Original scientific paper

Juraj Križanić - A Searcher for Wisdom

Ivan Golub ; Katolički bogoslovni fakultet, Zagreb, Hrvatska

Abstract

Juraj Križanić (161S-1683), a Croatian thinker, toiler and a sufferer, anticipating his death, said that be had spent all of his miserable and happless life searching for wisdom and correcting language. Križanić was truly a searcher, i. e. a searching thinker. His search followed the path of Aristotelian philosophy in 1bomistic reception, a Platonic inspiration in Augustinian tradition, a Russian wisdom recorded in the Russian psyche rather than in Russian books, a Biblical message in patristic interpretation.
Križanić did not merely follow the trails of ot hers, he also set his own one. He was interested in the meaning of the walk of mankind through time. He was above all a philosopher and atheologian of history. For him history was never a fact cemetery; neither were events - in their past, present and future dimensions - isolated, hidden, island-like trails. Križanić connected them by meaning. He built the tissue of a peculiar conception of events on a philosophical basis; he actually wove it from the threads of philosophy and the fibers of theology. He left an inerasable trail that was, to be true, hidden, but not destroyed by the Siberian wasteland.
Near the end of his life, Križanić joined the Dominican order and adopted Brother Augustine for his monastic name. Wrapped in Dominican cloak and named after Augustine, Juraj Augustin Križanić - like the Old Testament prophets who expressed realitiy through a significative gesture - marked himself as a thinker: Aristotelian Thomist on the outside, Augustinian spirit on the inside, scholastic by form, patristic by soul. Entirely devoted to the search for wisdom, especially for the wisdom of the language, Križanić was a passionate and creative searcher, as expressed by his word »impassioned«: »Ever since my childhood my only task has been the search for wisdom and correction of our disfigured language and that is what I spent all of my impassioned life on.«. A life of passion and suffering.

Keywords

Hrčak ID:

81963

URI

https://hrcak.srce.hr/81963

Publication date:

5.12.1994.

Article data in other languages: croatian

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