In our globalized, technocratic age people have a basic hunger for constructive spiritual content and a life imbued with higher meaning. And so we have reason to celebrate the concentration of collective memory embodied in Calvin’s Legacy, an exhibition at the Budapest History Museum. While perusing the exhibits and after reading its beautifully designed Catalogue, a single thought takes possession: the individual who strives to be creative in a culture and in his faith whilst fulfilling his responsibilities to God in struggles amid the twists and turns of history. István Bogárdi Szabó calls this commitment the “nobility of the mind and spirit”.
Lifelong study and teaching—tota vita est negotium cum Deo, our lifetime preoccupation with God—is the Calvinist community’s creed. Both sacred and secular are the responsibility of all Christians. God should govern a full and active life within the polis (civitas). Calvin’s rigorous moral discipline and holistic purpose is clearest at the nexus of Church and society: culture. The exhibition’s timeframe contains an outline of how this nobility of the mind and spirit succeeded in providing pertinent answers to the historical problems Hungary encountered from the 16th century onwards.

As in Western Europe, humanist and religious revivalist movements ushered in the Reformation in Hungary. Humanism precipitated a new phase in the study of science and the arts based on studia humanitatis et artes liberales, the accomplishments of Antiquity. Religious revivalism pointed to a fresh start,
purifying faith. Put together, the mind and soul were reborn (hence the Renaissance). The Reformation owed scholarly precision and the respect for ancient texts to Humanism, while movements within the Church recognised the imperative to purge divine service and religious life.
In the midst of this new intellectual and spiritual climate, Matthias Corvinus (r.1458–1490) established his policies and built his Palace in Buda containing the unrivalled collection of the Bibliotheca Corviniana. Great humanists such as Chancellor János Vitéz, the astronomer Regiomontanus and the Italian humanists Antonio Bonfini and Galeotto Marzio attended his court. After the untimely death of King Matthias the Sodalitas litteraria Danubiana, a circle of humanists, established themselves in Buda on the model of the Academia Platonica which Marsilio Ficino founded in Florence. They did so in cooperation with the city of Vienna, where Konrad Celtis wrote: “All over Pannonia lovers of literature and science so abound that their company and conversation is my great delight.”
Contacts with Erasmus of Rotterdam started when Johann Henckel, the chaplain to Queen Mary (consort to King Louis II), initiated a correspondence. Later her physician János Antoninus, the Thurzó brothers and many others exchanged letters with him. George, Margrave of Brandenburg, who had brought up the King and embraced Luther’s teachings, helped, however indirectly, the earliest spread of the Reformation in the region from his estate in the heart of the county.
In August 1526, however, the Ottoman invasion annihilated the Hungarian army at Mohács, and King Louis II was drowned near the battlefield. The widowed queen fled from Buda to Vienna, and thencej to the Netherlands, halting a cultural process in its tracks. The concern of leading thinkers shown for the fate of the queen attests to the significance of the event, which was traumatic for Hungary and shocked the whole of Europe. Martin Luther wrote Four Psalms of Comfort (1526), Erasmus of Rotterdam On the Christian Widow (1529), Sir Thomas More his last work in the Tower, A Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation (1534)—all dedicated to Queen Mary. After the Buda court had been emptied, the remaining men of letters disseminated the gospel in the vernacular, carrying out what Erasmus had proposed. Benedek Komjáti translated the Epistles of Paul into Hungarian (1533), Gábor Pesti, the most ardent follower of Erasmus, the Four Gospels (1536) and János Sylvester the entire New Testament (1541). A Buda theologian, Pelbárt Temesvári, a friar who was a stricter, more observant Franciscan, as well as Osvát Laskai appeared to be calling for a religious revival in their sermons, while Mátyás Dévai Bíró, Imre Ozorai, Mihály Sztárai and other Franciscans overtly preached in the spirit of the Reformation.
Any presentation of the culture of the Renaissance and Humanism lies beyond the scope of the exhibition and its catalogue. But to understand the Danubian Reformation, it is useful to know something about the culture in which it was embedded. Calvin’s spiritual legacy rose out of the ravages of the Ottoman occupation. With his humanist education, Calvin responded most sensitively to the yearning for the ‘just’ and ‘glorious’.

The Ottoman domination in the first half of the 16th century interrupted an initially unified humanist culture and social development. The country was divided into three parts—Kingdom of Hungary, direct Ottoman rule, Principality of Transylvania—and the relationship between Church and society evolved differently in each. Interestingly, Calvinist districts today more or less match the areal boundaries and cultural peculiarities of that three-way division.
Hungary experienced a deep crisis and transition, having lost much of its wealth and some of its independence. In this state, the country discovered what the theology of Luther and Calvin offered: the spiritual home of a living Word of God—the Gospels—and a life worth living in Christ in the midst of worldly tribulations. Knowledge of the Old and New Testaments taught them, by the example of the Jews, that God may punish even His chosen people for their sins by the bloody hand of foreign conquerors. The parallels in the history of the suffering Jews and Hungarians are highlighted in Gáspár Károli’s Két könyv (Two Books, 1563), which revived the medieval Hungarian chronicles’ idea of an analogous ‘conquest’ by Moses and Árpád. This biblical parallel meant that the concept of nation (“nemzet” as derived from “being begotten”) is interpreted quite differently in Hungarian than in English, French or German-speaking cultures. It is closer to the etymological meaning of adoption than to begetting or birth. Since the age of King Saint Stephen (r.1000–1038), the natio implied the community of the children of God, of those belonging to the Christian Church, as it also appears in the works of 16–17thcentury Protestant authors. As in other nations, Bible translations were available in the vernacular so that divinum and humanum, religious and philosophical knowledge, could be attained by many rather than a narrow elite. Book-printing flourished, built on the humanist tradition, as if there had been a nationwide campaign to renovate the scattered collection of the one-time majestic Corvina library of Buda, something which is demonstrated by the typology of the books and their leather bindings with Renaissance portraits.

Calvin, flanked by Princes of Transylvania and Gabriel Bethlen, on a stained glass window in the staircase of the Calvin Hall
of the Kálvin Square Calvinist Congregation, Budapest
Miksa Róth, 1934

István Szegedi Kis's theological treatise with the author's portait
Stephanus Szegedinus Theologiae sincerae Loci Communes de Deo et homine Cum Confessione de Trinitate ...
Editio Quarta, Basileae per Conrad Waldkirchium, 1599. Bound with Stephanus Szegedinusz: Tabulae Analyticae, Quibus Examplar illud Sanorum, Sermonum... Basileae, 1599.
Historical Portrait Gallery Hungarian National Museum, Budapest

Design for the facade and ground plan of the Calvinist Church on Kálvin Square
Ferenc Karacs, 1816 Historical Portrait Gallery Hungarian National Museum, Budapest

 

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Sándor Békési
teaches Dogmatics and Ethics as an Associate Professor of Systematic Theology at the Károli Gáspár Calvinist University in Budapest. His special field of research is Theological Aesthetics.