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

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and practice. Instead of the rather frightening role of a remote and revengeful vates he played the role (and truthfully and convincingly did he so!) of an exceptionally conscious and responsible member of a community in danger. This is the democratic, the presbyterian side of the Puritan way of thinking. Actually the best side - as Leland Ryken mentions it in his famous and excellent Worldly Saints - of the Puritans were the policemen of one anothers hearts commonplaced

This Puritan practicism and soberness, this continuous search for preparation and prevention could have been a very hard task. Perhaps partly that is why the conduct books, compilations, tarcts written by 17th- century authors are not so rich in theoretical and philosophical details as the earlier works of 16th-century Protestant theology. Their gnostic side had always a secondary importance compared to their practical one. That is why so many of them - even the world-famous Lewis Bayly himself, on the pages of his The Practice of Piety - can be considered as the forerunners of a „holistic medico-theology”. They dealt not only with spiritual and historical problems, but with such apocalyptical moments of human life as growing age, illnesses, death. Actually, a lot of our Puritan pastors studied medicine as ell. Among others Samuel Köleséri junior and Ferenc Pápai Páriz. The latter produced very popular „twin-books”, entitled Pax corporis and Pax animae. As, for instance, in Pax corporis he explains the black death, the plague not as a contagious illness, but as a direct result of human vices. At the Reformed College of Nagyenyed (today Aiud, Romania) Pápai Páriz studied the book of Henricus Regius (Henri LeRoy), a carthesian professor of Leiden University. His Fundamenta Physices (1646) became a basic element of his thinking. According to the sixth chapter of his Pax corporis, entitled On the Plague this terrible illness frightens the nations not only because of losing the cold-heat balance and the poisons circulating in the blood-system, but because of the variety of human sins. The examples given by him could have appeared in any 16th-century apocalyptic theory: the vices of Israel in king David’s times led to the first „plague” of mankind, the real remedy of which is -as it stays in the Book of Jeremiah - just true penitence. A childish national pride also appears on the pages of this plague-chapter when the author puts a highly poetical question: can we, Hungarians run away from the coming plague? The answer is: the Germans can, but the Hungarians not, as we must by all means stick to the right order and usus to our lifestyle.* 10

This Pax corporis is a relatively late product of our Puritan literature which came out only in 1690. But -as such - it also proves the

■' RYKEN, Leland: Worldly Saints, The Puritans As They Really Were, Academie Books, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1986.

10 PÁPAI PÁRIZ, Ferenc: Pax corporis, Magvető, Budapest, 1984, vp. 324-365.

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