Encyclopaedic Knowledge, Cartesianism, and Puritanism in Apáczai’s Writings

Abstract

János Apáczai Csere was the greatest Hungarian pedagogue, writer, translator, author of textbooks, theologian, and philosopher of seventeenth-century Transylvania, a distinguished representative of Cartesian thought, an eminent figure of the Transylvanian Puritan movement, the first Hungarian encyclopaedist, and the first Hungarian synthesiser of the sciences. Apáczai was the most significant representative of the peregrini who had attended Western universities; he had his principal work, the Magyar Encyclopaedia, printed in Utrecht (in 1655 with the date 1653), a Hungarian-language book intended for school use that summarised the entirety of the scholarship of his age. With him the period in which Hungarian philosophical texts were written exclusively in Latin came to an end, and the period of cultivating philosophy in the Hungarian language commenced. He is likewise associated with the first important Hungarian-language reception of one of the greatest philosophers of the age, René Descartes, who, according to the Transylvanian scholar, was “the reformer of all philosophy”, “the pride of the century”.[1]

The most significant Hungarian thinker of the period, the first truly modern Hungarian philosopher, was János Apáczai Csere.

[1]   With the appearance of Bacon, Spinoza, and Descartes, seventeenth-century European philosophical development set out on a radically new path, that of empiricism and rationalism. In the spread of the new ideas in Hungary, the presence of the Czech scholar Comenius also played an important preparatory role; he was a representative of encyclopaedism, a fashionable trend of the age that soon came to dominate Protestant intellectual life. This current regarded the construction of a universal system of knowledge as its aim. The new outlook found adherents among the professors of the Lutheran College of Eperjes. Its principal representative, János Bayer, a follower of Bacon’s experiential philosophy, regarded the world as an integral whole composed of the elements of matter, light, and spirit, and considered the task of the thinker to be the discovery of the key to universal knowledge that illuminates everything. Like Bacon, he too hoped that the logical instrument for understanding the world was induction, the articulation of general laws derived from the examination of every individual case. (His pupil, Izsák Czabán, first in Wittenberg and then in Eperjes, already represented the fashionable materialist atomism of the period, frequently referring to the most important source of his theory, Gassendi’s atomism.) While Lutheran scholarship of this period oriented itself towards Bacon (and Gassendi), the Reformed tradition turned towards Descartes. Several professors in Debrecen fell under suspicion of Cartesianism. A characteristic representative of this era was Miklós Apáti (1662–1724), who, in his work on moral philosophy – alongside his emphasis on the freedom of inquiry and of the will – expressed enthusiasm for the mathematical method: he maintained that “God is the supreme mathematician”. Another thinker of the same period was János Pósaházi (1628–1686). Alongside his activities as polemicist and theologian – even while disputing Descartes’s views – he nonetheless confirmed Descartes, as well as other natural philosophers of the age, in his reflections on matter and the nature of motion.