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

1976 / 2. szám

minds of the gullible be corrupted. Theirs was in fact a church in which the Hungarians had no place and, organizationally, even those Hungarians we can lable as Lutherans did not belong under Saxon jurisdiction. By 1557, there were two organized Protestant bodies in Transylvania, a Hungarian and a Saxon one, headed respectively by Bishops Ferenc David and Matthias Hehler. At this juncture there was still general agreement between the two corporations in doctrinal matters, but the separateness in organization and outright hostility in other affairs were a certain guarantee for further theological differentiation. It is therefore false to accuse the Hungarian churchmen, especially David, of fickleness. David's theological views progressed, to be sure, as time went on and as his freedom increased, but he remained, always, what he had chosen to be: a Hungarian pastor, who was Catholic as long as that was in his nation's interest, became the leader of the (socalled) Lutheran Hungarians when the Catholic Church became a Habsburg institution; continued to lead the Hungarian church while it moved, partly in reaction against the Saxons, partly due to influence from Habsburg Hungary, in the direction of a non-German, i.e., Calvinistic Protestantism, and finally, still leading the same Hungarian flock, broke with the dictates of foreign authorities altogether and developed instead his own, rather rationalistic views regarding the essence of Christianity.

By this I do not mean to belittle the role of the theological disputes themselves, We are after all dealing with the 16th century, when these questions were, so to speak, burning issues. I wish only to stress that the various Transylvanian factions were also very much motivated by factors dealing with national allegiance, sometimes consciously, at other times without the awareness of the protagonists — and that the role of the government in all this was to prevent disorder and open strife, while guaranteeing everyone’s rights as well as it could.

I should like to cite two more laws passed by the Transylvanian legislatures to underline the above. The first of these, from 1564, establishes that the two factions are now different in religion and nationality, in that it distinguishes the "superintendentes et pastores ecclesiarum Coloswariensis, nationis videlicet Hangari1* i.e., the bishops and pastors of the Kolozsvár churches, namely of Hungarian nationality, from the "Cibiniensis gentis Saxonicalis” — those of the Saxon people of Nagyszeben (Kolozsvár and Nagyszeben are the two cities in which these churches were respectively headquartered). As for tolerance, the law of 1564 states that, henceforth, people — individuals! —, be they of either nationality, are allowed to follow either the Saxon cr the Hungarian religion, and that no one might force his views on another, and that every city, town or village should have the right to retain preachers of either religion, as it saw fit. Further, it guarantees that people living in a commune of one denomination may go to another to worship, and makes it illegal to hinder them in this, even just to the point of ridiculing them. But the crowning glory of the Transylvanian Reformation is the even more liberal law of 1568, which states: "in every place the preachers snail preach and explain the Gospel each according to his understanding of it, and if the congregation like it. well. If not, no one shall compel them, but they shall keep the preachers whose doctrine they approve. Therefore none of the Superintendents or others shall annoy or abuse the preachers on account of their jreligion, according to the previous constitutions, or allow any to be imprisoned or be punished by removal from his post on account of his teaching, for faith is the gift of God, this comes from hearing, and hearing by the word of God. ”*

This was the height of the Transylvanian Reformation, in the time of a young, but wise

*Az angol szöveg forrása: Earl Morse Wilbur, AJiistorv of Unitarianism in Transylvania, England and America (Boston. Beacon Press, 1945), 38. old.

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