Emese

A few comments on myths, magyar and Christian. Posts proceed by date, from bottom to top.

Thursday, August 12, 2004

The Christian Symbols

The Communists suppressed not only nationalism and its symbols, they also did their best to control and eventually eliminate Christianity and its churches.

To me, Communism is a religion, and the party is its church.
And churches traditionally tolerate no competition. Convert or be destroyed. See the Islamist parallels in our own times.

It was so in Hungary after 896. István's father, Géza [GAY-zuh] accepted Christ, and István took his religion so seriously that he later achived sainthood. But during his life he dealt harshly with those Magyars who opposed him - Magyars labeled simply pagans by the chroniclers. (There were other considerations as well, and debate about their nature has yet to cease.) There were riots, civil wars, and in the end, Roman Catholic domination of the newly organized Hungarian realm.

There have been Hungarian nationalists (and there are a number still) who see the establishment of the official state church in Hungary as little more than a German plot. That view stems from several
later centuries of Habsburg rule, during which - much as in Spain, also a Habsburg realm - church and state existed in symbiosis with one another. What was good for the church was thought good for the country, and vice versa.

But the Reformation and the concurrent Turkish occupation of much of Hungary changed many a thing. From that point on, national-populists were usually Protestants, while royalists tended to remain loyal Catholics.

In the 16th century it was religion which was the most important mark of a man, not national allegiance. The writers of the day speak of Magyar heroes in the same context as of Christian soldiers, and it turns out that either label could fit Germans, Croats and other groups subject to the Crown. In the 17th century, Count Miklós Zrínyi writes his famous epic of the Hungarian defense of Szigetvár (Fort Sziget) from the Moslems, in which many of the protagonists are Croats. Zrínyi himself, though a Hungarian aristocrat, was of prominent Croatian stock.

The symbols of Christianity need not be explained to the educated American reader: belief in the Bible as the Word of God, belief in Christ, in the resurrection (or eternal life), the Cross, the Holy Ghost, to mention but the most important, are symbols for Catholics and Protestants alike. The interpretation of these symbols may have differed from church to church and time to time, but all agree that those who have accepted them were - or are - Christians. There are additional symbols galore that are not universally Christian, e.g. the Papacy, the mass, the saints, the sign of the Cross. These are Catholic symbols and signs, rejected by most Protestant denominations. The chalice was - and has remained - a Protestant symbol of the Reformation, because the Catholics would only let the priests have a drink of wine during communion, not the congregation. But even they have relented since.

Some disagreements - about predestination, for instance, or whether God was one in three or three in one, or only one now and forever, have lost their significance for most intelligent people today, but were questions to die for - and to kill for! - in those dark days of brutal power struggle among nations and churches.












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