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The French orientalist Henry Corbin’s (1903-1978) critique of “historicism” has proven polarizing not only among scholars of Islam but also in broader discussions about the place of phenomenological methods in the study of religion. Both critics and defenders of Corbin, however, assume that he made a singular argument against historicism that clearly differentiated his method from that of his historicist colleagues. By contrast, I argue that Corbin developed at least two arguments against what he termed “historicism:” a moderate anti-reductionist argument and a radical argument that questions the very value of historical research. While these arguments are logically independent, Corbin’s text-critical and exegetical writings appeal to material historical processes and contexts to analyze the texts he is studying. In this regard, Corbin’s own work shows the practical limitations of his radical argument while pointing to a middle ground between reductionist and phenomenological approaches.
The publication of Ephrem’s works at Rome from 1732-1746 marks a watershed in European Ephrem scholarship as the first major printing of his Syriac works. These editions, however, were not only foundational through the texts they provided, by also through their new framing of Ephrem as an author from the East. In their prefaces the editors depict Ephrem not merely as an ancient authority, but as a specifically “oriental” one, coming from and belonging to a context distinguished from the Latin west. This new oriental Ephrem emerges from a transformation of early modern approaches to ancient Christian texts (polemical appeal to Patristic authority, charting of liturgical difference) into a way of seeing the world as divided into East and West. Likewise, the relocation of "oriental" manuscripts to the Roman metropole to produce European printed editions to be exported back to the East reproduces in scholarship the patterns of European colonialism.
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