Abstract

In general, historians of science and historians of ideas do not focus on critical appraisals of scientific ideas such as vitalism and materialism from Catholic intellectuals in eastern and southeastern Europe, nor is there much comparative work available on how significant European ideas in the life sciences such as materialism and vitalism were understood and received outside of France, Germany, Italy and the UK. Insofar as such treatments are available, they focus on the contributions of nineteenth century vitalism and materialism to later twentieth ideologies, as well as trace the interactions of vitalism and various intersections with the development of genetics and evolutionary biology see Mosse (The culture of Western Europe: the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Westview Press, Boulder, 1988, Toward the final solution: a history of European racism. Howard Fertig Publisher, New York, 1978; Turda et al., Crafting humans: from genesis to eugenics and beyond. V&R Unipress, Goettingen, 2013). English and American eugenicists (such as William Caleb Saleeby), and scores of others underscored the importance of vitalism to the future science of “eugenics” (Saleeby, The progress of eugenics. Cassell, New York, 1914). Little has been written on materialism qua materialism or vitalism qua vitalism in eastern Europe.The Czech and Slovene cases are interesting for comparison insofar as both had national awakenings in the middle of the nineteenth century which were linguistic and scientific, while also being religious in nature (on the Czech case see David, Realism, tolerance, and liberalism in the Czech National awakening: legacies of the Bohemian reformation. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 2010; on the Slovene case see Kann and David, Peoples of the Eastern Habsburg Lands, 1526-1918. University of Washington Press, Washington, 2010). In the case of many Catholic writers writing in Moravia, there are not only slight noticeable differences in word-choice and constructionMaterialismVitalism but a greater influence of scholastic Latin, all the more so in the works of nineteenth century Czech priests and bishops.In this case, German, Latin and literary Czech coexisted in the same texts. Thus, the presence of these three languages throws caution on the work on the work of Michael GordinGordin, Michael, who argues that scientific language went from Latin to German to vernacular. In Czech, Slovenian and Croatian cases, all three coexisted quite happily until the First World War, with the decades from the 1840s to the 1880s being particularly suited to linguistic flexibility, where oftentimes writers would put in parentheses a Latin or German word to make the meaning clear to the audience. Note however that these multiple paraphrases were often polemical in the case of discussions of materialismMaterialism and vitalismVitalism.In Slovenia Čas (Time or The Times) ran from 1907 to 1942, running under the muscular editorship of Fr. Aleš Ušeničnik (1868–1952) devoted hundreds of pages often penned by Ušeničnik himself or his close collaborators to wide-ranging discussions of vitalismVitalism, materialismMaterialism and its implied social and societal consequences. Like their Czech counterparts Fr. Matěj ProcházkaProcházka, Matěj (1811–1889) and Fr. Antonín LenzLenz, AntonínLenz, AntonínMaterialismLenz, AntonínMechanismLenz, AntonínDynamism (1829–1901), materialismMaterialism was often conjoined with "pantheism" and immorality. In both the Czech and the Slovene cases, materialismMaterialism was viewed as a deep theological problem, as it made the Catholic account of the transformation of the Eucharistic sacrifice into the real presence untenable. In the Czech case, materialismMaterialism was often conjoined with “bestiality” (bestialnost) and radical politics, especially agrarianism, while in the case of Ušeničnik and Slovene writers, materialismMaterialism was conjoined with “parliamentarianism” and “democracy.” There is too an unexamined dialogue on vitalismVitalism, materialismMaterialism and pan-Slavism which needs to be explored.Writing in 1914 in a review of O bistvu življenja (Concerning the essence of lifeLives) by the controversial Croatian biologist Boris ZarnikZarnik, Boris) Ušeničnik underscored that vitalismVitalism was an speculative outlook because it left the field of positive science and entered the speculative realm of philosophy. Ušeničnik writes that it was “Too bad” that ZarnikZarnik, Boris “tackles” the question of vitalismVitalism, as his zoological opinions are interesting but his philosophy was not “successful”. Ušeničnik concluded that vitalismVitalism was a rather old idea, which belonged more to the realm of philosophy and Thomistic theology then biologyBiology. It nonetheless seemed to provide a solution for the particular characteristics of lifeLives, especially its individualityIndividuality. It was certainly preferable to all the dangers that materialismMaterialism presented. Likewise in the Czech case, Emmanuel Radl (1873–1942) spent much of his lifeLives extolling the virtues of vitalismVitalism, up until his death in home confinement during the Nazi Protectorate. VitalismVitalism too became bound up in the late nineteenth century rediscovery of early modern philosophy, which became an essential part of the development of new scientific consciousness and linguistic awareness right before the First World War in the Czech lands. Thus, by comparing the reception of these ideas together in two countries separated by ‘nationality’ but bounded by religion and active engagement with French and German ideas (especially DrieschDriesch, Hans), we can reconstruct not only receptions of vitalismVitalism and materialismMaterialism, but articulate their political and theological valances.