Aleas of history and frontiers of modernity

Hatos, Pál (2010) Aleas of history and frontiers of modernity. Hungarian Studies, 24 (2). pp. 225-244. ISSN 0236-6568

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Abstract

Liberal academics and enthusiastic lay audiences hailed the public debuts of the Calvinist theologian and acclaimed orator László Ravasz as the leading representative of a new generation of modernist clergymen in the early 1910s. Much to the regret of his liberal critics, in the wake of the collapse of historic Hungary following World War I his message stemmed from a modern cult and culture of defeat and was in no way a continuation of the old school liberals of the belle époque of the Dual Monarchy. In his memoires, which were written during the 1960s, Ravasz described his erstwhile political views as “fetishes,” but defended his theological motives. This raises questions concerning a central problem of modern religious experience: how can one map the constantly evolving frontiers between rampant secularization and the no less permanent and certainly insatiable nostalgia for the sacred order of things in modern societies? By redefining what is religious, the currents of Protestant and Catholic thought in interwar Hungary presented in the following article established intellectual contexts on both sides that make not only the historical description of Christian identity but also the very notion of modernity a function of multi-layered readings. At the same time, the Catholic and Protestant rapprochement may be interpreted as a symptom of the decline of religious explanations of the world and history, because they testify to the fact that the dialectics of historical interpretation are no longer defined by the particular approaches of Catholic or Protestant theology or the differences between the two, but rather by the state of competition between universalist utopias and religious world explanations forced into the conservative camp, which necessarily bleaches the emphatic elements of Christian teachings as well.

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