Szabó Ferencz S.J.: The Life and Work of Ottokár Prohászka (1858-1927) (Budapest, 2007)
X. Prohászka, the poet and mystic
volumes of poetry. He was more an artist of form, and the influence of Ady is more evident in him. When Prohászka was interviewed by Élet in 1918, he could not have known any poems by László Mécs, because the first volume of the poet of the Hungarian Highlands [today Slovakia] was only published in 1924. Later one can clearly detect the inspiration of Prohászka - mainly in his poems of a social inspiration. Gyula Illyés's exaggerated criticism of László Mécs at that time (1933) was only partially true;10 11 he erred when he said that Prohászka could not have been the leader of the Catholic poets because "in spite of his erudition he was an amateur, impatient, a demagogue, not the kind of magician who drew water from the rock."11 I do not know how much of Prohászka Illyés had read at that time. In any case the confessions of Sík and others, as well as the facts, refute this biassed judgment. Illyés, who stressed the influence of Ady on Sándor Sík, completely misunderstood the influence of Prohászka. No doubt Hungarian Catholic poetry at the beginning of the century fell much behind the French Catholic renaissance, which also attracted Ady's attention in Paris when he referred to the "tornado of conversions". It is a different matter how the "Catholic poetry" of Sándor Sík and László Mécs is judged today. István Jeleníts wrote a just assessment in the epilogue of Sík Sándor összegyűjtött versei [The Collected Poems of Sándor Sik]12 - "The young Sik's first, analytical essay was about Ady and Prohászka, which for him counted as discoveries. His ideals remained until the end within the inspirational confines of Prohászka's intellectual revolution. Babits, or Szabó Lőrinc, or József Attila, or among the still living Pilinszky and more recent poets, tell us more than he does about how the man of today is struggling with the problem of God". Jelenits then quotes Cardinal Ratzinger and adds: "The faith of today's Christian is a faith undergoing temptation... This faith is less strident than Prohászka's and Sik's "triumphant philosophy", but it is more authentic, and even if it cannot remove in a single lofty sentence the temptation to unbelief, it still tempts the non-believer, and proves the truth of Ratzinger's statement: today the believer lives with the temptation to not believe, and the non-believer with the temptation to believe." In order to understand the Prohászka phenomenon we have really to place ourselves in the world of the first third of the 20th century and its intellectual milieu. At that time Prohászka needed his "triumphant philosophy" to confront courageously the challenges of modernity, the materialist and scientific ideologies, the new intellectual trends. His desire was to build a bridge between faith and the new culture (cf. Modern katolicizmus). In his book World-conquering Christianity Béla Bangha described the intellectual situation, the destroying effect of anti-religious 10 See: Távlatok 51, p. 107 11 See the 1933 essay "Katolikus költészet [Catholic poetry]" by Gyula Illyés in Iránytűvel [With a compass], Budapest, Szépirodalmi Könyvkiadó, 1975, vol. 1, pp. 329ff. 12 Budapest, Szent István Társulat, 1976, p. 930. 297