Károly Kerényi (1897–1973), the centenary of whose birth
coincided with the twenty-fifth anniversary of his death, remains the only
Hungarian classical scholar whose work has exerted a vital influence upon
international intellectual life beyond the confines of the discipline.
In periods of exponentially growing overproduction in scientific quarters,
and especially when such surplus is aggravated by the burden of sweeping
paradigm change, twenty-five years are usually more than enough to bring
about oblivion—if only in the sense that, with increasing frequency, the
name of an innovator is silently dropped from references to his ideas.
This is a particularly likely scenario whenever there are no political
or institutional interests at work behind the perpetuation of a scholar’s
memory. As even a cursory familiarity with his biography will explain,
no political faction has been particularly eager to claim Kerényi’s
heritage as its own.
Having realized the dangers of rampant nationalism and the futility
of his isolated fight against it, Kerényi emigrated to Switzerland
in 1943. Although he returned to Hungary in 1947, very soon it became abundantly
clear that he could no more count on the favor of the left than formerly
on that of the right, so he settled for good in Switzerland. Yet academics
in Switzerland refused to take note of his ideas, indeed, they did so even
more reluctantly than previously their colleagues in Hungary. After the
war, Kerényi would not teach in Germany (excepting a brief visiting
professorship in Bonn a decade later) and he declined American invitations
with the quip that he had no idea what to do in America as long as there
were landscapes in Greece that he had not seen yet. Without institutional
affiliations, he spent the last thirty years of his life as a private person,
an “itinerant humanist” residing in Ascona on the shores of the Lago Maggiore,
which he regarded an extension of his beloved Italy. It was apparently
in respectful observance of this attitude that Kerényi’s family
refused to follow the commemoration industry of our days and decided to
refrain from initiating any form of public commemoration.
It is all the more remarkable in light of such reticence that several
major dailies took note of the anniversary, including the Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung and the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, the latter of which featured
a page-long article by Fritz Graf, one of the most outstanding scholars
of ancient religion. Five scholarly conferences paid hommage to Kerényi’s
achievements: first, the January sessions of the Society for Classics in
Budapest; a six-day conference in Ascona in February; the session devoted
to him at the Hungarian Academy in Rome; an international lecture series
lasting for two days in October in Milan; and a commemorative session in
November in Pécs, organized by the Kerényi Károly
College.
The more than fifty papers delivered on these occasions can be divided
into roughly four groups. In the first we find discussions of Kerényi’s
role and reception in a particular country or culture. Contributions belonging
to the second category examined Kerényi’s relationship to prominent
contemporaries. Other papers focused on particular works of Kerényi
and raised the question of their relevance today, judiciously considering
pros and cons. Finally, there was a group of discussions which took up
suggestions implicit in Kerényi’s work to unfold their consequences
or to apply the method inherited from him to topics not treated by him.
As one might have expected, most of the new material derived from the
discussions of the first group, and only to a lesser extent from the Hungarian
scholars participating in it, since Kerényi’s activities in Hungary
have already been examined from a number of angles in the past two decades.
Imre Monostori’s paper, delivered in Ascona, which limited itself to reception
history, drew on many of these sources. The Ascona lectures focusing on
Kerényi’s relation to Switzerland and Italy, respectively, contained
a wealth of carefully assembled material. Laura Gemelli Marciano traced
the history of Kerényi’s reception in Switzerland from the consolidation
of his friendship to Hermann Hesse (1938) to the first years of exile.
She gave a compelling account of Kerényi’s struggles against the
conservatism of his Swiss colleagues and the echoes his work found in the
wider, non-academic intellectual circle of his new home. Based on Kerényi’s
unpublished correspondence, Natale Spineto talked about the personal relationships
in which Kerényi’s longing for Italy manifested itself after its
inception during his first trip to Italy at the age of seventeen. He discussed
the changes in Kerényi’s relationship to the Italian schools of
history of religion, led by Pettazzoni in Rome and Pestalozza in Milan,
his attempts to settle in Italy, as well as the lasting and profound influence
of his work on Italian philosophers. Both contributions refer us to the
other, until now less clearly illuminated side of the story: Kerényi’s
relationship to Hungary from his voluntary exile in 1943, which he meant
to be temporary, until his ultimate exclusion from Hungarian intellectual
life in 1949. (This story can be gleaned from the commentary supplementing
the Hungarian translation of Spineto’s lecture in the April 1998 issue
of the Hungarian monthly Beszélô.) Of particular interest
was R. Dottori’s report in Rome on the philosophy conferences organized
annually by Enrico Castelli, the central topic of which was the interpretation
of the notions of myth and demythologization between 1961 and Kerényi’s
death.
Prominent in the second group, not always sharply distinct from the
first, are two lectures: Zsuzsa Szônyi’s recollections of the decades
of her and her husband’s friendship with the Kerényis, and Vincenzo
Tusa’s similarly personal acccount of Kerényi’s visits to Sicily
during Tusa’s term as archaeological supervisor in Palermo and Kerényi’s
discoveries in Western Sicily, especially in connection with the ancient
monuments found in Selinunte. Professor Volker Losemann of Marburg, renowned
for his book on the relation between Altertumswissenschaft and National
Socialism in Germany, analyzed the scholarly aspects of the unsteady friendship
between Kerényi and Franz Altheim, the historian of antiquity who
taught in Frankfurt and Halle. In Ascona, Hellmut Sichtermann, former deputy
director of the German Archaeological Institute in Rome, discussed the
lessons of their joint archaeological field work, supplementing his already
published recollections (Arcadia 11, 1976. pp. 150–177) with excerpts from
his own journal. Several contributions at the Ascona and Milan conferences
illuminated the origins and affinities of particular phases of Kerényi’s
work, focusing on his relationship to Thomas Mann
(M. Edler), Lipót and Peter Szondi (Chr. König), Freud,
Jung, Gershom Scholem (M. Treml), German philosophy in general (Chr. Jamme),
Walter
F. Otto (C. Sini), Otto and Heidegger (G. Moretti, A. Magris, L. Arcella),
and Frobenius (L. Vajda). On the periphery of this group, two lectures
in Ascona focused on Frobenius’ theory of cultural morphology and his notion
of paideuma (H. J. Heinrichs) and the activity of the Eranos circle (B.
v. Reinitz), without directly relating these issues to Kerényi himself.
The majority of the Rome sessions belong to the third category. The
most consequential contributions in this category were made, however, in
Ascona. Of the two scholars from Paris, J. Scheid searched for points of
contact between Kerényi’s understanding of ancient religion and
structuralism, while J. Bollack pointed out that the effort to identify
“primordial images”, manifested in the early works, is an anticipation
of the later encounter with Jung. Of the three outstanding German scholars
of ancient religions, A. Henrichs spoke of the novels of Greek antiquity
and argued that the young Kerényi’s 1927 monograph had a pioneering
role in the interpretation of novels in terms of the history of religion.
Stressing the groundbreaking significance of Kerényi’s work, Henrichs
discussed the ways in which papyrus texts discovered after the completion
of the book have modified Kerényi’s ideas. He assessed the value
of Kerényi’s method, which treats the novels as documents of secularized
mythology, by comparing it to Merkelbach’s study of novels as religious
texts. Walter Burkert, professor emeritus in Zürich and generally
recognized by his peers as the most knowledgeable expert of Greek religion
contested Kerényi’s interpretation, offered in his book on mysteries,
of the representations of the so-called Lovatelli-urn, a Roman marble vase
in the Museo Nazionale of Rome. Fritz Graf, disciple of Burkert, professor
at the University of Basle, gave one of the best talks of this years’ conferences.
He talked about the Kerényian interpretation of Greek and Roman
mythology. He was the only one to discuss the influence of Malinowski’s
works on Kerényi’s understanding of myth. He also underscored the
extent to which this conception of mythology was inspired by contemporaneous
political events and by Kerényi’s intention to sharply demarcate
his notion from the pseudo-mythology propagated in contemporary Germany.
He discussed the ethical motivations behind Kerényi’s hostility
to Wilamowitz’s line of inquiry (he repudiated Wilamowitz as the “last
dictator” of classical studies), and made an attempt to account for his
ostracization from “the guild of classical philologist”. What was particularly
remarkable, especially in comparison with Graf’s above-mentioned commemorative
article, was the essentially positive valuation of Kerényi in his
lecture, as Graf said, due to his re-reading of the correspondence with
Thomas Mann.
Aldo Magris from Triest, whose 1975 monograph to Kerényi’s conception
of the history of religion, (Carlo Kerényi e la ricerca fenomenologica
della religione, Milano 1975) gave a detailed analysis of the affinities
of Kerényi’s thoughts on the divine “coming to pass” (Ereignis)
of being with some of Heidegger’s writings which had not been published
until 1989. In Ascona, R. Seaford from Exeter, in Milan, G. Antonelli and
P. Pisi from the La Sapienza University of Rome analyzed Kerényi’s
image of Dionysos and his stance, by no means uncritical, toward Nietzsche’s
Die Geburt der Tragödie and Otto’s Dionysos monograph.
Two lecturers dealt with the role of fine arts in Kerényi’s
work: In Ascona Margot Schmidt discussed Kerényi’s interpretation
of mythological vase paintings from Southern Italy, stressing the pioneering
significance of some, without, however, underplaying the problematic character
of others. Cornelia Isler-Kerényi in Milan gave a complex analysis
of the function of interpretations of figural representations in Kerényi’s
works on mythology. She emphasized the fundamental importance of visual
perception in Kerényi’s works: he regarded the testimony of images
as equal in significance to that of texts, as living matter which keeps
metamorphosing in the vase painters’ hands.
It would be difficult to keep these contributions apart from those
of the fourth group, which consisted mainly of lectures continuing a particular
line of though or work of Kerényi’s. The above-mentioned lectures
on Dionysos belong to this group, in a sense. Kerényi’s Labyrinthos
studies (Labyrinthstudien, Amsterdam–Leipzig 1941; 1950, 1966) furnished
the point of departure for a lecture each in Rome and Milano, the latter
of which, by A. Carotenuto, examined the connections between labyrinths
and initiation rites.
Th. Köves-Zulauf (Marburg), who had been Kerényi’s student
in Budapest, focused on Kerényi’s interpretation of the Ion of Euripides
as an example for the problematic character of his method. In Pécs,
István Tóth used a work by Kerényi as his point of
departure to discuss the cult of Silvanus in the province of Pannonia,
and Róbert Somos talked about Kerényi’s interpretation of
Platonism. A lecture delivered in Hungarian in Budapest and in Italian
in Milan by the author of these lines on Religio Academici, the study with
which Kerényi won Hesse’s friendship, identified Kerényi’s
ethical attitude toward scholarship as his lasting heritage. The exegetic
possibilities opened up by an organic continuation of Kerényi’s
method of myth analysis were demonstrated by Géza Komoróczy’s
interpretation of a passage from the Old Testament in his lecture in Rome.
The diverse statements occasioned by this year’s dual anniversary,
representing different, indeed often conflicting, directions of research,
furnish abundant material for assessing which parts of Kerényi’s
heritage are likely to remain alive and how they will continue to exert
an influence on contemporary scholarship. Already the themes of the three
international conferences are suggestive of possible answers to this question:
“Humanism and Hermeneutics” was the title of the conference in Ascona,
“Existential Philology” in Rome, “Facing the Divine” in Milan. Given these
titles, it is hardly surprising that classical scholars in the strict sense
of the term were almost completely absent from the ranks of the lecturers.
With this observation we have touched the heart of the “Kerényi
question”. Kerényi studied with the leading scholars of the golden
age of historicism. The rigor of his schooling, the immense breadth and
depth of his erudition are evidenced by his first book on the novels of
antiquity,
(Die griechisch-orientalische Romanliteratur in religionsgeschichtlicher
Beleuchtung. Tübingen, 1927) whose significance has been generally
acknowledged by philologists and has not been overshadowed by later developments
in scholarship; its third edition appeared in 1973. After all, even in
the epochal debate between Nietzsche and Wilamowitz, no one accused either
of the contesting parties of insufficient expertise (indeed, their teachers
in the Schulpforta Gymnasium, which both Nietzsche and Wilamowitz attended,
considered Nietzsche’s knowledge of Greek superior to that of Wilamowitz).
Even the best disciples of Wilamowitz who rebelled against their master
under Nietzsche’s banner remained within the confines of their discipline,
however far they may have expanded these confines. Kerényi, on the
other hand, strove to overstep such boundaries from the beginning, and
not only by virtue of the content of his works. He sought an appropriate
form for his thoughts, one which could convey them to an audience beyond
the confines of his discipline. It is perhaps no exaggeration to say that
a considerable part of Kerényi’s labors was devoted to the struggle
for such a form. Thus it is understandable that one of the most animated
debates in Ascona was occasioned by the question concerning the genre of
Kerényi’s works and the legitimacy or injustice
of the old accusation
that they are “too literary for science but too scientific for literature”.
When such accusations are made, it is often difficult not to suspect the
secret jealousy harboured by a writer of insipid scholarly prose or a stylist
lacking substance. To be sure, sometimes the eloquence of Kerényi’s
expression relegates his scientific argument to a less conspicuous role,
and his aversion for the mandatory blandness of scholarly writing often
takes the form of a reluctance to provide the scholarly apparatus which
would be necessary for sufficient validation of his claims. We find a paradoxical
reconciliation between these contradictory requirements in the work sometimes
thought to be least typical of Kerényi, namely, his two books on
Greek mythology (The Gods of the Greeks, first English edition: London:
Thames and Hudson, 1951 and many new editions in 1958, 1960, 1961, 1974
etc.; The Heroes of the Greeks, first English edition, London: Thames and
Hudson 1959). In a thoroughly unobtrusive manner, which never interferes
with the outsider’s reading, Kerényi manages to intertwine his exposition
with the kind of apparatus that is indispensable for the specialist. Recondite
references, suggestive of an immense knowledge of the ancient literary
tradition and leading directly to the primary sources, combine with the
testimony of images from antiquity. Such a highly impressive presentation
of philological and archaeological materials is an incontestable scholarly
accomplishment and it can justifiably lay claim to being recognized as
such. At the same time, the author seems intent on preventing his readers
from pigeonholing his writing as a specialized study for a limited group
of scholars. His avowed objective is to speak to mature readers and to
inspire the poets of the future. Having left behind the youthful illusion
of writing literature and science at the same time, Kerényi makes
it quite clear that, given the inevitability of choice, he writes as a
“scholarly writer”. Yet there can be no doubt that one of the strongest
motivations of his work on Greek mythology is the desire to express his
life-long love of the novel, of large-scale epic prose, the ambition to
write the narrative work. In the wake of his earlier role models—Lawrence,
Powys, Thomas Mann—Kerényi wants to continue along the path of the
development of narrative art since Virginia Woolf.
Kerényi finds a point of contact to the modern novel, especially
to Woolf’s Orlando, as he writes in the Preface to The Heroes of the Greeks,
in its fragmentation of the continuous surface of linear narration. In
fact, this modern affinity of Kerényi’s practice of juxtaposing
storytellers of antiquity who lived in different periods brings us to one
of the most frequently made charges of his critics, the objection that
Kerényi lifts out sources from their historical context and underplays
their historicality. This objection does not apply, of course, to papers
in which Kerényi offers interpretations of a particular work—such
as “Eternal Antigone” in Dionysos und das tragische in der Antigone (Frankfurt
am Main, 1935) or the interpretation of Plato’s Phaedo in “Immortality
and Apollo Religion” (Apollon, Amsterdam, 1937) or his later studies devoted
to single monuments of classical antiquity. Where the force of the objection
cannot be ignored is in regard to Kerényi’s preoccupation in the
Thirties with the history of religion, in the course of which he found
points of contact with ethnology as practised by Frobenius and psychology.
Certainly Fritz Graf was right in his lecture in Ascona when he identified
a crucial reason for Kerényi’s professional ostracization in the
suspicion with which traditional classical scholars responded to the incursions
of psychology into their field.
There is also little doubt that the writings from the last thirty years
of Kerényi’s life cannot be viewed as instances of classical scholarship
traditionally understood. Nor was it Kerényi’s intention, however,
to participate in the discourse of the discipline. When, shortly
after his arrival in Switzerland, the editors of Museum Helveticum, which
represented the most conservative trend in classical philology, justified
their rejection of Kerényi’s article with this critique, Kerényi
made little effort to publish in other scholarly journals. There were few
exceptions, to be sure: his critical reviews in the 1956 issue of Gnomon
of a book by Otto and of Graves’ mythology (The Greek Myths, London, 1955),
the second of which plagiarized the basic notion of Kerényi’s own
mythology, as well as the articles he published regularly in respected
archaeological journals until 1969. The grounds for this mutual estrangement
are inherent in the very foundation of Kerényi’s work. He carried
on the rebellion against Wilamowitz which was unleashed under the banner
of Nietzsche to free inquiry from the narrow and artificial confines of
a discipline so that it can finally address the problems emerging from
the scholar’s own personal existence—the problems of a universal science
of humanity, epitomized in the Greek anthropologia and in the Latin humanitas.
Hence Kerényi first expanded the circle of the traditions under
consideration until it comprized every known civilization, and then set
out to find the roots of these traditions within the soul. His version
of the comparative study of myth and religion was thus essentially a religious
psychology, which ultimately led to a philosophy of religion. During three
decades of multifaceted activity in Switzerland, his most significant and
most widely influential works concentrated on two issues: the project of
defining the primordial images of human existence, most accessible to Kerényi
through the Greek gods, and the basic philosophical problems of the hermeneutics
of mythology, regularly addressed in the lectures that he held at the conferences
organized by Enrico Castelli.
At the first conference held in 1961, organized around “the problem
of demythologization”, Bultman’s opening address was followed by Kerényi’s
lecture, titled “Theos and Mythos”. This address was deliberately juxtaposed
by Castelli with Bultman’s as the most important and most influential antipode
of theologically inspired demythologization. These conferences were regarded
as the most important events of Italian intellectual life, and it is a
measure of the significance accorded to Kerényi’s participation
that his lectures were published in a separate volume in 1993, twenty years
after his death. (K. Kerényi, Scritti italiani, a cura di
G. Moretti. Naples, 1993) As R. Dottori, a highly respected participant
of the Rome conference said in his opening address, in which he stressed
Kerényi’s direct influence on Gadamer: “Karl Kerényi is undoubtedly
one of the most important figures in the study of classical religion and,
together with M. Heidegger, R. Bultmann, H. G. Gadamer, E. Levinas, P.
Ricoeur, J. Piaget, and M. Eliade, one of the most fascinating personalities
one can find in the Central European intelligentsia.”
Of course the potential to be either historical or phenomenological
is characteristic of comparative ethnology and comparative religious studies
as well. Indeed this was the point at which the paths of Kerényi
and his favorite disciple Brelich diverged. Brelich placed the works of
his master in the phenomenological category of religious study, perhaps
too rigorously demarcating historical forms of research from ahistorical
ones in subsuming all forms of research into religion under these two alternative
categories. The totality of Kerényi’s own research cannot be characterized
in such limited terms; all the less so as his career was shaped by interferences
among various factors, some of which were transient, others permanent.
His openness, his perpetual search for something new was deeply rooted
in his sensitivity to the most pressing questions of contemporary history
and in his ambition to formulate answers which were valid with respect
to his present. In Hungary after Trianon, it seemed that this answer would
be scholarship of a kind which was up to international standards. During
the Thirties, nationalist isolation had to be countered with the universally
valid values of classical antiquity, and soon enough the protection of
humanity itself became high priority, calling for a definition of what
is human in man in the face of rampant inhumanity. Nor did this calling
lose its appeal to Kerényi when the very same values were violated
by the occupying Soviets.
By the Thirties Kerényi had left behind the philology of irrelevant
minutiae, while on the other hand he carefully distinguished his position
from the one-sided classicism and superstitious irrationalism of W. F.
Otto, whom he continued to respect personally (he did not resolutely distance
himself from Otto until after the latter’s death, in Wege und Weggenossen
II, 1988, pp. 246–247, 251). Similarly, Kerényi demarcated his line
of research from Jung’s biologistic conception (in a comprehensive manner
in Eleusis, Archetypal Image of Mother and Daughter, 1967, XXIV–XXXIII,
and especially in Wege und Weggenossen II, p. 345). It is important to
point out his critical attitude toward these two figures, for it has been,
and still is, a matter of course to mention the names of Kerényi
and Otto, Kerényi, and Jung in the same breath.
The features of Kerényi’s work which these conferences have
shown to be still relevant are those which persisted throughout his entire
career, despite changing themes, emphases, and formulations: commitment
to the sources, the primacy of thought over the vain perfection of the
philological apparatus, faith in the paradigmatic value of classical antiquity,
the perpetual quest for the human import of scholarship, resolute opposition
to inhuman ideas and acts even at the cost of risking his own safety. All
these virtues were summed up in the brief text under the photograph
to accompany the article in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung: “classical scholar,
mythologist, humanist, clear-sighted witness of his times”. Kerényi
himself, however, prefered to put it differently in one of his last statements
printed in the Budapest Catholic monthly Vigilia: “My chief occupation
is the study of Greek antiquity” (1971, p. 125).
All of which is not to say that the scholarly questions raised in connection
to Kerényi’s work can be evaded. Kerényi remained virtually
unaffected by the sociological interests which were emerging in classical
studies and the study of religion simultaneously with his work. Indeed
he always attempted to free his thinking about a particular work or a cultural
phenomenon from the historical circumstances under which it came into being
and was handed down. While this approach undoubtedly underplayed the historical
significance of his subject-matter, it was Kerényi’s hope that this
shortcoming would be amply compensated for by its power to inspire individuals
who are able and willing to think, and even artists. That this hope was
justified is evidenced by Kerényi’s correspondence and informal
exchanges with Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, Martin Buber, Gershom
Scholem, and other prominent intellectuals of the time.
The bulk of these letters is still gathering dust in the archive maintained
by his wife. There is hardly any significant work in English, German, and
especially Italian, on the religion of classical antiquity which lacks
references to Kerényi. Many of the basic categories on which his
work was based have become problematic in recent years. In the eyes of
some scholars, his definition of religion cannot be applied to non-European
cultures (Brelich, Storia delle religioni, perché? 1979. p. 230).
On the other hand, others have doubts about the applicability of Kerényi’s
concept to Greek religion (as Dario Sabatucci has in his Ascona lecture).
Yet others criticize the concept of myth as an Enlightenment construct
and hence irrelevant to non-European cultures (F. Graf, Greek Mythology.
1993,
pp. 55–56). But the general truth that the latest is not necessarily
the best is also valid in the realm of scholarship. Even those whose line
of inquiry differs from the one proposed and pursued by Kerényi
acknowledge the exceptional significance of his work for twentieth-century
religious studies and recognize the impossibility of ignoring his ideas.
The lectures of such scholars at the centenary conferences as well as the
large number of recently published writings on Kerényi seem to vindicate
the writer, literary historian, and friend Antal Szerb’s prediction, made
with a characteristic loving irony, that “for the future historian of religion,
Kerényi himself as a unique phenomenon of the history of religion
will be more instructive than his findings in the history of religion”
(in the journal Apollo, 1937–1938. p. 193)
A few words, finally, on the relation between Kerényi and Hungary.
In its 1948 June issue, the social science journal Társadalmi Szemle
published György Lukács’ critique of the Hungarian edition
of Kerényi’s Töchter der Sonne (Zürich, 1944).
The book appeared without the translator’s name, an absence which was meant
to indicate that the cards had been stacked and the decision made from
the beginning. According to Lukács, “Noone wants to suggest that
Kerényi as a person is an adherent of Fascism, or even a political
reactionary,” but, he continued, Kerényi’s writings “point in the
direction of the darkest forces of reaction, supporting as they do an extreme
irrationalism with the distorted images of an arbitrary philology that
has degenerated into a pseudo-science. For, regardless of one’s intentions,
the atmosphere of mythology has already once proven to be the atmosphere
in which the ideological preparation for Fascism took place.” Apart from
a few specifics of the book that Lukács clearly misconstrued on
purpose rather than from mere ignorance, Lukács was cautious enough
to refrain from contending with Kerényi’s major scholarly claims.
To Lukács’ mind, Kerényi’s attempt to evoke the atmosphere
of mythology was the most salient aspect of his book, and one which showed
Kerényi in worrysome proximity to Klages, the favorite philosopher
of National Socialism. Indeed, wrote Lukács, “Kerényi’s ratiocinations
[...] are even more irresponsible than those of Klages”. Hence the verdict:
“Whether Kerényi knows it or not, his book actively participates
in the ideological demonstration of power led by today’s reaction. And
this is a fact whose every consequence has to be observed by us within
the domain of ideology”.
Lukács must have been well aware of the difference between the
ideas of Kerényi and Klages. Having quoted passages from the correspondence
between Thomas Mann and Kerényi, he could not have possibly overlooked
the letter—indeed he turned it inside out—in which Kerényi voiced
his opposition to Klages in the most emphatic terms as early as 1934 (and
even more resolutely in the journal Sziget (2, 1936, p. 13). Similarly,
Lukács’ clearly disregarded the preface to the second, 1941 edition,
of Apollon on purpose. In this one finds, among other things, this passage:
“The present author [...] knows that understanding the essence of actual
mythological figures is different from delivering freshly invented mythologies
to gullible irrationalists and equally gullible rationalists—such as mythologies
about the Spirit as the enemy of the Soul, or about Logos and Mythos as
contrary forces at war one with the other”.
Instead of continuing the endless list of distortions, falsities, and
self-contradictions, we should point out that the main junctures of Lukács’
article correspond precisely and often word-by-word to the polemical claims
made in a brutal attack on Kerényi published on September 4, 1946
in the short-lived periodical Köztársaság. Nor is it
difficult to see that Lukács articulated his views in an entirely
different register and on a different level of sophistication in his 1947
book Nietzsche és a fasizmus (Nietzsche and Fascism) and in his
1954 opus Az Ész trónfosztása (The Destruction
of Reason). The explanation is obvious enough: the article was meant to
formulate a judgment passed in advance from above, without bothering to
ask the question (proven meaningless by the experience of the long years
Lukács had spent in exile) whether the charge would justify the
verdict, which was primarily directed against a person rather than serving
a cause.
In Hungary the Lukács’ article was generally regarded as Roma
locuta. A brief vulgar book appeared in 1949 whose preface cited Lukács’
argument in its portrayal of Kerényi’s work; for the following twenty
years, not a single study approving of Kerényi’s work was to appear,
indeed, references to his name or writings had all but disappeared from
Hungarian scholarly literature. The first occasion on which his work was
recognized at all was the obituary published on the pages of Antik Tanulmányok
[Studies in Antiquity], a periodical published in three-hundred copies.
In the the milder political climate of the autumn of 1953, following
Stalin’s death and the recent rise to power of Khrushchev in the USSR and
Imre Nagy in Hungary, I had dinner in a Sofia restaurant with György
Alexits, an outstanding mathematician, who had been secretary of state
between 1945 and 1948. Alexits turned out to be amiably open in conversation
and asked me about the state of classical scholarship in Hungary. I replied
that the forced exile of Kerényi and András Alföldi
meant an irreparable loss, and, having expressed my incomprehension that
two world-renowned scholars with impeccable records of anti-Fascism were
barred from getting university chairs at a time when academic positions
were lavished upon mediocre scholars with a chequered or dubious political
past (I did not mention names), I finally posed a question which I had
meant to be rhetorical: “Who could possibly have arranged things this way?”
Alexits’ reply was to the point: “It was me.” he said and went on, “Look,
the others didn’t really pose a problem, but we would have been unable
to cope with Kerényi and Alföldi. To keep them silent by force
was unimaginable in view of their international reputation, but, knowing
their work and their temperament, we knew: we could neither hope to win
them over, nor that they would keep silent about their critical observations.
At the same time we also knew that there was noone we could have deployed
in debates who would have stood a chance against them”
Further conclusions can be drawn from the centenary conferences held
in Budapest and Pécs. After all, the question concerning Kerényi
has arisen in a different form in Hungary than abroad. In the international
arena, it has become clear that Kerényi’s oeuvre signals a crucial
moment in the history of religion by virtue of critically going beyond
previous scholarship and introducing the new paradigm which has been unfolding
in the past twenty-five years. For Hungarian scholars of antiquity, by
contrast, Kerényi has symbolized certain vitally important alternatives:
an attention to the needs of national culture in the broadest sense in
the face of disciplinary tunnel-vision; the readiness to think in universal
terms within an international horizon in the face of confinement to narrowly
conceived national goals; a willingness to face the ultimate problems of
human existence in the face of contentment with mere professional competence;
the ethically committed life of the mind in the face of a professionalism
which aspires for titles and positions of material power and influence,
using publications as mere means to these ends; and an active opposition
to the anxious precaution of those scholars who would disguise their cowardice
and indecision with the mask of scholarly objectivity to justify their
refusal to take a political stance. This is why in the Thirties Kerényi
was “a source of inspiration and a stimulant” for youth and others in of
Hungarian intellectual life, within which he managed to endow the study
of antiquity with a hitherto unprecedented importance. Never repudiating
his position as a specialized scholar, his writings and lectures nonetheless
enjoyed such a wide reception and provoked such heated discussion as noone
else’s before or since in classical scholarship in Hungary. Consensus was
complete in this respect even among those judging his work in diametrically
opposed ways. To be sure, Roman sources tell us that there had always been
a handful of households which kept the statues of emperors exiled from
the public memory of Rome. Forcing Kerényi to leave Hungary and
commiting his name to oblivion was, however, to deprive younger scholars
of the opportunity to continue the tradition whose foundations had been
laid down by him.
Especially in the past two years, Kerényi’s name has come up
in publications with increasing frequency. Some of his works once again
became available too. After three decades of enforced amnesia, it is understandable
that most of the studies on Kerényi are apologetic in nature—a notable
exception being the series published in the past ten years by Éva
Kocziszky, which is virtually the only significant attempt in Hungary to
assess Kerényi’s work in the light of contemporary philology and
philosophy. Conspicuous is the widespread indifference in classical studies,
which seems to perpetuate the hostile atmosphere of the professional climate
in the Thirties as well as the anathema pronounced by Lukács in
1949 and confirmed many times since then. The majority of recent publications
would seem to confirm the observation that classical scholars in Hungary
have thus far preferred the direction imposed on them in 1949 to the one
proposed by Kerényi (not that the latter has no positive alternatives).
A different testimony is offered, however, by the young audience of the
Budapest conference, and by the enthusiastic response to the commemorative
sessions in Pécs. No doubt the thread of the tradition created by
Kerényi’s work in Hungary has been so brutally cut that one might
believe the flower which used to blossom at the famous Friday evening lectures
to have turned to dust. And yet, it seems reasonable to hope now that sooner
or later someone will come who, like Paracelsus in Borges’ short story,
utters the word which has the power to make the flower shoot up again from
the ashes.
http://www.c3.hu/scripta