Abstrakt
Masaryk saw John Huss as a very important personality in Czech history. Huss was for him a religious man who died for his conviction on a stake, and he did not evaluate Huss from a theological or historical perspective.
In the context of his philosophy of history, Huss was the beginning of the Czech reformation, which in Masaryk's interpretation was a struggle for humanistic ideals. This struggle did not end there; the Enlightenment took over these humanistic ideals from the last bishop of the Unity of the Brethren (Unitas Fratrum), J.
A. Comenius, and after that the Czech National Revival.
Masaryk dedicated a separate work to Huss, titled John Huss: Our Revival and Our Reformation (1896) and also wrote of him as a moral example for the Czech nation in other treatises. From Palacký, T.
G. Masaryk adopted the position that the Czech reformation was the climax of the Czech religious history, which was suppressed by the Habsburgs' counterreformation.
In 1915, Masaryk used Huss as a symbol when he declared, in his famous address from the Reformation Hall in Geneva on July 6, a fight against the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Masaryk was a religious person whose faith is often described as rational theism.
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