Berecz Mátyás - Bujdosné Pap Györgyi - Petercsák Tivadar (szerk.): Végvár és mentalitás a kora újkori Európában - Studia Agriensia 31. (Eger, 2015)

BITSKEY ISTVÁN: Az Athleta Christi eszménye a végvári harcokban

István Bitskey

THE ATHLETA CHRISTI IDEAL DURING THE COURSE OF THE BORDER FORTRESS CONFLICTS

For border fortress society, whose job it was to defend the frontiers of European Christianity, the question of reconciling armed warfare with a religious and ethical outlook was a major issue. In the literary texts of the early modem period a number of different justifications may be found legitimizing armed straggle within the context of the accepted Christian moral standards of the time. It is the aim of this paper to present the views that existed on this topic in the literature of the period. The notion of the Christian warrior (miles christianus) can already be found in Early Christian literature. For understandable reasons the early Christians condemned all violence, all armed and military actions. It is usual to mention in this regard the case of St Martin of Tours, canonized in AD 356, who left his Roman legion declaring that as a Christian it was wrong to take up arms against one’s fellow man. During the course of the centuries that followed the notion of Christian soldier {Athleta Christi) underwent many changes and experienced many variations in meaning. At the time of the Mongolian invasions the pope referred to Béla IV as the defender of the faith. With the arrival of Islam in south-eastern Europe those rulers, countries and military leaders who fought against the infidel earned the right to use the epithet defensor fidei. In the Carpathian Basin of the 16th century attitudes towards the person of the Christian warrior and manner in which such a person should behave acquired a new relevance, both as a result of the increased expansion of the Islamic world and the ethics of the Reformation. This resulted in a reassessment of Christian participation in war, accompanied by an increasing interest in the moral questions surrounding military conflict. Already by the 1530s Melanchthon’s rhetorical textbooks integrated the motif of the Türkenkrieg, Türkengefahr into their systems of dispute. The Hungarian Protestant preachers talked about the Turkish conquest within a Biblical, eschatological context, and fighting against it was seen in terms of a moral self-purification. It was to the flagellum Dei that such preachers appealed (István Magyar, Alexis János Kecskeméti). On the Catholic side it was when preaching about St Martin that Péter Pázmány provided the most comprehensive and subtle elucidation of the athlete Christi, something which also appeared in Miklós Zrínyi’s Szigeti veszedelem (Peril of Sziget).

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