Page - 383 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

383Coping with Enlightenments learned public.142 As we have seen, Kollár later on welcomed the position advanced in the Demonstratio in his review of it, which—had it not been anonymous—would have made him, if possible at all, even more suspect. To- gether with him, by championing the “Lappish cause,” for an influential seg- ment of the contemporary Hungarian public scene Sajnovics and his mentor Hell seemed to be (ex-)Jesuit hirelings of a hostile court, employed in a plot that also involved willing collaborators from the camps of old and new na- tional enemies, Germans and Slavs. An increasingly influential voice in the chorus determining the climate of opinion in which Hell was attempting to assert his credentials as a “Hungarian patriot” belonged to Bessenyei, already introduced as a key figure of the Hun- garian Enlightenment and national awakening.143 Most of Bessenyei’s contri- butions to philosophical history, the idiom for him to discuss the problem of linguistic kinship and ethnic origins, appeared in the 1770s. It is true that his direct engagement of the “Lappish” theory—significantly enough, contained in a work entitled Magyarországnak törvényes állása (The legal status of Hun- gary [1802])—derives from the time of his retirement to his estate, but the ideas advanced in it must have been generated by the debates several decades earlier. Bessenyei’s criticism is developed in considerable detail. He recalls that a “writer has voiced the opinion that the Hungarian nation derives from Lap- ponia, for the reason that their language contains words that mean the same as in Hungarian.” This is asserted to be methodologically wrong: “But it is impos- sible to displace something of such a great consequence, on the basis of so little a circumstance [as language], and set it on a different footing. Instead of words, one should consider moral character and manners.”144 142 Cf. Csizmadia, “Egy kétszáz év előtti országgyűlés,” 224. For instance, Kollár suspected that the author of one of the attacks was the Jesuit fellow historian Kaprinai, mentioned above as a correspondent also of Hell’s. Kollár to Maria Theresa, May 22, 1765. Soós, Kollár le­ velezése, 179. 143 Given Kollár’s situation vis-à-vis the court on the one hand and the Hungarian elite on the other, it is noteworthy that in the early 1770s, Kollár—upon the request of Theresia Grass (1721–after 1780), a lady-in-waiting at Maria Theresa’s court—enthusiastically supported the young Bessenyei and recommended him for patronage to the empress. In one of his letters to his sovereign in this matter, Kollár praised the Hungarus “national character.” Theresia Grass to Kollár, December 4, 1772, April 16, and October 11, 1773, January 14, 1774; Kollár to Maria Theresa, April 16 and 18, 1773. Soós, Kollár levelezése, 336, 341–46, 349–50. In 1779, Bessenyei became a custodian of the library of which Kollár was the director. 144 György Bessenyei, Összes művei: Prózai munkák, 1802–1804, ed. György Kókay (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1986), 232.