Religion after Religion: Gershom Scholem, Mircea Eliade, and Henry Corbin at Eranos Paperback – 15 Nov. 1999

Sehr informativ, ganz toll gemacht.

Assigned textbook reading for my grad course. I have not delved into it much yet but all of my assigned readings are insightful and academically sound.

Steven Wasserstrom's brilliant and fascinating book is a marvellous study of three of the most brilliant and fascinating twentieth-century scholars of religion. All too often, readers are unaware of the human, idiosyncratic elements that inevitably shape the perspective of writers in various fields of the humanities. Dr. Wasserstrom gives us an objective view of these elements, and brings a new sense of depth to the background that contributed to the interests and, ultimately, to the published work of Corbin, Eliade, and Scholem.

Eranos was characterised by thinkers who got to the point and made one. If the author of this work was similarly inclined, this book might be worth a read.Instead, what we find is a distinctly un-Eranos-like fog of unrelated tid bits, cobbled together with a claim that it's some kind intellectual history. Despite considerably familiarity with the three Eranos thinkers in question, I wasn't able to see the point and suspect the author doesn't really have one, except perhaps Eranos was interesting, these thinkers were amazing, but he doesn't really "get" their theses.The experience is made worse by a startlingly low standard of editing. The mouthy style constantly distracts, large quotations in French go untranslated, and, despite an excess of footnotes (half a page per page of text), hundreds of quotes cite no source.If there is a religion after religion, it may be best practiced by engaging with the Eranos scholars in a less encumbered environment, such as that once found beside a lake in Swizterland.