This paper considers various approaches to love and morality in Protestant society in the late 18th century, as illustrated in Czechlanguage religious and educational literature (Korunka, aneb Wjnek Pannenský wssechněm pobožným a sslechetným Pannám toho Gazyku užjwagjcým, Litomyšl 1784; Kazatel Domovnj, Brno 1783). Our focus is on divine love, man’s love of God, marital love, parental and filial love, and definitions of immorality. We also examine some contemporary reactions to religious and educational writings in the memoirs of one of their readers, the rural preacher and Bible scholar Tomáš Juren (1750-1829), as well as the differences between the Christian confessions in their attitude to the emotions., Sixtus Bolom-Kotari., and Obsahuje bibliografické odkazy
The paper deals with the topic of evangelical preachers of the Helvetic and the Augsburg Confession coming from the Hungarian part of the Habsburg Monarchy, after the Patent of Toleration was issued, and establishing tolerance evangelical congregations in Bohemia and Moravia. Based on studying the sources of particular tolerance Czech congregations (for example Moraveč, Humpolec, Dvakačovice, Lozice, Raná, Sány, Prague), the process of forming a new social stratum of the petty intelligentsia, whose creation was conditioned by the Enlightenment reforms, is outlined. The text shows how the Hungarian preachers made the first contacts with the emerging evangelical communities, gives an idea of the circumstances of their arrival, describes the way of their adapting to an unfamiliar environment and their effort to stabilize the congregations. These particular findings are generalized in order to define some common characteristics typical of this group of Enlightenment intellectuals., Gabriela Krejčová Zavadilová a Hana Stoklasová., and Obsahuje bibliografické odkazy
The article lays out Jonathan Israel’s central ideas on the European Enlightenment, as they have been developed in his Radical Enlightenment (2001), Enlightenment Contested (2006) and A Revolution of the Mind (2009). I explain his ‘controversialist method’ of intellectual history and point out the advantages and faults of this approach. Israel’s model of the heterogeneous Enlightenment is shown as a response to A. MacIntyre’s postmodern criticism, and to the older models of a ‘single Enlightenment’, as presented by P. Gay, or older models of multiple enlightenments, as presented by J. G. Pocock. However, Israel’s heterogeneous Enlightenment recognizes just one progenitor of the positive ‘modern values’, which is identified with the Radical wing. The article reviews Israel’ s narrative of the development and spread of the Radical Enlightenment in Europe and the struggles with the Enlightenment mainstream and within the Enlightenment mainstream. However, I also show some faults in Israel’s argument, mainly his view of the ‘secular morality’, which should have been the outcome of the Radical Enlightenment’s campaign. In conclusion, I point at the inconsistency of Israel’s reconstruction of the Enlightenment morals and the differences between his view and J. Schneewind’s interpretation., Ivo Cerman., and Obsahuje bibliografické odkazy
The aim of the present text is to consider 18th century language genealogies, as proposed by Rousseau and Condillac, in relation to the question of gesture and affectivity. For it seems that a certain form of affect - need in Condillac, passion in Rousseau - comes to play a central role in the speculations concerning the possible origin of human communication whose nature is invariably considered to be gestural as well as vocal. Our aim will be to show that the insights both thinkers present on the subject corresponds, quite remarkably, with certain findings of modern linguistics and psychology. It is, of course, impossible to treat the issue in all its complexity; all that we will attempt to do is concentrate on certain significant passages and pinpoint what we consider to be the most remarkable arguments., Josef Fulka., and Obsahuje bibliografické odkazy
It is two hundred years since the first biographers of Ignaz Cornova – ex-Jesuit scholar, Prague university professor and member of the Royal Bohemian Society of Sciences – mentioned his articles written for periodicals, but to date these remain unstudied. They have been neither collected nor analysed; we do not even know how many periodicals he contributed to. In his research on the subject, the author has identified six periodicals in which Cornova published between 1793 and 1814 and found thirteen separate texts – a figure that is almost certain to rise. His analysis of these articles supplements and refines the conclusions reached by historians on the basis of Cornova’s writings in book form. He is presented as a historian of Bohemia (and beyond), a Czech patriot, a Catholic, and a loyal subject of the House of Habsburg-Lorraine who was committed to educating society as a whole, especially in the field of history, and maintaining social peace.
The varied and contradictory perception of the personality and work of Bohuslav of Lobkowicz and Hassenstein in the early modern period was symbolically crowned in the Enlightenment by Ignaz Cornova’s biography, which is still the most comprehensive work dedicated to Hassenstein. After a brief recapitulation of research and the state of knowledge before Cornova, the study examines his approach to the material and the main substantive and formal features of his biography. Older Latin literature dealing with humanism plays an important role, as do contemporary models from the European literatures of the Enlightenment. Cornova’s work partly follows the traditional chronological approach, but several timeless chapters emerge from it, driven both by an interest in Bohuslav as an individual and by a desire to make a purposeful pedagogical impact on the reader. His aim was to present a rounded and engaging picture of Hassenstein’s life and literary output, based on his surviving works, especially his poems and correspondence, tastefully and without distracting remarks and comments. Ludwig Schubart, for example, with his biography of the German humanist Ulrich von Hutten, could have been a model for him in this respect. Brief mention is also made of the critical reviews of Cornova’s work, which he himself deals with in the preface to Hassenstein’s biography. A separate section is devoted to a comparison of the selection of poems translated by Cornova and his contemporaries Thám, Vinařický and Budík. Although the biography was considered Cornova’s most important work in his lifetime, was cited and received positive feedback, it is not very useful for contemporary research, unlike the works of Josef Truhlář, who was a few decades younger. From a scholarly point of view it falls short of contemporary demands and as a literary work is even more outdated, although (or perhaps because) it reflected the literary trends of the time.
Despite advances in research into religious orders over the last decades, the Jesuits are still associated (especially in popular consciousness) with their past as exponents of “darkness”. Yet the abolition of the Society of Jesus in 1773 did not mark a critical turning point, nor even a radical change; the Jesuits continued to flourish, and the odium they attracted from other orders was often retrospective in effect. Ignaz Cornova, an unusually interesting man of idiosyncratic temperament, was not the only “atypical” Jesuit, nor was he the only member of the Society of Jesus in the Bohemian provinces who was far from being an ossified upholder of the ways of the past. Besides Josef Stepling, provincial Bohemia could boast other remarkable personalities; and Prague’s Charles Ferdinand University, whose Faculty of Divinity was until 1773 dominated by Jesuits, was at the same time one of the great sources of Enlightenment thought.
This article looks at the debate on clerical celibacy among Czech theologians during the Enlightenment. Drawing largely on their writings, which in many cases served as textbooks in the training of future priests and thus had a significant impact, it analyses the origins, arguments and course of the debate. Doubts about the future of celibacy first appeared in canon law in the 1770s, conditioned in part by secular factors such as populationism. In the late 1780s clerical celibacy was publicly challenged by influential university theologians such as the church historian Kaspar Royko in Prague and the theologian Josef Lauber in Olomouc, a former Jansenist. Their main argument was the widespread non-compliance by priests and its harmful social consequences. The law also had its defenders (e.g. Franz Christoph Pittroff), whose main argument was the traditional one of the need for purity in the Eucharist. During the 1790s the public controversy about celibacy disappeared; but for many years the discourse on the subject remained strongly influenced by Enlightenment thinking.