For a secular return to the sacred: Raffaele Pettazzoni's last statement on the name of the science of religions

Abstract

In 1959, the president of the International Association for the History of Religions, Raffaele Pettazzoni, wrote the last notes of his life. Among these documents, there is a group of unpublished remarks: an attempt to outline the possible task of a unified study of religion, bridging the two dimensions – historical and phenomenological – as two facets of a single and general science of religions named ‘sacrology’. Pettazzoni had this new name in mind to meet the challenge of the Conference called by the IAHR at Marburg (1960). The questions raised in this essay – which deal with the discipline's nature and with its programme – let us see the symptoms of the Italian storicisti's interest within the framework of the problems connected with the controversial notion of sacred.