D
ESPITE THE INCLUSION OFMircea Eliade in major histories of the history
of religions (e.g. Michaels [ed.] 1997), and even Eliade’s stature as a
classical figure in that history, Eastern Europe is perhaps the part of the world
that is both most promising and most deceptive for a cultural history of the
study of religion. There is no study of Eastern European intellectual history
comparable to Nineteenth Century Religious Thought in the West(Smart et
al., 1985), and there is also virtually no study of religious studies in Eastern
Europe comparable to studies of the field in Western Europe, North America,
Japan, South Africa, and Australia by prominent scholars of religion aware of
and interested in the history of their field. Curiously, many Eastern European
scholars interested in the local background of their discipline can recount better
the history of the field in Western than in Eastern Europe. The following
preliminary sketch, in many respects unprecedented, is of necessity more modest
than already classic or recent research, such as Mircea Eliade (1963), Jacques
Waardenburg (1974), Eric J. Sharpe (1986), Hans G. Kippenberg (1997/2002),
Arie L. Molendijk and Peter Pels, eds (1998), Gregory D. Alles (2005), and
Giovanni Casadio (2005). It is, I hope, only a beginning. But it does try to go
beyond the contemporary scholarly preoccupation of simply discussing ‘The
Academic Study of Religion during the Cold War’ (DoleÏalová, Martin, and
Papou‰ek [eds] 2001), followed by an attempt to discern the hottest academic
pursuits now that the Berlin wall has fallen and the Iron Curtain has
progressively dissolved.
For our purposes, Eastern Europe includes one country that joined the
European Union in 1981—Greece—several that joined the EU in 2004 and
2007—Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania,
Poland, Romania, and Slovakia—and others that are not EU members—
Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia,
Slovenia, Belarus, Moldova, Ukraine, and at least a part of Russia. This
political multiplicity is mirrored in scholarship. There is virtually no permanent
communication between all, or even a significant majority, of scholars in the
region. This is perhaps a result of the kaleidoscope of languages, which mixes
a large number of Slavic languages together with Modern Greek and Romanian.
Another cause is the insufficiently secularized culture of the Orthodox
communities that constitute a majority in the region. (This cause is insufficiently
studied.) The political history of the region is also a contributing factor. Two
and a half—and even one and a half—centuries ago Eastern Europe was
dominated by the Habsburg, Russian, and Ottoman empires. In the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries new or reinvigorated nation-states often found
in the category ‘religion’ fuel for identity struggles rather than an invitation
to calm, rational, erudite investigation. Historians have repeatedly pointed out
that periods of free cultural development have been rare in this region. By
contrast, regression and subsequent restratification have recurred vigorously,
and it has been common for methods from various scholarly epochs to existEASTERN EUROPE
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