The phenomenological-comparative approach to understanding the history of religions

Abstract

Following the theoretical and methodological work of Joachim Wach, Mircea Eliade and Joseph M. Kitagawa, in this article I try to show how Wach's model of systematic typology of disciplines, known as Religionswissenxchaft or the "general study of religions", can be fruitfully used to bridge the gap between the historical and the systematic approach to studying retigion/s. In that sense, by following the track of some of Kitagawa's works, I develop the idea of a phenomenological-comparative approach to understanding the historical development of the religions of mankind (primitive religions, classical religions and modern world religions) to which three main types of religious experience correspond. At the same lime, the article implicitely wishes to point out the so called general problem of "understanding" religious experience and its manifestations within different disciplines, or in other terms, the necessity of harmonizing and coordinating the different specialist views and contributions to the exploration of religion/s within the historical and systematic areas, under the condition that the generally accepted criteria of interpretation may not exclude the theoretical-methodological hypotheses of any of the different disciplines.