The remarkable figure of Dositej Obradović has an extraordinary place in the culture of the 18th and early 19th century. His life and work connected centuries of cultural differences that peaked in the 18th century among a dispersed people, as feelings of national pride emerged among the Serbs, as they did amongst other peoples in Europe at that time. This was the period when the ground work was laid that guided the Serbian nation toward their ultimate liberation from many centuries of Turkish rule and toward the creation of their own free state.
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Historians and other experts, especially Mita Kostić and Tihomir Ostojić, note the pronounced Western orientation of Dositej Obradović, but there are also many reasons to claim that this great ‘westerner’ of Serbian culture never quite broke from the spiritual legacy of the Byzantine world, which he first came into contact with while undergoing his first steps in spiritual instruction at the Hopovo Monastery.
That’s where Dositej encountered the main theological manuscripts of Eastern Orthodoxy – not merely literature derived from medieval Serbia but also literature that reached our monasteries from Russia in Baroque form. This is a variant of Orthodox theology unambiguously created under western influences, especially those nurtured and accepted in Catholic Poland.
In Hopovo, one of the most distinguished monasteries of Srem, Dositej’s longing for fresh knowledge and new vistas flourished. The ideas of the Enlightenment relentlessly penetrated all segments of society in Austria and were accepted as dominant ideas in Europe. Armed with knowledge he imbibed from the monastery’s predominantly Orthodox library, Dositej was driven by an unfathomable yearning for knowledge and learning. He left the Hopovo Monastery and ventured out into the world. The main motive for his leaving a closed and conservative milieu was certainly his desire for discovery.
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He departed convinced that one must shed any exclusionary attitudes on the paths to knowledge because culture is multilayered and does not suffer artificial barriers derived from prejudice, above all religious. Obradović’s musings created the inescapable eclectic foundations for his philosophical world view. Thoughts such as these naturally brought him to a notion of humanity, a virtue Dositej Obradović never abandoned, endeavouring ceaselessly to bring it closer to his much-suffering and tormented nation, as they lived in foreign, mostly unsympathetic countries. His works, among which first and foremost is his famous autobiography Life and Adventure, are marked by an unquenchable striving to teach and ennoble the mentality of his nation, which was tainted with a streak of the outlaw. Dositej does this like an entranced preacher, thoroughly convinced that the lack of enlightenment is the greatest obstacle in the way of national liberation of the Serbian people.
There were three figures in 18th-century Serbia who struggled towards the same goal, each in his own way. The three were graphic artist and writer Zaharije Orfelin, historian Jovan Rajić and Dositej Obradović. And while Orfelin and Rajić only slightly opened the door of the world, venturing to Venice and Vienna – and to Russia, respectively – Dositej Obradović was compared to them an unmistakable cosmopolitan in our culture. The map of his travels are stunning, even today. But, Obradović was not only a wayfarer, a restless monk covering thousands of miles on his long wanderings. He would stay for lengthy periods in important places, as the passion for learning continually broadened his horizons. From all these culturally diverse environments, Dositej would scrupulously absorb something, whether this was at a Protestant university centre like the town of Halle in Orthodox Russia, Baroque Vienna, the majestic but fading Venice, the Greek Mediterranean islands and their schools, the conservative Chilandar Monastery or the modest but upright Serbs in northern Dalmatia. In his inimitable way, Dositej moved through Paris and London with ease, as well as in the wealthy merchants’ milieu in Trieste where he was respected and loved by the local Serbs. Wise and discerning, he accurately perceived all the advantages that the “Patent of Toleration” of Franz Joseph II brought to the Serbs in Austria and to whose person and ideas he remained committed all his life. Dositej appreciated that the emperor was endeavouring to modernize the old Hapsburg monarchy by demolishing its obsolete medieval order, which favoured Hungarian state law, while transforming the Serbs into political Hungarians.
In the voluminous writings on Dositej Obradović, his virtues as a moralist, and a person whose main task in life was to enlighten his people, have been appropriately perceived and evaluated. This is why Dositej could discern and lash out at the many faults of his people, not sparing even the monkish class, to which he himself belonged. In his works, the rational overwhelmed the emotional, and the sacred principles of truth-seeking stood opposed to social compromise, flattering the powerful, and everything that in any way stifled and muffled the voice of one’s own conscience.
Despite everything, much remains to be interpreted concerning the complex figure of Dositej Obradović. Having said this, I mean the evident reputation and authority he enjoyed in a fragmented Serbian society. Dositej’s works connected and spiritually unified the Serbs, so it is no surprise that Serbian insurgents appointed him education minister. At the time of the First Serbian Uprising, Dositej Obradović was already an undisputed figurehead of such stature that no one, not even the stern Metropolitan Stratimirović, could deny his merits.
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Dositej Obradović played an exceptionally important role in the process of turning an uprising of downtrodden non-Muslims in the Pashaluk of Belgrade into a revolution aimed at renewing the Serbian state. He represented both the ultimate idea of Serbian civil society in Austria, a nationally mature community perfectly aware that the events in Serbia far outweigh the mere temporary dissatisfaction of the economically exhausted non-Muslim population.
Dositej’s activities in Serbia bear witness to his visionary and accurate assessment of the events taking place in the country, as the Enlightenment he championed was the founding stone of the future state and a conditio sine qua non of its survival and prosperity. Dositej Obradović’s arrival to Serbia at the time of the Uprising was undoubtedly a genuine revolutionary act. |
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In the maelstrom of the Serbian revolution, here was a man full of wisdom and life experience, the only one capable of bridging all those tragic cultural differences among the Serbian people, connecting that which centuries held apart. Dositej brought to Serbia his democratic world outlook, modern freedom-loving aspirations and held the idea of the Enlightenment with apostolic enthusiasm. Those were the great ideas of 18th-century Europe that Serbs embraced enthusiastically, incorporating them without delay into the goals of their revolution. Without this outlook that the old and wise Dositej brought to his homeland, the march of the Serbian revolution would have been slower, its goals lacking in the spiritual power that this devotee of the future Serbian state so lavishly expended – this visionary was capable of breaking through the barriers of many centuries that kept Serbians from the fertile currents of European civilizations, which in Serbia were checked during the time of Turkish enslavement.
Any antagonizing of Vuk and Dostiej is ultimately quite senseless. Regardless of the modernity of their pivotal points, they belong to different social phenomena. While Vuk brought our patriarchal society closer to Europe, informing it of the highest spiritual values, Dositej brought Europe in all its spiritual splendour to the Balkans, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he brought it back to the place it had been banished from by a non-Christian civilization. Without much ado, one could set out that both rightly deserve to be called great reformers of the Serbian people. They are connected by facts; each in his own way participated in the Serbian revolution – first in the all-sweeping one led by Karadjordje, and then in revolutions in which each was the spiritual spearhead of his people. On this path, they both inevitably must have encountered the conservative viewpoints of the high Church clergy, which as a rule had a cautious approach concerning ideas arriving from the West. Behind their conduct was a hidden fear of Uniatism, which implied a renunciation of the unalterable truths of Serbian Orthodoxy.
Dositej, as a monk, and later as an ordained hieromonk, was aware from within of the shortcomings of modern Orthodoxy, and sought ways to heal rifts beyond the confines of monastery walls. One should not forget that he was a contemporary of reformer-emperor Joseph II, who went against the monk class and Baroque church dignitaries not as an opponent of Catholicism, but precisely as a religious believer painfully affected by all the deviations of the right role of his Church. Instructed in evangelical truths, and above all, in the love for one’s neighbor in practice, Dositej Obradović resolved his church-related doubts by adopting humanity as the most valuable Christian commandment. And when he failed to meet this humanity as he expected, Dositej courageously accepted the challenges of his own Church, from which he never departed. Quite the contrary, he was buried as a hieromonk, according to his own wish. On the other hand, it is wrong to compare Dositej’s mission to enlighten with the work of St. Sava. Because while St. Sava preached inner spiritual enlightenment in the spirit of medieval Orthodoxy, Dositej drew on the age of Enlightenment whose aims clearly led towards the creation of a democratically oriented citizen, primarily turned to personal liberation from the anachronous shackles of an antiquated feudal society.
Among the Serbian people, Dositej was, together with Zaharije Orfelin, the harbinger of such broad social changes. And it is not a paradox to say that this great representative of the triumph of sense among the Serbs went on his life’s adventure inspired by a well-nigh romanticist fervor and, in particular, with the strength of genuine humanity. Dositej perhaps sometimes naively but never insincerely, fantasized about the power of the word that would restore to his neglected and tragically undeveloped people their long-lost glory, dignity, ethical balance and uprightness. It was in this mission that Dositej had revealed himself with all the virtues of a truly great man. |
