Samuel Štefan Osusky’s Theological-Prophetic Criticism of War and Totalitarianism

Abstract

: This article analyzes the thought legacy of Samuel Štefan Osuský (1888–1975), a famous Slovak philosopher and theologian, pertaining to his fight against totalitarianism and war. Having lived during arguably the most difficult period of (Czecho-)Slovak history, which included the two world wars, the emergence of independent Czechoslovakia in 1918, its fateful, forceful split by Nazi Germany in 1939, followed by its reestablishment after WWII in 1945, only to be afflicted again by a new kind of totalitarianism on the left, it is no surprise that Osuský aimed his philosophical and theological criticism especially at the two great human ideologies of the 20th century – Fascism (including its German, racial version, Nazism, which he preferred to call ›Hitlerism‹), and Communism (above all in its historical shape of Stalinist Bolshevism). After exploring the human predicament in ›boundary situations,‹ i.e. situations of ultimate anxiety, despair but also hope and trust, religious motives seemed to gain the upper hand, according to Osuský. As a ›rational theist,‹ he attempted to draw from theology, philosophy and science as complementary sources of wisdom combining them in his struggle to find satisfying insights for larger questions of meaning. Osusky’s ideas in his book War and Religion (1916) and article The Philosophy of Bolshevism, Fascism, and Hitlerism (1937) manifest the much-needed prophetic insight that has the potential to enlighten our own struggle against the creeping forces of totalitarianism, right and left that seek to engulf our societies today.