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 i-K? into the air. Famine and plague also arrived, consequently the circumstances became really apocalyptic. Due to all these negative changes, these tragic events, the earlier smooth and calm tone of Medgyesi changed greatly. From 1653 he published his six continual Woes, playing and at the same time also painfully living the role of a Hungarian Jeremiah.8 One of these Woes - actually the perhaps most prophetic one - has some modern editions as well. It was written - as I have already mentioned — at the very beginning of the tragic historical events. Prince György Rákóczi II. could hardly survivie the fiasco of his caesaromaniac plans and dreams about becoming king of Poland. The exact date of this pulpit oration’s being told at the Calvinist church of Sárospatak is the 2nd of September 1657. When quoting the words of Jeremiah and the curses of Isaiah originally dedicated to the sinful town of Jerusalem, he wants to warn his own people. After the forty peaceful „Solomonian” years of Transylvania, because of the misdeeds and unwise decisions of its head (e.g. Prince Rákóczi himself) and its people we have to expect the worst: a total decay of land and nation. The text - just like the 16th-century ones - is full of parables taken from the Old Testament. In this respect Pál Medgyesi proved to be an absolute follower of the Wittenberg school. But there are some basic differences as well between him and his preacher-predecessors. First of all: in spite of his anger (sometimes rage and fury) against the sinful and greedy prince and the almost equally sinful people his main purpose is not the frightening, the shocking, but the typical Puritan attitude of prevention, of warning. He didn’t intend to increase the status of „mortification”, of slow agony, but wanted to offer - as a true-born physician of the soul - some healing herbs. Second: he did it again with a characteristically Puritan pedanty and meticulousness, with pressing his passionate sentences into almost-geometrical, well-ordered points or item. What he tells and puts down in a very disciplined form sounds like a pathological report in a post-mortem room, written after an autopsy, the main purpose of which is to save some further patients from the grasp of the same mortal illness. It is sort of an Apocalypse as well, but the stress is not on its horroristic details, but on the possibilities of avoiding them. It is quite natural: our Puritans, just like their Dutch and English brethren, were utilitarian enough not to give up very easily. Medgyesi was not among the members of the London League (1632) in which János Tolnai dali and his fellow-students signed a pact of mutual responsibility for each other’s deeds in the name of Jesus Christ. But his educational background - from Leiden to Cambridge - led him to a very similar pattern of religious argumentation 88 See the Xth chapter of Charles CSÁSZÁR’s monograph on Medgyesi, entitled Pál Medgyesi, His Life and Age, Budapest, 1911, 84-93. 84
