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# {2-667.} 2. THE ENLIGHTENMENT AND NATIONAL CULTURES

Contents

- Freemasonry
- Progress in the Natural Sciences
- The Beginnings of Modern National Cultures

Before considering the Enlightenment's great breakthrough in Transylvania, it is well to recall the reverses that it suffered between 1711 and 1770. The early stages of the Enlightenment were far from triumphant: the Pietist teachers who had studied under Francke were driven away from Szeben's Lutheran high school; Bishop Graffius led a conservative assault on Pietism in Transylvania's Lutheran Church; Köleséri was disgraced and isolated, and some of his manuscripts disappeared; Huszti was de-nounced; and restrictions almost put an end to study abroad.

Yet in 1770, on the eve of this period, there were many signs of the Enlightenment's impact on Transylvania. The Hungarian and Saxon students who had attended university in Germany were the bearers of elements of German culture, as were the German theatrical companies that regularly toured Transylvania. The French literary works that were translated by Hungarian aristocrats in their spare time may have been of varying merit, but they conveyed the cultural values of western Europe. There were calls for the creation of an institutional focal point for cultural development.

This, then, was the situation at the beginning of a period in which the new intellectual and cultural values would spread like wildfire in Transylvania. Neither for the first, nor the last time, Transylvania's intellectual life showed a dynamism out of proportion with the country's rather modest economic and social circumstances. There appeared two tendencies that were ostensibly contradictory but, in the circumstances, quite predictable: one embodied a supra-national value system, and the other, the values of cultural {2-668.} nationalism. One might have expected a sharp cleavage between, on the one hand, a follower of Christian Wolff, a translator of Montesquieu, a member of the international society of free-masons, a well-educated official who loyally espoused the supranational line imposed by the Habsburgs' version of enlightened absolutism, or an internationally-minded natural scientist; and, on the other hand, those who laboured to develop culture along national lines. Yet such was not the case. Transylvania's intellectuals generally straddled that dividing line, espousing, to a varying degree and in diverse fashion, both value systems. Nor, considering Transylvania's ethnic mosaic and the nature of the intellectual 'ancien régime', should this come as a surprise.