"That was the philosophy I learned, those housing seminars. Philosophy as a way of life you could say. People were united by a desire to base their lives on independent thinking, you could put it that way. And to create an environment for that. And it was an environment of friendship, because these meetings were based on friendship, as we talked about it. In fact, it was necessary to know each other well so that there wouldn't be anybody who would turn us in or betray us in any way. It was based on friendly relationships. For example, in ancient philosophy friendship was an organic part of the philosophy. If you take Plato's Dialogues, those are dialogues between friends. Or even the Epicureans, for them friendship in their garden was their way of living. The Epicureans have a bad reputation, but wrongly perhaps, they wished to create an environment of philosophizing friendship. I don't think that's shocking, it existed with early Christian writers as well. With Augustine, his early works are also dialogues, conversations with friends, they were his students, but they were friends. So the housing seminars were these discussions between friends, or interpretations of texts. That's what I was personally interested in and also my husband, because he was studying philology, so we actually got more into the commentary literature quite early on, dealing with the meaning of text or the philological-historical-philosophical methods of interpreting text. I guess that's what we lived by then, and to a large extent we still try to do that today. But of course the environment is different now. As I would say, back in the late nineties and noughties when I started teaching in Prague, it was still a little bit in that tradition, actually. As a life orientation or 'in philosophia vivere' as Augustine called it, just living by thinking, problematizing and so, that was the heritage of that environment. Now it is slowly changing as philosophy has to stand as a university discipline, that is, it has to meet the demands that are made on academic disciplines. It certainly brings something positive, as you have to master some craft and stand up to some competition, but it also has the negative side of quantity over quality on submitted papers. That has unfortunately changed."
"Then, with Gorbachev, there really was a kind of loosening, one could even think about going abroad. I was always dreaming about studying abroad. It was great to have foreign lecturers here, but at the same time, it made me rather sad to realize what I couldn't do. Honestly, we were actually... I can't complain about anything, because we created a world where we were happy, ironically, when we were young. But when we first went out of the country, it was terrible because it was only in that comparison that you realised, what we were living in, it was really terrible. We suddenly started to see how dilapidated, dirty and dingy everything was, that nobody cared about it. You only had to go a few metres over the border into Bavaria or Austria... I remember, it was one thing how dilapidated the country was, and the other thing, I remember when I first went into a bookshop in Vienna, I cried. Suddenly I realised how much I had missed. Of course, in many ways you can catch up, but in some ways I don't think we've caught up to this day."
"One of these seminars took place at Prof. Hejdánek's. One of my classmates invited me there. Hejdánek was an Evangelical, and he was quite popular among my classmates, although he was persona non grata, he was already “a Chartist” then. We were told there would some other speaker, so we went. So we went there, but the speaker had been arrested, and all participants, who were in the apartment, were taken by the Secret Police for interrogation to the office at Bartolomějská Street. I was with my classmate, they took everyone separately and of course they interrogated everyone separately. And they asked me, 'How long have you known Professor Hejdánek?' I replied, 'I've never seen him.' And it was true. 'And what about the other participants? Who are they?' I said, 'I have no idea. It was my first time there, I didn't know anybody there.' Of course they thought I was lying. But they knew they weren't going to get anything out of me. We were small fish for them, and when they saw that there was nothing to learn from us, they let us go and it never happened again. But we had to face the consequences at the faculty. The police approached the faculty, we were both theology students, so the faculty had to react. So they called us in and my classmate was excellent, he said, 'I was thinking of quitting anyway, so I'll quit, I'll interrupt my studies.' And indeed he did interrupt, he completed his studies later, but at that time he left the faculty, which was enough for them as a sanction for such behaviour."
Lenka Karfíková was born on 11 February 1963 in Prague. Her parents Vladimír and Eva Votavovi were chemical engineers. Her grandfather František Votava founded a major construction company, which was involved in the creation of many concrete buildings in Prague before the war. In 1948 he lost both the company and the family house in Podolí. No one in the family was a member of the Communist Party, neither were they members of a church. Therefore, the parents were quite puzzled when their daughter Lenka chose to study at the Evangelical Faculty after her graduation in 1981. However, this choice was initially rather pragmatic for her. She was interested in studying philosophy, but not philosophy constrained by the Marxist ideology. This eventually came true for her. Philosophy and theology, to which she eventually found her inner path, were also intensively pursued in housing seminars in the 1980s. Here she also met her future husband, Filip Karfík. In autumn of 1989 she went to study at the Katholische Universität Eichstätt in Bavaria, where she spent many years and received her doctorate. She and her husband also spent a year at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris. Lenka Karfíková’s main interest gradually became Christian thought of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. In 1999 she received her habilitation at the Cyril and Methodius Faculty of Theology of the Palacký University in Olomouc, where she also headed the Philosophy Department and founded the Centre for Patristic, Medieval and Renaissance Texts. In 2005 she was appointed a university professor and became the Head of the Philosophy Department at the Protestant Theological Faculty of Charles University in Prague. Here she also teaches philosophy, as well as (now externally) at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University. She is the President of the Czech Patristic Society and National Correspondent of the Association Internationale d’Études Patristiques. She cooperates with many university departments in the Czech Republic and around the world and she is the author of many academic texts.
