Castle and Cathedral in Modern Prague. Longing for the Sacred in a Skeptical Age by Bruce R. Berglund (review)

Scholars of Czechoslovakia (and its predecessor and successor states) have highlighted the country's unique religious history. A proto-Protestant movement led by Jan Hus emerged in the fifteenth century, launching Bohemia into religious wars and inspiring widespread conversions to "Hussitism." The Habsburg Counter-Reformation following the Thirty Years' War reasserted Roman Catholicism in the region. By the late twentieth century, the Czech Republic had become one of the most secular countries in the world.

Historian Bruce Berglund seeks to understand this complex religious history and thought by narrowing in on the interwar Czechoslovak Republic. He explores the philosophical and theological ideas of three important Prague leaders—President Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, his daughter and social activist Alice Garrigue Masaryková, and the Prague-based Slovenian architect Jože Plečnik. His study offers a counternarrative to the theory that Europe was secularized in a steady decline from the Enlightenment through the twentieth century. This modernization theory proposes that religion became incompatible with "industrialization, urbanization, the embrace of rationalism and empiricism" (p. 13). Instead, Berglund uses Masaryk, Masaryková, and Plečnik to argue that some intellectuals sought to develop a "new religion" (p. XII) that combined spiritual and scientific truth. Rather than viewing modernism as an obstacle to religion, these thinkers considered it a new approach to religion. Berglund quotes Masaryk in 1906, over a decade before he became President of the new Republic: "I did not speak against Catholicism. I did not speak against religion. I spoke against the contradiction of theology and science" (p. 30).

Berglund offers a readable and engaging approach to intellectual history. The book is organized in two parts. Part I offers intellectual biographies of Masaryk, Masaryková, and Plečnik. The chapter on Masaryk focuses on the philosopherpolitician's integration of religion, spirituality, and the nation. Masaryk located Czech history's apex in the Bohemian Reformation. Berglund notes, "For Masaryk … care for the soul was not simply an individual matter. He held that the nation, like a person, also had spiritual and material parts" (p. 47).

Jože Plečnik similarly sought a modernist spirituality and aesthetic. A devoted Catholic and proud Slovene, Plečnik respected Masaryk's search for spiritual meaning in the modern nation-state. In turn, Masaryk—a convert from Roman Catholicism to an individualistic Protestantism—embraced Plečnik's artistic vision, which combined spiritual simplicity and democratic symbolism. He chose Plečnik, much to the chagrin of Czech nationalists, to renovate Prague Castle as the modern seat of government. Masaryková, who served as First Lady following her mother's death, was a formidable leader in the new Czechoslovakia. She earned a doctorate in history in Germany and studied social work in Chicago. As head of the Czechoslovak Red Cross, she viewed providing public health and education as a modern approach to traditional religious service work.

Berglund effectively characterizes Masaryk and his followers' intellectual contributions, and he discusses the conservative Catholic intellectual opposition, especially by the writer Jaroslav Durych. However, the reader would benefit from a deeper exploration of how citizens received these intellectual debates. While the book briefly addresses the religious practices of ordinary Prague citizens, it does not venture far beyond the capital, the state's most secular area. Berglund acknowledges that Czech church attendance declined even before the Communist Party's attacks on religion in the 1950s. Yet, Berglund contends that most Czechs today still believe in "something." Their secularism, even atheism, maintains an element of Masaryk's conviction that spirituality and modernity were not incompatible.

Berglund's book is a scholarly contribution to Czechoslovak intellectual history as well as debates about European secularism and modernity. Scholars and advanced students in these fields will find much to engage with in this well researched and engagingly written monograph.