Itt-Ott, 1976 (9. évfolyam, 1-6. szám)

1976 / 2. szám

Éltető J. Lajos (Portland, Oregon):

THE REFORMATION IN TRANSYLVANIA

(Az alábbi előadás elhangzott az American Academy of Religion északnyugati, kongresszusán, Eugene, Oregonban, 1976. május 7-én.)

The Transylvanian Reformation is both a cause and an effect of the breakup of the Hungarian Catholic Kingdom, At the time Martin Luther launched his movement, Hungary could look back on an existence of half a millenium as a unified state,- but after the death of its renaissance king, Mátyás Hunyadi, in 1490, the country suffered a series of internal and external blows from which it was never to recover. The general malaise of Europe overcame Hungary, too,- there was revolution within and war without the borders, and a sense of impending disaster in the air. The final act began with the battle of Mohács, in 1526, in which the Turks dealt a total defeat to the Hungarian army. King Lajos II. and many of the country's ablest leaders fell on Mohács Field, and were followed to the grave by 25 000 men.

Before Mohács, the Reformation had already begun to spread to Hungary. The reaction of the peers was swift and unequivocal: the parliaments of 1523, 1524 and 1525 all passed laws against the new heresy. Their essence is simple; "Lutherani comburantur" — Lutherans are to be burned.

Though these laws were in effect never invoked, their harshness is surprising. We must remember, they were not made by ecclesiastic authorities, nor by the ruler — rather, by an assembly of the Hungarian nobility, who could not have been concerned about theological arguments. Their concern must have been caused by something quite different, something they perceived as a threat.

An obvious explanation is suggested by the names of the earliest reformers in Hungary: Bernhardt, Henckel,Silesius, Kresling, Staudacher, Honter are just a few of a rather long list. Almost without exception, the early reformers are Germans, from Hungary's German-speaking towns in the east and the north. Facing them, on the Catholic side, the names of the bishops and other church functionaries are overwhelmingly Hungarian; Szálkái, Szathmári, Perényi, Szegedi, etc. The opposition in the early years of the Hungarian Reformation seems therefore to have been not only Protestant vs. Catholic, but also German vs. Hungarian. And this means that in the view of the parliaments a strong, national minority was rebelling against the established order of the Hungarian state, for at this time the Hungarian church and state are still one. Seen in this light, the laws of 1523—1525 become understandable, even though they shock us.

The intermediary role of the ethnic German element in spreading the Reformation to and in Hungary is generally recognized by church historians. But their widely held view is that the Hungarian Reformation is merely a continuation of the German one. This is basically not tenable. There is not a straight-line development from Catholicism through Lutheranism to Calvinism, and, in the case of Transylvania in particular, through Calvinism to Unitarianism traceable in the process, even if, paradoxically, individual reformers of necessity followed such a continuum in their personal careers. We must keep in mind that the whole time-span of the Reformation in the stricter sense is only one generation, furthermore that the denominational distinctions are more often than not arbitrary and artificial when applied to this early period. They were made in retrospect, by denominational historians attempting to claim for their respective churches the longest possible pedigree.

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