Sárospataki Füzetek 21. (2017)

2017 / 2. szám - ARTICLES-STUDIEN - INTERCULTURAL DIALOGUE SINCE THE AGE OF THE REFORMATION-INTERKULTURELLER DIALOG SEIT DER REFORMATION - Nagy Károly Zsolt: Leaving a Mark: The calvinist landscapes of remembrance

Károly Zsolt Nagy

manifestation forms of the transcendent, while advancing an other tradition, which sees the presence of Christ in this world embodied in the church itself.

The church — according to its Calvinist interpretation — is pointedly not the hierarchy, and not the clergy, but the actual (local) community: Christ’s body,8 and so the manifestation of the transcendent is tied to the community as well. Thus, anything that is sacred may only be so — that is, maintained and separated for the transcendent, as in the original meaning of the word — if the church, that is, its physical form, the community, uses it. This way not even the building of the church is sacred in itself, as on the one hand, it does not continually contain anything of sacred characteristics (pictures, the sacraments, relics, the Eucharist), but it becomes sacred when the community in which Christ manifests himself gathers inside, and in the Calvinist sense, this is when it becomes “the house of God”.9 In the other way around, it results in that any place - a barn, a stable, etc. — may be sacred, should a congregation be formed inside. This logic is applied by Calvinism to the full system of sacral objects — the so called clenodia —, the ritual objects, and the paramenia, that is, the objects offered for decorating the church.

At the same time, there is “another side” to this concept. Namely, the communal nature results in that the transcendent experience is “location-specific”. Partly, this means the influence of patriotism and local traditions to the recognition of the manifestation of the transcendent; but it also means that the manifestation of the transcendent gains its meaning within the horizon of the local. Thus, the history of the local community and the embedded “individual” experiences become the media of the manifestation of the transcendent, and those places and locations, to which these experiences are tied (for example the church, the clenodia, or the appropriated drapery) turn into locations of remembrance.

The professional literature of ethnography and anthropology mostly focuses on the church building, its inscriptions, the memorial tablets placed inside, the clenodia and paramenia, as well as the written resources created by the church, when trying to capture that remembrance of the community. At the same time, with some generosity, we could also consider a peculiar group of remembrance reflecting the use of the church space, as written resources, which are only rarely examined by the researchers:10 the scribbles found on the walls, pillars, gallery parapets, and especially the benches themselves. What are these scribbles about? How are they tied to the

Zwingli’s teachings are summarized by Ulrich Gabler: Huldrych Zwingli: Eine Einführung in sein Leben und sein Werk, Theologischer Verlag Zürich, 2004.

8 “Now you are the body of Christ, and each one of you is a part of it.” 1 Corinthians 12:27.

9 The mutual influence of the different uses and interpretations of the word “the house of God” is rather peculiar, and not insignificant in terms of the issue at hand.

10 These inscriptions mostly draw the attention of researchers when they are peculiar for some reason. For example, there is a considerable literature of the remembrances written in Old Hungarian script and found in the inside of churches; I will just make note of one here, that of Klára Sándor’s book that was published in 2014: A székely írás nyomában, Budapest, Typotex, 2014.

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