The Enlightenment and the Bohemian Reformation: a Liberal Paradigm Zdeněk V

Selected Papers from the 2003 SVU North American Conference, Cedar Rapids, Iowa, 26-28 June 2003 The Enlightenment and the Bohemian Reformation: A Liberal Paradigm Zdeněk V. David, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars One Woodrow Wilson Plaza, 1300 Pennsylvania Avenue, NWWashington, D.C. 2004-3027 A perennial problem in Czech historiography has involved the relationship between modern Czech political culture, which emerged in the nineteenth century, and the Bohemian Reformation of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and how to deal with the awkward 1620- 1780 intermezzo of the Counter Reformation. Traditionally, the two divergent viewpoints on this relationship were defined by Thomas Masaryk, who postulated a disruption in the Czech intellectual life between the sixteenth century and the Enlightenment, and by Josef Pekař, who sought to integrate the Counter Reformation into a seamless web of a continuous cultural development. Masaryk viewed the ideological content of the Awakening as liberal and universal, Pekař as ethnic and national. My presentation is concerned with recent literature dealing with the Czech National Awakening, its sources, character, and objectives. It surveys the leading treatments on the topic in Czech, English, Russian and German. The Marxist-Leninist literature of 1945-1990 appears, as might be expected, rather stereotypical, and hence (with some exceptions) not particularly illuminating, More notable are several major works on the Czech National Awakening, which were written and published outside an official doctrinaire framework, abroad or, if in Bohemia, after the Velvet Revolution. Finally, the most recent views from the turn of the second millennium are briefly examined. The survey finds that existing literature has paid scant attention to the substantive link between the sixteenth-century Utraquist culture and the National Awakening. Let us first turn to the treatment of the relationship between the Bohemian Reformation and the National Awakening in the Marxist Leninist historiography, which has involved a paradox. On the one hand, the “revolutionary” character of Bohemian Reformation’s radical strands was held in high esteem. On the other hand, the Marxist ideology of historical materialism militated against a transfer of ideas over a lengthy hiatus. First, the culture of a period, its intellectual superstructure, was to be a reflection of the economic and social base, hence ideas played a derivative role in a particular historical era. Second, according to Marxism, the economic and social base of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was feudal, hence it was qualitatively different from the base of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, which was capitalist. The intellectual superstructures of the two eras, therefore, had to differ fundamentally. Third, the intellectual outlook of the Utraquist sixteenth century which was permissive, individualistic and open-ended was akin to the Enlightenment spirit that nurtured the National Awakening. At either end this outlook was at odds with the authoritative, collectivist and closed Weltanschauung of Marxism. Marxist historiography, therefore, had little incentive to emphasize the liberal features of either the Bohemian Reformation or the Enlightenment, or to dwell on the parallel between the two. The major works, typifying the Marxist Leninist approach, include the following: Josef Kočí, České národní obrození (Prague, 1978); Josef Haubelt, České osvícenství (Prague, 1986); - 1 - Selected Papers from the 2003 SVU North American Conference, Cedar Rapids, Iowa, 26-28 June 2003 and Josef Petráò and others, Počátky českého národního obrození: Společnost a kultura v 70. až 90. letech 18. století (Prague, 1990).1 Within the Marxist Leninist historiography two authors occupy a more distinctive and strangely contradictory place. One is Bedřich Slavík whose monograph, Od Dobnera k Dobrovskému (Prague: Vyšehrad, 1975) ironically for a work, published in the Communist era, exudes the harshness of a conservative Tridentine spirit in its negative attitude toward the liberal Catholicism of the Josephin Enlightenment. The other is Aleksandr S. Myl’nikov, whose Russian-language treatment of the topic, Epokha Prosveshcheniia v cheshskikh zemliakh: Ideologiia natsional’noe samosoznanie, kul’tura (Moscow, 1977), was preceded by a longer Czech version, Vznik národně osvícenské ideologie v českých zemích: Prameny národního obrození (Prague, 1974).2 Surprisingly for one coming out of the school of Soviet historiography, Myl’nikov celebrates the tolerant attitude and advocacy of intellectual freedom in the Bohemian Enlightenment virtually as an enthusiast for Jeffersonian liberalism. Aside from Hugh Agnew, whose work is discussed later, among the significant works concerning the Bohemian National Awakening, appearing in latter part of the twentieth century, were those of Walter Schamschula, Die Anfänge der tschechischen Erneuerung und das deutsche Geistesleben, 1740-1800 (Munich, 1973), Vladimír Macura, Znamení zrodu: České národní obrození jako kulturní typ (Rev. ed. Prague, 1995; 1st ed., Prague, 1983); and Miroslav Hroch, Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe: A Comparative Analysis of the Social Composition of Patriotic Groups Among the Smaller European Nations (New York, 2000). Schamschula says little concerning the awakeners’ interest in the literary legacy of the Utraquist period. Only in passing, he calls attention to the rehabilitation of Jan Hus by Kašpar Royko,3 as well as the call for reincorporating the Reformation period into the narrative of Bohemian history.4 As for language, he considers the proposed restoration of the sixteenth- century grammatical norms as an elitist approach implying contempt for the common man’s speech, and thus as an experiment doomed to failure.5 Minimizing the content-value of the sixteenth-century literature, he subordinates its usefulness to the linguistic aspect and attributes its appreciation by the awakeners to the perfection of vocabulary, grammar and style.6 This in turn leads him to under appreciate the awakeners’ bibliographic work as an uninspiring, pedantic and rather pointless accumulation of dates, book lists and authors’ biographies, as well as histories of printing.7 Consequently, Schamschula fails to note the relationship between the production of such inventories and the program of reprinting the classics of the sixteenth-century that was to influence the intellectual life of the coming generations. In general, in his assessment of the awakeners’ interest in the culture of the Utraquist age, he does not draw any further conclusions for the relationship between the culture of the Golden Age and the intellectual content of the Awakening. Vladimír Macura, even more blatantly, assigns the position of primacy in the National Awakening to the restoration of the Czech language to the status of a literary medium, not to the philosophical substance or the intellectual content of the Awakening. He (mis)directs much of his discussion of the linguistic character of the National Awakening (lingvocentrismus) by invoking - 2 - Selected Papers from the 2003 SVU North American Conference, Cedar Rapids, Iowa, 26-28 June 2003 the views of the Slovak, Jan Kollár.8 According to the index, Kollár with 17 lines receives a larger number of references than any other person or subject. This compares with 12 lines for Jungmann, 8 for Palacký, 4 for Havlíček, and merely 2 for Dobrovský. The fact that the first version of Macura’s book (1983) antedated the political division of Czechoslovakia might account for assigning Kollár -- for the sake of political correctness -- the role of a major player, rather than that of an atypical, and often mocked, Romantic maverick, in the otherwise realist ambiance of the Czech National Awakening.9 Despite the emphasis on the linguistic aspect of the revival Macura does not discuss either the restoration of the lexical and grammatical norms of the sixteenth century, or to the program of reprinting the sixteenth-century classics. Hroch, above all, is the most sociologically oriented of the post-Communist authors so far considered and his approach may be viewed as highly mechanical (for devising mathematical formulae) and defective (for omitting intellectual factors). He appears to justify his emphasis on formal sociological aspects and his neglect of philosophical and cultural content of the National Awakening by appealing to what looks like the Marxist tenet that privileges the socio-economic base over the cultural superstructure. As he writes: “We are in any case convinced that the establishment of the general social and economic conditions governing the emergence of any national movement constitutes the necessary starting-point for a fresh interpretation of its program, its demands and its ideological superstructure.”10 On the central topic of our interest, he makes only one stray and cryptic remark concerning the relationship between the Awakening and the Utraquist period: “The Czech national movement could gain a point of support in the cultural sphere from a well-developed ancient [sic] literature.”11 Based on sources in Czech, Latin, German and Russian, Hugh L.Agnew’s Origins of the Czech National Renascence (Pittsburgh, 1993) in a way represents an ecumenical summary of research on its topic toward the end of the twentieth century. On the whole, Agnew seems to be skeptical about the influence of the Bohemian Reformation. Instead, he calls attention of the contributions

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