Eastern Christians in the Catholic Literature of the Enlightenment Era—Perspectives from the Kingdom of Hungary

For today’s Catholic intelligentsia, Eastern Orthodoxy appears as the custodian of the ancient Christian tradition: they seek the roots of their own faith—which they believe to have been lost—in the Byzantine rite and the teachings of the Eastern Church Fathers. This perspective, however, is relatively recent: in the centuries preceding the Second Vatican Council, Catholicism viewed the Eastern Churches as schismatics who had turned their backs on the true doctrine. This dismissive attitude was particularly reinforced during the period of Catholic confessionalization that began under the influence of the Council of Trent. This study seeks to answer the question of to what extent the ideas of the Enlightenment—which found resonance even among the Catholic ecclesiastical intelligentsia—modified this dismissive attitude. Can the roots of the open-minded tendencies characteristic of the second half of the 20th century be found in the works of 18th-century ecclesiastical authors? The setting for this study is the former Kingdom of Hungary, a multinational and multiconfessional realm where Western and Eastern Christians lived side by side for centuries, sharing the region’s common history.