side by side. That mixture characterizes religious studies in Eastern Europe
today. In the very same cultural location, a Frazerian approach might coexist
with fashionable, recently imported postmodern methodologies, and academic
discourse about religion(s) in one and the same country may simultaneously
include both an antiquated ‘hierarchy’ of religions with false claims to
objectivity, mainly within the faculties of Orthodox theology, and positivist
scholarship that treats ‘religion’, as it treats every other epistemological object,
very unsystematically. Until now no Central or Eastern European scholar has
investigated this diversity, and it is rare to meet in a single publication references
to, for example, Czech, Polish, Greek, and Russian research, except for some
Eastern European topics, which are in any case rather rarely discussed.
The tragic irony is that the greatest historical ‘unity’ of Eastern Europe was
the coerced and highly artificial unity that resulted from Communist/
Soviet domination after World War II. Rather than a Gadamerian ‘fusion of
horizons’—the object of a patient, still partial recomposition, the task of the
historiography of the period 1948–1989 must be to detect and eliminate the
shadows of half a century of falsification and suppression (beginnings in
Miliband 1995). Prohibited, denounced, studied in order to promote the
victory of ‘scientific atheism’, and ‘scientifically’ discredited as superstition,
‘religion’, at all levels, was purged from Communist humanity. ‘In the former
Eastern Europe—especially East Germany and the Soviet Union—the history
of religions allied itself with scientific atheism, an ideological version of the
study of religion which played a role in the persecution of the Church’, as
Geertz and McCutcheon recently wrote. ‘After the wall fell our German
colleagues were accused for working for Stasi or the KGB and related
organizations in Eastern Europe’ (2000: 11). The ideological unity imposed
by all Communist parties phantasmatically absorbed virtually all difference
but also diversified tragedy with perceptions that were hilarious: ‘[w]hen, at
the beginning of the eighties, Mircea Eliade’s book Aspects du mythecame
out from one of the publishing houses in Bucharest, the minister of culture at
that time, informed by a well-wisher about the ideological inconformity of the
text, asked that the author be immediately brought before him, together with
the Party secretary of the institution where he worked’ (Ples,u 1991: 66). In
fact, Eliade’s writings from Chicago reinvigorated the production of private,
hand-made/samizdatcopies.
Instead of homologizing the beginnings of religious studies in Eastern Europe
within a larger European (and Eurocentric) scale (paceHoryna 2005: 8772),
it is more effective to provide a larger, more composite view of historical
development that includes episodes of mutual mimesis but also reciprocal
polarization, indifference, and exclusion. Within the area there are three main
spheres: the Russian sphere, Central Europe, and Romania and the Balkans.
In contrast to a holistic, Western-style approach, a Russian, a Czech, or a
Romanian scholar will necessarily understand much better the specificity of52
EUGEN CIURTIN