakes! As a result, the religionist and Enlightenment paradigms both fall short, and seriously so, as methodological frameworks for historiography proper. With respect to the study of Western esotericism specifically, we will see that the former has tended to “reify” it as an autonomous spiritual tradition sui generis at the expense of historical and social context, while the latter has either ignored its very existence, or simply treated it with contempt as the pariah of Western thought.
In contrast to both paradigms, it is the anti-apologetic current – from Jacob Thomasius through Colberg, and even up to and including Brucker – that appears to have created the essential foundations for a properly historical/empirical and therefore non-ideological study of Western esotericism. Such a thesis might seem counter-intuitive at first sight: after all, these staunch Protestants were declared enemies of anything that we might categorize as “esoteric,” and far from wanting to turn it into a separate field of research, they would much rather have seen it disappear altogether. It is also true that the essentially non-historical Enlightenment perspective on Western esotericism emerged from the same anti-apologetic current, in the writings of Christian Thomasius, [Christoph August] Heumann, and [Jacob] Brucker; and that the latter prepared the eclipse of Platonic Orientalism, and everything it had come to imply, by carefully separating each of its single components from “true philosophy” along Heumannian lines, and thus readying it for exclusion by the next generation. However, none of this detracts from the lasting achievements of the anti-apologetic school: the combination of a methodology of historical criticism with a theoretical focus on the “Hellenization of Christianity” as the conceptual core and historical origin (“the platonic egg,” to quote their own favorite metaphor) of everything that is nowadays known as “Western esotericism.”
If the history of anti-apologeticism finally ended in large-scale suppression and neglect of that domain in mainstream intellectual and academic culture, this did not follow with any compelling logic from its basic theoretical and methodological perspectives – on the contrary, the latter demanded close historical study and critical analysis of the encounter between Hellenistic “paganism” and Christian religion, and its historical effects. It happened, rather, because of the strong normative and ideological biases of its main proponents and their audience: the combination of a dogmatic Protestant stereotyping of anything “pagan” with the no less dogmatic Enlightenment assumption that only rational beliefs deserve to be taken seriously by historians. Hence Enlightenment ideology eventually trumped historical criticism, leading to endless cases of historians showing deep embarrassment about the fact that their objects of research so often failed to live up to modern standards of rationality. Such embarrassment is clearly based on anachronistic projections, and does nothing to help us understand the historical realities under scrutiny. Indeed, if one of the most lasting achievements of the Enlightenment has been its insistence that “prejudice” in any form should be subjected to critical investigation, then there is no good reason to make an exception for the anti-“pagan,” anti-“mystical” and even anti-“religious” prejudice ingrained in the Enlightenment itself, partly derived from its Protestant roots,* or to refrain from questioning the long-standing effects it has had on the practice of academic historiography.
From this point of view, the study of Western esotericism that will be defended here might be characterized as anti-eclectic historiography. It questions the selective procedures by which historians since the period of the Enlightenment have been narrowing the study of philosophy down to what they consider “real” philosophy, the study of Christianity to that of “real” Christianity, the study of science to that of “real” science (as will be seen in Chapter 3), and even the study of religion to that of “real” religion or the study of art to that of “real” art. Anti-eclectic historiography seeks to correct the attenuated and ideology-driven pictures of Western history that result from such forms of eclecticism, by calling attention to the historical role and significance of the various currents and ideas that have ended up in the reservoir of “rejected knowledge” since the period of the Enlightenment. In short, it questions the canon of modern intellectual and academic culture and emphasizes that our common heritage is of much greater complexity than one would infer from standard academic textbooks. Obviously this program does not reflect an apologetic agenda in favor of “paganism” or “Western esotericism,” but a historiographical one: its goal is neither to defend nor to attack “pagan” or “esoteric” claims, but to ensure that the currents to which these labels refer are recognized as significant historical factors in the development of Western culture.
– Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture (2012), pp. 149-52
* It might seem strange to suspect not just the Enlightenment, but even Protestantism of an antireligious prejudice, but that assertion is made here deliberately. What it means is that “religion” is understood as a human phenomenon, in sharp contrast to the truth believed to be revealed by God himself in the Jewish and Christian traditions: a distinction that amounts to treating “religion” as an equivalent of “paganism,” thereby deliberately including Roman Catholicism under the latter rubric. This basic perspective was famously formulated by Karl Barth in the seventeenth paragraph of his Kirchliche Dogmatik, where he presented the absolute authority of “Revelation” over “religion” in the most extreme form possible, leading to the notorious conclusion “Religion ist Unglaube” (Religion is unbelief). Barth left no doubt that his concept of Christian theology was the polar opposite of any scholarly study of religion (Religionswissenschaft), because the latter, instead of accepting the absolute truth of Revelation, reduced it to just another hegemonic claim made by a religion, Christianity in this case. The “reversal of revelation and religion” was traced by Barth to Salomon van Til and Johann Franz Buddeus in the decades around 1700, and was held responsible for the “catastrophe” of Protestant theology since the eighteenth century by which it had fallen into “heresy” […]. From an academic point of view the argument of Barth’s seventeenth paragraph is supremely bizarre, and would be difficult to take seriously at all, if it were not for the enormous influence it has exerted in twentieth-century theology.