Dénes Dienes: History of the Reformed Church Collég in Sárospatak (Sárospatak, 2013)
SPIRIT AND MOOD - Famous Teachers
he did author, however, set him apart from his peers. Immediately after leaving Vienna, he wrote an essay of forty pages in length entitled “A Political View of Europe in 1825”. Most likely a translation of a writing from abroad, the content is somewhat radical in nature, expressing pro-republican sentiment, condemning tyrannical royal power and is spiced with outrightly bellicose notions. On the basis of this essay, the thirty year-old József Csengery casts the appearance of one who, in denouncing both the monarchy and revolution, supported the notion of a constitutional monarchy. His other significant publication was a textbook of world history written in Hungarian. Given that this textbook was published and distributed, it also was reviewed by the censors, a requirement which made him choose his words more carefully than in the case of his first essay. Nonetheless, it is evident that he was a representative of a progressive attitude, purposely veering away from the path of traditional historiography, this latter consisting of extremely long descriptions of the ancient past and relatively short and summary descriptions of recent history. In his book of four hundred pages, there are only seventy pages dealing with ancient history and eighty with the middle ages. More than half of the book described the immediately previous three hundred years, placing special emphasis on the detailed description of the final few decades of this period. The shift in these proportions indicates a significant paradigm shift. It is worthwhile to note that in this tome he has apportioned descriptions of relatively equal length to the history of each country, these descriptions not being limited to the usual listing of foreign policy and military undertakings - sometimes even omitting these - but also included descriptions of actual and changing tendencies in each country’s internal and domestic policies. The third traditional chair for professors in Sárospatak was reserved for the discipline of philosophy. For the period under discussion there are two professors of philosophy worth mentioning: István Szentgyörgyi and József Rozgonyi (Rozgonyi’s successor, István Nyiry was introduced earlier). Szentgyörgyi educated students between 1767 and 1799, throughout the near entirety of his adult years, and was considered to be one of the most popular professors. Despite not having the opporunity during the reign of Maria Teresa to study and experience life abroad, his knowledge was so extensive that it won the admiration of his fellow professors. He was among the first ones who wrote textbooks in Hungarian; he produced and published books on Hungarian and Latin grammar but these could not be published under his name. It is to a large extent due to his efforts that the two most important disciplines were aligned to the expectations of a rational mode of reflection in Patak and thus were modernized. His book Theologia Naturalis was published in 1784 and was used by his successors for many years, it containing numerous principles issuing from the teachings of Descartes, Pufendorf, Leibniz and Wolff. It was with great respect of his knowledge, his humbleness, his good sense of humor and, last but not least, of his extensive library that Ferenc Kazinczy often spoke of Szentgyörgyi. The life of József Rozgonyi, who was the successor to Szentgyörgyi’s chair, evolved in a more fortunate fashion in many aspects but he was never able to József Rozgonyi’s signature
