Petrőczi Éva: "Nagyságodnak alázatos lelki szolgája” Tanulmányok Medgyesi Pálról - Nemzet, egyház, művelődés 4. (Budapest - Debrecen, 2007)

The Apocalyptics of the Hungarian Puritans

The Apocalyptics of the Hungarian Puritans

Relative stability at home and a flourishing trade in the world market brought increasing prosperity. During the seventeenth century while England was torn by internal strifle and civil war and Central Europe was devastated and depopulated by the Thirty Years’ War the Netherlands lived in peace and prosperity. Feeling secure in their way of life they could afford the luxury of permitting occasional deviation, being save of the strength of domestic Calvinism they could grant religious toleration without fear, being economically favored they could give themselves to the pleasure of intellectual and cultural pursuits. Under these favorable conditions the Netherlands of the seventeenth century developed rapidly into the intellectual center of the world.”2

This solidity and smoothness of Dutch life is reflected in the career of the tutor number one of our Hungarian students of theology . He was the Anglo-Dutch William Ames, an almost-Melanchthon-like spiritual father ,a magister perpetuus of this scholarly circle. 3 Amesius was born in Norfolk,England, and educated by William Perkins at Christ’s College,Cambridge. His greatest enemy, the Archbishop Bancroft forced him to leave his native country. He fond a shelter,a second home and a position at the University of Franeker .There he filled the chair of professor of divinity for twelve years(i622-i634) and wrote his famous, era-marking textbook, his Marrow of Divinity (Medulla Theologiae, 1623). Its opening sentence sounds like this:” Theologia est doctrina Deo vivendi.” Another often- quoted sentence from this remarkable work:’’Faith is the resting of the heart in God.” „Fides est acquiescentia cordis in Deo.”4

Even these short Amesian fragments prove the truth of the American church historian, William Haller who called the Puritan writers the „physicians of the soul”.s In other words: the main purpose of the Puritan conduct books (both of the Dutch, the English and the Hungarian ones) was not to frighten, not to shock the readers, but to tranquillize them with numerous instructions of godly life. They wrote very systematically, dividing their material into logical chapters and sub-chapters. The hysterical tone of the Melanchthonian apocalyptics seemed to be ceased forever. But the history of Hungary was apocalyptical enough to press out some quasi-apocalyptics even from the most calm, most Amesian, most physician-like authors of our seveneenth century. It happened so in the case of the ouvre of the leading author of the period, Pál Medgyesi. He was born cca in 1605,studied in Bárt fa (Now Bardejov,Slovakia), Debrecen,later in Frankfurt an der Oder and from 1629, exactly from the 13th of April in 2 3 4

2 STOEFFLER, F. Ernest: The Rise of Evangelical Pietism, Leiden, E.J. Brill, 1971, p. ill.

3 See my other article in this book, entitled: Some Features to thePortrait of William Ames.

4 AMES, William: Medulla Sacrae Theologiae, Franeker, 1627, p. 7.

3 FIALLER, William: The Rise of Puritanism, N Y, Columbia University press, 1947, p. 3-49.

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