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Xystus Paulus Schiers [1727-1772] dissertation on the Corvina
456 - its timeless lessons [that reach beyond itself]
At the beginning of the third millennium AD, due to the debates about Europe
a number of questions emerged that led scholars of historical disciplines to re¬
think their image of the nature of communal and individual minds. It is indeed
an important question, the results of the research carried out to answer this ques¬
tion could form a new chapter in our cultural history, what kind of identity did
Melchior Inchofer (cca. 1585-1648),*’ David Czvittinger (1675/79-1743),*°* or
Xystus Paulus Schier (1727-1772)*? have? What motivated them to write about
the history of the Church in Hungary,*” to compile a biographical encyclopaedia
of Hungarian writers,“! or to write about Hungarian queens,*” or the cultural
institutions of the time of Matthias Hunyadi? How can we describe the motiva¬
tion of these scholars at the beginning of the 21st century? I think, even if only
to formulate the first thoughts of the response, it is worth examining the debates
that we referred to in the first sentence. The focus of these dialogues mainly began
as a consequence of Europe’ crisis in the second half of the 20th century. The
debaters took it for granted, and did not really address the topic, that Europe is
in fact the Common Market, and this has mainly been expressed in that only the
values developed in the welfare societies of the Common Market countries were
(and are) considered “European”. All the realities that existed and still exist, either
in Europe in the geographical sense or in Western Christian Europe according to
religious maps, have hardly been taken into account. The other starting point in
these debates is that the post-WWII political, economic, and social status quo is
sacrosanct, and any question raised about it is in itself a denial of “Europeanness”.
Countless conferences have been organized and a library of literature written on
this, but the questions have generally been too theoretical and as have the answers
(with the main economic players smiling cheekily, the politicians they control
playing their roles, and the third estate, the free press, playing their part in con¬
trolling and directing minds and thinking).
46 ScHIER 1766.; 2nd edition: ScH1ER 1799.
#7 A child of a German Lutheran family, raised Catholic, from Kőszeg, who did not study in the
Hungarian Kingdom, became a Jesuit monk, lived in Messina and then in Rome.
58 He was born into a German Lutheran middle-class family in Selmecbanya, and was raised as Hungarian
nobility. He studied at several universities in the German-speaking area, and later worked in Tubingen.
He spent the last decades of his life in poverty as an unemployed man in his home town, due to explicit
Jesuit objections.
#9 Tue child of a German-speaking citizen of Lower Austria, he was educated in Pozsony and later in
Vienna, and lived his life in the Augustinian Order, mainly in Vienna.
460 INCHOFER 1644. Cf. DUMMERTH 1987a, 155-204.
461 CzvITTINGER 1711.
462 SCHIER 1774a; SCHIER-ROSNACK 1776.
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