A modernitás válaszútjain: Klaniczay Tibor és Keserű Bálint vitája az újsztoicizmus hazai recepciójáról [At the crossroads of modernity: Bálint Keserű and Tibor Klaniczay's debate on Hungarian Stoicism]

Bene, Sándor (2024) A modernitás válaszútjain: Klaniczay Tibor és Keserű Bálint vitája az újsztoicizmus hazai recepciójáról [At the crossroads of modernity: Bálint Keserű and Tibor Klaniczay's debate on Hungarian Stoicism]. In: Magyar sztoikusok: Tanulmányok az újsztoicizmus magyarországi történetéről. Gondolat, pp. 30-61. ISBN 9789635565627

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Abstract

Tibor Klaniczay's study, The Problems of the Hungarian Late Renaissance: Stoicism and Mannerism, a lecture given in 1959 and published in 1960, is one of the rare papers covering a wide range of literary, political, ideological and stylistic phenomena that created a productive research paradigm for decades at the turn of the 16th and 17th centuries. The reception of New Stoic thought, especially the works of Justus Lipsius, and the Mannerist stylistic movements closely associated with it, reflected the shattering of the worldview of the domestic intellectual elite of the period, the crisis of Renaissance ideals, and provided the framework for a major literary and intellectual history of the period. The study proved to be highly inspiring for the scholar Bálint Keserű, who was also a schoolboy, but it also stimulated debate. In his Vallási-ellenzéki törekvések a magyar késő-reneszánszbanszbanban (unfortunately unpublished in its entirety), he formulated fundamental objections in two respects. The first concerned the neglect of the religious aspect, which, according to Keserű, was much more dominant in the intellectual life of the period than the Klaniczay research paradigm, which focused on the "inter-confessional" elite, suggested. The other, closely related, concerned the periodisation model of a literary history handbook published in the early 1960s, in which, according to Keserű, the Stoic-Manierist 'late Renaissance' period begins (around 1600) when its real heyday has already come to an end. It is mainly in the context of the latter critique that the lecture will attempt to situate the debate between the two influential scholars within the framework of European modernisation in the sense of the history of ideas, and to interpret it in the light of recent research on Stoicism. In this perspective, the similarities between the two will be more important than the points at issue. Bálint Keserű's fundamental insight is that members of the emerging modern elite 'cynically exploited the passion of the fanatics of the new religious wave against their opponents', and indeed: 'stoic pacifism with an inter-confessional outlook' was often coupled in the same actors with 'biased and fanatically proclaimed (possibly radically innovative) religious-ideological convictions'. And Klaniczay warns that 'not only absolutism, but also an anti-absolutist politics of order could be theoretically justified from Lipsius'. The lecture tries to interpret this parallel, without losing sight of the fact that the debate naturally also reflects the stakes of the intellectual search for a way forward and attempts at modernisation in the decade and a half after 1956.

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