engleski

Limits of Tolerance: The topoi of Fornication in the Hungarian Reformation

When nowadays people urge politicians (or politicians urge people) to be tolerant, what they really have in mind is an attitude of indifference. If we accept the relativity of our truths, we should be reluctant to condemn the acts or beliefs of our fellow man that differ from our own – that is the basic idea of our so-called tolerance. On the contrary, in 16th century Protestant discourse tolerance itself was regarded as deviant with its acceptance of deviations from accepted beliefs, doctrines in a dogmatic, political or ethical sense. So with respect to the Reformation tolerance history the perhaps more plausible question might be: When and to what extent was Protestantism in today’s sense “intolerant” with “tolerance” itself? The paper attempts to answer this question, focusing on one hundred years from approximately the 1530s to the 1630s in Hungary and in Transylvania, passing in examination the most important Protestant authors of the time, from Mátyás Dévai Bíró (cca 1500–after 1545), to András Batízi (before 1515 – around 1545), to Gáspár Károlyi (around 1530-1591), to Péter Bornemisza (1535–1584), and first of all to the bishop of Trans-Tisza diocese in Eastern Hungary, Péter Melius Juhász (around 1532–1572), the “Calvinist pope” as his enemies called him at the time. The term “tolerance”, however, does not even occur in the above-mentioned sources. The values strengthening the cohesion of the community can be clustered under the concept of “faithfulness” – while passive acceptance or active support of different beliefs, convictions, behaviors/ethical norms are clustered under the concept of “unfaithfulness”. The root metaphor that brings all these things into motion in the fields of religion and politics is marriage metaphors from the books of the Old Testament. The covenant of God and his chosen people is marriage in the spiritual sense of the word. Faithfulness, chastity and love are juxtaposed to the betrayal of one’s spouse, corruption of the body, prostitution and fornication. These sins can be committed within the community – “tolerance” of these sins is an ethical and spiritual sin at the same time (since it corrupts society and blemishes the transcendental relationship with God). The analysis focuses on the root-metaphor of the marriage, paying special attention to the changes in meaning of the term ‘fornication’ in the works of the Hungarian Protestant authors. As a conclusion, it can be stated that the federal line of thought (from the federal theology of the 16th century represented in Hungary by P. Melius Juhász), though in different ways, but has had its effects up until recent times, and even today it plays a leading part in Hungarian political discourse. The strength of this federative matrix lies in its characteristics that its political terms have always retained a quasi-sacral aura, or that it is not restricted to certain constitutional or state forms, it works in nation states as well as city states, in a minority situation as well as when its followers have formed a relative or absolute majority, it can take an authoritarian as well as a democratic form. And it is in one respect only that this considerable flexibility is not to be found among its characteristics: it does not tolerate the modern notion of tolerance or anything it implies (the division of private and public spheres, the relativity of values, religious indifference, or the indifference towards sacralised political entities such as nation).

tolerance, Hungarian Reformation, federal theology

nije evidentirano